Disfigured forms: Surgical interventions and the body.

摘要

This dissertation explores the relationship between aesthetic surgery and contemporary discourses of disability. Employing a cultural sociological perspective, I elaborate these discourses of disability and describe how they are used to justify cosmetic and reconstructive surgical procedures. Each chapter focuses on a particular empirical site or context. The first chapter investigates the realm of popular culture, specifically the makeover television show genre; the second chapter looks more closely at scientific and evolutionary theories of beauty; the third chapter analyzes face transplantation; and the last chapter explores cosmetic surgery patients' self-understandings of their decision to undergo surgery. These empirical investigations underscore the main theoretical points of this project, namely, that disability serves as a foundational cultural system informing a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, and secondly, that medical procedures help reaffirm the notion that disability is a deficiency.