Susan Bordo - Unbearable Weight, Part 2, Ch. 2,

"The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity"

Reconstructing Feminist Discourse on the Body

The body is a medium of culture and a metaphor for culture. Anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that the body "is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body" (pg. 165). In addition, Bourdieu, Foucault and others argue that the body is also a "a practical, direct locus of social control" (pg.165). Through our everyday routines, culture is transformed into automatic, habitual activity. The body is regulated by cultural norms. "Through the organization and regulation of the time, space, and movement of our daily lives, our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity" (pp. 165-166).

Bordo argues that women are spending more and more time on the management and discipline of our bodies which makes us less socially oriented and more focused on self-modification. She points that, historically, the discipline and normalization of the female body should be recognized as an extremely durable and flexible form of social control. In today's world, she argues that such a preoccupation with appearance may be a form of backlash against changing gender configurations and power relations. Therefore, we need an effective political discourse about the female body. Bordo sees three of Foucault's concepts as useful to the development of such a discourse. 1) We should not think of power as something one group has and uses against another. Rather, we should examine the "network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain" (pg. 167). 2) we need a method of analysis that is capable of describing a power whose mechanisms are not repressive, but constitutive. Constitutive mechanisms shape and generate our desire, creating our sense of normalcy and deviance. 3) We need a discourse that can account for the subversion of potential rebellion and explain how the oppressed can end up colluding with the mechanisms of her own repression.

In this chapter, Bordo analyzes a group of disorders that she argues are gender-related and historically localized: hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia nervosa. She sees these disorders as providing a paradigm of how "potential resistance is not merely undercut but utilized in the maintenance and reproduction of existing power relations" (pg. 168).

The Body as a Text of Femininity

These disorders vary historically. Hysteria in the second half of the 19th c., agoraphobia, anorexia and bulimia in the second half of the 20th c. Bordo argues that the symptoms of these disorders are textuality. They have symbolic and political meaning within the rules governing gender during that historical period. The body of the sufferer is "deeply inscribed with an ideological construction of femininity emblematic of the period in question" (pg. 168). For ex., doctors and feminist critics have noted that the symptoms of 19th c. hysteria involved the exaggeration of stereotypical feminine traits. Agoraphobia and anorexia of the 20th c. involve extreme literalism of the feminine ideal. Agoraphobia escalated in the 1950s and 1960s when the domesticity and dependency of women was reasserted as the feminine ideal. Agoraphobia is the extreme version of this ideal. The anorexic is the extreme version of the feminine ideal of ultra-slimness as well as the female trait of nurturance of others not oneself. However, Bordo points out that today girls learn traditional "feminine" virtues, but they must also learn "masculine" values, such as self-control, determination, emotional discipline, etc. The anorexic pursues these virtues to the extreme as well. "In the pursuit of slenderness and the denial of appetite the traditional construction of femininity intersects with the new requirement for women to embody the 'masculine' values of the public arena" (pg. 173). This intersection, the androgynous ideal, can be described as a war between the male and female sides of the self, an internal contradiction.

Protest and Retreat in the Same Gesture

In these disorders, the female body can be seen as the surface that exposes the conventional constructions of femininity to their extreme form. One common view in feminist literature is to see these female disorders as embodied protest, although an unconscious and counterproductive protest without an effective language or voice. For ex., the agoraphobic is striking out against the expectations of the housewife which they could not consciously voice a protest against. Unfortunately, the same gesture that protests can also be a retreat. For ex., agoraphobia also increases dependency. Bordo points out that the nature of such protest is counterproductive and self-defeating. "Functionally, the symptoms of these disorders, isolate, weaken, and undermine the sufferers; at the same time they turn the life of the body into an all-absorbing fetish, besides which all other objects of attention pale into unreality. On the symbolic level, too, the protest collapses into its opposite and proclaims utter capitulation of the subject to the contracted female world" (pg. 176)

Collusion, Resistance, and the Body

So the disorders that function as female protest actually reproduce the cultural conditions that create them, as if in collusion. The potential source for rebellion and resistance ends up maintaining the existing order. Bordo argues that, at this point, objective accounts of power relations fail because the symptoms are created by the individual who invests certain meanings in the body. We must examine the production of these meanings in order to understand the mechanisms of domination.

Anorexia, for ex., emerges out of today's conventional feminine practice. Through that practice, the woman pushes beyond moderate dieting and begins to see how it feels to crave and withstand that craving. At this point, a new set of meanings is discovered. Those traditionally considered male: self-mastery, power over others through extreme will and control. These feelings are enticing. She soon discovers that her body is admired, not visually or sexually, but as a symbol of her strength and self-control. She learns the power she has over others through battles over her eating. She begins to despise the feminine parts of her body. Through anorexia, she has found a way into the privileged male world, ironically, by pursuing the female ideal to an extreme. This feeling of power and privilege culturally seen as male is, of course, illusory, because she is still female. "To reshape one's body into a male body is not to put on male power and 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"(pg. 179).

Textuality, Praxis, and the Body

These disorders are "solutions" that develop out of the practice of femininity, but they take this practice to an extreme that leads to its own demise. There is a tension between the psychological meaning of the disorder as a protest and the practical life of the body that is defeated. Bordo argues that this tension may be obscured by too much focus on the symbolic and not enough on praxis. She discusses Foucault's concepts of the 'intelligible body' (cultural conceptions of the body) and the 'useful body' (practical rules and regulations that train and shape the body). They are two sides of the same discourse that mirror and support on another, both are culturally mediated. However, they can also contradict each other. For ex., women who strive to fulfill the female ideal of slenderness through extreme diet and exercise are anything but in control of their lives.

Bordo's final point is that a study of cultural representations alone is not enough. We must examine their relation to the practical lives of bodies and analyze the female body as a locus of practical cultural control. We must be aware of the contradiction between image and practice and "view our bodies as a site of struggle, where we must work to keep our daily practices in the service of resistance to gender domination, not in the service of docility and gender normalization" (pg. 184).

Key Words

- protest and retreat

- body as cultural text

- body as locus of social control

- intelligible vs. useful body