Michelle Shao

Mini Assignment 2: Revision with a geography article

Holliday, Ruth, et al. “Beautiful Face, Beautiful Place: Relational Geographies and Gender in
Cosmetic Surgery Tourism Websites.” Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 22, no. 1, Aug. 2013, pp.
90–106., doi:10.1080/0966369x.2013.832655.

The authors of this article are Ruth Holliday et al. The authors are all reliable sources
because they are all renowned professors in the UK and Australia. Additionally, Holliday is a
gender studies professor, which is an important field for the article as the article is located in a
journal about gender, place, and culture. The topic of the article is also primarily centered on
females. The overarching argument that the article makes is that cosmetic surgery tourist
websites, their creation, and general layout are linked to the geographies of that place and many
other related places. For instance, certain beauty standards are associated with certain nations. In
South Korea, cosmetic surgery websites tend to show off procedures such as cheek shaving to
make the face seem thinner, or calf thinning, due to the fact that most Asian countries favor
Western, or “white,” beauty standards. In addition, the topic of relational geography is also
brought up. All the websites included in the study focus on the same motifs, for example,
relaxation to mask the goriness of actual procedures. Essentially, cosmetic surgery websites
consist of place, people, products, and service in different geographies all intertwined together.
In this journal, Holliday primarily uses the evidence of the research conducted by herself and her
co-authors as a method to structure and bring about the argument. In this research, they visited
various cosmetic surgery websites designed to draw in cosmetic surgery tourists and analyzed
each one individually before finally linking them together through relational geography. The
websites studied came from Thailand, the Czech Republic, and Spain, as a result of them being
key destinations for UK and Australian cosmetic tourists. As for gaps, I feel as if the article
could have better explained relational geography. Also, I feel as if the websites used should have
just been the top 3 most frequented websites for all surgery seekers, not just the British and
Australians. I did really love the detail they went into with describing each individual website
and analyzing almost every aspect, including the pictures and layout. I searched for hours on
multiple databases, using multiple different search keywords in different geographic journals, but
this was the only academic article I could find that I could at least connect somewhat into my
project. I don’t think it will be as useful as my other articles, but it brings up a concept that I can
talk about in relation to beauty standards, and that is the concept of relational geography, the
blending of both the US and China in beauty standards and such. Although, I am still a bit
confused on what exactly this concept/perspective is, which raises the question for me, what
exactly is relational geography? What I got from the article is that it’s analyzing the mutual
blending of multiple places, spaces, environments, etc., whether they are similar or not. Another
question that I wonder is, does relational geography have a lot to do with globalization? I know
that Western beauty standards were spread to China through the globalization of American
makeup companies and ads. If I can clear those questions up, this article will be minor but still
good in my project for bringing up another perspective.