Consumer Transformation: Cosmetic Surgery as the Expression of Consumer Freedom or as a Marketing Imperative?

Abstract

McCracken’s analysis of identity construction in contemporary culture sees the drive to transform oneself as the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom. Transformation is accessible through cosmetic surgery, enabling consumers with funds to purchase a ‘whole new me’. This consumer is an active participant in the transformation process, not content with observing beauty but actively engaged in the creative construction of new improved selves. In doing so, they have “mastered the codes of cultural production” making themselves “co-creators in the culture they consume” (McCracken xvi). An alternative and far less positive narrative of consumer transformation focuses on the pervasive influence of promotion on individual identity. Marketing and promotion constructs a deficiency in the lives of consumers which, marketers imply, can be remedied by the purchase of cosmetic surgery. Rather than being powerful co-creators of their own fluid identity, consumers are constructed as victims of a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ and preys on consumer vulnerabilities (Fatah 1). In this paper I draw on consumer blogs, industry webpages and regulatory and professional publications to explore the tensions between these competing narratives of bodily transformation. In doing so, I argue that there is an inherent paradox in the discourse of consumer transformation which advocates consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to certain forms of ideal beauty which can be marketed by the promotional industries.