Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (4 page)

Wollstonecraft had provided a classic statement of this theme. As a privileged woman, she focuses on the social construction of femininity as delicacy and domesticity, and it is as clear an example of the production of a socially trained, "docile body" as Foucault ever articulated:

To preserve personal beauty, woman's glory! the limbs and faculties are cramped with worse than Chinese bands, and the sedentary life which they are condemned to live, whilst boys frolic in the open air, weakens the muscles and relaxes the nerves. As for Rousseau's remarks, which have since been echoed by several writers, that they have naturally, that is since birth, independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking—they are so puerile as not to merit a serious refutation. That a girl, condemned to sit for hours together listening to the idle chat of weak nurses, or to attend to her mother's toilet, will endeavor to join the conversation, is, indeed, very natural; and that she will imitate her mother and aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is undoubtedly a most natural consequence Nor can it be expected that a woman will resolutely endeavor to strengthen her constitution and abstain from enervating indulgences, if artificial notions of beauty, and false descriptions of sensibility, have been early entangled with her motives of action . . . Genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies, and glory in their subjection, . women are everywhere in this deplorable state. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
17

A more activist generation urged escape from the prison, and, long before poststructuralist thought declared the body a political site, recognized that the most mundane, "trivial" aspects of women's bodily existence were in fact significant elements in the social construction of an oppressive feminine norm. In 1914, the first Feminist Mass Meeting in America—whose subject was "Breaking into the Human Race"—poignantly listed, among the various social and political rights demanded, ''The right to ignore fashion."
18
Here, already, the material "micropractices" of everyday life which would be extended by later feminists to include not only what one wears but who cooks and cleans (the classic "Politics of Housework" by Pat Mainardi),
19
and even, more recently, what one eats or does not eat—have been brought out of the realm of the purely personal and into the domain of the political. Here, for example, is

a trenchant 1971 analysis, presented by way of a set of "consciousnessraising" exercises for men, of how female subjectivity is trained and subordinated by the everyday bodily requirements and vulnerabilities of "femininity":

Sit down in a straight chair. Cross your legs at the ankles and keep your knees pressed together. Try to do this while you're having a conversation with someone, but pay attention at all times to keeping your knees pressed tightly together.

Run a short distance, keeping your knees together. You'll find you have to take short, high steps if you run this way. Women have been taught it is unfeminine to run like a man with long, free strides. See how far you get running this way for 30 seconds.

Walk down a city street. Pay a lot of attention to your clothing: make sure your pants are zipped, shirt tucked in, buttons done. Look straight ahead. Every time a man walks past you, avert your eyes and make your face expressionless. Most women learn to go through this act each time we leave our houses. It's a way to avoid at least some of the encounters we've all had with strange men who decided we looked available.
20

Until I taught a course in the history of feminism several years ago, I had forgotten that the very first public act of secondwave feminist protest was the "No More Miss America" demonstration in August of 1968. The critique presented at that demonstration was far from the theoretically crude, essentializing program that caricatures of that era's feminism would suggest. Rather, the position paper handed out at the demonstration outlined a complex, nonreductionist analysis of the intersection of sexism, conformism, competition, ageism, racism, militarism, and consumer culture as they are constellated and crystallized in the pageant.
21
The "No More Miss America" demonstration was the event that earned "women's libbers'' the reputation for being "braburners," an epithet many feminists have been trying to shed ever since. In fact, no bras
were
burned at the demonstration, although there was a huge "Freedom Trash Can" into which were thrown bras, along with girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, copies of the
Ladies' Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle,
etc. The media, sensationalizing the event, and also no doubt influenced by the paradigm of draftcard burning as the act of political resistance par excellence, misreported or invented the burning of the bras. It stuck like crazy glue to the popular

imagination; indeed, many of my students today still refer to feminists as "braburners." But whether or not bras were burned, the uneasy public with whom the image stuck surely got it right in recognizing the deep political meaning of women's refusal to "discipline" our breasts, culturally required to be so exclusively "for" the other— whether as instrument and symbol of nurturing love, or as erotic fetish.

And "whither the bra in the 90's?" Amy Collins, writing in 1991 for
Lear's
magazine, poses this question. She answers herself:

Women are again playing up their bust lines with a little artifice. To give the breasts the solid, rounded shape that is currently desirable, La Perla is offering a Lycra bra with pre formed, pressedcotton cups. To provide a deeper cleavage, a number of lingerie companies are selling sidepanel bras that gently nudge the breasts together. Perhaps exercising has made the idea of altering body contours acceptable once more. In any case, if anatomy is destiny, women are discovering new ways to reshape both.
22

Indeed. In 1992, with the dangers of silicone implants on public trial, the media emphasis was on the irresponsibility of Dow, and the personal sufferings of women who became ill from their implants. To my mind, however, the most depressing aspect of the disclosures was the
cultural
spectacle: the large numbers of women who are having implants purely to enlarge or reshape their breasts and who consider any health risk worth the resulting boon to their selfesteem and "market value." These women take the risk, not because they have been passively taken in by media norms of the beautiful breast (almost always siliconeenhanced), but because they have correctly discerned that these norms shape the perceptions and desires of potential lovers and employers. They are neither dupes nor critics of sexist culture; rather, their overriding concern is their right to be desired, loved, and successful on its terms. Proposals to ban or even to regulate silicone breast implants are thus often viewed as totalitarian interference with selfdetermination, freedom, and choice. Many who argue in this way consider themselves feminists, and many feminist scholars today theorize explicitly
as
feminists "on their behalf." A recent article in the feminist philosophy journal
Hypatia,
for example, defends cosmetic surgery as being
"first and foremost
.
.
. about taking one's life into one's own hands."
23

I examine this contemporary construction later in this volume. For now, I would only highlight how very different it is from the dominant feminist discourse on the body in the late sixties and seventies.
That
imagination of the female body was of a
socially
shaped and historically "colonized" territory, not a site of individual self determination. As Andrea Dworkin described it:

Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her motility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body.
They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom.
And of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

In our culture, not one part of a woman's body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement From head to toe, every feature of a woman's face, every section of her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This alteration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to the economy, the major substance of malefemale differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking, painting and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of makeup and costuming caricature the women they would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.
24

Here, feminism inverted and converted the old metaphor of the Body Politic, found in Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and many others, to a new metaphor: the politics of the body. In the old metaphor of the Body Politic, the state or society was imagined as a human body, with different organs and parts symbolizing different functions, needs, social constituents, forces, and so forth—the head or soul for the sovereign, the blood for the will of the people, or the nerves for the system of rewards and punishments. Now, feminism imagined the human body as
itself
a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control—from footbinding and corseting to rape and battering to compulsory heterosexuality, forced sterilization, unwanted pregnancy,

and (in the case of the African American slave woman) explicit commodification:
25

[H]er head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina. Her back and muscle were pressed into field labor where she was forced to work with men and work like men. Her hands were demanded to nurse and nurture the white man and his family as domestic servant whether she was technically enslaved or legally free. Her vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital investment—the capital investment being the sex act and the resulting child the accumulated surplus, worth money on the slave market.
26

One might rightly object that the body's literal bondage in slavery, described above by Barbara Omolade, is not to be compared to the metaphorical bondage of privileged nineteenthcentury women to the corset, much less to the twentiethcentury "tyranny of slenderness." No feminist writers considered them equivalent. But at the heart of the developing feminist model, for many writers,
was
the extension of the concept of enslavement to include the voluntary behaviors of privileged women. Problematic as this extension has come to seem, I think it is crucial to recognize that a staple of the prevailing sexist ideology against which the feminist model protested was the notion that in matters of beauty and femininity, it is women alone who are responsible for their sufferings from the whims and bodily tyrannies of fashion. According to that ideology, men's desires bear no responsibility, nor does the culture that subordinates women's desires to those of men, sexualizes and

commodifies women's bodies, and offers them little other opportunity for social or personal power. Rather, it is in Woman's essential feminine nature to be (delightfully if incomprehensibly) drawn to such trivialities and to be willing to endure whatever physical inconvenience is entailed. In such matters, whether having her feet broken and shaped into fourinch "lotuses," or her waist straitlaced to fourteen inches, or her breasts surgically stuffed with plastic, she is her "own worst enemy." Set in cultural relief against this thesis, the feminist "antithesis''the insistence that women are the
done to,
not the
doers,
here; that
men
and
their
desires bear the responsibility; and that female obedience to the dictates of fashion is better conceptualized as bondage than choice—was a

crucial historical moment in the developing articulation of a new understanding of the sexual politics of the body.

The limitations of simple antithesis, however, ultimately disclosed themselves. Subsuming patriarchal institutions and practices under an oppressor/oppressed model which theorizes men as possessing and wielding power over women—who are viewed correspondingly as themselves utterly powerless—proved inadequate to the social and historical complexities of the situations of men and women, and many different foci of criticism emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. A good many critics emphasized the necessity of constructing theory that would do better justice to racial, economic, and class differences among women. Others protested against what they viewed as a depiction of women as passive, without agency, a depiction that overlooks both women's collusions with patriarchal culture and their frequent efforts at resistance. Correlatively, the "old" feminist discourse has been charged with portraying men as the enemy and "essentializing" them as sexual brutes and cultural dominators. From more deconstructionist quarters, it has been criticized for its lack of textual sophistication—that is, its insensitivity to the multiplicity of meanings that can be read in every cultural act and practice. Within this type of critique, one may find arguments for the ''creative" or "subversive" nature of practices and cultural forms, such as makeup, high heels, or cosmetic surgery, which the "old" feminist discourse would view as
simply
oppressive to women. In general, the "old" discourse is seen as having constructed an insufficiently textured, undiscerningly dualistic, overly pessimistic (if not paranoid) view of the politics of the body.