The Case of the Missing Areolae: Race and Breast Reduction Surgery — Page 4:
16 And then, there are the areolae, those coins or circumambulating talismans of darkness around the nipples, forming a broad, supportive shadowy bridge of in-between-wholeness between nippled desire and fleshy anxiety. Before the surgery, she gave them little attention except to note out of the corner of her consciousness that they seemed larger, more spread out, covering almost half of each breast, than those of the pale pink women at whose breasts she slipped a glance in the locker rooms. She was more focused on the weight and intrusion of these things that seemed determined to stifle her, when she was lying down, on her chest, on her side, on her back, when she was standing, when she was running, when she was lifting weights, every second of her material existence.
17 Anecdotally, on my expressing my concern about the possible implications of my research, in that I feared that there also I would find evidence of racism, a physician friend, who is Jewish, told me that he dated black women from Africa, from the U.S., as well as white and Jewish women, and he never noticed any race-based difference in breast size or size of the areola.[2]Telephone conversation, December 9, 2005.
18 Well, maybe he was not looking. Or maybe he could only see areolae of a size correlating with what he expected to see. Maybe the larger areolae were invisible to him.
19 Gilman definitively states that the “breast functions as a racial sign even in the basic aesthetic surgical guides to breast reduction” (232). Ample evidence exists, as presented by Haiken and Gilman, of the surgical creation of northwestern European noses on black and Jewish patients and of Northwestern European eye shapes on Asian patients, both at the request of the patients and at the hands of surgeons helping patients to appear more ideal, more civilized, more pleasing, more “Western,” more beautiful, or perhaps to try to escape the restrictions of their cultures. Either they’re reacting to the outside world looking at and judging their physical presence or it’s their own world jumping on them. Or both at the same time. I came across no evidence that in changing noses or eyes, information about specific changes that were to be made was not shared with the patient, as was the case with this particular patient and her areolae.
20 My research uncovered no unequivocal statements about the presence of race-based ideas in determining what the post-surgery breast areola should look like. To claim that the areolae “should” be reduced in proportion to the breast, I ask why, and who determines what that proportion “should” be. Therefore, I hypothesize that the resulting areolae in breast reduction surgery embody race-based notions about the “ideal” breast.