Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to all of the people who agreed to be interviewed for this book. There are also many other people who need to be thanked. They include my colleagues and friends at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York: Patricia Clough, Deidre Conlon, Paisley Currah, Mitch Duneier, Hester Eisenstein, Harry Levine, Milt Mankoff, Lisa Jean Moore, Robin Rogers-Dillon, Lauren Seiler, Dean Savage, and Charlie Smith. For their research assistance, I thank Joli Brown, Danielle Wellington and Maria Russell. At Brandeis University, Peter Conrad organized a lecture that provided the first audience for my work on surgery addiction. I also want to thank Arthur Frank, who offered invaluable advice and feedback. Other people who gave various kinds of help include Stefan Timmermans, Meredith Jones, Jon Mowitt, Ed Lenert, Brenda Weber, Debra Gimlin, Abigail Brooks, the Honorable Mark Taylor, Chris and Jana Julka, and Nikki Sullivan. In addition, I thank my graduate students in the 2005 Sociology of Bodies Seminar at CUNY Graduate Center for stimulating and challenging my thinking. At the University of California Santa Cruz, I thank Helene Moglen and Nancy Chen of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research for organizing the 2005 conference on “Bodies in the Making” and inviting me to give the address. ix Much of chapter 1 is based on my talk there, which was first published in the IAFR Feminist Provocations series. At the Biomedical Ethics Unit/Faculty of Medicine of McGill University, Montreal, Leigh Turner organized the “Surgical Solutions” conference in 2006, which brought together ten scholars writing on cosmetic surgery. I thank him and all of the participants for helping me further my thinking on this topic. At Rutgers University Press, Kristi Long gave me her trust and support, and Adi Hovav, my editor , offered help, guidance, and patience. I thank Joe Rollins for assisting with chapter 5, as well for taking me to see Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, which I discuss in chapter 3, for attending the Bodies conference with me and, most important , for his enduring and invaluable friendship for the past eight years. Personal life feeds intellectual life. I thank my friends and family for the various ways in which they supported me personally during the years of this writing and research. In addition to those already mentioned, they include Maureen O’Sullivan, who has been a dear friend, and Elizabeth Wood, who has been an important part of my life for over a decade. I am grateful to my parents for their help and encouragement . I thank Milan Ferencei for his encouragement and humor. My sisters, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei and Angela Gosetti-Murray John, are inspirations to me in many ways, and I must acknowledge all of their guidance over the years, which has been considerable. I also thank Jennifer for her critique of chapter 3. I am lucky to have such intellectually powerful sisters, and even luckier to have their abiding friendship and enthusiastic support of my work and life. Finally, and most especially, I am indebted to Gregory Warwick Taylor, MD, PhD, for more than I can possibly list, but including: our stimulating conversations about x Acknowledgments medicine and other bodily subjects, his kind interest and ongoing support of my work, his feedback on many of the chapters here, his various efforts to help me finish this volume, his brilliance in his work and dedication to his patients, his perseverance in keeping me healthy, and most especially, for making my personal life so fulfilling. I dedicate this book to him, with my deepest gratitude and affection. Acknowledgments xi Surgery Junkies ...