Reshaping the “Pillow Angel”: Plastic Bodies and the Rhetoric of Normal Surgical Solutions

Abstract

This essay uses the controversial “Ashley Treatment” to argue that normative body rhetorics have become untethered from and more influential than traditional medical perspectives in determinations about surgical intervention. While disagreeing greatly over the ethics of the “Treatment,” both its supporters and critics construct rhetorics of a “healthy” body against which pre- and post-Treatment bodies can be evaluated. These rhetorics demonstrate how “health” and “illness” can be defined more through social ideology than medical certainty, resulting in fluid notions of what it means to have a “normal” body and how surgical techniques should be employed to achieve normality.