Recent decades have seen the rise of a global beauty boom, with profound effects on perceptions of bodies worldwide. Against this background, Beauty and the Norm assembles ethnographic and conceptual approaches from a variety of disciplines and across the globe to debate standardization in bodily appearance. Its contributions range from empirical research to exploratory conversations between scholars and personal reflections. Bridging hitherto separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science, disability studies, gender studies, and critical race studies, this volume reflects upon the gendered, classed, and racialized body, normative regimes of representation, and the global beauty economy.

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

"The appreciation of the imagery produced by disease is bittersweet; we simultaneously experience the beauty of the natural world and the pain of those living with these disease processes. Ultimately, this series of images from more than sixty medical science professionals will leave the viewer with an understanding and appreciation of visual beauty inherent within the field."--Jacket.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Driving, wild and hilarious” (The Washington Post), here is the incredible “memoir” of the legendary actor, gambler, raconteur, and Saturday Night Live veteran. When Norm Macdonald, one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time, was approached to write a celebrity memoir, he flatly refused, calling the genre “one step below instruction manuals.” Norm then promptly took a two-year hiatus from stand-up comedy to live on a farm in northern Canada. When he emerged he had under his arm a manuscript, a genre-smashing book about comedy, tragedy, love, loss, war, and redemption. When asked if this was the celebrity memoir, Norm replied, “Call it anything you damn like.”

I was asked and, alas, with little reflection on the magnitude of the task, thoughtlessly consented, to take on the 'simple' job of writing a preface to the collection of essays comprising this volume. That I was asked to carry out this simple task was probably due to one consideration: I was the main representative of the host institution (Clark University) for the 1991 ISTP Conference, at which the talks, foreshadowing and outlining the 'extended remarks' here printed, were originally presented, and hence, as a token of gratitude, I was vouchsafed the honor of setting the stage. It did not dawn on me, until I began piecemeal to receive and accumulate, over a period of months, the remarkably diverse and heterogeneous essays precipitated by the conference, how mind-boggling it would be to pen a preface pertinent to such an aggregate of prima/acie unrelated articles. Typically, prefaces to collections of essays from different hands are attempts by the prefator or a pride of prefators to provide an overview, a concise map, of the complex terrain which readers are invited to enter; or to direct the attention of potential readers to what the editors take to be the essential or central themes of each of the variegated articles: a practice which, not infrequently and often not unjustifiably, irritates and even enrages individual authors, who object to the complexity, profundity, and nuanced character of their thought being reduced to clicMs and editorial equivalents of sound bites.

The authors in this book ask us to consider whether the perception of beauty has been defined by our genetics and culture over the years - has it grown and changed? Do certain neural connections define our emotional reactions to beauty? Does beauty follow any rules or laws? Can the aspiration toward beauty be detrimental? Can we divorce ourselves from dictates and sink into a mindful connection with our internal beauty? Can we move from the superficial where "beauty is only skin deep" to an intense appreciation of beauty in all of its variations. The Perception of Beauty will lead to a deeper understanding and contemplation of nature, art, and the world around us.