title: Plastic paradise: transforming bodies and selves in Costa Rica's cosmetic surgery tourism industry.
abstract: Long popular as a nature tourism destination, Costa Rica has recently emerged as a haven for middle class North Americans seeking inexpensive, state-of-the-art cosmetic surgery. This paper examines "cosmetic surgery tourism" in Costa Rica as a form of medicalized leisure, situated in elite private spaces and yet inextricably linked to a beleaguered national medical program. Through historical context and ethnographic analysis of activities at medical hotels and clinics, I describe how the recovery industry operates on the embodied subjectivities of visiting patients and their local caretakers. Recovery sociality and healing landscapes facilitate patients' transition through a period of post-surgical liminality and provide nostalgic transport to an imagined medical arcadia, while clinicians are attracted by a neoliberal promise of prosperity and autonomy. Ultimately, Costa Rica's transformation into a paradise of medical consumption and self-optimization is contingent on a mythology that obscures growing uncertainties and inequities in the nation's broader medical landscape.
authors.affiliation: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA. saralouiseackerman@gmail.com
authors.forename: Sara L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Ackerman
mesh_terms: D003364:Costa Rica; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D057193:Medical Tourism / Q000191:economics* / Q000523:psychology*; D013518:Surgery, Plastic / Q000191:economics* / Q000523:psychology*