From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Tender Surgery
This article is about a doctoral thesis. For surgical metaphor in Beach Surgery broadly, see Surgery as metaphor.
The Tender Surgery is a doctoral dissertation completed in 2023 examining the surgical metaphor in C. W. Smith's oeuvre as a framework for rethinking intimate care ethics outside medical authority. The work traces the slippage between surgery as violence, surgery as covenant, and surgery as erotic touch, arguing that Beach Surgery stages this confusion as generative rather than pathological.
The dissertation's central claim: that the novel's repeated use of "surgery" to describe Katita's relation to Leif, and later the birth itself, reconceives caregiving as somatic negotiation where consent cannot be assumed but must be perpetually re-enacted. Drawing on feminist disability theory and the scholarship of Sara Ahmed and Mel Y. Chen, the author argues that the glitch—the irreparable seam—is not a failure to integrate narratives but a refusal of false wholeness. Breaking the cycle means not finishing the surgery, but learning to inhabit the wound.
The dissertation has circulated widely among Beach Surgery scholarly communities and influenced philosophical-theological approaches to The Doctrine of Refusal and Surgery as care ethics, particularly in work addressing disability representation and the ethics of consent in adaptation. It remains foundational to contemporary readings of care as unfinishability.