Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (35 page)

If so, it is, not the result of conspiracy, but a "strategy," as Foucault would say, "without strategists," operating through numerous noncentralized processes: through the pleasure of joining an intellectual community and the social and material rewards of membership; through the excitement of engagement in culturally powerful and dominant theoretical enterprises; through our own exhaustion at maintaining an agnostic stance in the institutions where we work; through intellectual boredom with stale talk about male dominance and female subordination; through our postmodern inclination to embrace the new and the novel; through the genuine insights that new theoretical perspectives offer; through our feminist commitment to the representation of difference; even (most ironically) through our "female" desire to heal wounds made by exclusion and alienation.

More coercively, the demands of "professionalism" and its exacting, "neutral" standards of rigor and scholarship may require us to abandon our "female" ways of knowing and doing. The call to

professionalism is especially powerful—almost irresistible—for an academic. In the classical traditions of our culture, "the man of reason" provided the model of such "neutrality." That neutrality feminists have exposed as an illusion and a mystification of its masculinist biases. Today, however, the category of the "professional" functions in much the same way; it may be the distinctively twentiethcentury refurbishing of the "view from nowhere."

It is striking—and chilling—to learn how many of the issues confronting professional women today were constructed in virtually the same terms in debates during the 1920s and 1930s, when the social results of the first feminist wave were being realized. Then as now, there was a strong backlash, particularly among professional women, against feminist talk about gender difference. "We're interested in people now—not men and women," declared a Greenwich Village female literary group, proclaiming itself—in 1919!—as "postfeminist."
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The "New Woman" of the twenties, like her counterpart today, was glamorized for her diversity, equal to that of men: "The essential fact about the New Women is that they differ among themselves, as men do, in work and play, in virtue, in aspiration and in rewards achieved. They are women, not woman," wrote Leta Hollingworth.
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''The broad unisexual world of activity lies before every human being," declared Miriam Ford.
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Professional women in particular shunned and scorned the earlier generation of activist women, who had made themselves a "foreign, irritating body" to prevailing institutions and who attempted to speak for an alternative set of emphatic, relational "female" values.
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Instead, women were urged to adopt the rationalist, objectivist standards they found in place in the professions they entered, to aspire to "excellence" and "forgetfulness of self" rather than gender consciousness, to develop a "community of interest between themselves and professional men [rather than] between themselves and nonprofessional women."
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Professional women saw in the "neutral" standards of objectivity and excellence the means of being accepted as humans, not women. In any case, as Nancy Cott points out, to have mounted a strategy
against
those standards (to expose them as myths, to offer other visions) would have surely "marked them as outsiders."
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In a culture that is
in fact
constructed by gender duality, however, one cannot be simply "human." This is no more possible than it is

possible that we can "just be people" in a racist culture. (It is striking, too, that one hears this complaint from whites—"why can't we just be people; why does it always have to be 'black' this and 'white' that . . ."only when
black
consciousness asserts itself.) Our language, intellectual history, and social forms are gendered; there is no escape from this fact and from its consequences on our lives. Some of those consequences may be unintended, may even be fiercely resisted; our deepest desire may be to transcend gender dualities, to have our behavior judged on its merits, not categorized as male or female. But, like it or not, in our present culture our activities
are
coded as male or female and will function as such under the prevailing system of genderpower relations. The adoption of the "professional" standards of academia is no more an activity devoid of gender politics than the current fashion in women's tailored suits and largeshouldered jackets is devoid of gender meaning. One cannot be genderneutral in this culture.

One might think that poststructuralism, which has historicized and criticized the liberal notion of the abstract "human," would be an ally here. This is partially so. But the poststructuralist critique of liberal humanism is mitigated by its tendency, discussed earlier, to insist on the "correct" destabilization of such general categories of social identity as race,
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class, and gender. Practically speaking that is, in the context of the institutions we are trying to transform the most powerful strategies against liberal humanism have been those that demystify the "human" (and its claims to a "neutral" perspective)
through
general categories of social identity, which give content and force to the notions of social interest, historical location, and cultural perspective. Now, we are being advised that the strongest analyses along such lines—for

example, classic feminist explorations of the consequences of femaledominated infant care or of the "male'' biases of our disciplines and professionsare to be rejected as resources for understanding history and culture. Most of our institutions have barely begun to absorb the message of modernist social criticism; surely it is too soon to let them off the hook via postmodern heterogeneity and instability. This is not to say that the struggle for institutional transformation will be served by univocal, fixed conceptions of social identity and location. Rather, we need to reserve
practical
spaces both for generalist critique (suitable when gross points need to be made) and for attention

to complexity and nuance. We need to be pragmatic, not theoretically pure, if we are to struggle effectively against the inclination of institutions to preserve and defend themselves against deep change.

Of course, it is impossible to predict the cultural meanings one's gestures will take on and the larger formations in which one will find one's activities participating. Nonetheless, history does offer some cautions. The 1920s and 1930s saw a fragmentation and dissipation of feminist consciousness and feminist activism, as women struggled with what Nancy Cott calls "the dilemma of twentieth century feminism": the tension between the preservation of gender consciousness and identity (as a source of political unity and alternative vision) and the destruction of "gender prescriptions" which limit human choice and possibility.
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The "postfeminist'' consciousness of the twenties and thirties, in pursuit of an ideal world undermined by gender dualities, cut itself adrift from the moorings of gender identity. This was culturally and historically understandable. But we thus, I believe, cut ourselves off from the source of feminism's transformative possibilities—possibilities that then had to be revived and imagined again four decades later. The deconstruction of gender analytics, I fear, may be participating in a similar cultural moment of feminist fragmentation, coming around again.

In a culture in which organ transplants, lifeextension machinery, microsurgery, and artificial organs have entered everyday medicine, we seem on the verge of practical realization of the seventeenthcentury imagination of body as machine. But if we have technically and technologically realized that conception, it can also be argued that metaphysically we have deconstructed it. In the early modern era, machine imagery helped to articulate a totally determined human body whose basic functionings the human being was helpless to alter. The thendominant metaphors for this body clocks, watches, collections of springs—imagined a system that is set, wound up, whether by nature or by God the watchmaker, ticking away in predictable, orderly manner, regulated by laws over which the human being has no control.

Understanding the system, we can help it to perform efficiently, and we can intervene when it malfunctions. But we cannot radically alter its configuration.

Pursuing this modern, determinist fantasy to its limits, fed by the currents of consumer capitalism, modern ideologies of the self, and their crystallization in the dominance of United States mass culture, Western science and technology have now arrived, paradoxically but predictably (for it was an element, though submerged and illicit, in the mechanist conception all along), at a new, postmodern imagination of human freedom from bodily determination. Gradually and surely, a technology that was first aimed at the replacement of malfunctioning parts has generated an industry and an ideology fueled by fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and, indeed, the very materiality of the body.

In place of that materiality, we now have what I will call cultural plastic. In place of God the watchmaker, we now have ourselves, the master sculptors of that plastic. This disdain for material limits and the concomitant intoxication with freedom, change, and self determination are enacted not only on the level of the contemporary technology of the body but in a wide range of contexts, including much of contemporary discourse on the body, both popular and academic. In this essay, looking at a variety of these discursive contexts, I attempt to describe key elements of this paradigm of plasticity and expose some of its effacements—the material and social realities it denies or renders invisible.

"Create a masterpiece, sculpt your body into a work of art," urges
Fit
magazine. "You visualize what you want to look like, and then you create that form." ''The challenge presents itself: to rearrange things."
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The precision technology of bodysculpting, once the secret of the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Rachel McLishes of the professional bodybuilding world, has now become available to anyone who can afford the price of membership in a gym (Figure 39). "I now look at bodies," says John Travolta, after training for the movie
Staying Alive,
"almost like pieces of clay that can be molded."
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On the medical front, plastic surgery, whose repeated and purely cosmetic employment has been legitimated by Michael Jackson, Cher, and others, has become a fabulously expanding industry, extending its domain from nose jobs, face lifts, tummy tucks, and breast augmentations to collagenplumped lips and liposuction shaped ankles, calves, and buttocks (Figure 40). In 1989, 681,000 procedures were done, up 80 percent over 1981; over half of these were performed on patients between the ages of eighteen and thirtyfive.
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The trendy
Details
magazine describes "surgical stretching, tucking and sucking" as "another fabulous [fashion] accessory" and invites readers to share their cosmeticsurgery experiences in their monthly column "Knifestyles of the Rich and Famous." In that column, the transportation of fat from one part of the body to another is described as breezily as changing hats might be:

Dr. Brown is an artist. He doesn't just pull and tuck and forget about you He did liposuction on my neck, did the nose job and tight

ened up my forehead to give it a better line. Then he took some fat from the side of my waist and injected it into my hands. It goes in as a lump, and then he smooths it out with his hands to where it looks good. I'll tell you something, the nose and neck made a big change, but nothing in comparison to how fabulous my hands look. The fat just smoothed out all the lines, the veins don't stick up anymore, the skin actually looks soft and great. [But] you have to be careful not to bang your hands.
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Popular culture does not apply any brakes to these fantasies of rearrangement and selftransformation. Rather, we are constantly told that we can "choose" our own bodies (Figures 41 and 42). "The proper diet, the right amount of exercise and you can have, pretty much, any body you desire," claims Evian. Of course, the rhetoric of choice and selfdetermination and the breezy analogies comparing cosmetic surgery to fashion accessorizing are deeply mystifying. They efface, not only the inequalities of privilege, money, and time that prohibit most people from indulging in these practices, but the

desperation that characterizes the lives of those who do. "I will do anything,
anything,
to make myself look and feel better," says Tina Lizardi (whose "Knifestyles" experience I quoted from above). Medical science has now designated a new category of "polysurgical addicts" (or, in more casual references, ''scalpel slaves") who return for operation after operation, in perpetual quest of the elusive yet ruthlessly normalizing goal, the "perfect" body.
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The dark underside of the practices of body transformation and rearrangement

reveals botched and sometimes fatal operations, exercise addictions, eating disorders. And of course, despite the claims of the Evian ad, one cannot have
any
body that one wants—for not every body will
do.
The very advertisements whose copy speaks of choice and self—determination visually legislate the effacement of individual and cultural difference and circumscribe our choices (Figure 43).

That we are surrounded by homogenizing and normalizing imagesimages whose content is far from arbitrary, but is instead suffused with the dominance of gendered, racial, class, and other cultural iconography—seems so obvious as to be almost embarrassing to be arguing here. Yet contemporary understandings of the behaviors I have been describing not only construct the situation very differently but do so in terms that preempt precisely such a critique of cultural imagery. Moreover, they reproduce, on the level of discourse and interpretation, the same conditions that postmodern bodies enact on the level of cultural practice: a construction of life as plastic possibility and weightless choice, undetermined by