Venus Envy

Traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on sources including personal accounts, medical journals and beauty guides, the text reveals how culture came to see cosmetic surgery as a panacea for both individual and societal problems.

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Traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on a range of sources, including personal accounts, medical journals and beauty guides, the text reveals how 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" characteristics to psychological conditions such as the inferiority complex, for which cosmetic surgery appeared to offer a cure. The book also explores the new meanings with which the era of plastic surgery endowed race, ethnicity, ageing and femininity, from Fanny Brice's 1923 nose operation to Michael Jackson's race- and gender-bending transformation of the late-1980s.