What makes a woman’s body beautiful? Plastic surgery, cosmetic surgery and non-surgical interventions such as Botox are changing women’s bodies physically and affecting cultural notions and expectations of what it means to be a woman. Yet where does the law stand? Is the renovation of women’s bodies legal? This book explores a range of topics, including: whether shape-changing by surgical and non-surgical means is ‘really’ what women want; the question of legal intervention when operations, injections and other methods go wrong; the impact of consent determinations on whether women can or cannot freely seek changes to their body structure; and the role which culture and social expectations play in women’s decision-making. Taking a legal perspective on the vast range of ‘beauty’ interventions available to women, Scutt discusses women’s perceptions of body and beauty, pressures on women to conform to ‘idealised’ notions of the perfect woman’s body, and outcomes of legal actions including those taken by individual women who are unhappy with results, as well as those launched against companies trading in products advertised as safe and for women’s benefit. Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law will appeal to readers with an interest in women’s and gender studies, law, and cultural studies.

Explains why lawyers seeking gender progress from primary legal materials should start with the common law.

The Female Body and the Law provides an original and incisive reexamination of the dynamics of sexual equality. Eisenstein contends that sexual inequality is fostered both by the law and by the insistence that men and women are biologically different. Through a fascinating discussion of a series of issues including affirmative action, AIDS, Baby M, pornography, and abortion, Eisenstein shows how the law operates as a political language that establishes and curtails choices and actions. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

"It hurts to be beautiful" has been a cliche for centuries. What has been far less appreciated is how much it hurts not to be beautiful. The Beauty Bias explores our cultural preoccupation with attractiveness, the costs it imposes, and the responses it demands. Beauty may be only skin deep, but the damages associated with its absence go much deeper. Unattractive individuals are less likely to be hired and promoted, and are assumed less likely to have desirable traits, such as goodness, kindness, and honesty. Three quarters of women consider appearance important to their self image and over a third rank it as the most important factor. Although appearance can be a significant source of pleasure, its price can also be excessive, not only in time and money, but also in physical and psychological health. Our annual global investment in appearance totals close to $200 billion. Many individuals experience stigma, discrimination, and related difficulties, such as eating disorders, depression, and risky dieting and cosmetic procedures. Women bear a vastly disproportionate share of these costs, in part because they face standards more exacting than those for men, and pay greater penalties for falling short. The Beauty Bias explores the social, biological, market, and media forces that have contributed to appearance-related problems, as well as feminism's difficulties in confronting them. The book also reviews why it matters. Appearance-related bias infringes fundamental rights, compromises merit principles, reinforces debilitating stereotypes, and compounds the disadvantages of race, class, and gender. Yet only one state and a half dozen localities explicitly prohibit such discrimination. The Beauty Bias provides the first systematic survey of how appearance laws work in practice, and a compelling argument for extending their reach. The book offers case histories of invidious discrimination and a plausible legal and political strategy for addressing them. Our prejudices run deep, but we can do far more to promote realistic and healthy images of attractiveness, and to reduce the price of their pursuit.

Today women are lifting weights to build muscle, wrapping their bodies in seaweed to reduce unwanted water retention, attending weigh-ins at diet centers, and devoting themselves to many other types of "body work." Filled with the voices of real women, this book unravels the complicated emotional and intellectual motivations that drive them as they confront American culture's unreachable beauty ideals. This powerful feminist study lucidly and compellingly argues against the idea that the popularity of body work means that women are enslaved to a male-fashioned "beauty myth." Essential reading for understanding current debates on beauty, Body Work demonstrates that women actually use body work to escape that beauty myth. Debra Gimlin focuses on four sites where she conducted in-depth research--a beauty salon, aerobics classes, a plastic surgery clinic, and a social and political organization for overweight women. The honest and provocative interviews included in this book uncover these women's feelings about their bodies, their reasons for attempting to change or come to terms with them, and the reactions of others in their lives. These interviews show that women are redefining their identities through their participation in body work, that they are working on their self-images as much as on their bodies. Plastic surgery, for example, ultimately is an empowering life experience for many women who choose it, while hairstyling becomes an arena for laying claim to professional and social class identities. This book develops a convincing picture of how women use body work to negotiate the relationship between body and self, a process that inevitably involves coming to terms with our bodies' deviation from cultural ideals. One of the few studies that includes empirical evidence of women's own interpretations of body work, this important project is also based firmly in cultural studies, symbolic interactionism, and feminism. With this book, Debra Gimlin adds her voice to those of scholars who are now looking beyond the surface of the beauty myth to the complex reality of women's lives.

For five decades, negative body image has been a major focus of study due to its association with psychological and social morbidity, including eating disorders. However, more recently the body image construct has broadened to include positive ways of living in the body, enabling greater understanding of embodied well-being, as well as protective factors and interventions to guide the prevention and treatment of eating disorders. Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment is the first comprehensive, research-based resource to address the breadth of innovative theoretical concepts and related practices concerning positive ways of living in the body, including positive body image and embodiment. Presenting 37 chapters by world-renowned experts in body image and eating behaviors, this state-of-the-art collection delineates constructs of positive body image and embodiment, as well as social environments (such as families, peers, schools, media, and the Internet) and therapeutic processes that can enhance them. Constructs examined include positive embodiment, body appreciation, body functionality, body image flexibility, broad conceptualization of beauty, intuitive eating, and attuned sexuality. Also discussed are protective factors, such as environments that promote body acceptance, personal safety, diversity, and activism, and a resistant stance towards objectification, media images, and restrictive feminine ideals. The handbook also explores how therapeutic interventions (including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Dissonance, and many more) and public health and policy initiatives can inform scholarly, clinical, and prevention-based work in the field of eating disorders.