Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences explores cosmetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity. From its onset as a medical specialty at the end of the nineteenth century, cosmetic surgery has been intimately liked to discourses of 'normalcy,' as well as to gender, race, and other categories of difference that have shaped its technologies and techniques, its professional ideologies, and the objects of its interventions. Davis considers how cosmetic surgery is taken up in representations of cosmetic surgery in medical discourse and in popular culture, drawing on a wide range of cultural manifestations including televised 'infotainment,' popular music, performance art, surgeon biographies, stories of patients, public debates, and medical texts. Davis critically engages with the notion of cosmetic surgery as a neutral technology and shows how it is implicated in the surgical erasure of embodied difference.

"An intelligent, complicated look at some of the questions surrounding cosmetic surgery. [Davis's] writing is elegant; she avoids jargon but uses precise terms from philosophy and medicine when necessary. All discussions of concepts and terminology unfamiliar to a general reader are accompanied by concise explanations. If all academicians could present their research so lucidly and persuasively, students the world over would rejoice, and non-academics might take more kindly to scholarly books." - The Women's Review Of Books

"Davis has written a provocative book." - The Common Review