4: On Beauty Ideals with Julie Starr, PhD

In this episode, we speak with Julie Starr about her book Modified Bodies, Material Selves: Beauty Ideals in Post-Reform Shanghai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023). Our student co-host for this episode, second-year medical student Piper Schneider, is interested in pursuing plastic surgery and wanted to know more about how and why women think about beauty and body modification – and the techniques used to study those ways of thinking. We discuss the concept of tizhi, anthropological methods and the “data problem” in that field, and how cultural beauty ideals influence health, wellness, and medicine.