Spectacular Castration: Labiaplasty as Body Negation in the Age of Globalization (2014)
This study is a Descriptive research regarding IV FGM/C with the following characteristics:
Author(s): Rusiko Lomtatidze
FGM/C Type(s): IV
Health area of focus: None.
Objective: To understand how labiaplasty became a rising trend amongst young women in some North American and Western European cultures during a time of globalization beginning at the start of the twenty first century and how this may be indicative of a new and unique form of biopower,relative to a shift in representation of the gendered female body
Study Population: NA
Findings: The “vulva ideal” emerges as a sign of a culturally defined femininity,that adheres to culturally prescribed borders and is devoid of the uncontrolled,bodily desires traditionally associated with female bodily difference. Study concludes that labiaplasty has become a rising trend for young women in North American and Western European cultures. Although,contemporary mainstream pornographic spectacle produces affect,which further helps shape subjectivities towards autonomous reproduction of ideologies and norms,pornography does not influence or cause the practice of labiaplasty; rather it is a reflection of the ideals already present in dominant cultural productions. These ideals work to sustain the phallocentric symbolic order by shaping female subjectivities to autonomously reproduce that order by reproducing male desires and sexualities that prioritize the pleasure of the penis. The “vulva ideal” is primarily a product of marketing,specifically relative to the cosmetic surgery industry that is further perpetuated in dominant representations such as reality television. Such marketing and representation breeds it’s own excess,producing the notion of the deviant vulva,relative to the deviant femaleness as excess of contemporary femininity.
Geographical coverage
Region(s):Not specified
Country(ies):Not specified