From hormone replacement therapy to IVF, women now have access to a range of technologies that allow them to alter, even remake their biology. Of all of these, none has become so familiar as cosmetic surgery, which, once considered outlandish, has quickly passed into the cultural mainstream. The feminist response has traditionally been hostile, taking the view that surgically altering your body to become "more beautiful" is capitulating to a particular set of white Anglo-Saxon social norms. But is cosmetic surgery just about conformity and repression ? How does it differ, other than in scale, to wearing makeup, or having electrolysis, or taking hormones to reduce acne ? And should women really refuse point-blank to employ a technology which allows them this kind of control over their bodies ? Controversial French artist Orlan and American feminist academic Kathy Davis are both examining these questions. They could not have approached them from more diverse points of view.
Orlan is something of an institution. Working since the '70s, her inimitable brand of performance art consists of undergoing cosmetic surgery procedures, seven of them to date. Orlan's operations are performed live before an audience, or broadcast over the Web via satellite, while the artist reads aloud from philosophical texts, poems, feminist tracts and fables. She apologises for making the audience suffer, but insists that she herself does not - she takes pain killers instead. The trick, as one essay in her book, Ceci est mon corps... Ceci est mon logiciel... (This is my body... This is my software...) puts it "is to hold [one's audience] in thrall and still have them puking on their shoes." Though Orlan's first surgery was a matter of medical necessity, and she feels being operated on is "beyond the frivolous", she is still on her way to Japan to have constructed for herself the largest anatomically and technologically possible nose. You have to ask yourself: rebel or poseur?
Orlan's rationalisations for her "interventions", as she calls them, are close to the traditional feminist distaste for cosmetic surgery. Her surgeries are not usually performed to make her "more beautiful" by conventional standards, but to make her appearance almost monstrous - having a pair of "horns" grafted to her forehead or prominent implants inserted into her cheeks. By doing this she hopes to point out that most surgeries are not acts of self-creation, but conformity. Orlan seems to see herself as a lone identity rebel in a sea of compliance, employing a technology to point out the limited ways in which this technology is normally used.
By way of contrast to Orlan's emotive, extravagant statements, Kathy Davis's Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery soberly examines feminist arguments for and against cosmetic surgery, and interviews a number of women who have had it. She contrasts cosmetic surgery in the US with that in the Netherlands, where for a time it was available under the national health system. This led to the emergence of an elaborate set of guidelines, determining whether or not a particular case merited surgery at the state's expense. Yet however precise these guidelines became, it was nigh-on impossible for officials to come up with criteria that would allow them to decide all cases. More often than not, doctors found themselves relying on "rules of thumb" - a breast lift was indicated if the "nipples were level with the recipient's elbows", for example. Finally, cosmetic surgery was returned to the private sector.
Davis gives a much more realistic picture than Orlan of the "cons" of cosmetic surgery, citing bruising, deaths from anaesthesia, swelling, encapsulation. She questions why women will undergo a practice that is both dangerous and oppressive, but is careful to contrast these "cons" with potential benefits to self-esteem, and says that women who have cosmetic surgery "are no less able than anyone else to assess risks and calculate benefits."
Travelling by profoundly different routes, Davis and Orlan eventually reach the same conclusion. Though many women and some men seek conformity in cosmetic surgery, the knife is a poor mechanism for control of the individual. It offers too many choices, and by taking those choices, women must become more aware of themselves, and more responsible for themselves.
Davis reaches her conclusion by locating the issue of cosmetic surgery within a framework of feminist and sociological theory that is almost totally hostile to it. Orlan turns surgery against itself, forcing her audience to confront the reality of a technology they have almost come to take for granted. Like Davis, Orlan believes that it is no longer necessary to accept what she calls "the lottery of genes"; must we, she asks, give in ? She thinks we can work against innate, inexorable DNA - as she puts it, "move the bars of the cage." Cosmetic surgery may not be natural, "but neither is tak-ing antibiotics."
Both women see cosmetic surgery as questioning the status of the body in society. Orlan takes this further to include the body's manipulation in future via genetic engineering. In future, women - and men - will control their identity right down to its genetic blueprint.
Me, I would side with both Davis and Orlan, and class myself as "pro-choice" about cosmetic surgery. I'm not wild about either Orlan's grotesqueries or the conventional prettification of nose jobs and breast implants. But then who am I to tell anyone else she shouldn't have it, if the view she has of herself will be altered for the better ? As the technology gets better and more plentiful, we'll have to accept that an increasing number of people - men, too - will be doing it. Orlan and Davis show us that cosmetic surgery is largely about power; society's power over women, but also women's power over their own bodies. Unless we can learn to live with this ambivalence, we cannot argue about cosmetic surgery at all - feminist political correctness will keep women in a position where they need defend their decisions to re-make their bodies in a way that provides them the identity they desire.
Ceci est mon corps... Ceci est mon logiciel... (This is my body... This is my software), by Orlan: book and CD-ROM £25.00. Black Dog Publishing Ltd: (0171) 380 7500, email ucftlil@ucl.ac.uk.
Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery, by Kathy Davis: £11.99 (paper). Routledge: (0171) 583 9855.
Liz Bailey ( lizzie@wired.co.uk) is chief sub-editor at Wired.