The "Beautiful" pain: cosmetic surgery and the embodiment of pain

Authors

cosmetic surgery, embodiment, pain, sociology of the body, qualitative methodology

This article focuses on women undergoing plastic surgery operations, highlighting their particular

attitude toward pain, which is caused by the desperate pursuit of beauty. Extracting

data from semi-structured interviews, it is shown how pain is defied, eliminated or even

denied by individuals undergoing cosmetic surgery. Since cosmetic procedures are carried out

for aesthetic reasons, people disconnect this process from any negative emotion and ignore

pain and trauma yielded from surgical operation. Hence, a special kind of pain embodiment

is reflexively emerged. Pain is not a one-dimensional biological stimulus; it is rather associated

with how each social group perceives, interprets and reacts to the biological stimulus, producing

a particular mode of embodiment.

2012-04-15

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