Gracie Hall

         In the first, more overarching article: “Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery: A Critical Review of Current Knowledge and Contemporary Debates”, Virginia Braun frames FGCS (Female Gentile Cosmetic Surgery) as “the latest chapter in the surgical victimization of women in our culture’’ but also covers another argument that promotes a stance we heard in Edmonds’ ‘The Poor Have The Right To Be Beautiful’; she claims it can be seen as liberation for individual women and that “women’s genitalia and sexual problems are getting the attention they deserve.”

         Braun begins by laying out the history and facts of FGCS. Although FGCS came into public discourse in the early 2000’s, the facts and statistics surrounding the procedure have been deemed untrustworthy. Different sources promote different tellings, and important issues of safety and effectiveness are masked. Instead, most accounts tell of poor self-esteem or unsatisfactory sex lives being restored. Statistics also show that functionality is one of the driving forces behind FGCS, however, Braun claims that instead, like other cosmetic surgeries the intentions are primarily aesthetic.

            An argument that reveals itself early on is one we saw in Edmonds’ article a few weeks before. Braun claims “women seek surgery to address psychological concerns” and that “psychology provides a moral justification for cosmetic surgery, rendering it acceptable.” Braun notes that the cause of this psychological concern is coming from the narrow representation of a vulvul ideal, and that our language concerning female genitals places normal variatons as pathological. Braun also states that these concerns are produced by commercial pressures that result in a culturally circumscribed “free choice”. She elaborates on this further in her other article, ‘The Women Are Doing This For Themselves”. Here, the main argument is that choice is constructed and deployed, and instructs readers to ask if women every really have personal agency when it comes to questions of bodily modifications, specifically FGCS. Western ‘choice’, Braun claims, is ‘deeply embedded within a consumer discourse’, and is really not so much free choice as it is conformity.

            Braun and Jafar both compared FGCS to FGM (Female Gentile Mutilation). Jafar’s list of particular procedures and corresponding list of influences drew a somewhat shocking similarity. What really separated them was the interpretation of a different culture and the supposed “cultural vacuum” of the west. Jafar also noted that FGCS has a more extensive list of procedures than FGM, such as depigmentation and the addition and removal of fat (alluding to a future with a ‘Labial Mass Index’).

            Braun also compared FGCS to FGM, claiming it was only our “double standard of morality” and notion of choice that separated the two procedures. Braun, however, spends the entirety of the article examining our supposed ‘free choice’. She states, “‘We’ are culturally free, agentic and empowered; ‘they’ are culturally oppressed, duped and victimized, unable to step beyond culture into autonomy and agency.” The argument claims that because women in the west are informed, they are able to make free choices; what knowledge, however, is fueling these choices? Braun claims that the choice to have FGCS is being made for a variety of reasons: western ideology of personal transformation, mainstream pornographic culture, and the possibility/availability of advertising. Jafar states that it is the men behind the women and our idea that this procedure is a mark of modernity (like Glenn’s argument in ‘Yearning for Lightness’). Both Braun and Jafar make note of the cultural context that fuels FGCS and other procedures.

            In “Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery: A Critical Review of Current Knowledge and Contemporary Debates” Braun furthers this argument about cultural context, citing the interference between culture and medicine. She claims “surgeons bring culturally influenced personal values and preferences to the work they do” and that “media coverage of new surgical interventions ‘seduces more individuals to place their bodies under the surgeon’s knife.”’ She compares this argument to that of breast augmentation, which is similarly represented; Jafar stated that like breast implants FGCS is “here to stay” and may become a high school graduation gift in the future. Like any other cosmetic surgery it is framed as individually liberating but socially disempowering. The idea of choice and social construction put this whole argument, and really our whole course in context; Braun ends her article with a statement that really sum up our study this semester, by provocatively saying that “the body is always socioculturally produced and mediated, and so is the mind.”