Social and Feminist Theories and the Body

Abstract

This chapter sets a range of theoretical approaches to the body and its place in the social world. These theoretical approaches help situate the practice of cosmetic surgery in contemporary Western society. As we have seen in the previous chapter, body image is a pervasive presence in women’s lives. The way women interact with their bodies and experience them is socially and biologically determined. While no one theoretical approach can fully explain or encapsulate cosmetic surgery, between them they provide a platform that enables us to question some assumptions that are the common parlance of cosmetic surgery. For instance, some feminist theorists characterise cosmetic surgery as simply a repressive or disciplinary regime (Morgan, 1991; Wolf, 1990). Others (Davis, 1995) see women’s choice of cosmetic surgery as a matter of exercising ‘agency’ over their own body and how it looks. Fraser (2003b) sees this repertoire of agency as being reflected in magazines which often characterise women as actively taking charge of their bodies through their decision to undergo cosmetic surgery.