Flesh Wounds

The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery

Virginia Blum

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English

University of California Press
04 April 2005

Society & culture: general; Cosmetic surgery

When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity.

For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.

By: Virginia Blum
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 590g
ISBN: 9780520244733
ISBN 10: 0520244737
Pages: 366
Publication Date: 04 April 2005
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgments 1. The Patient's Body 2. Untouchable Bodies 3. The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient: A Slow Dance 4. Frankenstein Gets a Face-Lift 5. As If Beauty 6. The Monster and the Movie Star 7. Being and Having: Celebrity Culture and the Wages of Love 8. Addicted to Surgery Notes Works Cited Index

Virginia L. Blum is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction (1995).

Reviews for Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery

As face lifts and tummy tucks become increasingly affordable to middle-class Americans, Blum argues, even those who have never considered the knife cannot escape cosmetic surgery's implications and its pervasive promotion by everyone from doctors to those who play them on TV. - Publishers Weekly