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CHAPTER 7
Reshaping ‘Turkish’ Breasts and Noses:
On Cosmetic Surgery, Gendered Norms
and the ‘Right to Look Normal’
Claudia Liebelt
With a large number of reconstructive plastic and cosmetic surgeons,
Turkey now ranks among the top ten countries worldwide with the high-
est number of cosmetic surgeons per capita (ISAPS 2017), and its cul-
tural capital Istanbul has become a regional centre for the beauty and
fashion industries. Against the background of neoliberal urban restruc-
turing, the feminization of the urban service sector and an expansion of
the urban middle classes, aesthetic body modication and surgery have
become ever more normalized forms of consumption. There are specic
bodily concerns in Turkey that are the product of history and that tie
a particular bodily appearance to imaginations of modernity, femininity
and urban citizenship. ‘Heavy’ female breasts and ‘large’ or ‘hooked’
noses, whose surgical treatment is the focus of this chapter, are clearly
among these.
© The Author(s) 2019
C. Liebelt et al. (eds.), Beauty and the Norm,
Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91174-8_7
C. Liebelt (*)
University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
156 C. LIEBELT
In the language of medical experts in Turkey, heavy female breasts and
large or hooked noses are national bodily defects, and their treatment is
commonly labelled ‘ethnic plastic surgery.’ Developed by US-based cos-
metic and plastic surgeons, the notion of ethnic plastic surgery is com-
monly employed to account for the specic physical characteristics and
different anatomic features of ‘minority patients,’ that is, non-Caucasian
plastic surgery patients (cf. Mann 2014; Slupchynskyj 2005). In societies
in which ethnic features are tied to marginalized minorities, the correction
of these features has been characterized as a major motivation for cosmetic
surgery. For example, in his comprehensive cultural history of cosmetic sur-
gery, Sander Gilman (1999) foregrounds ‘racial passing,’ that is, the desire
to pass visibly from a negative category to a positive one, as ‘the basic moti-
vation for aesthetic surgery’ (ibid., xvii). According to Gilman, the rise of
cosmetic surgery at the end of the sixteenth century in Europe thus rested
on attempts by those constructed as dangerous, namely the syphilitic, ‘no
longer to be identied as different’ (ibid., xxi), in this particular case by
reconstructing a nose lost from illness. Gilman shows that, with the emer-
gence of ideologies of race and racial science, passing meant primarily racial
passing, with patients turning their deviant ‘Jewish,’ ‘Irish’ or ‘Black’ noses
into normative ‘Aryan,’ ‘English’ or ‘White’ ones (ibid., 23).
This chapter seeks to contribute to the debate on the standardization
of bodily appearances by probing an understanding of cosmetic surgery,
in particular nose and female breast (reduction) surgery, as a classed, gen-
dered and racialized desire for a ‘normal’ body image in urban Turkey.
Labelling specic cosmetic surgery procedures ethnic, I argue, is prob-
lematic not only because it sets a norm, namely Caucasian physical fea-
tures, while labelling looks that deviate from this norm ‘ethnic.’ Also, as
the following account will show, it pays little attention to the complexities
of local meanings of and motivations for surgery within particular social,
urban and cultural settings. Drawing on surgeons’ and religious experts’
accounts of what constitutes a ‘normal’ appearance with regard to nose
and breast surgery practices on the one hand and female patients’ accounts
on the other, this chapter analyses the multiple and changing meanings of
nose and breast surgeries for women in contemporary urban Turkey.
As sexualized and prominent personal features, large breasts and noses
are not problematic for women as racial or ethnic features per se, but
they may become so in some cases and in particular social settings. Not
least, female breasts and noses are scrutinized by a patriarchal society that
seeks control over the sexual female body. Against this background, my
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 157
ethnographic data suggest that surgery may also be a tool for women
hoping to reduce ‘dominating stares’ on their bodies by ‘normalizing’
them (cf. Garland-Thomson 2009) in an attempt to regain control. This,
I argue, complicates the ‘negative hermeneutics’ (Felsky 2006, 273) of
feminist approaches to beauty practices that focus on the oppressive,
painful and harmful aspects of cosmetic surgeries that these certainly also
involve. In line with recent approaches to beauty and cosmetic surgery
(Coleman and Figueroa 2010; Elias et al. 2017; Jarrín 2017), I argue for
an understanding of these as affective processes embedded in particular
biopolitical histories as well as a transnational beauty economy.
In the following, I will discuss feminine beauty and normative body
images in Turkey along four major lines, rst, in respect of the histori-
cal relationship with hegemonic norms of femininity and citizenship in
Turkey, where the ‘Western’ and secular woman has long been a norma-
tive ideal, including beauty, one that has been subject to heated debates
and transformations in Turkey’s recent past. Secondly, as a relationship
that cosmetic surgeons and religious experts claim can be ‘objectively’
determined and treated. Thirdly, as a normative and affective practice
engaged in by women to create ‘normal-’ and ‘natural-looking’ bodies
that no longer defy the norm or, by refraining from aesthetic body mod-
ication, that actively violate the norm. Finally, this chapter documents
the normalization of aesthetic body modication in urban Turkey, where
an increasing number of (young) women, in spite of its risks and possible
violation of religious norms, have come to regard cosmetic surgery as a
standard practice of bodily grooming and proper self-care.
RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY
This chapter is part of ongoing research into femininity, beauty work,
and aesthetic body modication in Istanbul,1 drawing on fteen months
of anthropological eld research, including ve short eld trips since
2011 and an uninterrupted period of eleven months of eldwork in
2013 and 2014. I conducted some one hundred ethnographic guideline
interviews, mostly scheduled and recorded, with customers and patients
of hair and beauty salons and clinics; beauty salon owners and workers;
cosmetic surgeons and other experts, among them tattoo artists; activists
in various feminist organizations; a fashion photographer; and an Islamic
scholar who rules on the permissibility of beauty treatments. Moreover,
the project employs media analysis, including the systematic analysis of
158 C. LIEBELT
newspaper archives, online forums (Kadinlar Kulübü and Fetva Meclisi),
and so-called makeover shows on private television. In 2013 and 2014, I
attended the annual Istanbul Beauty and Care Fair and distributed ques-
tionnaires among its visitors. I also distributed questionnaires among
participants in two municipal training courses on make-up and facial
care. The interlocutors selected for presentation in the following are not
representative, but they do draw attention to some common themes and
issues with regard to aesthetic practices in Istanbul, Turkey.
In focusing on the manufacture of beautiful, feminine, and more gen-
erally proper bodies in a particular urban setting, I seek to contribute
to a fast-growing body of feminist literature on the politics of beauty.
Women’s involvement in beauty work has long been criticized as the
effect of disciplinary power (Bartky 1990; Bordo 1993; Sawicki 1991)
and indeed, as functioning as a pervasive ‘beauty myth’ that has triggered
a feminist backlash in patriarchal societies (Wolf 1991). More recently,
however, there has been what Elias et al. (2017, Pos. 366) call a femi-
nist ‘(re)turn to beauty.’ Recent studies have now come to re-centre the
affective and future-oriented ‘aspiration to normalcy’ that is also involved
in women’s beauty work (Coleman and Figueroa 2010). My research
contributes to this debate and is rooted in an inter-sectional critique of
earlier feminist approaches to beauty that tended to assume the existence
of a generalized female subject who is a ‘racially unmarked, implicitly
heterosexual woman, of unspecied class’ (Craig 2006, 162). Instead,
Craig suggests we conceive of individuals and groups as differently
located in elds that promote ‘particular ways of seeing beauty’ (ibid.).
Such an approach underlines the importance of ethnographic research
on particular economies and cultures of beauty in relation to gendered
subjectivities.
BODY AESTHETICS AND NORMATIVE
FEMININITY IN URBAN TURKEY
As elsewhere, in urban Turkey the construction of femininity, and with
it bodily beauty, is highly normative and excludes certain bodies or else
creates pressure to modify them visually. It has long been tied to disci-
plinary practices that are a prerequisite for achieving what is considered
‘the right look.’ Being involved in beauty work and bodily self-care is
widely expected, and women’s failure to do so is commonly associated
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 159
with a lack of discipline, cleanliness and, more generally, moral degen-
eration. An oft-quoted saying in beauty salons and clinics is that ‘there
are no ugly women, just careless ones’ (in Turkish, ‘çirkin kadın yoktur,
bakımsız kadın vardır’). Urban middle-class women’s standard routines
of bodily grooming are increasingly relegated to professional beauty ser-
vice workers and include regular manicures, pedicures, complete body
and facial hair removal, eyebrow shaping, the dying or highlighting of
hair and, for middle-aged to younger elderly women especially, various
anti-ageing treatments. Most importantly, as I will show in what follows,
cosmetic surgery has become an ever more normalized technique for (re)
shaping bodies so that they correspond to dominant ideals of gender.
However, the visible manufacturing of normative femininities in
urban Turkey includes not just beauty (service) work, but also processes
of identity politics and self-fashioning. Thus, it is the secular, modern
and ‘Western’ feminine body that has long been the unmarked category
in urban Turkey, against which other women have been measured and
found wanting as a deviance from the norm. This normative ideal has
to be seen within the context of Turkey’s nation-building process as a
young republic seeking to replace and modernize a supposedly ‘degen-
erate’ Ottoman elite, one that nevertheless already regarded itself as a
part of European cosmopolitan society based on civilizational principles
and the desire for modernity (Aydin 2007). In her analysis of beauty
contests in early republican Turkey, A. Holly Shissler (2004, 117)
shows the pivotal role of the public presentation of feminine bodily
beauty in republicans’ attempts to project images of just such a modern
and ‘civilized’ nation. The public presentation of uncovered, yet ‘hon-
ourable’ (in Turkish, namuslu) women in state-sponsored beauty con-
tests redened patriarchal concepts of honour and shame to ‘secularize
Islam’ and ‘normalize the female body’ (ibid.). The outcome was an
imaginary ideal of the secular Republican woman that one pious inter-
locutor in Jenny White’s ethnography on the pious new middle class
described as ‘blond and modern, also honourable (namuslu), clean,
sexually honourable (iffetli). … [and wearing] her skirt below the
knees’ (quoted from White 2013, 141). In recent decades, this hegem-
onic ideal has been subject to change due to the increased importance
of hyper-femininity in contemporary consumer capitalism, with its
emphasis on youth and sexual attractiveness in women on the one hand
and political changes towards more pious gendered norms on the other.
160 C. LIEBELT
Much has been written on the role of Islamic dress and sartorial styles
in creating new Islamic (elite) lifestyles and feminine subjectivities fol-
lowing the banning of the head scarf in the public sector during the
1980s and 1990s.2 In an atmosphere of ‘hyper-politicization’ (Kandiyoti
2015, 8) and ongoing public debate and conict about gendered roles
and norms after the consolidation of power by the conservative and
pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi,
AKP) and its increasingly authoritarian rule, women’s bodies have
recently become a battleground once more between imaginations of
modernity and tradition, secularism and Islamism. Today, a new Islamic
urban middle class is questioning the taken for granted-ness of the earlier
feminine ideal by promoting more pious modes of outer appearance and
public behaviour for women. Defying common assumptions, and despite
the problematic nature of aesthetic body modication from a religious
perspective, upwardly mobile pious women often share a willingness to
engage in forms of hyper-feminine beautication and actively negotiate
the boundaries of moral permissiveness and bodily appearance (Liebelt
2016). Perhaps as an outcome of these dynamics, as what follows will
show, the narrative focus in cosmetic surgery is on the ‘right to look nor-
mal,’ rather than the ‘right to be beautiful.’
During the 1990s and early 2000s women in Islamic dress who ven-
tured into the more ‘secular’ neighbourhoods of Istanbul’s upper (mid-
dle) classes were commonly subject to verbal abuse and harassment as
space intruders (Turam 2013). More recently, an increasing number
of stories of attacks on women for dressing ‘provocatively’ in shorts or
miniskirts, sporting ‘un-Islamic’ tattoos, make-up or piercings and more
generally behaving ‘loosely’—for example, by kissing or consuming alco-
hol in public—have gone viral in the social media and the wider pub-
lic.3 To varying degrees, however, all women are subject to dominant
stares that, according to Garland-Thomson (2009, 42), function to reg-
ulate looks and may lead those stared at to employ strategies of ‘gender
and racial passing.’ As one interlocutor, Esma,4 a veteran beauty service
worker and beauty school teacher in her early thirties observed:
[In Turkey today,] there’s no one who dresses in a really extravagant way,
really. … If you go to Spain, for example, you see girls dressed in mini-
skirts, coloured tights and Converse [shoes]. Also in Britain. They might
even go to work like this, dressed in sneakers. … In Turkey, you won’t
see this. You won’t even see young women cutting their hair very short.
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 161
The maximum is like this (points to her chin), and they will go to have
blow-outs all the time to look presentable. … People pay much attention
to what others might think of them, [wondering:] ‘If I do this, what will
they think?’; ‘If I do this or that, what are they going to say?’; ‘How will
they look at me?’5
The quote illustrates the strong normative ideals of gendered identi-
ties and body images in urban Turkey and shows that ‘people’, as Esma
puts it, take great care of what others might think or say or how they
might look at them. While she quotes long hair and ‘presentable’ looks
as gendered ideals for women, adherence to such norms, as what follows
will show, now prominently includes cosmetic surgery which promises
not only to ‘beautify,’ but also to ‘normalize’ the body.
BODY AESTHETICS AND THE ‘RIGHT TO LOOK NORMAL’
In the past two decades, cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from
an elite phenomenon associated with the urban sosiyété (high society) to
an increasingly common procedure among younger and middle-aged
women especially. The most common cosmetic surgery procedures in
Turkey—in descending order and according to the statistics gathered
by the International Society of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons (ISAPS
2017)—are rhinoplasty or nose surgery, breast augmentation, liposuction
or fat removal surgery, eyelid surgery, and until recently, breast reduc-
tion for women. While this list resonates with the global average, as well
as with the ISAPS listings for the US, Brazil, Japan, Russia and India,
who currently top the list of countries with the highest number of plastic
surgery procedures worldwide (ISAPS 2017), nose and breast reduction
surgeries are more frequent in Turkey than in any of the countries just
listed. As mentioned above, these procedures are commonly called ‘eth-
nic plastic surgery’ by cosmetic surgeons in Turkey and associated with
particular national or even ‘racial’ bodily defects. By utilizing ‘standard’
measures of beauty, cosmetic surgery promises not only to beautify bod-
ies, but also to normalize them.
In contrast to Brazil, where Alex Edmonds (2007) reports cosmetic
surgeons proclaiming the ‘right to be beautiful,’ in Turkey, where the
High Commission on Religious Affairs and other religious experts regu-
larly warn that aesthetic body modications are a ‘sin’ (günah) for both
men and women, cosmetic surgeons and their patients more usually
162 C. LIEBELT
champion the ‘right to look normal,’ framing cosmetic surgery within
a discourse of health rather than aesthetics. Religious experts commonly
emphasize inner beauty in contrast to outer appearance and frequently
quote the well-known saying that beauty and ugliness lie in the eye of
the beholder. In Sunni Islam and the Hana school of thought and juris-
diction, which are dominant in Turkey, changing one’s features as cre-
ated by God and, following a particular hadith, shaping one’s eyebrows
and tattooing are prohibited (haram), an interdiction that has been
conrmed by a number of religious commissions and individual clerics.6
However, even the most staunchly conservative religious experts are pre-
pared to consider exceptions to this rule, for example, if the surgery is
predominantly a matter of health or is intended to correct ‘inferiority
complexes’ or bodily ‘abnormality,’ according to the High Commission
on Religious Affairs.7 In prototypical fashion, Ahmed Şahin, a chaplain
at the Istanbul Süleymaniye Mosque, who regularly contributed to and
provided advice on cosmetic surgery in the popular conservative daily
Zaman (1986–2016), differentiates between two cases in response to a
reader’s query about the permissibility of cosmetic surgery. In the rst
case, a person looks ‘normal’ but desires to become more attractive,
for example, by changing their nose. In such a case, cosmetic surgery is
‘absolutely not permitted’ (haram) because it means changing ‘God’s
creation’ for no good reason. In the second case, an ‘extraordinarily
ugly’ person desires the same surgery because they feel ‘disabled’ or ‘anx-
ious’ due to their appearance. In this case, cosmetic surgery is permissi-
ble (caiz) because it is a ‘medical treatment’ to ‘correct an abnormality.’8
This raises the question of how religious experts establish criteria
for scrutinizing bodies and measuring bodily ‘normality’ or ‘abnormal-
ity.’ To this question, another religious scholar and advisor on cos-
metic surgery, Nureddin Yıldırım, venerated as Nureddin Hoca (teacher
Nureddin) by his many followers, replied:
I mean, there are certain ideal standards in the creation of human beings.
What is a standard human being? Women are usually 165 cm in height and
men about 170 cm. So, if there is one boy who reaches 220 cm at the age
of 18, how to account for that? It is an exception to the norm. Then again,
if a lady ties herself up and does stretching to grow taller, this is a different
matter altogether. The latter is denying God’s creation; the former is what
we call a malfunction. It is a [medical] problem, because it is an excep-
tion from the standard norm. Like being born with six ngers, or having a
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 163
crooked nger… These things can be xed by cosmetic and plastic surgery.
… Being created as an exception to the norm and being xed by plastic
surgery – there is no problem according to our religion. It is not up to
us to criticize. We also consider it normal to x a broken bone. But, for
example, if a 45-year-old man or woman makes themselves look the age of
35, this is forbidden by the religion. It may be considered a form of deceit.
… And both the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and the Holy
Koran prohibit deception.9
The quote illustrates how the description of bodily averages and the
establishment of standard measurements, in this case a person’s body
height, function as ‘a prescription for normality’ (Garland-Thomson
2009, 30). Other examples of permissible cosmetic surgery provided later
on in the same interview included the reduction of large noses that made
‘a woman look like a man’ and the reduction of female breasts so large
that they created backache and could be considered a ‘natural disorder.’
In an age of the medicalization and normalization of invasive proce-
dures, whenever possible the treatment of aesthetic ‘abnormalities’ is
thus regarded as legitimate even by those who were otherwise quick to
condemn the same kind of procedure because of its potentially deceit-
ful impact, or because it was based on a presumptuous intention that
was disrespectful of divine creation. As in other situations of Islamic
decision-making, the nal decision is with the believer, who is forced to
scrutinize his or her intention (niyet) to undergo surgery. It should be
emphasized that the arguments put forward by religious experts like Şahin
or Yıldırım, which are widely reported and discussed in the Turkish public
sphere, have a legitimizing impact on decisions regarding cosmetic surgery
regardless of whether patients consider themselves pious or not.
Cosmetic surgeons, even more than religious experts, claimed to be
able to objectively establish and measure bodily ‘abnormalities’ or ‘defor-
mations,’ often routinely employing tables of standard measurements
in their medical practice. One interlocutor, Prof. Dr. Ismail Kuran, who
was also President of the Turkish Society of Plastic-Reconstructive and
Cosmetic Surgery in Turkey, championed the idea of a ‘mathematics of
beauty’:
[In cosmetic surgery,] you need mathematics. Even on the face, on most
parts of the body, you can use mathematics. I have been employing these
measurements, not only on the nose, but also on the breast, and now this
164 C. LIEBELT
[procedure] has become a standard method to decide about the right
implant, the right width, the right projection [in breast surgery]…. I think
mathematics is a very important part of the scientic process and for those
[who believe that] cosmetic surgery cannot be taken only as an artistic
study. It is a combination of science and artistry, so you have to develop
some kind of measurements to regulate your practice.10
When, for example, I wondered how these measurements responded to
patients’ different and changing desires, given the recent trend towards
smaller breasts, he responded:
Of course, there are fashions, but we should also talk about the optimum.
I am not talking about trends here. You might want a bigger breast, but
there are limits. What happens if your shoe number is 39 and you try to
use [a shoe of the size] 35? – it’s impossible! What if you use 45? It will
be loose. Just like our feet or hands, breasts have a size to start with. This
includes the width and height, and if you go beyond your limits, you’re
in trouble. … There are more than ve hundred different types [of breast
implants, in terms of] shape, height, width and projection. So, breasts
are an important area for the decision-making process with mathematics,
actually.
As will have become clear, Prof. Kuran’s understanding of bodily aes-
thetics relies on the idea of a universal, transcultural ‘optimum’ that
clearly extends beyond cultural or personal taste, not to speak of fashion.
Elsewhere in the interview, Prof. Kuran called this quality ‘harmony,’ with
a beautiful person being someone ‘who has harmony about her body and
face.’ This kind of bodily harmony was clearly measurable, and the fact
that his medical practice relied on the refashioning of bodies in accordance
with a sample of ‘standard measurements’ indeed qualied it as science,
in contrast to an understanding of cosmetic surgery as merely ‘artistry.’
As Jarrín (2017, 134–35) notes, in Brazil, plastic surgeons conceptualize
cosmetic surgery as a strategy for harmonizing patients’ somatic features
in association with the idea of treating the ‘miscegenation’ of Brazilian
society. On the background of a historical linkage of cosmetic surgery
with eugenic thought, Brazilian cosmetic surgeons established a ‘right for
beauty’ that is tied to nationalist narratives of progress (ibid., 54–65).
To sum up, in their medical and theological practices respectively, cos-
metic surgeons and religious experts in Turkey likewise assume that ‘nor-
mal’ looks can be objectively established. They regard the treatment of
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 165
bodies that defy standard norms of appearance as a ‘right’ untouched by
moral objections or religious bans. I will now turn to female patients’
cosmetic surgery practices, namely breast and nose surgeries, that are
intended to create ‘normal-’ and ‘natural-looking’ bodies that no longer
defy the norm.
RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS
Human breasts are a symbol of femininity, and the popular imagina-
tion often seems to regard them as its measure. Thus, in her insightful
book on Staring, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that ‘[t]oo much
breast means too much femininity; too little breast means not enough’
(2009, 143). Given that women’s breasts come in very diverse shapes
and sizes, Garland-Thomson remarks upon the astonishing fact that, in
the ubiquitous media images of them, they ‘look remarkably uniform’
(ibid., 147). This too is the case in Turkey, where women use various
techniques, including (push up) brassieres, breast-shaping treatments in
beauty salons and cosmetic surgery, to change the size and shape of their
breasts, and indeed, as the following account of Özge’s breast reduction
surgery will show, to ‘normalize’ them.
Since the early 2000s, there has been a global trend towards smaller
breasts, which has also impacted on Turkey, where during the early
2000s, according to the acting general secretary of the Chamber of
Turkish plastic reconstructive and aesthetic surgeons, Ali Barutçu, the
ideal breast size fell ‘from 85 to 80 [cm]’, with the exception of per-
forming artists, who apparently continued to prefer larger breasts.11 The
same report goes on to quote him saying that ‘[b]reast reduction surgery
reduces stress in social life while it also improves the quality of women’s
everyday life and their success in working life.’ The following account
will help to understand in what ways women’s breasts could possibly be
linked with social stress, the quality of life and professional success in
contemporary urban Turkey.
Özge, a mathematics teacher at a private college and a cheer-
ful woman in her mid-thirties with accurately shaped eyebrows, short
black hair and a preference for casual dress, framed her breast reduction
surgery within a discourse of patriarchal oppression of the sexualized
female body in Turkey. Early on in the interview, Özge distanced her-
self from ‘those women who easily have cosmetic surgery,’ stating that
for her, ‘cosmetic surgery had always been, well, something that popular
166 C. LIEBELT
culture enforces upon women.’
12 Instead, she emphasized the health
aspect of her surgery, which resulted in the removal of two kilos of fat
from her breasts, as her main motivation for undergoing the procedure.
However, when I expected Özge to continue talking about backaches,
an ailment women seeking breast reduction surgery often reported suf-
fering from, she told me about the restriction of movement she experi-
enced as the result of the ‘over-sexualization’ of her pre-surgery body.
In order to explain what she meant by this, she recounted the restric-
tive atmosphere of her coming of age as the daughter of rural-urban
migrants in a working-class neighbourhood in Istanbul during the con-
servative post-military putsch era of the 1980s:
We were raised in the culture of the neighbourhood [mahalle]. At those
times, girls who had their periods and whose breasts started growing, they
couldn’t play outside anymore. It was a society that forced you to grow up
early. … If this [menstruation and the development of female breasts] hap-
pens too early, it is a disadvantage for the girl. I remember feeling ashamed
[because of my breasts]. My friends were saying: ‘Are they really this big?’
Such kind of things really troubled me. I had many problems during ado-
lescence. I felt it [my body/breast] was ugly. … I mean, as a kid, you want
to play outside with your friends, but your physique has turned you into a
woman from one day to the other. In this [cultural] context, I experienced
puberty too early.
During high school, Özge remembered being constantly on a diet, try-
ing to reduce the size of her breasts. Dieting, however, proved useless,
she said, because, pointing to her breasts laughingly, ‘Everything I ate
went there!’ While Özge attempted to reduce the sexualized feminin-
ity of her body by loosing weight, she felt she was becoming ever more
attractive to men:
Girls are sexual objects in Turkey. For example, if your hips are big, it is
not considered erotic. But if you are slim and your breasts are big, you’re
like ‘very sexy.’ … Like I said, you can have a big body and just be a fat
person, but me – my body was thin, I was so thin. My size in clothes was
36, and my breast measurement was like 100 [cm], so these two things
combined made me look too sexy.
This resulted in ever more (self-chosen) connement, because whenever
she ventured out alone Özge felt men staring at her breasts, with some
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 167
also harassing her verbally. Accordingly, she tried to hide her breasts
under ‘layers of loose clothing.’ It was only after breast reduction surgery
that Özge felt she was no longer being stared at and happily proclaimed
that now, quoting her cosmetic surgeon, she had ‘standard-size breasts.’
As soon as the bandages were removed, she went shopping for a new
and indeed sexier set of clothes, including tight T-shirts and, for the rst
time in her life, a bikini. Now that her body was ‘normal’ and she felt
she was in a position to control and regulate her publicly visible attrac-
tiveness better, men’s stares no longer made her feel vulnerable. While
her choice to undergo cosmetic surgery met with a divided response
from her feminist friends, Özge felt that it had earned her respect among
her female colleagues at the private college where she taught and where
many female employees engaged in various forms of aesthetic body
modication.
In contrast to Özge, who was single when she undertook breast sur-
gery, many younger interlocutors intended to postpone their breast
reduction surgeries until after they got married and had had children,
fearing that the surgery might impact on their ability to breastfeed or
else harm their attractiveness for their sexual partners, who were com-
monly assumed to prefer larger female breasts. This was the case with
Sevda, the fashion-conscious daughter of a beauty salon owner in the
conservative neighbourhood of Fatih, who fantasized about breast
reduction surgery. Sevda’s large breasts made her feel uncomfortable
about her body, especially since she knew from female relatives who
suffered from the same kind of ‘problem’ that these tended to become
even larger after giving birth and breastfeeding. While Sevda’s maternal
grandmother had undergone breast reduction surgery several years ear-
lier, other relatives shunned the procedure out of moral and religious
conviction. Among them was her aunt, whose breasts Sevda had recently
and accidentally seen naked, an encounter that continued to haunt her.
For Sevda, her aunt’s breasts made her look like ‘the typical old peas-
ant woman (köylü kadın),’13 namely those in her family’s hometown in
the Black Sea region, who had given birth and breastfed many children.
Inheriting this look, Sevda conded, was among her greatest fears.
Talking to me about her breasts shortly before and again shortly after
she got married, Sevda was still not prepared to undergo surgery. She
knew that her husband actually ‘liked’ her larger breasts and feared that
reducing them might prove risky for their sexual relationship. As a ‘good
wife,’ she hoped to seek his consent in the near future, perhaps after
168 C. LIEBELT
giving birth and breastfeeding, which would provide her with the oppor-
tunity to frame the surgery as a form of postnatal ‘reconstructive’ surgery
that also had a health aspect to it, namely the reduction of backache.
In postponing breast reduction surgery, Sevda was juggling contrast-
ing expectations of her as a young urban, modern and sexually attractive
woman. These expectations and her related fears were tied to two distinc-
tive connotations of larger female breasts in Turkey, on the one hand the
erotic female breast as a strong symbol of sensuality and sexuality, com-
monly seen as desirable by male sexual partners, and on the other hand the
maternal breast, signifying fertility and exuberance but also, in the popular
imagination, a characteristic of the devalued peasant woman. As indicated
by common caricatures of the köylü kadın, as well as media coverage of
the topic,14 if not carried by an urban upper-class woman or a performing
artist, larger female breasts risked linking its wearer with a lower social sta-
tus and those regions most readily associated with peripheral rural life in
Istanbul, namely the Black Sea or the Anatolian southeast.
Changing the size of their breasts was never an easy choice for women,
one that was commonly hidden from or else had to be negotiated with
relatives and/or sexual partners. Within more conservative or, as in Özge’s
case, feminist circles, decisions about breast reduction surgery were com-
monly framed within a discourse of medical normalization and health,
rather than aesthetics. Moreover, women whose parents, like Özge’s
and Sevda’s, had been part of the large inux of rural-urban migrants to
Istanbul in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to be especially haunted by the
symbolic connection between larger female breasts and rural cloddishness.
However, as exemplied by Sevda’s hesitation to undergo surgery and
Özge’s account of men’s predatory stares at her pre-surgery breasts, they
were also well aware of the normative link between larger female breasts,
sexual attractiveness and gendered roles, carefully weighing their surgery
decisions against it. In spite of the high costs, pain and risks involved, the
reshaping of breasts seen as ‘abnormal’ was commonly seen as a power-
ful way of managing one’s adherence to gendered norms. To Özge, her
surgical choice to go for more ‘standard-size’ breasts seemed an almost
subversive act against the ever more sexualized, hyper-feminine bodily ide-
als that for many years had made her the object of dominating male stares
and subsequently, restriction of movement. On the other hand, it was also
embedded in a professional environment of socially aspiring women, who
clearly knew how to take care of themselves and actively participated in the
booming beauty service economy.
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 169
RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ NOSES
As mentioned above, the idea of an aesthetic optimum is deeply racial-
ized in Turkey, with ‘large’ female breasts and noses being consid-
ered especially problematic and widely associated with more peripheral
regions in Turkey, and more generally, rural backwardness. Rather than
being considered a national characteristic per se, ‘big’ or ‘hooked’ noses
are linked with the Black Sea region and the Anatolian southeast in par-
ticular. For example, in an interview with the Hürriyet daily newspaper
in 2006, cosmetic surgeon Prof. Dr. Onur Erol, himself a media star in
Turkey and internationally renowned for his so-called Turkish Delight-
nose surgery technique (Erol 2000), talked about different types of
‘deformed’ noses in need of correction, differentiating between the ‘big
and pointed noses’ of the Black Sea population and the ‘big and eshy
noses’ of those originating in the Turkish southeast.15 As the religious
scholar Nureddin Yıldırım, mentioned above, put it, ‘[w]omen especially
are obsessed with their noses … Actually, in Turkey, in the Black Sea and
in eastern regions, women do have big noses. So when they migrate to
big cities like Istanbul, they think they draw attention to themselves.’
While interlocutors rarely linked their decisions about nose surgery
with migration directly, they nevertheless often half-jokingly stated their
desire to change their ‘Turkish’ or ‘Greek’ noses into smaller ‘French’
ones, reecting yet another geography of beauty.
Among them was Ruken, a 23-year-old woman who was introduced
to me by her uncle, a friend of mine, shortly after she moved in with his
family while at-hunting in Istanbul. About a year prior to our rst meet-
ing, she had graduated from university and taken up employment as a
lawyer in Izmir, where her family had resettled from the eastern Anatolian
region of Tunceli/Dersim during the Kurdish uprising and violent armed
conicts in the region during the 1990s. Shortly before starting to apply
for jobs in Istanbul and eventually moving there, Ruken had undergone
nose surgery to remove her ‘bump,’16 as she put it. Arriving for our
interview in a café in central Istanbul straight from a lecture given by the
well-known philosopher and feminist-socialist writer Gülnur Acar-Savran,
Ruken joked about the irony of talking to me about her cosmetic surgery
right after having listened to a lecture on feminism, something she clearly
perceived as a contradiction in terms. She quickly moved on to tell me
how important the surgery had been for her, after many years of suffering
from a nose that had made her feel ‘really ugly,’ even ‘handicapped.’
170 C. LIEBELT
She had fantasized about nose surgery ever since her childhood, but
was forced to wait until she was nally able to pay for it out of her own
savings, this being the rst major purchase from her own income. With
her new, smaller nose, she felt perfectly equipped to start ‘a new chapter
in life,’ as she told me, and prepared for moving to Istanbul. About ten
months after the surgery, with a new position in an Istanbul-based law
rm and all signs of surgery gone, Ruken happily recounted how nally
she felt ‘perfectly normal.’ Indeed, she expressed surprise at the fact that
her initial euphoria about her long desired new nose had quickly given
way to a sense of ‘normal everyday life.’ While she had not talked to her
new colleagues or Istanbul friends about the surgery, she knew of others
having had the same type of surgery. She mused that for young upwardly
mobile women in Istanbul, a smaller nose or else cosmetic surgery were
simply ‘part of the deal.’
There is a history of the operated nose in Turkey, with the President
of the Chamber of Plastic Reconstructive and Aesthetic surgery in
Turkey telling me that ‘it used to be a [pre-]fabricated operation
before: small noses with upturned tips.’ This earlier aesthetics of the
‘standard’ operated nose, popularized by Turkish celebrities such
as pop star and cosmetic surgery afcionada Ajda Pekkan, who had
her rst nose surgery in the mid-1960s, were now widely rejected as
‘overdone,’ ‘articial’ or even ‘tasteless,’ especially if performed by
patients from lower social strata, who might engage in cosmetic sur-
gery as a form of conspicuous consumption. Instead, many cosmetic
surgery patients and surgeons were concerned with what were com-
monly called ‘natural’ designs. These were seen as being both in line
with the aesthetic standards of the day and hardly recognizable as hav-
ing been operated upon. Ruken, mentioned above, had also been con-
cerned about acquiring a ‘natural-looking’ nose and engaged in much
research along these lines in preparation for her surgery, especially in
the large nose surgery section of the popular online forum Women’s
Club (Kadınlar Kulübü).17 With the help of this virtual community,
she had chosen a surgeon who was renowned for his ‘natural’ nose sur-
gery designs. When this surgeon suggested that Ruken return with the
picture of someone whose nose she liked, her resulting query posted in
the forum triggered a long debate on natural-looking designs. While
some uploaded pictures of celebrities, whose noses they liked for their
naturalness—among them that of the Turkish model and actress Deniz
Akkaya, rumoured to have had her own nose modelled after the looks
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 171
of US American model Liv Tylor by celebrity surgeon Onur Erol—
others warned that emulating another person’s nose posed a great
threat to natural looks.
The common reference to ‘naturalness’ with regard to bodily aesthet-
ics is closely linked to the ideal of looking ‘normal’, yet it also relies on
a particular aesthetic style that draws heavily on current discourses of the
beauty industry. In its claim to produce ‘naturalness,’ this discourse relies
on an understanding of the body as something that has to be made, pref-
erably through the consumption of beauty services and cosmetics, rather
than something that has been given. Among interlocutors, naturalness
as the outcome of surgery was an important criterion in talking about
satisfaction with their surgery, with those remaining dissatised claiming
that surgery had made them look ‘unnatural.’ Among them was Sibel,
a middle-aged entrepreneur, who, thirteen years after her rst nose sur-
gery procedure, lamented that, by changing her ‘kind of characteristic
nose’ into an unnatural-looking smaller one, she had ‘turned into a regu-
lar cosmetically touched woman.’18 While for Sibel too ‘normalizing’ her
nose had been a major motivating factor for surgery, paradoxically the
standardization of her body as an unnatural-looking one that had been
operated on becomes similarly problematic.
Indeed, in the 2010s, the aesthetic modication of noses had become
so common among young, upwardly mobile women in Istanbul that
the decision of individual women not to undergo surgery was com-
monly seen as a very ‘brave’ or ‘cool’ choice, even as a fashion statement.
Talking about her favourite Turkish model, Didem Soydan, a female
fashion photographer told me: ‘She is blond, she has blue eyes, she’s one
of the most popular models [in Turkey] – and she has a big nose! I think
she is so cool!’19
In an age of consumer capitalism that makes one desire and easily
achieve the ‘right look’ through cosmetic surgery, Didem Soydan’s ‘big’
nose, which seemed to defy the dominant beauty norms, could indeed
be interpreted as a ‘cool’ countercultural aesthetic move. Engaged in by
someone who otherwise conformed to dominant beauty ideals, Soydan’s
‘refusal’ of cosmetic surgery of course did little to destabilize the pres-
sure to ‘normalize’ bodies for Ruken or others. Instead, the decision not
to reshape one’s ‘Turkish’ nose (or breast, for that matter) was beyond
debate for those less rmly established within the urban geography of
fashion and beauty, even if, like Özge or Ruken, they shared feminist
positions that were critical of beauty.
172 C. LIEBELT
CONCLUSION
This chapter contributes to the debate on standardization in bod-
ily appearance by describing the normalization of cosmetic surgery in
Turkey’s recent past, especially with regard to women’s nose and breast
(reduction) surgery. Given the construal of large female breasts and
noses as particularly prevalent and problematic in urban Turkey, the
treatment of these bodily ‘deformations,’ in medical language, was com-
monly narrated as based on an affective desire for, and indeed a right to,
a ‘normal’ rather than (merely) ‘beautiful’ look.
Whereas early republicans were eager to emphasize that Turks formed
a homogenous ‘race,’ with predominantly light skin and eyes and a
straight nose, thereby idealizing the look of the founder of the Turkish
Republic, Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk,’ as the perfect representation of this
type (Özyürek 2004, 219), in contemporary aesthetic discourses a rather
heterogeneous image and ideal of national ‘mixed-ness’ is emerging. At
the same time, hitherto dominant (secular) gendered norms have been
challenged by the rise of a conservative urban middle class, as well as ide-
als and images of hyper-femininity in the global market. Similar to what
Edmonds discusses with reference to cosmetic surgery in Brazil, rather
than creating room for manoeuvre for women by making it possible for
them to conform to one of many different models of gendered beauty,
the national ideal of ‘mixed-ness’ puts additional pressure on women to
conform to the demand to ‘take care of oneself.’ Given the demands of
hyper-feminine outer appearances in an age of consumer capitalism and
medicalization, taking care of oneself also comes to include invasive
forms of beautication, such as cosmetic surgery.
Moreover, similar to Brazil, where northeasterners hope to become
upwardly mobile by ‘getting rid of the noses that mark them as rural
migrants’ (Jarrín 2017, 135), there is an imagined national geography of
beauty in Turkey, where the large inux of domestic migrants from the
Black Sea and south-eastern Anatolia to Istanbul has led to a particular
form of social distinction by long-term urban residents. Female breasts
and noses, as well as their surgical modication, are imbued with specic
meanings in this particular location, with large breasts, for example, con-
noting both erotic femininity and rural backwardness, depending on who
has them and at what point in the lifecourse. Tanıl Bora (2010) anal-
yses the stereotypes of the urban and secular elite, the so-called White
Turks, towards those who do not qualify as modern city-dwellers in their
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 173
eyes as a form of ‘racism that has an emphasis on class, relating social
differences of people with cultural and even physical characteristics.’
Immigrants to the city or those living in more marginal neighbour-
hoods are scrutinized visually for not belonging fully and may thus put
particular emphasis on reshaping their bodies to conform to certain gen-
dered ideals concerning their appearance. For them, intensive beauty
work proves especially tricky, because both their bodies and their aes-
thetic bodily modications may give away their more peripheral regional
backgrounds, especially if the latter produce ‘unnatural’ results.
To sum up, there are strong normative ideals of gendered images and
subjectivity in urban Turkey that are regulated not only by patriarchal
control of the female sexual body, but also by affective desires and an
ethos of women taking care of themselves. As argued above, the nega-
tive hermeneutics of earlier feminist studies of beauty failed to grasp this
complexity. Cosmetic surgery patients, many of whom are aware of and
even share the feminist critique of beauty, still manage to draw satisfac-
tion from and legitimize their efforts to beautify themselves as a form of
‘normalization.’ Beauty, writes Alex Edmonds (2007, 371), in his eth-
nography of cosmetic surgery in Brazil, ‘can become a “right” during
a neoliberal regime where rights are re-interpreted as access to goods
and the antidote to social exclusion is imagined as market participa-
tion.’ For the young women portrayed in this chapter, the consumption
of cosmetic surgery is an often hard-earned, albeit double-edged ‘right’
that may indeed enable them to move more freely and participate in the
urban economy embedded in a particular history of biopolitics within a
transnational imaginary.
NOTES
1. This chapter is based on a larger study supported by the German Research
Foundation (No. LI 2357/1-1) and the Chair for Social Anthropology
at the University of Bayreuth, in afliation with the Department of
Sociology of Boğaziçi University.
2. See, for example, Çınar (2005), Gökarıksel (2009, 2012), Gökarıksel
and Secor (2009, 2010), Navaro-Yashin (2002, 78–113), Secor (2001),
Turam (2013), and White (2002, 29–55, 212–41).
3. See, for example, the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet Gazetesi from 17 July 2016,
available online at http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/video/video_haber/
568899/Moda_da_gericiler_cimlerde_oturan_vatandaslara_saldirdi.html
(accessed 14 February 2017).
174 C. LIEBELT
4. The names of research sites and participants without a public role or func-
tion have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout this article.
5. Interview with Esma, 3 April 2014.
6. For example, the Religious Commission Committee in Konya prohibited
cosmetic surgery in 2000 (Hürriyet 2000. Konya müftülügü: estetik günah
[Konya Religious Commission Committee: Aesthetic Surgery Is a Sin].
Hürriyet, 19 December), the grand mufti of Istanbul, Ahmet Okutan, in
2005 (Ferah, Metin 2005. Ameliyatla güzelligi dinimiz tasvip etmez [Our
Religion Does Not Agree to Beauty through surgery]. Hürriyet, September
10) and the mufti of Edirne, Ömer Taşcıoglu, in 2009 (Hürriyet 2009.
Edirne Müftüsü: Estetik yaptırmak günah [The Edirne Religious Commission
Committee: To Undergo Aesthetic Surgery Is a Sin]. Hürriyet, July 17).
7. Quoted from Özdemir, Şemsinur 2005. Estetik ameliyat ruh sağlığını
bozuyor. Zaman, 5 June.
8. Şahin, Ahmed 1995. Estetik ameliyat caiz olabilir mi? [Can Aesthetic
Surgery Be Permissible?] Zaman, 20 July.
9. Interview with Nureddin Yıldırım, 22 October 2013. The following
quotes by Yıldırım are also taken from this interview.
10. Interview with Ismail Kuran, 10 July 2014. The following quotes by
Kuran are also taken from this interview.
11. Hürriyet 2002. Kadınların tercihi artık küçük göğüs [Women Now Prefer
Small Breasts]. Hürriyet, 17 March.
12. Interview with Özge, 21 January 2014. The following quotes by Özge
are also taken from this interview.
13. Interview with Sevda, 21 July 2014. The following quotes by Sevda are
also taken from this interview.
14. For example, in an article about breast reduction surgery published in
the Hürriyet daily, the focus of reporting on the topic is on southeastern
Anatolia, where, the authors claim, the waiting period for breast reduc-
tion surgeries is six months in the leading regional university hospital, and
surgeons no longer give out appointments (Hürriyet 2010. Bu ameliyat
için 6 ay sıra yok [For This Surgery, the Waiting Time Is Six Months].
Hürriyet, 28 October).
15. Quoted from Hürriyet 2006. Dünyanın en güzel kadınları Türkler [The
Most Beautiful Women in the World Are Turkish]. Hürriyet, 6 December.
16. Interview with Ruken, 10 March 2012. The following quotes by Ruken
are also taken from this interview.
17. See http://kadinlarkulubu.com/portal/ (accessed 4 March 2016).
18. Interview with Sibel, 15 January 2014.
19. Interview with Demet, 18 December 2013. In spring 2015, the tab-
loid press reported that Didem Soydan did have nose surgery (see, for
example, Posta 2015. Didem Soydan burnunu neden yaptırdı? [Why Did
7 RESHAPING ‘TURKISH’ BREASTS AND NOSES … 175
Didem Soydan Have Her Nose Done?] Posta Magazine, 15 May, online:
http://www.posta.com.tr/didem-soydan-burnunu-neden-yaptirdi-foto-
graihaberi-282173, accessed 28 September 2017).
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