ABSTRACT

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.

part I|78 pages

Revisiting Feminist Critique

chapter 2|13 pages

Twenty Years in the Twilight Zone

chapter 3|13 pages

Revisiting Feminist Debates on Cosmetic Surgery:

Some Reflections on Suffering, Agency, and Embodied Difference

chapter 4|29 pages

Women and the Knife:

Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women's Bodies

chapter 5|18 pages

Scary Women:

Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects

part II|54 pages

Representing Cosmetic Surgery

chapter 7|15 pages

The “Natural Look”

Extreme Makeovers and the Limits of Self-Fashioning

chapter 8|18 pages

Selling the “Perfect” Vulva

part III|56 pages

Boundaries and Networks

chapter 9|17 pages

“Engineering the Erotic”

Aesthetic Medicine and Modernization in Brazil

chapter 10|19 pages

Pygmalion's Many Faces

chapter 11|16 pages

All Cosmetic Surgery is “Ethnic”

Asian Eyelids, Feminist Indignation, and the Politics of Whiteness

part IV|42 pages

Ambivalent Voices

chapter 12|15 pages

In Your Face

chapter 13|13 pages

Crossing the Cosmetic/Reconstructive Divide

The instructive Situation of Breast Reduction Surgery

chapter 14|10 pages

Farewell My Lovelies