The history of Botulinum toxin: from poison to beauty.

Botulinum toxin, also called the "miracle toxin," is a neurotoxin produced by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum. It is known to block nerve signals that contract muscles resulting in a temporary paralysis of the muscles. Toxins type A and B have been extensively studied and utilized in the realm of beauty and cosmetology. Initially, the toxin gained popularity as a disease-causing "poison". It was only later that it found its way to becoming a must have in modern aesthetic practice. Today, this wonder toxin has proven to be an apt and convenient option in the field of anti-aging medicine.

Fat, desire and disgust in the colonial imagination.

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from 'primitive' corpulence to 'civilized' moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books ­ all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time ­ it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally 'savage' or 'uncivilized' traits. This tension between fat and 'civilization' was by no means univocal or stable. Rather, this analysis shows, a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals can be traced between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed 'primitive' in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard was sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.

The making and transnationalization of an ethnic niche: Vietnamese manicurists.

The article addresses how Vietnamese immigrant women developed an urban employment niche in the beauty industry, in manicuring. They are shown to have done so by creating a market for professional nail care, through the transformation of nailwork into what might be called McNails, entailing inexpensive, walk-in, impersonal service, in stand-alone salons, nationwide, and by making manicures and pedicures de riguer across class and racial strata. Vietnamese are shown to have simultaneously gained access to institutional means to surmount professional manicure credentializing barriers, and to have developed formal and informal ethnic networks that fueled their growing monopolization of jobs in the sector, to the exclusion of non-Vietnamese. The article also elucidates conditions contributing to the Vietnamese build-up and transformation of the niche, to the nation-wide formation of the niche and, most recently, to the transnationalization of the niche. It also extrapolates from the Vietnamese manicure experience propositions concerning the development, expansion, maintenance, and transnationalization of immigrant-formed labor market niches.

Disordered eating in African American and Caucasian women: the role of ethnic identity.

The influential roles of culture and ethnic identity are frequently cited in developing disordered eating and body dissatisfaction, constituting both protective and risk factors. For African American women, strongly identifying with African American cultural beauty ideals may protect against disordered eating to lose weight, but may actually increase risk in development of disordered eating directed at weight gain, such as binge eating. This study compares African American and Caucasian women on disordered eating measures, positing that African American women show greater risk for binge eating due to the impact of ethnic identity on body dissatisfaction. Findings indicate low levels of ethnic identity represent a risk factor for African American women, increasing the likelihood of showing greater binge eating and bulimic pathology. In Caucasian women, high levels of ethnic identity constitute a risk factor, leading to higher levels of both binge eating and global eating pathology. Implications for prevention and treatment are discussed.

Seeing your way to health: the visual pedagogy of Bess Mensendieck's physical culture system.

This essay examines the images and looking practices central to Bess M. Mensendieck's (c.1866-1959) 'functional exercise' system, as documented in physical culture treatises published in Germany and the United States between 1906 and 1937. Believing that muscular realignment could not occur without seeing how the body worked, Mensendieck taught adult non-athletes to see skeletal alignment and muscular movement in their own and others' bodies. Three levels of looking practices are examined: didactic sequences; penetrating inspection and appreciation of physiological structures; and ideokinetic visual metaphors for guiding movement. With these techniques, Mensendieck's work bridged the body cultures of German Nacktkultur (nudism), American labour efficiency and the emerging physical education profession. This case study demonstrates how sport historians could expand their analyses to include practices of looking as well as questions of visual representation.

The making of a modern female body: beauty, health and fitness in interwar Britain.

In interwar Britain female athleticism, keep-fit classes and physical culture were celebrated as emblems of modernity, and women who cultivated their bodies in the pursuit of beauty, health and fitness represented civic virtue. This article argues that a modern, actively managed female body was part of women's liberation during this period. A modern female body required sex reform and birth control. Fitness culture was circumscribed by traditional notions of femininity. Women's competitive sport remained controversial and slimming in pursuit of fashion was widely condemned. Women from across the social spectrum embraced sport and joined fitness organizations. The rise of a modern female body contributed towards greater equality between the sexes. However, the gender order did not change fundamentally and the ideal woman of the interwar years was represented as a modern, emancipated race mother.

"Almost invisible scars": medical tourism to Brazil.

Along with a handful of other nations in the developing world, Brazil has emerged as a top destination for medical tourism. Drawing on the author's ethnographic fieldwork in plastic surgery wards, this article examines diverse factors - some explicitly promoted in medical marketing and news sources, others less visible - contributing to Brazil's international reputation for excellence in cosmetic plastic surgery. Brazil's plastic surgery residency programs, some of which are housed within its public health system, attract overseas surgeons, provide ample opportunities for valuable training in cosmetic techniques, and create a clinical environment that favors experimentation with innovative techniques. Many graduates of these programs open private clinics that, in turn, attract overseas patients. High demand for Brazilian plastic surgery also reflects an expansive notion of female health that includes sexual realization, mental health, and cosmetic techniques that manage reproduction. Medical tourism is sometimes represented as being market-driven: patients in wealthier nations travel to obtain quality services at lower prices. This article ends by reflecting on how more complex local and transnational dynamics also contribute to demand for elective medical procedures such as cosmetic surgery.

Surgeon and Safari: producing valuable bodies in Johannesburg.

This essay explores how concepts of value and cheapness circulate around the bodies of clients of the Johannesburg-based cosmetic surgery tourism company Surgeon and Safari. I show how the production of a luxurious experience and the mitigation of risk take place within a transnational network enabled by the presence of medical tourism in multiple locales. By placing Surgeon and Safari's activities within the context of the neoliberalization of health care in South Africa, I explore how the division between private versus public health spaces functions as both a technique of valuing clients' bodies and as a process of racialization.

Medical tourism: reverse subsidy for the elite.

The medical tourism sector in India has attracted global attention, given its phenomenal growth in the past decade. India is second only to Thailand in the number of medical tourists that it attracts every year. Estimates indicate that the medical tourism market in India could grow from $310 million in 2005 to $2 billion by 2012. These figures are significant when contrasted with India's overall health care expenditure - $10 billion in the public sector and $50 billion in the private sector. Factors that have contributed to this growth include the relative proficiency in English among health care providers and the cost effectiveness of medical procedures in India. Generally, most procedures in Indian hospitals cost a quarter (or less) of what they would cost in developed countries. The expansion of medical tourism has also been fueled by the growth of the private medical sector in India, a consequence of the neglect of public health by the government. India has one of the poorest records in the world regarding public financing and provisioning of health care. A growing driver of medical tourism is the attraction of facilities in India that offer access to assisted reproductive care technologies. Ironically, this is in sharp contrast with the acute neglect of the health care needs of Indian women. The Indian government is vigorously promoting medical tourism by providing tax concessions and by creating an environment enabling it to thrive. However, there is a distinct disjunction between the neglect of the health care needs of ordinary Indians and public policy that today subsidizes the health care of wealthy foreigners.

Nennu and Shunu: gender, body politics, and the beauty economy in China.

This essay analyzes recent discourse on two emerging representations of women in China, "tender" women (nennu) and "ripe" women (shunu), in order to examine the relationships among gender, body politics, and consumerism. The discourse of nennu and shunu suggests that older, ripe women become younger and more tender by consuming fashions, cosmetic surgery technologies, and beauty and health care products and services because tender women represent the ideal active consumership that celebrates beauty, sexuality, and individuality. This discourse serves to enhance consumers' desire for beauty and health and to ensure the continued growth of China's beauty economy and consumer capitalism. Highlighting the role of the female body, feminine beauty, and feminine youth in developing consumerism, this discourse downplays the contributions of millions of beauty and health care providers (predominantly laid-off female workers and rural migrant women) and new forms of gender exploitation. Such an overemphasis on gender masks intensified class division. This essay suggests that women and their bodies become new terrains from which post-Mao China can draw its power and enact consumerism. Gender constitutes both an economic multiplier to boost China's consumer capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to regulate and remold women and their bodies into subjects that are identified with the state's political and economic objectives. Since consumerism has been incorporated into China's nation-building project, gender thus becomes a vital resource for both consumer capitalist development and nation building. This essay shows that both gender and the body are useful analytic categories for the study of postsocialism.

The right to fashion in the age of terrorism.

As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article appears as a companion essay to Mimi Thi Nguyen's "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms" and offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite in the fashionably modern - and implicitly Western - woman become convenient metaphors for articulating geopolitical contests of power as a human rights concern, as a rescue mission, as a beautifying mandate. This article examines newer iterations of this opposition, in the wake of September 11, 2001, in order to demonstrate the critical resonance of a biopolitics on fashion and beauty. In "The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism," the author examines the relationship between the U.S. war on terror, targeting persons whose sartorial choices are described as terrorist-looking and oppressive, and the right-to-fashion discourse, which promotes fashion's mass-market diffusion as a civil liberty. Looking at these multiple invocations of the democratization of fashion, this article argues that the right-to-fashion discourse colludes with the war on terror by fabricating a neoliberal consumer-citizen who is also a couture-citizen and whose right to fashion reasserts U.S.exceptionalism, which is secured by private property, social mobility, and individualism.