The Body and Reproduction of Femininity

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The Body and Reproduction of Femininity

• Susan Bordo

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Thesis

• This essay focus on the analysis of one
  particular arena that the interplays of several
  dynamics is striking and exemplary.
• Disorders like anorexia, hysteria and agoraphobia
  may be resistance that undercuts and is utilized
  as a reproduction of power relations.
• With her central mechanism involving a
  transformation of meaning, Bordo intends to
  exemplify that various contemporary critical
  discourses can be joined and generate an
  understanding of the unwitting role which our
  bodies play in the symbolization and reproduction
  of gender.

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Reconstructing Feminist Discourse on the Body

• The concept of body a medium of culture
• The body is more than a text of culture.
  According to Bourdieu and Foucault, it is a
  practical, direct locus of social control.
• An effective political discourse expected

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The Concept of body

• Body as a medium of culture
• Bourdieu culture as a made body, can be
  converted into automatic, habitual activity.
• Foucault the primacy of practice over belief is
  not chiefly through ideology, but through the
  organization and regulation of the time, space
  and movements of our daily lives. These means
  make our bodies trained, shaped, and impressed
  with prevailing historical forms of selfhood,
  desire, masculinity, femininity.

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The Concept of body

• Body as a medium of culture
• Docile bodies
• Female bodies forces and energies are habituated,
  to external regulation, subjection ,
  transformation and improvement.
• Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines
  of diet, makeup, and dress, women are rendered
  less socially oriented and more centripetally
  focused on self-modification.
• The discipline and normalization of the female
  body has to be acknowledged as an amazingly
  durable and flexible strategy of social control.

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Reconstructing Feminist Discourse on the Body

• An effective political discourse expected
• In the era that appearance is the contemporary
  preoccupation, when applying Foucaults idea, it
  is important that we think of the network of
  practices, institutions, and technologies that
  sustain positions of dominance and subordination
  in a particular domain.

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Reconstructing Feminist Discourse on the Body

• An effective political discourse expected
• We need an analytics to describe a power, not
  repressive but constitutive.
• We need a discourse to account for the
  subversion of potential rebellion a discourse
  that not merely insists on objectively analysis
  on power relations, social hierarchy, political
  backlashes, but also confronts the difficulty and
  entrapment that the subject at times is trapped
  in sustaining her own oppression.

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The Body as a Text of Femininity

• History of female disorder and normal feminine
  practice
• Disordered body as a text Reading of the
  slender body
• A double bind

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History of female disorder and normal feminine
practice

• Symptoms of disorder
• Among most close reading or analysis of disorder,
  women appear to be apparently much more
  vulnerable (than men).
• 19th Century Neurasthenia and hysteria
• 20th Century Agoraphobic, anorexia nervosa,
  bulimia

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History of female disorder and normal feminine
practice

• Symptoms could be regarded as the text and be
  analyzed as a textuality
• Symptoms of disorders contain symbolic or
  political meanings that can be taken as
  reflections upon the constructed and existed
  gender roles
• Examples
• Women are expected to fee, to serve, to
  sacrifice they starve themselves and whittling
  down the space they/their bodies take up.

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History of female disorder and normal feminine
practice

• Symptoms could be regarded as the text and be
  analyzed as a textuality
• An ideological construction of femininity
• Femininity is constructed and the definition of
  femininity is homogenized and normalized
  disregard of race, class and other differences.
• Disordered female bodies aggressive
  texts/graphics for interpreters

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History of female disorder and normal feminine
practice

• Historical normal feminine practice
• 19th Century the definition of lady and the
  traits of a lady
• Delicacy, dreaminess, sexually passive,
  charmingly labile and capriciously emotional

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History of female disorder and normal feminine
practice

• Historical normal feminine practice
• In various literary texts and scientific reports,
  the term hysteria becomes
• interchangeable with the term feminine
• formalized and scientized in male theorists
  works (Norton 2366)

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History of female disorder and normal feminine
practice

• Historical normal feminine practice
• Femininity is constructed through stadardized
  visual images.
• Femininity a matter of constructing
• Femininity the appropriate surface presentation
  of self
• Example 1950s1960s agoraphobia

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Disordered body as a text Reading the slender
body

• 1950s1960s agoraphobia
• emerged at a period of reaffirmation of
  domesticity and dependency as the feminine ideal
• career women a dirty word
• movie and screen images as examples
• The emaciated body of the anorectic
• a caricature of the contemporary ideal of
  hyperslenderness for women, an ideal bodily form
  l for women nowadays still

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A Double Bind
A Double Bind

• Women emotional and physical nurturer
• The rules for this construction of femininity
  require that women learn to fee others, not
  the self(2367).
• Self-feeding is taken as greedy and excessive for
  women who are expected to develop an
  other-oriented emotional economy.

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A Double Bind

• Femininity Masculinity ? the anorexic as an
  extreme performer
• Women are continually taught feminine virtues
  and are also expected (simultaneously) to learn
  the masculine language and value.
• Popular images of femininity and masculinity
• The androgynous ideal hence tears the subject
  into two.

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Protest and Retreat in the Same Gesture

• Muteness as a way to protest
• A feminine slim body that demonstrates
  well-control and self-mastery
• American and French feminists interpret the
  hysteric speaking as a protest through their
  muteness.
• Dianne Hunter and other Lacanian feminists view
  on the hysterics regressive and expressive
  articulation to patriarchal thought
• Catherine Clement the hysterics accuse and
  points
• Helene Cixous Dora as an example

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Protest and Retreat in the Same Gesture

• Muteness as a way to protest
• Literary protest
• Robert Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow as examples
• Carroll Smith Rosenberg
• Susie Orbach the anorectic uses hunger strike
  to express a political discourse

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Retreat

• Kim Chernin
• By intervening personal development, the anorexic
  may assuage the guilt and separation anxiety
• Of being surpassed their mothers (in terms of
  freedom?)
• Of living freer lives (? Is that possible?)
• Agoraphobia
• usually happens shortly after marriage
• a way to weld dependency and attachment

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Retreat

• The self-destructing nature of the protest
• The symptoms of disorders actually isolate and
  weaken the sufferer.
• The life of the body becomes the anorectics
  fetish.
• For the hysterics
• They use their bodies to express.
• Muteness turns them into silent and uncomplaining
  woman.
• Their muteness can be regarded as a gesture of
• rejecting the symbolic order of the patriarchy
• Recovering a lost world of semiotic, maternal
  value.

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Collusion, Resistance, and the Body

• A Social Formation
• During historical periods of cultural backlash,
  which challenges reorganization and redefining
  male and female roles, hysteria and anorexia come
  across to their peak.
• Female pathology which is a form of social
  formation later presses potential resistance and
  rebellion to maintain the existed gendered order.

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Collusion, Resistance, and the Body

• A Social Formation
• No matter what sort of objective social
  condition/formation create the female pathology,
  the subject is the one that always produces the
  symptoms.
• The body is invested with various meanings by the
  individual/subject.
• By embodying the body with meanings, we may
  perceive how the subjects dream and desire are
  weaved into the matrix of the power relations.

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Collusion, Resistance, and the Body

• Anorectics body Anorexia is a feminine
  practice
• Anorexia began as moderate diet regime.
• Anorexia came out as a conventional feminine
  practice, often undertaken by patriarchal
  remarks.
• Female finds the way to control the need and the
  want, a sense of triumph is thus formed

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Collusion, Resistance, and the Body

• Anorexia as a feminine practice
• Finding the idea that self-mastery and
  self-transcendence, expertise and power over the
  body are regarded as superior will and control is
  appealing, a habit is hence formed by female.
• Anorectics enjoy their slender bodies admired and
  viewed as a project of self-mastery.
• The anorectic realizes that a female body is
  vulnerable and at times treated as a childs body.

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Collusion, Resistance, and the Body

• Anorexia as a feminine practice
• The Anorexics experience of power is illusory
• Reshaping the body does not mean they are able to
  gain male power or privilege.
• To feel autonomous and free while harnessing
  body and soul to an obsessive body-practice is to
  serve, not transform, a social order that limits
  female possibilities (2373).

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Textuality, Praxis, and the Body

• A tension between the meaning and the practical
  life of he disordered body
• Two different bodies under the same discourse
• A possible suggestion to the further development
  of feminism
• Conclusion

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Two different bodies under the same discourse

• The intelligible body
• Scientific, philosophic, and aesthetic
  representations of the body
• The useful body
• The one that is shaped and trained by practical
  rules and regulations in the presentation of
  cultural conceptions of the body

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Two different bodies under the same discourse

• Cooperation of these 2 bodies
• 19th Century the ideal female body of hourglass
  figure
• intelligible symbolic form that represents a
  domestic and sexualized ideal of femininity
• became a useful body through feminine praxis
• 17th Century concept of the body as a machine

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Two different bodies under the same discourse

• Contradiction of these 2 bodies
• Exposure and productive cultural analysis of
  such contradictory and mystifying relations
  between image and practice are possible only if
  the analysis includes attention to and
  interpretation of the useful the practical
  body (2375).
• Images and presentation of pop culture

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A possible suggestion to the further development
of feminism

• Comparison of two feminist praxises

French Feminist U.S. Feminist
Advantage Provide a powerful understanding on the phallocentric and dualistic culture on gendered body Flourishes in the study of cultural representations of female body
Limit/ disadvantage Fail to offer concrete analysis of the female body as a locus of practical cultural control Fail to consider the relation between this cultural representations of the female body and the practical lives of these bodies
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A suggestion to the further development of
feminism

• Helena Michies The Flesh Made Word
• makes metaphorical connections between female
  eating and female sexuality
• discusses female hunger as unspeakable desires
  for sexuality and power
• A lack eating disorder that has inchoated from
  19th Century as yet is not mentioned.

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Conclusion

• Bordo views bodies as site of struggle where we
  must work on so as to carry on daily practices
  that resist gender domination, docility and
  gender. She suggests that we ought to be more
  aware of the existing contradictions between
  image and practice, rhetoric and reality (2376).