Social construction of beautiful body in postmodernity: A research on individuals who undergo cosmetic surgery

In postmodernity, the body is a place which reflects the self and is a part of personal development goals. Since bodies are at the forefront as they have never been before, individuals have to constantly control them. Social actors struggle to stay within boundaries of normality by cooperating with the structures and norms that regulate the bodies. Beauty is a concept related with normality, so it is an incomplete attempt to consider the desire of being beautiful as a purely aesthetic purpose. In postmodernity, the beautiful body is something that must be earned through the self-constructing of the individual, which determines the social position and provides various advantages in everyday life. Individuals may consume beauty products in order to attain beauty and may undergo aesthetic surgery which is becoming widespread among different age groups and regardless of sex. Aesthetic surgery intervention is not merely a beauty practice, but a body politics, a bridge between self and body of individuals and a mechanism of dealing with state of being other. In this work, the phenomenology and agency of the body, its role and meaning in the symbolic interaction, and the way how beautiful body is constructed in the postmodernity were mentioned; and through a field research it was aimed to understand the self-perception of the individuals who have undergone aesthetic surgery intervention, their interpretation of the intervention and social interactions during their body construction process. In addition, the relationships between aesthetic surgery and various social institutions and structures such as gender, ethnicity and class has been examined