Alka Menon

Areas of Interest

Health and Medicine; Science and Technology; Race and Ethnicity; Gender; Culture/Knowledge; Global, Regional and Transnational Sociology; Sociology of the Body

Bio

Alka Menon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University. She studies how society and medicine shape each other, especially through technology and markets. More specifically, her research examines how medicine and the sciences define categories like “race,” “health,” “beauty,” and “accountability,” giving them new cultural and commercial life. Her research and teaching interests include medical sociology, science and technology studies, cultural sociology, race and racism, gender, law and society, and qualitative research methods.

Her first book, Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards, draws on fieldwork in the U.S. and Malaysia to show how cosmetic surgeons reshape race—on patients’ bodies and in the broader culture. Her current book project follows GLP-1 drugs, also known as Ozempic, as a clinical and commercial phenomenon. Titled Weighing Inequality, the book offers a portrait of how GLP-1s blur the line between therapy and enhancement, changing health and healthcare in the U.S. The book draws on interviews, ethnography and content analysis and is under advance contract with UC Press.

Professor Menon also engages in interdisciplinary collaborations with computer scientists, engineers, clinicians, and other social scientists on projects about AI, computer graphics, and wearables. She is co-authoring a book that develops a sociohistorical framework for understanding the challenges of implementing AI in medicine (under advance contract, Cambridge University Press). In 2026, she received a Yale AI Seed Grant to extend this work in new directions. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.

At Yale, she holds a courtesy appointment in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is affiliated with the Program on the History of Science and History of Medicine, the Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the Yale Ethnography Hub, and the Council on Southeast Asian Studies and MacMillan Center for Area and International Studies. She received a B.A. in biological sciences from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.

Book

Menon, Alka V. 2023. Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards. University of California Press.

Cosmetic surgery was once associated with a one-size-fits-all approach, modifying patients to conform to a single standard of beauty. As this surgery has become more accessible worldwide, changing beauty trends have led to a proliferation of beauty standards for members of different racial groups. In Refashioning Race, Alka V. Menon enters the world of cosmetic surgeons, journeying from a sprawling convention center in Kyoto to boutique clinics in the multicultural countries of the United States and Malaysia. She shows how surgeons generate and apply knowledge using racial categories and how this process is affected by transnational clinical and economic exchanges. Surgeons not only measure and organize but also elaborate upon racial differences in a globalized field of medicine. Focusing on the role of cosmetic surgeons as gatekeepers and producers of desired appearances, Refashioning Race argues that cosmetic surgeons literally reshape race—both on patients’ bodies and the broader level of culture.

Refashioning Race shows how cosmetic surgeons act as gatekeepers and producers of ideal racial appearances, reshaping how we think about race.