This paper follows a small group of medical tourists travelling from the UK to Tunisia for cosmetic surgery, exploring their experience of place as ‘dis-orienting’. We unpack this encounter by drawing on work discussing cosmopolitanism and conviviality and argue that the ways the women understood both their own journeys and those of the other people they met in Tunisia can be usefully interrogated by thinking about conviviality. In their meetings with each other, with medical staff and crucially with patients being treated for injuries sustained in the civil war in Libya following the Arab Spring uprisings, these patients experienced both a global geopolitical reality that they were unaware of, and moments of empathy, vulnerability and generosity that were as transformative as the surgeries they came to Tunisia to access. Such encounters can be read as producing cosmopolitan beginnings – shifts in worldview that emerge as unintended effects of the surgical journeys this group of women embarked upon. However, encounters between these medical travelers and patients with ‘real’ injuries inevitably evoked gendered discourses of cosmetic surgery as vain, selfish and unnecessary. In some cases this spoiled new identities the women traveled to Tunisia in search of, invoked shame and limited their cosmopolitan possibilities.

Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture at the University of Leeds. She is a former Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies and is best known for her work on the Sociology of the Body. She has written on Identities, Visual Methods, Kitsch, Cosmetic Surgery and most recently Medical Tourism.

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