Debra Gimlin's book "Body Work" is an in-depth exploration of American women's relationships with their bodies. She argues that women do not engage in body work (activities like exercise and plastic surgery) in order to conform to a paternalistic, and unrealistic view of beauty that is perpetrated by the popular media. Instead, Gimlin gives the empowering argument that women engage in body work in order to nurture a relationship between the body and self-identity. In "Body Work," Gimlin examines a series of mini-ethnographies in her attempt to understand the complex relationships that American women have with their bodies and their self-identities. She examines four main sites, in collecting research for her book. Gimlin conducted in-depth research and extensive interviews at each location. Gimlin explores a beauty salon, an aerobics class, a plastic surgery clinic, and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), a political and social organization designed to empower overweight women.

The best evidence for Gimlin's assertions comes from her interviews with individual women. The women are candid, powerful and honest in their assessments of their bodies, and in revealing their reasons for attempting to change their bodies, or come to terms with their bodies' "imperfections." Ultimately, the interviews reveal that women often engage in body work like plastic surgery or aerobics as an attempt to come to terms with their self-image. This encouraging view goes beyond the simple assumption that women exercise and subject their bodies to surgery simply to meet society's narrow...

Further, it integrates these empirical studies with an academic basis in feminism, and cultural studies. As such, the methodology employed in Gimlin's work provides a strong and lasting basis for her investigation into the complex reality of women's relationships between their bodies and the self.
Body Work" investigates the emotional and intellectual motivations that drive women to engage in body work, a term that encompasses almost any activity designed to reshape the body. She fills the book with interviews and evidence from the lives of real women, and ultimately argues against the idea that women's body work is motivated by women's enslavement to the patriarchal beauty myth popularized by feminist writer Naomi Wolf. Instead, Gimlin argues that women use body work to escape the beauty myth, and focus on their relationship between their body and the self.

Gimlin's book picks up where earlier feminists like Naomi Wolf and her ilk left off, and delves into the reality beyond the idea that women simply manipulate and view their bodies in an attempt to please men. Ultimately, Gimlin gives an encouragingly positive view of most women's attempts to come to terms with their bodies, and provides a clearer focus of the relative importance of the "beauty myth" that Wolf described to women's real-life struggles with body image.

Gimlin is highly qualified to write such a book. She received her Ph.D. from…