To Learn the World Again: Examining the Impact of Elective Breast Surgery on Body Schema

This paper comprises a feminist phenomenological exploration of women’s experiences with breast augmentation and breast reduction. Situating the results of semi-structured interviews in the context of body schema, this study discloses how women perceive, think, feel and respond to bodily change created by elective breast surgery. Women’s narratives express that breast augmentation and reduction shifted their conception of the lived body and its possibilities by provoking bodily reorientations and adjustments as well as changes in bodily sensations. In contrast with body image studies that emphasize elective breast surgery as transforming attitudes towards the body, this phenomenological investigation reveals that elective breast surgery also galvanizes a relearning of the world and a rearticulation of embodied doing.