- Convenors:
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Isabel Pires
(Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon)
Federica Manfredi (University of Bergamo)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
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Chiara Pussetti
(Universidade de Lisboa)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores the polarized meanings of body modification—between empowerment and conformity, creativity and commodification—tracing how global and local practices shape identities, aesthetics, models of health and powers in contemporary societies.
Long Abstract
The worldwide diffusion of cosmetic products, procedures, and treatments—becoming increasingly refined, less invasive, and more accessible—has contributed to the normalization of body modification and generated new encounters among diverse aesthetic traditions and visual cultures. The liminal border between therapeutic purposes and models of performative body excellence questions the legitimation of interventions. Once marginalized as subcultural or stigmatized practices—or, alternatively, confined to medical/cosmetic domains—body modifications have moved into the mainstream, yet their interpretations remain profoundly polarized.
Practices that were once rejected as extreme, deviant, or unattainable are now widely embraced in popular culture. Still, they carry polarized meanings: celebrated as acts of empowerment, self-enhacement, creativity and agency, while simultaneously criticized as signs of conformity, commodification, or submission to globalized hegemonic regimes. This ongoing polarization between liberation and regulation makes body intervention a powerful site for interrogating wider dynamics of identity, power, and social change.
This panel invites scholars and researchers to examine the cultural, social, and symbolic meanings of body modifications, focusing on their historical transformation and contemporary polarizations. We welcome papers that address how modified bodies negotiate these positions across varied contexts, engaging with questions such as:
• How do polarized views of body modification intersect with identity, agency, and self-expression in relation to gender, race, class, age, and sexuality?
• What power structures drive body modification, and how are these structures themselves polarized across cultural contexts, often against local or indigenous practices, thereby reshaping traditional understandings of the body?
• In what ways do media, fashion, and celebrity culture reinforce or destabilize the polarization between normalization and exoticization? And the medical boundary between “cosmetic” and “necessary”?
• How do individuals navigate the polarized gazes of admiration and stigma in relation to their altered bodies?
• How do new technologies—gene editing, biohacking, AI-driven enhancements—amplify polarized ethical debates?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Why do women choose breast reduction in a culture that celebrates enhancement? Drawing on ethnographic research in Zhejiang, China, this paper explores how health, stigma, gender identity, and medical authority shape women’s decisions to make their breasts smaller as a form of bodily agency.
Paper long abstract
In global aesthetic cultures, breast surgery is often associated with enlargement and enhancement, reflecting dominant ideals of femininity, desirability, and bodily abundance. This paper shifts attention to a less examined practice, breast reduction surgery among women in contemporary China.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zhejiang province, a regional hub for public plastic surgery departments and private cosmetic clinics, this study draws on interviews with women seeking breast reduction and with surgeons practicing in different institutional settings. Rather than pursuing a singular aesthetic ideal, these women articulate diverse and sometimes conflicting motivations for reducing their breasts. Some seek surgical lifting and reduction after breastfeeding, framing the operation as a restoration of bodily order and dignity. Others describe long-term experiences of stigma, sexualization, and verbal harassment associated with large breasts since adolescence. For patients diagnosed with macromastia, breast reduction is understood primarily as a therapeutic intervention addressing pain, mobility, and physical burden. Additionally, lesbian and gender nonconforming women frame breast reduction as a means of aligning their bodies with a more androgynous or neutral gender presentation, resisting heteronormative expectations embedded in mainstream beauty culture.
By foregrounding these narratives, the paper argues that breast reduction constitutes a polarized form of body modification, positioned against dominant logics of enhancement while remaining embedded in medical, aesthetic, and moral regimes. Choosing to make the body smaller becomes a way of reclaiming bodily control, negotiating health and identity, and reworking gendered norms within China’s expanding cosmetic surgery industry.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how young people with cleft lip/palate in Medellín navigate later-stage surgeries, particularly rhinoplasty. It explores autonomy, gendered aesthetic pressure, and the paradox of being "finished but not done"—navigating polarization between self-acceptance and body modification.
Paper long abstract
For young people born with cleft lip and palate, medical and social scrutiny of their faces begins at birth. This paper examines how young women with cleft navigate late-stage surgical decisions in Medellín, Colombia, particularly rhinoplasty. Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how aesthetic pressure and self-making unfold in a context where appearance holds high gendered social value and cosmetic intervention is increasingly normalized, yet aspirational.
Cleft care exposes the false polarization between "functional" and "aesthetic" intervention. By late adolescence, this inseparability peaks as treatment culminates in rhinoplasty—framed as the "final" procedure. Participants discussed it less in terms of functionality and more as becoming beautiful and "fully themselves," finally "graduating" from years of treatment. Rhinoplasty thus emerged as a key moment where clinical care, aesthetic social aspiration, and internal/external transformation intersected.
Agency appeared not through refusing surgery, but through negotiation: participants pushed for accelerated timelines, shaped outcome expectations, and engaged in everyday aesthetic practices. Some declined the lip revision—often performed simultaneously—keeping their scars as markers of personal history and self-acceptance. The rhinoplasty also created paradoxical social capital: participants could proudly disclose a sought-after cosmetic operation while quietly omitting the stigmatized congenital difference that had prompted it.
Despite surgical satisfaction, those who had completed treatment emphasized that "the process" never truly ends; it involves ongoing appearance management and inner work. Rather than representing closure, late-stage cleft treatment highlights polarized meanings in contemporary body modification: between functional repair and aesthetic aspiration, social pressure and empowerment, and self-improvement and self-acceptance.
Paper short abstract
Medicalization of FGM/C in Egypt rebrands the practice as “aesthetic surgery” bypassing legal bans. This exploits medical authority to normalize excision as a cosmetic refinement, institutionalizing it under a modern facade and shifting its social perception from ritual to medical necessity.
Paper long abstract
In Egypt, the medicalization of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) has fundamentally shifted the practices legitimacy, transforming it from a traditional ritual into a sanctioned medical act. This paper explores how the symbolic authority of healthcare providers is exploited to justify the practice through a blend of traditional arguments and pseudo-scientific rationalizations. By disguising excision as medical recommendation, practitioners suggest the practice as “legitimate” and “medically justified” thereby anchoring it within modern social ideals.
We analyze the transition from a ritual passing by the “medical necessity” arguments to the contemporary rebranding of FGM/C within the expanding field of aesthetic gynecology. As legal prohibitions tighten, a new clandestine cover emerge by reframing FGM/C as “cosmetic procedure” or “trimming” to correct alleged “congenital malformations”. This shift aligns medicalized FGM/C with global beauty standards and aesthetics, effectively normalizing the alteration of female genitalia and reinforcing that the vulva requires modification to be “normal” and “desirable”.
Furthermore, this paper addresses the ethical and legal double standards inherent in international discourse, which often criminalize FGM/C while tolerating genital cosmetic surgeries like labioplasty. By blurring the boundaries between “medical necessity” and “aesthetic requirement”, the medicalization of FGM/C create a “scientific cachet” that hinders abandonment. Ultimately, this mutation highlights a profound ethical crisis within the medical profession, where the pursuit of modernity is instrumentalized to institutionalize the practice clandestinely rather than facilitating its abandonment.
Paper short abstract
It examines the biomedicalization and commodification of female genital anxieties in Turkey through vaginoplasty and labiaplasty. It shows how these processes operate through contested forms of expertise, shaped by gendered cultural norms, profit motives, feminist ethics, and alternative therapies.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the biomedicalization and commodification of female genital anxieties in Turkey, with a specific focus on vaginoplasty and labiaplasty. Drawing on interviews from an ongoing study with gynaecologists, cosmetic surgeons, psychotherapists, and physiotherapists, most of whom are based in İstanbul, we explore how gendered concerns about vulval appearance, postpartum vaginal change, sexual dissatisfaction, and aging are produced, framed, and managed across different professional domains. These concerns are recast as surgical problems, with the benefits of intervention overemphasized while potential risks are downplayed. Such framings reinforce the notion of the female body and its parts as sites of potential imperfection that require constant monitoring, correction, and improvement.
Our preliminary findings suggest that some gynecologists have moved away from obstetrics toward cosmetic gynecology, where genital cosmetic surgeries offer greater financial return and professional autonomy, as well as reduced biopolitical surveillance. This shift is partly driven by the contemporary conditions of obstetric practice in Turkey, which involves high legal risk and low remuneration under strong state regulation of abortion and c-sections. By contrast, some gynecologists refuse to perform these surgeries, viewing them as patriarchal, profit-driven, and ethically problematic. Surgeons tend to frame these surgeries as technical solutions to culturally produced concerns, while psychotherapists and physiotherapists complicate this terrain by advocating non-surgical assessment and treatment. Overall, we demonstrate that biomedicalization operates through uneven and contested configurations of expertise. In this process, profit motives, feminist ethics, and alternative therapeutic logics continually reshape the boundaries between intimate care, biomedical enhancement, and professional practice.
Paper short abstract
This paper aims to focus on the social construction of women in post-reproductive ages, seeking to understand the use of HRT in India, which is polarised between debates of risks and regulation. This polarity compels women to negotiate between ‘ageing successfully’ and ‘ageing naturally'.
Paper long abstract
Post reproductive ageing is often marked by cessation of menstruation and onset of menopause. While this phase involves significant physical and psychological changes, it is rarely understood beyond the biological framework. As a result, older women are marginal to mainstream policy, research and public discourse. Inspired by the ideals of ‘successful ageing’, these bodily transitions are shaped by medical and anti-ageing narratives that frame ageing female bodies in need of ‘regulation’ and ‘optimisation’. In this context, Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) has become a key biomedical response which is at the intersection of therapeutic care and anti-ageing enhancements. Though globally recognised, HRT has been underutilised in India. Empirical research is scarce on women’s engagement with the healthcare system for HRT and how medical practitioners navigate through the social, cultural and medical contexts. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the use of HRT in India, focusing not only on women’s experiences but also on how healthcare providers navigate through the clinical, cultural and moral dynamics involved in it. Using a social constructionist approach, this is a work-in-progress paper from my doctoral thesis, aiming to contribute to the broader narrative around HRT, which is polarised in nature; both empowering as well as medicalised, reinforcing gendered and ageist ideals. Therefore, this polarity compels women to negotiate between ‘ageing successfully’ and ‘ageing naturally’. Based on in-depth interviews of doctors and patients from different cities in India, the study aims to contribute to the broader discourse of ageing, body modification and gender in contemporary India.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines pain from the process of tattooing from a phenomenological perspective, arguing that pain functions not as harm but as an affective medium that intensifies bodily awareness and enables the lived body to be experientially reclaimed.
Paper long abstract
This paper offers a phenomenological account of pain in tattooing, approaching it not as a pathological or purely negative sensation, but as an affective condition through which embodied meaning emerges. Rather than treating pain as an obstacle to agency or aesthetic experience, I argue that pain during tattooing operates as a medium that intensifies bodily awareness and reconfigures the subject’s relation to their own body.
Drawing on phenomenological traditions in the anthropology of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, Leder, Csordas), the paper conceptualizes pain as a somatic mode of attention that temporarily re-centers the lived body. Tattooing pain differs from accidental or pathological pain in that it is intentional and anticipated, allowing it to be integrated into meaningful bodily experience rather than experienced as an intrusion. In this context, pain becomes productive as it marks a transition in how the body is felt, owned, and recognized.
The paper further argues that tattooing pain plays a key role in transforming inscription into incorporation. The mark on the skin gains significance not only through its visual permanence, but through the sensory intensity of its making. Pain thus mediates between sensation and meaning, connecting aesthetic form to embodied memory.
By focusing on pain as an experiential process rather than a medical risk, this paper contributes to debates on polarized bodies, health, and body modification. It proposes a phenomenological framework for understanding why painful body practices persist across cultural contexts, not despite the pain, but through it.
Paper short abstract
We examine the body projects associated with two transitional periods in women’s lives (pregnancy/postpartum and perimenopause/postmenopause), both of them aesthetically anticipated and treated as requiring corrective measures, shaped by digital cultures and neoliberal regimes of responsibility.
Paper long abstract
Relationships with one’s corporeality situate themselves at the intersection of identity, appearance, and social aspirations in the context of late capitalism, heavily influenced by digital cultures and neoliberal regimes of responsibility. In this paper, we employ an autoethnographic lens to discuss the body projects associated with two transitional periods in women’s lives, both of which are felt physically with great intensity and clearly marked culturally: pregnancy and postpartum, on the one hand, and perimenopause and postmenopause, on the other. Both periods are aesthetically anticipated and treated as requiring “corrective” measures, oftentimes before any change is visible at all. We examine the body as a dynamic site of investment, judgment, and negotiation. Female bodies are not only subject to specific (double) standards but recently function within a regime of increasingly ephemeral, internally contradictory, and axiologically ambivalent norms. This normative instability opens up new spaces for practices that do not fit into simple binaries of subordination and transgression and, as such, require nuanced tools of description. In reflecting upon the socio-cultural conditionings of the female body and its transformation through adopted (or rejected) practices, we employ our age difference as a temporal pivot for our methodology. In this way, we examine socio-cultural mechanisms not as abstract structures, but through forces that act on the body in real and virtual ways, shaping, disciplining, and negotiating it in everyday practices.
Paper short abstract
This paper draws on ongoing doctoral research into Kosovar women’s beauty practices, showing how fashion and cosmetic surgery serve as tools for personal agency and as responses to structural precarity that demand ongoing labor and self-regulation.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on ongoing doctoral research into the beauty practices of Kosovar women after the state’s independence in 2008. It examines fashion, cosmetic labor, and private surgical interventions as everyday spaces where global political projects are interpreted and contested. Following conflict and international intervention, Kosovo has pursued state-building efforts to cultivate national subjects who embody “modern” ideals. This study explores how young women navigate state-driven discourses of modernity while balancing local social norms related to family, kinship, and social status.
Drawing on fieldwork in fashion academies, ateliers, wedding ceremonies, and aesthetic centers, this research explores the polarized meanings attached to these body modifications. It demonstrates how they serve both as tools for personal agency and as responses to structural precarity that require ongoing individual labor and self-regulation within a “not-yet-state.”
Visual ethnography is central to this study and is used to capture the symbolic grammar of appearance. By combining photography, video recording, and post-production editing with participant observation and interviews, the research documents the gestures, visual codes, and spatial arrangements through which beauty is enacted, performed, normalized, and contested in everyday practices.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how Lithuanian women’s pursuit of authenticity oscillates between empowerment and new norms. Framed as freedom and self-expression, authenticity also becomes an obligation, shaping bodies, beauty practices, and self-perception in a polarized cultural landscape.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how contemporary lithuanian women negotiate individuality and authenticity in a polarized socio-cultural context shaped by both emancipatory ideals and normative pressures. Theoretically, authenticity is approached as a field of negotiation between inner selfhood and external norms, as a performative script, a form of bodily capitalization, and a neoliberal obligation of continuous self-optimization. This perspective allows everyday beauty and body practices to be analyzed as sites where self-expression and conformity, emancipation and control, are constantly balanced.
In today’s polarized world, women experience a double bind. Public discourse promotes self-acceptance, body diversity, and authenticity, while beauty industries, social media, and visual culture intensify standardized aesthetic and emotional norms. As a result, the lithuanian female “self” in 21st-century is constructed between proclaimed freedom of choice and clearly defined boundaries imposed by media, family, professional environments, and cultural stereotypes.
Empirical survey data reveal that authenticity operates through two interconnected poles. On the one hand, it empowers women through narratives of confidence and self-worth (“be yourself,” “trust yourself”). On the other hand, it functions as a disciplinary regime demanding to be “authentically correct”: emotionally resilient, aesthetically moderate, orderly, and socially acceptable. Deviations acquire moral and psychological significance. Empowerment and control thus emerge simultaneously from the same cultural logic.
Finally, the study identifies six interrelated phases in women’s search for individuality, conceptualized as a dynamic mechanism of the authenticity norm. Individuality appears not as an achieved state but as an ongoing, never fully completed process shaped by contemporary body politics.