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Beautyscapes explores the rapidly developing global phenomenon of international medical travel, focusing specifically on patient-consumers seeking cosmetic surgery outside their home country and on those who enable them to access treatment abroad, including key figures such as surgeons and facilitators. Documenting the complex and sometimes fraught journeys of those who travel for treatment abroad, as well as the nature and power relations of the transnational IMT industry, this is the first book to focus specifically on cosmetic surgery tourism. A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Beautyscapes draws on key themes in studies of globalisation and mobility, such as gender and class, neoliberalism, social media, assemblage, conviviality and care, to explain the nature and growing popularity of cosmetic surgery tourism. The book challenges myths about vain and ill-informed travellers seeking surgery from ‘cowboy’ foreign doctors, yet also demonstrates the difficulties and dilemmas that medical tourists – especially cosmetic surgery tourists – face. Vividly illustrated with ethnographic material and with the voices of those directly involved in cosmetic surgery tourism, Beautyscapes is based on a large research project exploring cosmetic surgery journeys from Australia and China to East Asia and from the UK to Europe and North Africa.
class, frequent fliers or globetrotters, nor were they the celebrity-emulating cosmetic surgery addicts portrayed in the popular media. They were ‘ordinary people’ who wanted to change one part of their body that they did not like. Our fieldwork enabled us to share their experiences of cosmetic surgery tourism, and these experiences powerfully challenged some of the assumptions in the media and in the academic literature about international medical travel. The photos of Sue’s surgical journey capture something of the ‘ordinariness’ of cosmetic surgery tourism as it
the surgeon’s. This mundane cosmopolitanism comes to hold significant value in the world of international medical travel. Language skills are essential, of course, but a culturally sensitive sense of humour when transporting nervous passengers facing surgery alone in an unfamiliar country makes workers like Jarek lynchpins of their organisations. The cosmetic surgery tourism industry provides significant opportunities for surgeons too. Surgeons reported higher earnings than were possible working in the public sector or not-for-profit hospitals. However, they also
Clinical trails 1 1 Clinical trails: researching cosmetic surgery tourism When we began the research project on which this book is based, we were all too aware of the criticisms of international medical travel (IMT) and of cosmetic surgery. In the mainstream media IMT is largely represented as personally and socially selfish and reckless, especially when it involves cosmetic procedures. The stereotype is one of patients travelling abroad for procedures on the cheap, carried out by unqualified ‘cowboy’ medics who make big profits based on the promise of
simultaneously independent and connected with other components [including hospitals, doctors, patients, airlines and others], to differing extents and depths of interaction, and may have arisen from or continue to be part of other assemblages’ (243). In their view – one remarkably consonant with our own – ‘international medical travel comes to consist of, and is maintained by, interactions and relationships of elements drawn together at particular conjunctures’ (243– 244). The particularity of the conjuncture is especially significant: assembling happens in particular times