Cosmetic surgery is the fastest growing medical speciality in both the USA and western Europe. The surgical fix belongs to the growing arsenal of practices and technologies which are aimed at transforming the female body for the sake of beauty. Despite its increasing popularity, cosmetic surgery is controversial. It raises the question of why women are willing to put themselves under the knife for operations which are painful, expensive, risky and often leave them in worse shape than they were before. It attempts to make sense of women's involvement in cosmetic surgery. Whereas traditional...

Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences explores cosmetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity. From its onset as a medical specialty at the end of the nineteenth century, cosmetic surgery has been intimately liked to discourses of 'normalcy, ' as well as to gender, race, and other categories of difference that have shaped its technologies and techniques, its professional ideologies, and the objects of its interventions. Davis considers how cosmetic surgery is taken up in representations of cosmetic surgery in medical discourse and in popular culture, drawing on a wide range...

Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences explores cosmetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity. From its onset as a medical specialty at the end of the nineteenth century, cosmetic surgery has been intimately liked to discourses of 'normalcy, ' as well as to gender, race, and other categories of difference that have shaped its technologies and techniques, its professional ideologies, and the objects of its interventions. Davis considers how cosmetic surgery is taken up in representations of cosmetic surgery in medical discourse and in popular culture, drawing on a wide range...

This work offers a critical appraisal of the recent body revival. It draws upon insights from recent contemporary feminist theories on gender and power to explore the subject of the body.