From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Tender Surgery (PhD Dissertation, 2023)
This article is about scholarly thesis. For the surgery concept across the canon, see Surgery as metaphor.
This dissertation argues that Beach Surgery adaptations across film, opera, visual art, and installation stage not two lovers but a phenomenology of care—the intimate labour of maintaining a body through recurrence. Drawing on Smith's triptych and comparative media analysis, the author reads Leif's three injuries (blindness, paralysis, cardiac rupture) as mapping onto Dostoevsky's temptations, but argues that Katita is not the tempter: she is the tender, the one who sustains the body through every loop.
The dissertation traces the erotic charge across adaptations not as romance but as the surgical intimacy of care work—the stitching of leather, the removal of the pacemaker, the rebinding of eyes. Drawing on Noddings, Held, and disability studies, the author reads recurrence itself as erotic: the body memory of touch, the knowing of how to touch again, the analogy between selves created through repetition. The thesis situates this within Australian philosophical traditions (ontological incompleteness, Murnanian thought) and argues that Smith's work privileges successful micro-gestures of care—the bandage, the breath, the hand held steady—over grand surgical narratives.