Women's magazines teem with its promises and horror stories; feminists ardently debate its status as harmful or heroic; surgeons and regulators compete to define which procedures can be offered and how. Through its representation, cosmetic surgery impacts on us all, not just those who go 'under the knife'. This book investigates the ways in which cosmetic surgery is shaping gender, and in the process, it questions contemporary cultural studies assumptions about how we read the media.
"Surgery Junkies is an innovative, fast-paced mix of theory and empirical research that advances our understanding of contemporary bodies, lifestyle medicine, and the making of the embodied, self-fashioned self. Scholars and teachers of cultural and media studies, sociology of the body, and health and society will value its contributions to both their research and their teaching."-Arthur W. Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics and The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live "Whether analyzing Extreme Makeover, 'Body Dismorphic Disorder,' or her own rhinoplasty, Pitts-Taylor makes difficult theoretical concepts clear-and clearly relevant to our lives."-Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body Despite the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery, there are still those who identify individuals who opt for bodily modifications as dupes of beauty culture, as being in conflict with feminist ideals, or as having some form of psychological weakness. In this ground-breaking book, Victoria Pitts-Taylor examines why we consider some cosmetic surgeries to be acceptable or even beneficial and others to be unacceptable and possibly harmful. Drawing on years of research, in-depth interviews with surgeons and psychiatrists, analysis of newspaper articles, legal documents, and television shows, and her own personal experience with cosmetic surgery, Pitts-Taylor brings new perspectives to the promotion of "extreme" makeovers on television, the medicalization of "surgery addiction," the moral and political interrogation that many patients face, and feminist debates on the topic. Pitts-Taylor makes a compelling argument that the experience, meanings, and motivations for cosmetic surgery are highly social and, in doing so, provides a much needed "makeover" of our cultural understanding of cosmetic surgery. Victoria Pitts-Taylor is associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification.
"An impressive book. An important book."—Jamie Lee Curtis "I blame mirrors. If it weren't for them we wouldn't need plastic surgeons. In the meantime, anyone tempted to re-shape face, body and mind by means of knife should first read Blum's intelligent, persuasive and absorbing book. Both enticed and alarmed, the reader will at least know what she's doing and more importantly why. This is a book that takes you and shakes you by the throat, and leaves you the better for it."—Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil "An eye-opening look at the dangers, both physical and emotional, of plastic surgery and of the power of beauty in all of our lives. Blum's book is an impressive interweaving of observation, oral interviews, cultural studies, and historical sources. An absorbing read, this is a scholarly book that general readers can enjoy."—Lois Banner, author of American Beauty "A provocative and thoroughly persuasive argument that we live in a culture of cosmetic surgery where identity is sited on the shifting surfaces of the body. Flesh Wounds brilliantly explores the link between the seductions of surgical self-fashioning and the star system, drawing on a stunning array of materials ranging from interviews with plastic surgeons, psychoanalytic theory, and the novel to the visual media of digital photography, film, and television."—Kathleen Woodward, author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions
Working at the forefront of cosmetic surgery at the turn of the twentieth century, Dr Suzanne Noël was both a pioneer in her medical field and a firm believer in the advancement of women. Today her views on the benefits of aesthetic surgery to women may seem at odds with her feminist principles, but by placing Noël in the context of turn-of-the-century French culture, this book is able to demonstrate how these two worldviews were reconciled. Noël was able to combine her intense convictions for gender equality and anti-ageism in the workforce with her underlying compassion and concern for her female patients, during a time when there were no laws in place to protect women from workplace discrimination. She was also responsible for several advances in cosmetic surgery, a thriving industry, and is today best known for her development of the mini facelift. This book, therefore, sheds much valuable light on advances in aesthetic surgery, twentieth-century beauty culture, women and the public sphere, and the ‘new woman’.
This ethnographic account of Brazils emergence as a global leader in plastic surgery takes readers from Ipanema socialite circles to telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery.
The surprising history of cosmetic surgery—and America's quest for physical perfection—from the turn of the century to the present. Face lifts, nose jobs, breast implants, liposuction, collagen injections—the body at the end of the twentieth century has become endlessly mutable, and surgical alteration has become an accepted part of American culture. In Venus Envy, Elizabeth Haiken traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on a wide array of sources—personal accounts, medical records, popular magazines, medical journals, and beauty guides—Haiken reveals how our culture came to see cosmetic surgery as a panacea for both individual and social problems.
A timely intervention into debates on the representation of feminist and feminine identities in contemporary visual culture. The essays in this collection interrogate how and why certain formulations of feminism and femininity are currently prevalent in mainstream cinema and television, offering new insights into postfeminist media phenomena.
Practices of cosmetic surgery have grown exponentially in recent years in both over-developed and developing worlds. What comprises cosmetic surgery has also changed, with a plethora of new procedures and an extraordinary rise of non-surgical operations. As the practices of cosmetic surgery have multiplied and diversified, so have feminist approaches to understanding them. For the first time leading feminist scholars including Susan Bordo, Kathy Davis, Vivian Sobchack and Kathryn Pauly Morgan, have been brought together in this comprehensive volume to reveal the complexity of feminist engagements with the phenomenon that still remains vastly more popular among women. Offering a diversity of theoretical, methodological and political approaches Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer presents not only the latest, cutting-edge research in this field but a challenging and unique approach to the issue that will be of key interest to researchers across the social sciences and humanities.
Should western beauty practices, ranging from lipstick to labiaplasty, be included within the United Nations understandings of harmful traditional/cultural practices? By examining the role of common beauty practices in damaging the health of women, creating sexual difference, and enforcing female deference, this book argues that they should. In the 1970s feminists criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but some ‘new’ feminists argue that beauty practices are no longer oppressive now that women can ‘choose’ them. However, in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices seems to have become much more severe, requiring the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent, but in many ways more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women’s bodies, and concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created. This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women’s health.
