No abstract

In this article, the author addresses two critical environmental situations in southern Italy: the Terra dei fuochi (Land of fires) near Naples, characterized by a history of illegal disposal of toxic waste, and Taranto, where the Ilva steel plants have a record of exceeding the legal emission limits for several pollutants. Despite a recognition of these situations, public political discourse in Italy still tends to link the higher than average incidence of cancer in the two areas to lifestyles rather than to environmental factors. The author locates this phenomenon within the larger context of the ‘Southern Question’ – the historical stigmatization of southern Italy as backwards and uncivilized. She argues that this same stereotype not only stigmatizes a geographical region, but also facilitates the stigmatization of the people who become ill in Taranto and Terra dei fuochi as the result of lifestyle rather than environmental factors. Furthermore, this same stereotype also stigmatizes social movements against the pollution as irrational and uncivilized. Previous studies have linked situations of environmental injustice to the Global South or to specific areas with racialized stereotypes; here it is argued that the whole southern half of Italy can be considered a new geographic scale in which phenomena of environmental injustice, denial of environmental causes of disease, and geographic stigmas, intersect.

This article analyses the areas of overlap between cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery, using the examples of both female and male breast surgery, and shows that these areas of overlap are sites of the construction of gendered bodies. The data are drawn from two pieces of research: the first based on 17 in-depth interviews with Italian cosmetic surgeons and the second based on 99 interviews with breast cancer patients and medical oncological professionals conducted in France and Italy. The primary data are supplemented by an analysis of the medical literature. 'Too small' female breasts (micromastia) and male gynecomastia (male fatty breast tissue) are pathologised by the surgeons and the medical literature, and a surgical intervention is presented as a way to heal this pathology. The pathologisation of healthy breasts goes along with the aestheticisation of oncological breast surgery. The interventions performed during a post-mastectomy breast reconstruction are guided by normative ideas of how a female body should be. The gender norms inscribed in this surgery practice can however be contested by patients: they can ask for a breast reconstruction while refusing all forms of 'enhancement'.

Results form this large, retrospective, multicenter survey indicated that one out of five patients still complain pain at 3 years after cardiac surgery; persistence of pain was more common in the older patients. The approach to management of chronic pain by cardiologists and cardiac surgeons should be improved.