The Ways Women Age - Using And Refusing Cosmetic Intervention

he Ways Women lige 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 white 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-firstcentury expectations of youth and beauty.