Aesthetic surgery cannot erase visible ethnic difference and marks false acculturation.

Evidence

Fitting into American society means having the right kind of nose. In the fictional world representing the imaginary body of the American Jew, the retroussé “oriental” nose comes to be an ideal. But for the Chinese American, according to Gish Jen’s portrait, it is a sign of the new “Asian” identity. One nose does fit all. There aesthetic surgery is a sign of middle-class rather than “American” identity, though one could argue that there is a fatal parallelism between these two ideas of imagining oneself as different. Thus among Asian-Americans in California, double eyelid surgery has become “the gift that parents offer their daughters when they graduate from high school or college.” This parallels the experience of Jewish Americans in the 1960s. For the Vietnamese and Koreans in America aesthetic surgery becomes a means of defining identity as flexible rather than permanent. Hybridity means now reshaping the body to make it more American. Yet the end result is not an “American” body but an “Asian American” body. The diasporic body remains marked as different and, just as “black” became “beautiful” in the 1960s, so too is “Asian” beautiful today. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 784 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Double eyelid surgery produces an Asian American body, not an American one; Cosmetic surgery to assimilate produces a marked ethnic, not American, body. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 784; Claiming whiteness fails when one’s appearance does not fit normative whiteness — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 171 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Cosmetic surgery to assimilate produces a marked ethnic, not American, body. #corroborates (0.97) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 784