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In "Venus Envy", Elizabeth Haiken traces the
quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of
the century to the present. Drawing on a wide array of sources
- personal accounts, medical records, popular magazines, medical
journals, and beauty guides - Haiken reveals how our culture came
to see cosmetic surgery as a panacea for both individual and societal
problems. As Americans and their surgeons linked the significance
of "normal" standards of beauty to social adjustment and economic
success, they also linked "undesirable" physical characteristics
to psychological conditions such as the "inferiority complex,"
for which cosmetic surgery appeared to offer a sure cure. Many
Americans now view cosmetic surgery as the most practical solution
for an ever-increasing number of perceived problems - from low
self-esteem to stalled careers - and plastic surgery has become
one of the largest and fastest growing medical specialties in
the world. But Haiken questions whether these "solutions" are
not in some sense chimeras: by emphasizing the importance of appearance,
cosmetic surgery raises serious concerns about how society views
such intractable problems as aging, gender, and race - and about
how Americans view themselves.
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- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Present at the Re-Creation
- 1. Plastic Surgery Before and After
- 2. The Specialty Takes Shape
- 3. Consumer Culture and the Inferiority Complex
- 4. The Lifting of the Middle Class: Aging in Post-World War
II America
- 5. The Michael Jackson Factor: Race, Ethnicity, and Cosmetic
Surgery
- 6. Beauty and the Breast
- Epilogue: The Eye of the Beholder
- Notes
- Illustration Credits
- Index
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