Overview

"""Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences"" explores cosmetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity. From its onset as medical specialty at the end of the 19th century, cosmetic surgery has been intimately linked to discourses of ""normalcy"" as well as gender, race and other categories of difference. This link has shaped its technologies and techniques, its professional ideologies, and the objects of its interventions. Kathy Davis shows how cosmetic surgery is represented in medicine and popular culture, drawing upon a wide range of examples taken from the media, music, performance art, literature, public debates and medical texts. She uses her own uneasiness about the ubiquitous erasure of difference under the spurious banner of equality as symptomatic of the cosmetic surgery culture. Davis proposes an approach which takes embodied difference (collective and biographical), the experience of suffering, and an appreciation of individuals' capacity for agency even under less-than-perfect circumstances as starting points for thinking about the normative issues involved in cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery in a different voices; lonely heroes and great white clouds; the rhetoric of cosmetic surgery; surgical stories; surgical passing; ""my body is my art""; ""a dubious equality""."

Full Product Details

9780742514201

Table of Contents

Reviews

An intelligent, complicated look at some of the questions surrounding cosmetic surgery. [Davis's] writing is elegant; she avoids jargon but uses precise terms from philosophy and medicine when necessary. All discussions of concepts and terminology unfamiliar to a general reader are accompanied by concise explanations. If all academicians could present their research so lucidly and persuasively, students the world over would rejoice, and non-academics might take more kindly to scholarly books. The Women's Review Of Books The essays in this book are consistently stimulating, sometimes disturbing, and raise a whole range of theoretical, ethical, and political issues. Kathy Davis skilfully performs a 'feminist balancing act,' one which recognizes the numerous gendered and commercial pressures while constantly giving full recognition to the importance of human agency. -- David Morgan, emeritus professor, University of Manchester In her insightful new exploration of the feminist and cultural implications of cosmetic surgery, Davis challenges the idea that bodily 'differences' are equally valued, and takes on the debate over the place of agency in surgical intervention to achieve desired appearances. Her critical eye greatly enriches feminist theories of the body. -- Judith Lorber, author of Paradoxes of Gender and Gender and the Social Construction of Illness Davis has written a provocative book. The Common Review Kathy Davis does it again! Another brilliant book on the problems, pitfalls, and advantages of cosmetic surgery. In a world so beset with famine, despair, genocide, and terror, more and more of us take refuge in that one thing we believe we can control-our bodies. Kathy Davis shows us that that desire is just as fraught as the rest of the world. -- Sander L. Gilman, University of Illinois-Chicago

In her insightful new exploration of the feminist and cultural implications of cosmetic surgery, Davis challenges the idea that bodily 'differences' are equally valued, and takes on the debate over the place of agency in surgical intervention to achieve desired appearances. Her critical eye greatly enriches feminist theories of the body.

Author Information

Kathy Davis is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Humanities at Utrecht University.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available