"Oh, sure they're nice, but are they real?": Greeting cards and the normalizing of cosmetic surgical intervention in practices of feminine embodiment.

Introduction

On the exterior of a recently available greeting card published by Carleton Cards' "Marketplace" division, three brown cartoon bulls are pictured seated around a stage on which a cartoon Jersey cow is performing a pole dance. The cow's head is thrown back, a garter on a hind leg holds some green bills and her full, pink udder with prominent teats is exposed, in the foreground one bull comments to his tablemate, "Oh, sure they're nice, but are they real?" The card's interior offers a friendly, pun-y, wish "Hope your birthday's udderly fantastic!"

While the humour is dubious, this parody nicely represents the increasing cultural ubiquity of cosmetic surgery parlance in North American lives. These anthropomorphized cattle, through their legible familiarity, demonstrate the presumption that everybody knows about cosmetic surgery. This knowledge is so pervasive that a specific cosmetic surgery does not even have to be referenced for the achievement of verisimilitude that structures the humour of this birthday greeting. We all (are supposed to) know that "they" refers to breasts/teats and "real" references the possibility of cosmetic "enhancement." We all already know about cosmetic surgery's supposed benefits and the underlying gendered normativities through which these benefits are constructed. These cards then take their place amongst the "resources of history, language and culture" (Hall, 1996, p. 4) through which we negotiate our identities in 21st century North America.

Aesthetic surgeries and other practices of body modification have been present across cultures for thousands of years (Haiken, 1999). However, the past three decades have witnessed the proliferation and mainstreaming of cosmetic surgery techniques and procedures in Westernized societies. Indeed, public knowledge and use of cosmetic surgeries has never been more widespread. (2) As this awareness and use grows we increasingly see representations of cosmetic surgery across the practices, relations and products of our everyday lives. Such everyday representations, I shall argue, are critical to the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery. Moreover, they are ultimately both exemplary of, and (re)productive of, a gendered social order that instructs us, especially those of us who desire to be understood as women, on the contours of normative femininity.

I specifically locate my analysis in an examination of the representation of cosmetic surgeries in relation to expectations of normative femininity (Bartky, 1998) as expressed in examples of contemporary, mass produced greeting cards. I decided to undertake this project after encountering increasing references to, and jokes about, cosmetic surgery in commercially produced greeting cards. The exchange of greeting cards is illustrative of how the representation of these surgeries within an everyday social practice participates not only in promotion of, and cultural conversance with, cosmetic surgeries but also in the (re)production of very specific standards of feminine embodiment. The representation of cosmetic surgery through the standards of the discourse of femininity (Bartky, 1988) has been explored in relation to television (Heyes, 2007; Morgan, 1998) and popular culture more broadly (Bordo, 1995 and 1997), as these scholars have been concerned with the versions of gendered, raced, classed, youthful and able realities posited by these cultural texts. My work in this area builds on existing feminist scholarship, such as that of Susan Bordo (1995) and Kathy Davis (1997), which contends that cosmetic surgery has become a normalized technique of feminine body management.

It is because greeting cards are such an under-considered part of everyday social niceties that their participation in the mainstreaming of cosmetic surgeries is so interesting. Greeting cards are a taken for granted element of holidays, birthdays and other occasions of friendship and kin-keeping. Greeting card purchases are a $7.5 billion annual market in the United States (Greeting Card Association, 2007). The much smaller Canadian market generates approximately $750 million in annual sales (Delbarre, 2007). At approximately $4 a card, that's a lot of market-assisted greeting. The appearance of images and text about cosmetic surgery within these exchanged greetings is indicative of cosmetic surgery's contemporary popularity. Given the gendered normativities both embedded in and facilitated through the delivery of cosmetic surgery (Dull and West, 1991), important implications for women's sense of self and cultural belonging are (re)inscribed through this cultural landscape.

In this paper 1 unpack the taken-for-granted exchange of greeting cards and situate these practices within the gendered discourses of consumerism through which we, as variously located social subjects, construct (conform, negotiate, resist, and revise) our identities. My analysis in this paper begins with an overview of the growing popularity of cosmetic surgeries and procedures in North America and how their use is both representative of, and reproductive of, the contemporary gendered social order in Westernized cultures. I next discuss the gendered utilization of greeting cards, the situation of greeting cards as mass media and evaluate their discursive force as artifacts of the everyday world. From this groundwork I specifically examine how cosmetic surgery-themed greeting cards participate in the female ritual of body talk through the employment of humour to simultaneously embrace and disavow such bodily interventions. I then shift my analytical site to electronic greeting cards, or e-cards, and present a preliminary analysis of the discursive shift these greeting cards demonstrate through their unqualified embrace of "feminizing" cosmetic surgeries.

Cosmetic Surgery and Femininity

In less than two generations, cosmetic surgeries have become a normalized element of the beauty system. These body projects (Brumberg, 1998) that were as recently as the early 1980s considered vanity-based pursuits of the idle rich are now represented by surgeons, celebrities and related purveyors of body management products as reasonable age-defying tools for the female masses. In the widely acclaimed 1991 publication The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf identified feminine beauty as an unattainable ideal which, through its continual refinement to an ever-narrowing though centrally white, youthful, and able-bodied vision of femininity, persuasively shapes women's development and negotiation of their identities (Wolf, 1991). Magazines, the fashion industry, celebrity culture, literature and other cultural scripts all promote the importance of "'proper" feminine appearance. The significance of these repeated instructions, writes Wolf, is that:

   The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are
   merely symbols of the female behavior that the period considers
   desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior
   and not appearance. (1991, pp. 13-14)

The connection of the social construction of gender and the discourse of femininity to the promotion and acceptance of cosmetic surgery is evident in the preponderance of women amongst the clients of plastic surgeons. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (which co-ordinates information from surgeons in the United States and Canada), there were over 11 million cosmetic surgical procedures performed in North America in 2006. Approximately 89 percent of these were performed on women (American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 2006). These data do not include plastic surgical procedures considered reconstructive (such as post-mastectomy breast augmentation or cleft palette corrective surgeries), or minimally invasive (such as Botox[TM] injections) (ASPS, 2007). These 11 million procedures do, however, represent a dramatic 48 percent increase in the use of cosmetic surgery by North Americans since 2000 (ASPS, 2007).

The further connection of standards of feminine embodiment to the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery is also evident in the specific procedures these women choose to undergo. The top five surgical cosmetic procedures for women in 2006 were breast augmentation (369,000), nose reshaping (307,000), liposuction (303,000), eyelid surgery (233,000), and tummy tuck (146,000)" (ASPS, 2006). [3] Additionally, there were 4.1 million Botox [TM] treatments administered during this period (ASPS, 2007). The combined and individual aesthetic trajectory of these surgeries and procedures is toward the production of more buxom, white-appearing, taut and curvaceous female bodies. No one, it seems, as both Susan Bordo (1997) and Kathryn Pauly Morgan (1998) have noted, uses cosmetic surgery technologies to look older, become fatter or less white in appearance.

The inherently gendered standards of health, hygiene and appearance in contemporary Western societies are naturalized through discourses that create what Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber has termed "the cult of thinness" (Hesse-Biber, 2007).

Fueling this trend are large-scale market interests that exploit women's insecurities about their looks. American food, weight loss, and socmetic industries thrive on the purchases made to attain the unattainable goal of physical perfection. The slim and flawless "cover girl" is an icon created by capitalism for the sake of profit. Millions of women pay it homage (HesseBiber, 2007, p. 3).

These are the economic, social, and political relations (Jhally with Earp, 2006) through which "nice" in reference to female breasts is taken to stand for full, symmetrical, perky and a host of other (genetically and technologically rare but) seemingly common-sense traits that prescribe the standards of feminine beauty. Through their ritual enactment of feminine embodiments that seek to conform to these imperatives many women, most unknowingly, effect a "double" commodification of self, as their use of the products of beauty culture reproduces them as more conforming and, arguably, more commodified bodies (Foucault, 1995). Every decision a woman takes to modify or style her body, whether in an everyday habit such as the application of eye shadow, a significant medical(ized) intervention such as breast enhancement surgery, or a resistant assertion to embrace one's "of size" body is necessarily enacted in relation to the broader prescriptive, culturally sanctioned discourse of femininity.

Throughout this cultural trend feminist scholars have interrogated the intensification and proliferation of beauty technologies (Morgan, 1991: Davis, 1995: Bordo, 1999). These scholars specifically predicted that, as cosmetic "remedies" were normalized, women who did not "take advantage of" such remedies would come to be seen, in one way or another, as unfeminine and therefore abnormal. Scholars such as Susan Bordo (1997) have identified the capitalist impetus of this narrowing standard of feminine embodiment,

The fact is that the plastically reconstructed and preserved faces and bodies of the forty and fifty - something actresses...have made the ideal of aging beautifully and "gracefully" obsolete. Now we are supposed to "defy" our age, as Melanie Griffith (her own lips decidedly poutier than they were a few years ago) instructs us in her commercials for Revlon (Bordo, 1997, p. 45).

While her celebrity reference point is now somewhat dated her analysis remains timely. Similarly, in her 1998 publication Kathryn Pauly Morgan predicted that:

As cosmetic surgery becomes increasingly normalized through the concept of the female "make-over" that is translated into columns and articles in print media or made into nationwide television shows directed at female viewer, as the "success stories" are invited on to talk shows along with their "makers," and as surgically transformed women win the Miss America pageants, women who refuse to submit to the knives and the needles, to the anesthetics and the bandages, will come to be seen as deviant in one way or another (Morgan, 1998, pp. 273-74).

As evidenced by the APSA data, being forewarned of the increasingly specific gendered imperatives of cosmetic surgery has not inoculated a new generation of women against the seductive promise of cosmetic enhancement.

There are significant social and economic rewards available to women who seek to attain and conform to the aesthetic standards of feminine embodiment (Gapinski et al., 2003; Wade and DiMaria, 2003; Sullivan, 2001). As Deborah A. Sullivan reports, attractive adults "enjoy a favourable stereotype," that is, attractive adults are perceived as more competent, better adjusted, more sociable, smarter, and possessing greater integrity and empathy than less attractive adults. Sullivan further notes that this "stereotype is the same for men and women, except attractive women are also expected to have more 'sexual warmth' "(Sullivan 2001, p. 19). The consequences of this pro-normative beauty bias have been shown to be understood by girls as young as seven and eight (Hesse-Biber, 2007). This bias in contemporary society has significant economic consequences for all adults in that, again as reported by Sullivan, "good looks.., pay off in higher earnings ... [v]ery attractive people earn approximately 5 percent more, after credentials, occupation, and age are taken into consideration" (Sullivan, 2001, p. 27). These disparities are cumulative and, over the course of a career, amount to an economically significant "plainness penalty" and "beauty bonus" (p. 27).

This "beauty bonus" indicates that the rise in the use of cosmetic surgery should not simply be explained in terms of individual women's supposed vanity or personal preferences. According to Statistics Canada, "Canadian women constitute approximately 45 percent of the [paid] labour force. Further, "recent census data indicate that the two-breadwinner [or dual-earner] family is now the [statistical] norm". Even so, women wage earners continue to face a gendered wage gap that, depending on occupation, can range anywhere from 8 to 28 percent (Sugiman, 2006, p. 276). For many of these women wage earners, a pressing question can become whether they can actually afford not to embody socially legitimated standards of feminine appearance.

On these social and economic terms, and in keeping with the dictates of the contemporary discourse of femininity, cosmetic surgeries and procedures are often represented as an investment in one's self and one's future. As one birthday card by Shoebox (a division of Hallmark) coyly implies, "On your birthday it's normal to think about getting 'em lifted." This message is delivered by a slender cartoon woman in her shower. She is clad only in a shower cap and addresses the reader with a shower curtain delicately draped across her torso. In this age of cosmetic enhancement in support of "perky" female breasts, readers understand the inference of this line. While the punch line on the card's interior refutes this interpretation ("And I say, 'They're YOUR spirits! You lift 'era as high as you want.' ") this strategy of disavowal, and the discursive weight of its implication are complicit in the representation of narrowing body-centred standards of contemporary femininity and the promise of remedy through cosmetic surgery.

The Gendered Cultural and Economic Significance of Greeting Cards

The purchase, receipt and exchange of greeting cards is widely viewed as a benign but not insignificant element of familial and friendship relations. Approximately "90 percent of all U.S. households buy greeting cards" (Greeting Card Association, 2007). As a child--the eldest daughter of a white middle-class Canadian family--1 learned that it was rude to ignore a card and unwrap a present. The proper behaviour was to first open the card, read the message and acknowledge the sender (whether present or absent) and, perhaps, pass this card around for others to read. These cards in practice had a public life that far outlasted any gift as they could remain on display in the den or living room for weeks (if not months).

Greeting cards are culturally authorized ceremonial tokens of affection (Jaffe, 1999; Schrift, 1994; and Mooney et al., 1993) exchanged primarily between women. In Westernized societies, according to Susan A. McDaniel and Lorne Tepperman, "women have been defined as primary kin-keepers .... the family member who maintains and nurtures family [and friendship] contacts" (McDaniel and Tepperman, 2004, pp. 10 and 26). In recognition of this social role, greeting card producers have self-consciously targeted the address of these cards to women, their relationships and their supposed preoccupations (Mooney et al, 1993, p. 619). According to the Greeting Card Association of the United States, an industry advocacy group of more than 280 greeting card publishers, "women purchase more than 80 percent of all greeting cards" (Greeting Card Association, 2007). Thus, there are intersections of norms of feminine social role and feminine aesthetics for both the sender and receiver in the purchase and exchange of a cosmetic surgery-themed greeting card.

Greetings cards are a popular albeit secondary form of mass media. When sociologists consider the influence of mass media, we generally reference films, television, newspapers, magazines and, more recently, the intemet. If by mass media we mean, "a largely one-way flow of standardized content from a centre to" an audience of many "by way of electronic or mechanical channel" (Fleras, 2003, 378) then greeting cards are exemplary of this process of information production and exchange. They are, as Melissa Schrift notes, "... a form of mass-produced communication primarily used by women to maintain, re-enforce and re-establish social.., relationships" (Papson, in Schrift, 1994, p. 112). As such, the imagery, address and sentiments of mass marketed greeting cards as exchanged by women can help us elaborate the discursive terrain of socially legitimated femininity and feminine relations within which and through which we negotiate our lived experience.

The mass-produced nature of retail cards is of significance in terms of the materiality of gendered social relations. Following the insights of Dorothy E. Smith, I consider greeting cards as artifacts of "the everyday world" wherein,

The social organization of the abstracted conceptual practices of ruling is provided for by a determinate material organization, a standardization of technologies of various kinds to the material and social world as a means to transform it toward forms corresponding to the categories and concepts of the organizing processes of the ruling apparatus (Smith, 1987, p. 97).

The messages of greeting cards and their exchange can be seen to both reinforce and instigate specific knowledges of femininity and feminine embodiment as authorized through capitalist and patriarchal authority.4 That cosmetic surgery is a growing body management strategy is both self-evident in the imagery of cosmetic surgery-themed greeting cards and simultaneously reproduced as self-evident through their exchange. In the cards I examined, women are represented as getting, or desiring, plumper lips (collagen injections), thinner hips (liposuction), larger breasts (breast augmentation surgery), less saggy breasts (breast lift), and younger faces (face lift). As discursively (re)produced in the images and text of mass produced greeting cards, femininity is connected to a woman's self worth and is fundamentally body-centred.

Cosmetic Surgery-Themed Greeting Cards and Female "Body Talk"

Throughout this paper I discuss specific greeting cards widely available through various retail outlets in Canada. I collected eleven cards collected at drug and convenience stores in Edmonton, Alberta and Wolfville, Nova Scotia from 2005 and 2007. These are not a representative sample but rather are exemplary of the ubiquity of the theme of cosmetic surgery in contemporary greeting cards sold in Canada. Ten of the eleven assembled cards employ cartoon imagery and the cover of one displays an older, white, woman in a black and white photograph. The overwhelming whiteness of the representations of women presented across these cards is most notable. Of the 17 women pictured in the eleven cards, 16 are white and 1 pictured in a group - is brown. This preponderance of whiteness is both broadly representative of the racial imagery of mass produced cards (Schrift, 1994, p. 121) and specifically facilitative of particular norms of femininity and women's bodies.

The themes of body dissatisfaction, the physical "troubles" of aging, and competition amongst women have long been featured in greeting cards marketed to women (Schrift, 1994). Generally, greeting cards that reference cosmetic surgery do so in relation to one or more of these broader themes in the context of explicitly expressed sentiments of friendship, acknowledgement of birthdays, wishes of "get well" or other everyday non-occasions. An example of this placement of representation of cosmetic surgery by implication occurs in a twice-issued card by Carleton Cards. The exterior of this card shows a group of four women; three on one side of a table with a birthday cake on it, a banner in the background reads "Happy Birthday Joan!" The middle member of the group of women says, "Aw, c'mon Joan, you can tell us .... What did you wish for?" Upon closer inspection of this cartoon image we notice that the party guests each possess large, full breasts while birthday-girl Joan has comically drawn tiny breasts. The interior wish simply states, "May all your birthday wishes come true!" Again, cosmetic surgery is not explicitly mentioned in this card. In this case the supposed wish itself is represented as self evident (what else could Joan, about whom we know so little, want) as is the manner of wish-fulfillment.

A key feature of these cards is the presumption of women's specifically scripted "female" concerns with their bodies and a simultaneous ambivalence towards cosmetic surgical intervention. These concerns are repeatedly represented in contemporary mainstream greeting cards as: women's competitiveness with women; fear of aging; and bodily dissatisfaction (Schrift, 1994). (5) In this way, the images, text, purchase and exchange of cosmetic surgery themed greeting cards between women reproduces a self-objectifying dialogue which has come to be variously referred to as "fat talk" (Nichter & Vukovic, 1994; Gapinski et al., 2003) or "body talk." Greeting cards in general, and cosmetic surgery-themed cards in particular, exhibit key features of in-person "body talk": they use appearance as a reference point for feelings; promote group affiliation and solidarity; and situate relative self-esteem with peer group and broader societal framings of femininity (Gapinski et al., 2003, p. 2). Preliminary research in the area of women's "body talk" however, does not demonstrate a link between body critique and lowered "self esteem" (Stice, Maxfield and Wells, 2003).

An example of such body talk as a feature of female to female affiliation is available in the images and text of a card from the "Share a Laugh" card line from American Greetings. This card features two cartoon women sharing coffee at a street side cafe and remarking as another more buxom-ly drawn woman walks by. "Clearly had lipo!" remarks one seated woman as her companion concurs, "... And implants...". The card's interior message asserts that this comedy has verisimilitude: "We're not catty, we're just observant." As one early twenty-something grad student explained of her choice of this card for her friend's birthday, "! don't know, it's funny because it's real." As this student's comments indicate, young women in her peer group do use body talk to gossip and enhance group solidarity. As well, they are aware of the variety of "feminizing" cosmetic surgical "enhancements" available for those willing, and able, to pay. However, they are disinclined to look favourably upon cosmetic surgery. For them, cosmetic surgery itself is part of the joke. These perspectives are reflected in the cosmetic surgery-themed cards which lampoon the risk of error attendant to cosmetic surgeries.

In this analysis 1 read these ritualized exchanges of cosmetic surgery humour as manifestations of the mainstreaming, or now successful, "everydayness" of such interventions for women. However, this mainstreaming has not been accomplished without some hesitation and resistance by women. As such, the "humour" of cosmetic surgery-themed greeting cards positions the exchange of these cards as a "comtbrtable outlet" through which "the unspeakable can be expressed" (Schrift, 1994, 113). Indeed, two of the sample cards specifically invite a derisive response to cosmetic surgical intervention through the representation of the unsightly consequences of cosmetic surgery "typos" ("My, that IS a typo .... So you were expecting the collagen injection in your LIPS, and the liposuction on your HIPS?") and "plastic surgery nightmares" (cartoons images of an upside down nose, a too pulled back face, and over-inflated lips). Cosmetic surgery in these representations is for "other people" specifically "other foolish people." In these cards, senders do not validate or endorse the practice of cosmetic surgery, but they do tangibly bring awareness of cosmetic surgery into everyday rituals of female friendship and familial relations.

We may not choose to undergo cosmetic surgery ourselves but we know about the option and, down the road, "You never know." As the only photograph-based card in my collection (by Prism, 2002) depicting a smiling female senior citizen at a fruit stand, a chest-high cantaloupe prominently displayed in each hand, remarks, "Always lead with your assets." Regardless of age, a woman's feminine worth remains firmly entrenched in the display of her body. As sociologist C.J. Pascoe writes of high school students' challenges to gendered and sexual norms, political consciousness and articulated critique present more productive resistance to the gendered social order than do forms of humour and gender "play" that avoid direct challenges to institutionalized standards (Pascoe, 2007, p. 151). Similarly, senders of these cards may mock cosmetic surgeries with further personalized sentiments (or even graffiti) however purchasing, and exchanging these cards brings reminders of the cosmetic fix into spaces of personal-relation. As proposed by Schrift, "... rather than alleviating existing anxieties, [body-themed] birthday cards [may] create more anxiety about aging, especially for women in their unique struggle to attain 'ideal' beauty and stay young forever" (Schrift, 1994, p. 116). Transformative strategies of resistance to this commercialized discourse of aesthetic femininity might include d.i.y. (do it yourself, or homemade) cards, the exchange of "feminist" greeting cards, and or activism organized around the communication of rejection of cosmetic surgery-themed cards to their producers and distributors.

The humourous address of cosmetic surgery-themed greeting cards is a form of disavowal of cosmetic surgery for younger women, but not a productive refusal of these technologies. On one hand, the cards say "we know people do this, but we don't need to." On the other hand, this disavowal does not disclaim the culturally constructed "need" for cosmetic surgeries and procedures. That is, this disavowal simultaneously also acknowledges and concretizes the sender and receiver's acceptance of the aesthetic standards of femininity and the utility of cosmetic surgeries to approximating this standard. As one card from Carleton Cards asserts in its exterior greeting, "As you enter your 50s, new doors will open for you." This tri-fold card opens to reveal seniors approaching either of three doors: "The Geriatric Crisis Center", "The Office of Aging", or "The Cosmetic Surgery Clinic," the latter, of course, approached by a saggy-breasted, cane wielding older woman. In this way the (supposedly) humourous portrayal of cosmetic surgeries and their subjects authorizes a very specific aesthetic trajectory for older women and necessarily denigrates those who do not adhere to it. After all, you may be "looking great" this year but what about next year?

E-greetings: the Discursive Tightening of Standards of Feminine Embodiment?

Many scholars have written about the effects of new internet-based communications technologies on contemporary social relations (Scott-Dixon, 2004; Stewart Millar, 1998, and Spender, 1996). Indeed by 2007, 216 million Americans, or 71 percent of the population, were using the internet (Time Canada, 2008). Though this use continues to increase, as more and more services and businesses invest in technology to connect with customers on-line and social networking sites such as MySpace and facebook gain popularity, critical questions about access and participation abound. As this technology proliferates, simply "having access" to a computer becomes insufficient to describe the complexities of technology use. Considerations such as type and speed of internet connection, age and power of computer, as well as safety and privacy dictate the extent of potential users "access" to an ever-more "connected" society (Pascoe, 2007b). Within these questions and considerations, how gender norms and relations are implicated, challenged, reformulated or entrenched both materially and discursively within virtual communications is of great significance.

In 2003 e-cards, or on-line greeting cards, accounted for less than 5 percent of the greeting card market although that figure is likely higher now (GCA; Delbarre, 2003). One company, American Greetings, reported the expected delivery of 3 million e-cards for Valentine's Day 2006 (Tedeschi, 2006). By July 2007, approximately 29 million Americans visited e-card sites per month (Sullivan, 2007). One e-greeting site alone, Someecards.com, reported over 700,000 cards sent (Sullivan, 2007). This growth parallels the increasing everydayness of internet-based information exchange. Once largely offered for flee, e-greeting cards are increasingly offered on a for profit basis (either through the purchase of individual cards, through paid subscriptions to e-card providers, or through fees by advertisers for space on these web sites). According to Clancy Delbarre, Executive Director of the Greeting Card Association of Canada, industry consensus is that "electronic greetings are largely used by people who would not have purchased a traditional card in the first place" (Delbarre, 2003). While this perspective indicates the potential of the e-card to attract non-traditional greeters, e.g. men and youth, it also portends the broadening of the number of available greeting "occasions." As noted in the previous section, such greeting occasions traditionally include general friendship, birthdays, and illness. Another greeting occasion that has appeared on the landscape of e-greetings is cosmetic surgeries themselves. Significantly, the humour that structures the texts of cosmetic surgery-themed e-cards quite clearly participates in a discourse of acceptance.

While the representations of cosmetic surgery found in contemporary printed greeting cards are generally ones of humourous acknowledgement and disavowal, this discourse has narrowed in the growing use of on-line greeting cards. Interestingly, in this emerging mode of greeting, the representation of cosmetic surgery is that of a laudable, desirable, and widespread practice within the feminine beauty regime. As exemplified in an e-card by GoodtoBeYou.com, e-greetings demonstrate an enthusiastic acceptance of cosmetic surgery. In this card we see a close up of the head and torso of a cartoon stick woman as she looks adoringly at two chest high mounds partially swaddled in blue, under the caption, "Congratulations on the twins!" In the card's second frame, we see a full body image of the stick woman who is revealed to be admiring her extremely large breasts. The caption reads "They make a good addition to the family." The discursive innovation of this card is that it takes the conventions of a classic greeting card occasion, i.e., congratulating parents on the birth of babies, and reframes these in support of cosmetic surgery. The humourous greeting here is explicitly that of acceptance of cosmetic surgeries, and the women who have them, rather than of distancing or derision, as found in cosmetic surgery-themed printed greeting cards.

This card is one of eight cards in GoodtoBeYou's "Lift Me Up" Cosmetic Surgery line of e-cards. These eight cards make greeting occasions from several common cosmetic surgeries including breast augmentation, rhinoplasty and liposuction. E-greetings from this line are described on their web site as "a humorous way to congratulate friends or family members for cosmetically enhancing themselves." While this description is gender neutral, the exterior and interior imagery of all the e-cards in this line display only female subjects. While cartoon imagery conventions of humour are still the prominent mode of animation, which can be read as a distancing strategy, there is a textual shift to a direct embrace of cosmetic procedures for women.

The distancing strategy of humour is not as prominent in e-cards as it is in traditional printed greeting cards. This change of address in on-line cards possibly results from the perceived freedom and privacy of virtual correspondence. As represented in e-cards, cosmetic surgeries, and those who might have them, are never the subject of mockery or derision. For example, as the text of the Electric Doodle Greetings e-card "Breast Wishes!" intones in an animated display of text, floral imagery and music, "Like a perfect flower finding its bloom at last.... As wonderful as you looked before ... You look even better now! Congratulations and Breast Wishes on your new boobs!" Here, breast augmentation itself is the "occasion" that instigates the greeting. Two of the ten offerings in Electric Doodle's "Appearance" line directly congratulate recipients who've undergone cosmetic surgery. Additionally, indicating the discursive authority of norms of "healthy" feminine embodiment, three cards in this line offer bold "encouragements" to start or stick to a diet. Also illustrative of e-cards reliance on, and participation within, the discourse of normative femininity is the marked absence of e-cards that compliment receivers on their survival of breast cancer, or other gendered health crises. While there may be more "freedom" to speak the unspeakable in virtual communications, e-card providers have not anticipated a market that acknowledges crises that present very real challenges to normative feminine embodiments (for example, I could find no e-cards complimenting the receiver on a fetching post-chemo wig or head scarf). (6) In the context of a society that is increasingly conversant with the question, "Are they real?", the inquiry itself becomes redundant. As exemplified by these e-greetings, and predicted by Morgan and Bordo, biological "realness" (for women) has become less socially valued than the attainment of aesthetic normalcy. Simultaneously, the standard of the "curvaceously thin" (Harrison in Seligson, 2007, p. 28) embodiment as dictated by both producers (of fashion, leisure, health and other products) and consumers themselves becomes narrower and less "realistic."

Conclusions

The Good Bodv began with me and my particular obsession with my imperfect stomach.... The pattern of the perfect body has been programmed into me since birth. But whatever the cultural influences and pressures, my preoccupation with my flab, my constant dieting, exercising, worrying, is self-imposed. / pick up the magazines. / buy into the ideal. / believe that blond, flat girls have the secret. What is far more frightening than narcissism is the zeal for self-mutilation that is spreading, infecting the world. (Ensler, 2004, p. xii)

Cosmetic surgery offers a very seductive promise. It is a promise of worthiness, of normalcy and, accordingly, a promise of belonging (Gilman, 1999). The lure of cosmetic surgery becomes increasingly persuasive as we recite its supposed necessity and acceptance in so many everyday gestures (Butler, 2005): the purchase of a magazine, the maintenance of the strictures of a diet, the envy of "beautiful" others, or the purchase of a greeting card that models those same preoccupations. While women may not yet be encouraged to undertake cosmetic surgeries and procedures to the same extent that they are encouraged to wear make up and shave body hair, the desire to look a little "better" (younger, thinner, whiter, etc.) has been pro-rooted and commodified through popular culture. According to the cultural promise of cosmetic surgery, we are supposedly no longer hampered in our desire to belong by the limits of our bodies. Embodiment has become both process and project (Brumberg, 1998).

As evidenced through a generation of feminist and sociological scholarship on gender and bodies, women's lives are lived within and in relation to a gendered hegemony of embodiment. Through an interrogation of the politics of normativity, many contemporary social theorists have identified "normal" as a tyrannical idea(l) that structures individual understandings of the performance of gender and sexuality. As Mary Louise Adams notes of the power/knowledge dynamic of normativity, "normalization draws our attention to discourses and practices that produce subjects who are "normal," who live "normality," and, most importantly, who find it hard to imagine anything different" (Adams, 1997, p. 13). Normalization creates and maintains (naturalizes) particular embodied subjectivities. For women, the normative ideals articulate "real" femininity as specifically racialized, youthful, and thinly voluptuous. Such a standard dictates that it is the individual woman who must change and who must want to change her appearance in order to obtain the belonging promised through aesthetic and behavioural conformity and renders the non-conforming woman culturally "unintelligible" (Butler, 2005). The emergence of cosmetic surgery-themed greeting cards, their exchange, and the discursive shift promoted in their electronic versions demonstrates the simultaneous complexity and under-consideration of these messages within our everyday social practice. The analysis of cosmetic surgery themed greeting and e-cards in this paper demonstrates the process of normalization in action, presents new terrain for feminist analysis and resistance and reveals the contemporary promotion and acceptance of cosmetic surgeries in conjunction with the (re)production of very specific standards of feminine embodiment.

Decisions regarding body modifications are always accomplished at the intersections of gender and other socialized differences. The persuasive force of capitalist patriarchy is a clear architect of these intersecting expectations. Resistance to these normalizing discourses requires analysis of the minutia of their penetration of our everyday lives and social spaces. Ideals of feminine embodiment are situated within overall gendered body ideals that, in oppositional relation to an active masculine physicality, prescribe a taut, slender, youthfulness for women. Writing in 1990, Susan Bordo stressed that what was of critical interest to feminists was that where negotiations of these ideals take the form of "preoccupation[s] with fat, diet, and slenderness," they risk:

function[ing] as one of the most powerful "normalizing" strategies of our century, ensuring the production of self-monitoring and self-disciplining "docile bodies," sensitive to any departure from social norms, and habituated to self-improvement and transformation in the service of those norms (Bordo, 1990, p. 85).

Unfortunately, as of this writing, Bordo's analysis holds up as well in a new century as it did at the close of the last.

It is within and against this discursive landscape of femininity that the delivery, technologies and epistemologies of cosmetic surgery are constructed. Through media usage, such as greeting cards, person-to-person social relations, such as gift-giving and the acknowledgement of significant life occasions and events and myriad other social processes, we are situated in the (re)production of the very norms that govern our identity and experiences. Having a normative female aesthetic, as exemplified through the refraining of cosmetic surgery from print to electronic greeting cards, comes to be represented as an accomplishment for women, a success for a female friend or family member that just might be an occasion for a congratulatory greeting card.

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Diane Naugler

Sociology

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Surrey, BC

Notes

(1.) A shorter version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association at the University of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on May 30, 2007. Elements of this work and drawn from my doctoral thesis: To Take a Load Off: A Contextual Analysis of Gendered Meaning(s) in Experiences of Breast Reduction Surgery (2005). I would like to thank the two anonymous RFR reviewers whose commentary greatly influenced the further development of these ideas. My thanks also to my graduate assistant Heather Cunningham for her able mining of data bases and my constant gratitude to Kate Campbell for her editorial expertise and much appreciated support.

(2.) This proliferation has been the focus of substantial critical commentary by feminists across Westernized societies. See for example Gimlin (2007, 2001), Heyes (2007), Davis (2003, 1995), and Bordo (2003, 1997).

(3.) The top five cosmetic surgical procedures for men in 2006 provide further evidence of the persuasive intersections of race, age, and class as they cohere through normative gender. These procedures were: nose reshaping, eyelid surgery, liposuction, hair transplantation and male breast reduction.

(4.) This is not to say that women are passive recipients within these relations of power/knowledge or that our possibilities of identification are pre-determined or static (Hall, 1996) but rather that popular culture represents standardized gender, race, class and other positions of socialized differences in the service of modern governmentality (Foucault, 1995).

(5.) Simultaneously, there has been an increase in "feminist" or counter culture greeting cards and other ephemera that lampoon these very stereotypes including the popular culture jamming work of U.S. based artist Anne Taintor.

(6.) Someecards.com does however offer three cancer-related cards. Two congratulate the recipient (pictured as female) on not having cancer and the third promises, "I will be by your side if you ever get a horrendous form of cancer" juxtaposed with a cartoon image of two prepubescent girls smiling at each other.