The ways women age : using and refusing cosmetic intervention / Abigail T. Brooks.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brooks, Abigail T., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminine beauty (Aesthetics).

Older women.

Aging--Psychological aspects.

Aging.

Body image in women.

Surgery, Plastic--Social aspects.

Surgery, Plastic.

Physical Description:

xiv, 279 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2017]

Summary:

The Ways Women Age explores what is it like to be a woman growing older in a culture where she cannot go to the doctors', open a magazine, watch television, or surf the internet without being confronted with products and procedures that are designed to make her look younger. In the United States today, women have become the overwhelming consumers of cosmetic anti-aging surgeries and technologies. And while not all women undergo these surgeries and technologies, their exposure to them is almost inevitable. What do women have to say about their decision to embrace cosmetic anti-aging procedures? And, alternatively, how do women articulate their decision to grow older without them? Set against the backdrop of commercialized medicine in the United States today, Abigail T. Brooks investigates the anti-aging craze from the perspective of women themselves, drawing from in-depth interviews with women who choose to have cosmetic anti-aging procedures and women who refuse to do so. Brooks illuminates personal biographies of the body and the self embedded in a web of social relationships and reflexively shaped by an increasingly normalized climate of cosmetic anti-aging intervention. The Ways Women Age offers a fresh perspective on how today's women feel about aging, and how they respond to twenty-first-century expectations of youth and beauty. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: older women in cosmetic culture

"I wanted to look like me again": aging, identity, and cosmetic intervention

"I am what I am!": The freedom of growing older 'naturally'

"Age changes you, but not like surgery": refusing cosmetic intervention

"Can we just stop the clock here?" Promise and peril in the anti-aging explosion

"Why should I be the ugly one?": choosing intervention

"It's not in my world': living as a natural ager

Conclusion: taking the body back

Epilogue.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780814724101

0814724108

9780814724057

0814724051

OCLC:

961205531