The last three chapters have examined women’s attempts to negotiate nondeviant identities within institutions organized around altering the body. Hairstyling, aerobics, and plastic surgery serve not only as methods for shaping women’s appearances but also as techniques for neutralizing bodies that will never meet cultural standards for beauty. Furthermore, I have shown—particularly in the introduction and chapter i—that women can create spaces of empowerment from within an oppressive system of beauty ideology while neither rejecting that ideology nor clearly challenging it.
Importantly, hairstyling, aerobics, and plastic surgery involve body work aimed at changing minor, run-of-the-mill departures from ideal...