Steven Polgar Prize Essay (1991). Medicalization of Racial Features
Asian American Women and Cosmetic Surgery
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20182828 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eugenia Kaw (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 74-89 |
| Publication date | 1993-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Medical Anthropology Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0745-5194 • E-ISSN: 1548-1387 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1525/maq.1993.7.1.02a00050 |
| OpenAlex | W1962672467 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 102 |
| References cited | 13 |
This article presents findings of ethnographic research in the San Francisco Bay Area, exploring the recent phenomenon of Asian American women undergoing cosmetic surgery to have their eyelids restructured, their nose bridges heightened, and the tips of their noses altered. This research suggests that Asian American women who undergo these types of surgery have internalized not only a gender ideology that validates their monetary and time investment in the alteration of their bodies, but also a racial ideology that associates their natural features with dullness, passivity, and lack of emotion. With the authority of scientific rationality, medicine effectively promotes these racial and gender stereotypes and thereby bolsters the consumer‐oriented society, of which it is apart and from which it benefits. Data are drawn from structured interviews with plastic surgeons and patients, medical literature and newspaper articles, and basic medical statistics
Aesthetics · Art · Ethnography · Ideology · Media studies · Medicalization · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Rationality · Sociology · Anthropology · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Law · Medicine · Psychology
Reading Dual Meanings of Power on Young Women's Bodies
Beauty is in the soul of the beholder
Asian Americans and standards of attractiveness
Under the Knife and Proud of It
Designing Women
Doing Difference/Doing Power
The Medicalization of Society
Technologies of Beauty: The Materiality, Ethics, and Normativity of Cosmetic Citizenship
The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao China
Race and Beauty
Reframing Internalized Racial Oppression and Charting a way Forward
The relationship among cultural variables and weight issues for Asian American women
The Effect of Age-Stigma Concealment on Social Evaluations
The Value of Integrating Evolutionary and Sociocultural Perspectives on Body Image
Getting Under the Skin Trade
Appropriated racial oppression
It Represents Me
Racialized beauty, visibility, and empowerment
The biomedical digitalization of women's bodies and women's body politics in the context of globalization
Human growth hormone and the temptations of biomedical enhancement
What is Internalized Racial Oppression and Why Don't We Study It? Acknowledging Racism's Hidden Injuries
Embodying Racism
Under siege
Beauty
The Significance of Race in the Private Sphere
Erotic Capital as Societal Elevator
Globalizing Evolution
Deadly Medicine Today
The Sociological Imagination of R. D. Laing
El cuerpo subordinado y politizado
Body Image and Disordered Eating Among Asian American and Caucasian College Students
The Ucla Body Project I
Reading Representations of Black, East Asian, and White Women in Magazines for Adolescent Girls
Genetic Nature/Culture
The anxious production of beauty
Aching for the altered body
The Double Binds of Our Bodies
Eating Disorders in Asian American Women
Beauty Between Empires
Annual Selected Bibliography
Parallel play in medical anthropology and medical sociology
The Dubious Enhancement
Historical transformations of aesthetic surgery as a normalization apparatus. The case of rhinoplasty
Do Racial Minorities Respond in the Same Way to Mainstream Beauty Standards? Social Comparison Processes in Asian, Black, and White Women
Complicating Power in High-Tech Reproduction
Imagining the Perfect Asian Woman Through Hate
Tweakments
The Persistent Problem of Colorism
Latina bodies in the era of elective aesthetic surgery
Modification of the body
Trading faces
Skin pedagogies and abject bodies
Strong is the new skinny’
Forensic evidence
Asian American college women's body image
Body Modification in East Asia
Deracialisation or Body Fashion? Cosmetic Surgery and Body Modification in Japan
The Duty to Transform
Navigating white academe during crisis
Beautiful face, beautiful place
The (In)visible Body
Selling Cosmetic Surgery and Beauty Ideals
Teaching Critical Perspectives on Body Weight
Race, Gender, and Bodily (Mis)Recognitions
A Culturally Modified Application of Objectification Theory to Asian and Asian-American Women
Cultural gatekeeping in cosmetic surgery
Pricing the Priceless Surgery
Transformative Possibilities
Gangnam-Style Plastic Surgery
The Rise of the Cosmetic Nation
Plastic Paradise
Triumphant Miscegenation
Chinese women constructing and negotiating an 'ideal' beauty in Lisbon, or how women and aesthetical medical practitioners materialise 'race
Surgical Passing
Race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty pleasure
The biological subject of aesthetic medicine
Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea
Flagging' the Skin
Elaborating Embodied Boundaries
Embodying Progress
Where Health and Beauty Meet
Beauty Work
Cultivating Japanese Whiteness
On the Ethics of Facial Transplantation Research
Health in the African American Community
The poor have the right to be beautiful
Reconstructing race and gender in American cosmetic surgery
Making faces racial
The racialization of the globe
Geographies of Capital and Capital of Geographies
Exploring the utility of eye tracking for sociological research on race
Gender, Ethnicity, and Transgender Embodiment
Enhancement Technologies and the Body
The Commodification of the Body and its Parts
Operating (for) legitimacy
A second youth
Aesthetic anti-ageing surgery and technology
A will to youth
Social spaces of little people
Scales of care and responsibility
| Unique citing works | 102 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3,09 |
| Citation span | 1993 - 2025 (33) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 96 |