Skin deep, soul deep: Mass mediating cosmetic surgery in popular magazines, 1968–1998

Abstract

In mainstream women's magazines, cosmetic surgery has long been associated with physical health which in turn is linked with wealthy power, and confidence. But whereas thirty years ago, the cosmetic surgery patient required an operation to address a debilitating insecurity resulting from a physical “flaw,” today that patient starts out as an empowered woman “doing it for herself by making herself feel and look even better after surgery than before. I argue that the adoption and distortion of feminist rhetoric spurred this shift in representation. Additionally, this study questions the dominant popular frame, often mirrored in critical scholarship on the body, that Americans treat the body “pragmatically”—that in recognizing it as a social signifier and social tool, we have few qualms about manipulating it. Rather, the data presented here conveys a discord between the intentional positive frame found in articles on beauty and youth and the unintentional negative frame found when cosmetic surgery is mentioned in passing, where it almost always carries a negative connotation, associated with vanity, frivolity, deception, and violence.