“In this deeply engaging and much-needed book Camille Nurka shows that labiaplasty―surgery designed to fix ‘hypertrophy of the labia minora’―is not a medical necessity but rather a cultural invention. Nurka skilfully deploys psychoanalytic, feminist, and philosophical theories along with medical, surgical, and scientific discourse as she examines the history of this much-debated surgical procedure.

The book shows clearly how labiaplasty shares a continuum with other genital procedures such as intersex surgery and ritual female genital cutting. It explains a vital race/gender connection in situating labiaplasty’s history partly in colonial-anthropological studies of black women’s genitals. Finally, this excellent book powerfully demonstrates how labiaplasty is part of a continuing fantasy of heterosexual ‘normality’.” (Meredith Jones, author of Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery)

“Camille Nurka has written a richly researched, beautifully located account of what I would call the ongoing ontological project of the vulva. She identifies and explores deep historical roots – including in sex(ist) and race(ist) science – that provide the foundation and basis for contemporary ideas of gendered genital normality and desirability, freakishness and pathology.

These roots underpin the contemporary ‘truths’ and experiential realities, the logics, that produce contemporary desires for, and practice of, labiaplasty (and other genital cosmetic procedures on the vulva and vagina) as a solution to genital distress. Richly researched and diversely located in terms of scholarship, this book is, above all else, a fascinating and engaging read!” (Virginia Braun, Professor of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand)