The French performance artist Orlan underwent a series of nine surgical operations between 1990 and 1993 that constituted a single artwork titled 'The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan,' in which she had her face surgically modified to incorporate features from famous Western art history — the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the forehead of the Mona Lisa. Each operation was performed as a live-streamed theatrical event with Orlan reading from psychoanalytic, feminist, and philosophical texts while conscious under local anaesthetic. The series became one of the most discussed works of body art in the history of contemporary art.

Orlan's performance surgeries generated an enormous response in feminist literary and critical theory, particularly in writing about the female body, cosmetic surgery, and cultural ideals of beauty as forms of violent inscription. Her practice of reading literary and philosophical texts aloud during her operations — treating surgery as a kind of embodied literary performance — directly linked body modification to the act of literary production. Poets including Anne Carson and Lisa Robertson have cited the Orlan tradition in their theoretical and poetic explorations of the female body's relationship to cultural ideals and violent transformation.