Kathy Davis explores cosmetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity. She critically engages with the notion of cosmetic surgery as a neutral technology and shows how it is implicated in the surgical erasure of embodied difference.

This book explores an innovative study of women who undergo cosmetic study and the doctors who carry it out. It situates cosmetic surgery as a personal choice made by women against the social and cultural reality of the way women's bodies are scrutinised in Western countries.

This collection of essays emphasizes society’s increasingly responsible engagement with ethical challenges in emerging medical technology. Expansion of technological capacity and attention to patient safety have long been integral to improving healthcare delivery but only relatively recently have concepts like respect, distributive justice, privacy, and autonomy gained some power to shape the development, use, and refinement of medical tools and techniques. Medical ethics goes beyond making better medicine to thinking about how to make the field of medicine better. These essays showcase several ways in which modern ethical thinking is improving safety, efficacy and efficiency of medical technology, increasing access to medical care, and empowering patients to choose care that comports with their desires and beliefs. Included are complimentary ethical approaches as well as compelling counter-arguments. Together, the articles demonstrate how improving the quality of medical technology relies on every stakeholder -- not just medical researchers and scientists -- to assess each given technology’s strengths and pitfalls. This collection also portends one of the next major issues in the ethics of medical technology: developing the requisite moral framework to accompany shifts toward patient-centred personalized healthcare.

This volume explores the ethical and social issues raised by the recent proliferation of surgical techniques aimed at making children appear more normal. Using three cases -- involving surgeries to correct ambiguous genitalia of children who are intersexed, surgeries to lengthen the limbs of children who are dwarfs, and surgeries to eliminate craniofacial abnormalities such as cleft lip and palate -- Eric Parens deepens our understanding of the debate surrounding surgical interventions in children.

The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body investigates the concept of body shame and explores its significance when considering philosophical accounts of embodied subjectivity. Body shame only finds its full articulation in the presence (actual or imagined) of others within a rule and norm governed milieu. As such, it bridges our personal, individual and embodied experience with the social, cultural and political world that contains us. Luna Dolezal argues that understanding body shame can shed light on how the social is embodied, that is, how the body—experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject—becomes a social and cultural artifact, shaped by external forces and demands. The Body and Shame introduces leading twentieth-century phenomenological and sociological accounts of embodied subjectivity through the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Dolezal examines the embodied, social and political features of body shame. contending that body shame is both a necessary and constitutive part of embodied subjectivity while simultaneously a potential site of oppression and marginalization. Exploring the cultural politics of shame, the final chapters of this work explore the phenomenology of self-presentation and a feminist analysis of shame and gender, with a critical focus on the practice of cosmetic surgery, a site where the body is literally shaped by shame. The Body and Shame will be of great interest to scholars and students in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory, women’s studies, social theory, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and medical humanities.

Surgery inevitably inflicts some harm on the body. At the very least, it damages the tissue that is cut. These harms often are clearly outweighed by the overall benefits to the patient. However, where the benefits do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery. When, if ever, do the benefits of these surgeries outweigh their costs? May a surgeon perform dangerous procedures that are not clearly to the patient's benefit, even if the patient consents to them? May a surgeon perform any surgery on a minor patient if there are no clear benefits to that child? These and other related questions are the core themes of this collection of essays.

The body and experiences of embodiment have generated a rich and diverse sociological literature. This volume articulates and illustrates one major approach to the sociology of the body: symbolic interactionism, an increasingly prevalent theoretical base of contemporary sociology derived from the pragmatism of writers such as John Dewey, William James, Charles Peirce, Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead. The authors argue that, from an interactionist perspective, the body is much more than a tangible, corporeal object - it is a vessel of great significance to the individual and society. From this perspective, body, self and social interaction are intimately interrelated and constantly reconfigured. The collection constitutes a unique anthology of empirical research on the body, from health and illness to sexuality, from beauty and imagery to bodily performance in sport and art, and from mediated communication to plastic surgery. The contributions are informed by innovative interactionist theory, offering fresh insights into one of the fastest growing sub-disciplines of sociology and cultural studies.