New Books In Medicine

Today on New Books in Gender Studies Jana Byars talks with Lindy McDougall, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia about her new book, The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, out this year, 2021, with Indiana University Press. In The Perfect Vagina, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform these procedures, both in Australia and globally, while also examining the environment in which surgeons and women come together. Physicians have a vested interest in establishing this surgery as valid medical intervention, despite majority medical opinion explicitly acknowledging that a wide range of genital variation is normal. McDougall offers a nuanced picture of why and how these procedures are performed and draws parallels between FGCS and anthropological discussions of female genital circumcision (cutting). Using the neologism biomagical, she argues that cosmetic surgery functions as both ritual and sacrifice