Table of Contents

Chapter One: Shame and Philosophy: Introducing the Philosophical Significance of Body Shame
Chapter Two: Phenomenology of the Body and Shame: Visibility, Invisibility and the Seen Body
Chapter Three: Shame and the Socially Shaped Body: Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias 000
Chapter Four: The Politics of Shame: Phenomenology of Self-Presentation and Social (In)visibility
Chapter Five: Body Shame and Female Experience
Chapter Six: The Case of Cosmetic Surgery: The Body Shaped by Shame

About the Author

Luna Dolezal is an Irish Research Council ELEVATE Postdoctoral Fellow based in the Department of Philosophy, Durham University and the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin.

Reviews

Guiding the reader carefully through a huge variety of philosophical and sociological theory, and providing a clear review of contemporary feminist analyses of cosmetic surgery, Dolezal has composed a well-informed, convincing, and highly accessible book. The book teaches us a great deal about the relation between body shame, our image-saturated consumerist society, and appearance-improving behavior.
*Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy*

In this very well written and eminently readable book, Dolezal deftly explores the concept of body shame from both the phenomenological and the social constructionist points of view, finding a tension between the phenomenological emphasis on constitution and the social constructionist emphasis on social constraint. The author expertly presents and evaluates the contributions to the analysis of embodiment and intercorporeality in Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Norbert Elias. This is a deeply original and instructive work, a genuine contribution to the study of embodiment and to the understanding of human social encounters.
*Dermot Moran, Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin*

Every woman – indeed every member of an oppressed group – will find this topic resonant. Dolezal argues that, while ‘acute’ body shame is necessary to socialization (what Norbert Elias called ‘the civilising process’), ‘chronic’ body shame is undermining; its destructive potential is exemplified in the case of cosmetic surgery. Dolezal skilfully weaves together social theory (Elias, Foucault, Goffman) with phenomenology (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) to outline a theory of the socially shaped body that will be required reading for feminists and social theorists alike.
*Katherine Morris, Oxford University*