Invisible Labour? Tensions and Ambiguities of Modifying the ‘Private’ Body: The Case of Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery

Abstract

The ‘designer vagina’ is a relatively new phenomenon, becoming part of public discourse only in the late 1990s. Although female genital surgery has a history longer than 150 years, modification has not usually been for aesthetic reasons (Green 2005). Nowadays, cosmetic surgeons promising ‘designer vaginas’ offer to modify all parts of women’s genitals, often to render them more attractive: the labia minora are minimised and made symmetrical (labiaplasty), the clitoral hood is made less prominent (clitoral hood reduction), the labia majora are plumped to make them look more ‘youthful’, and liposuction is available for a ‘fat’ mons pubis (Michala et al. 2012). Normal genital variation among women has been pathologised by describing visible labia minora as ‘hypertrophic’ (Miklos and Moore 2008). Simone Weil Davis (2002) quotes a cosmetic surgeon as telling her that ‘the ideal look for labia minora was not only minimal and not extended but also symmetrical, homogenously pink and not wavy’.