Marketing and Resisting Plastic Surgery: Heteroglossic Voices in the Multimodal Construction of Female Identity

Contemporary consumer culture tends to see personal appearance as the crucial symbolic capital whereby an individual can assert her/his own identity as a member of a socially recognized community. The orders of discourse (as sites of articulated discursive formations; Fairclough 1992: 10, 43 et passim) which naturalize surgical intervention as a means to erase one’s ethnic origins while conforming to globalized Western (viz. US) standards of beauty, dialogically engage with voices arguing for the preservation of one’s physical traits as anchors of traditional culture, ideology and self-identity. This paper explores multimodal strategies of female identity construction and positioning as enacted through bank loans and advertisements for plastic (viz. cosmetic, as opposed to reconstructive) surgery with particular reference to non-Western countries and, more specifically, to Lebanon as a paradigmatic case in point. At the same time, it compares such globalizing, centripetal strategies with the localizing, heteroglossic voices of online communities of Lebanese women who contrast and resist such dominant discourse practices. They do so by ‘advertising’ for real beauty and encouraging the others to build their social capital on their ethnic and cultural origins and to promote their own real selves, while strategically monitoring the potential negative consequences that this might entail, including shame, stigma and social exclusion. Against the backdrop of an intersemiotic approach integrating multimodal and discourse-as-mediated-action studies, the paper investigates “the role of the market in shaping a habitus of agency-as-choice” (Kress 2010: 132) and ultimately advocates for shifting the focus of analysis from the individuals involved in communication to social action and social change.