Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (5 page)

My own perspective on these criticisms will emerge in detail throughout this book. In this introduction, however, I want to provide some very general remarks, focusing in particular on the strengths and weaknesses of the old feminist discourse in the context of our increasingly imagedominated culture. I agree with the textual critique that the "old" discourse did not deal adequately with the multiplicity or contextuality of meaning. Rather, it laid down an initial lexicon, which others have elaborated and complicated. Susan Brownmiller's excellent book
Femininity,
for example,

is extremely valuable in its examination of the body as a text saturated with gendered symbols and meanings.
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The lexicon through which she interprets this text, however—for example, long hair, skirts, and high heels as symbolic of femininity—often cries out for further elaboration, both historical and contextual. With the exception of those eras in which certain styles were rigorously marked as masculine and forbidden to women (for example, trousers in the nineteenth century), the demonstration of "femininity" has involved the arrangement of items within a
system
that gives them their meaning. Context is everything, especially in our postmodern culture of pastiche and rearrangement. So, for example, a crew cut may be seen as "feminine" if the model's mouth is vividly colored and a lacy blouse is worn, but "masculine" when worn with no makeup, but with overalls and a confident body posture; men's jackets are hardly "masculine'' when they overwhelm the body of an extremely petite sixteenyearold, but they
do
carry connotations of maleness when they are tailored, accompanied by briefcase and a nononsense demeanor. Long hair on men has functioned as a symbol of resistance against establishment authority (as among hippies, rock stars, and bikers), and it also may function to
highlight
a man's "masculinity": long, straight ponytails are frequently worn by extremely muscular men. As to muscles themselves, are they invariably male, as Brownmiller says? Certainly they have been dominantly coded in this way, but (as I argue in "Reading the Slender Body"), they have also been race and classcoded, and today they frequently symbolize qualities of character rather than class, race, or gender status.

Given the differences that race, class, gender, ethnicity, and so forth make to the determination of meaning, "reading" bodies becomes an extremely complex business. However, I do not agree with those who claim that images must always be read for "difference." Readers will indeed experience multiple responses to the same image or icon; a lesbian's "reading" of Madonna, for example, may be very different from that of a heterosexual "wanna be." But to focus
only
on multiple interpretations is to miss important effects of the everyday deployment of mass cultural representations of masculinity, femininity, beauty, and success.

First, the representations
homogenize.
In our culture, this means that they will smooth out all racial, ethnic, and sexual "differences"

that disturb AngloSaxon, heterosexual expectations and identifications. Certainly, highfashion images may contain touches of exotica: collagenplumped lips or corn rows on white models, Barbra Streisand noses, "butch" styles of dress. Consumer capitalism depends on the continual production of novelty, of fresh images to stimulate desire, and it frequently drops into marginalized neighborhoods in order to find them. But such elements will either be explicitly
framed
as exotica or, within the overall system of meaning, they will not be permitted to overwhelm the representation and establish a truly alternative or "subversive" model of beauty or success. (White models may collagen their lips, but black models are usually lightskinned and Anglofeatured.) A definite (albeit not always fixed or determinate) system of boundaries sets limits on the validation of "difference."

Second, these homogenized images
normalize—
that is, they function as models against which the self continually measures, judges, "disciplines," and "corrects" itself. Cosmetic surgery is now a $1.75billionayear industry in the United States, with almost 1.5 million people a year undergoing surgery of some kind, from facelifts to calf implants. These operations have become more and more affordable to the middle class (the average cost of a nose job is $2,500), and almost all can be done on an outpatient basis—some during lunch hour. Lest it be imagined that most of these surgeries are to correct disfiguring accidents or birth defects, it should be noted that liposuction is the most frequently requested operation (average cost $1,500), with breast enlargement (average cost $2,000) a close second. Are diverse ethnic and racial styles of beauty asserting their "differences" through such surgery? Far from it. Does anyone in this culture have his or her nose reshaped to look more "African" or ''Jewish"? Cher is typical here; her various surgeries have gradually replaced a strong, decidedly (if indeterminately) "ethnic" look with a much more

symmetrical, delicate, Anglo Saxon version of beauty. She also looks much younger at fortysix than she did at forty, as do most actresses of her generation, for whom facelifts are virtually routine. These actresses, whose images surround us on television and in videos and films, are changing cultural expectations of what women "should" look like at fortyfive and fifty. This is touted in the popular culture as a liberating development for older women; in the nineties, it is declared, fifty is

still sexy. But in fact Cher, Jane Fonda, and others have not made the aging female body sexually more acceptable. They have established a new norm—achievable only through continual cosmetic surgery—in which the surface of the female body ceases to age physically as the body grows chronologically older.

Even within the context of homogenizing imagery, deciphering meaning is complicated. Female slenderness, for example, has a wide range of sometimes contradictory meanings in contemporary representations, the imagery of the slender body suggesting powerlessness and contraction of female social space in one context, autonomy and freedom in the next. It is impossible adequately to understand women's problems with food and body image unless these significations are unpacked, and this requires examining slenderness in multiple contexts. Although only one of the essays in this book claims to "read" the slender body, in fact all of the essays that discuss eating disorders do so. These are: "Hunger as Ideology," "Anorexia Nervosa,'' "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity," "Reading the Slender Body," and "Whose Body Is This?"

To the extent that feminist discourse
has
employed a framework of oppressors and oppressed, villains and victims (and this, of course, is not equally true of all writers), it requires reconstruction if it is to be able adequately to theorize the pathways of modern power. In this reconstruction, the work of Michel Foucault has proved useful to much feminist thought, including my own work. Since several essays in this volume make use of Foucauldian categories and perspectives, it may be useful for me to provide an overview, in connection with the themes under discussion in this introduction. For Foucault, modern (as opposed to sovereign) power is nonauthoritarian, nonconspiratorial, and indeed nonorchestrated; yet it nonetheless produces and normalizes bodies to serve prevailing relations of dominance and subordination. Understanding this new sort of power requires, according to Foucault, two conceptual changes. First, we must cease to imagine "power" as the
possession
of individuals or groups—as something people "have"—and instead see it as a dynamic or network of noncentralized forces. Second, we must recognize that these forces are
not
random or haphazard, but configure to assume particular historical forms, within which certain groups and ideologies
do
have dominance.

Dominance here, however, is sustained not by decree or design

"from above" (as sovereign power is exercised) but through multiple "processes, of different origin and scattered location," regulating the most intimate and minute elements of the construction of space, time, desire, embodiment.
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Here is one juncture where Foucauldian insights prove particularly useful to social and historical analysis of "femininity" and "masculinity." Where power works "from below," prevailing forms of selfhood and subjectivity (gender among them) are maintained, not chiefly through physical restraint and coercion (although social relations may certainly contain such elements), but through individual selfsurveillance and selfcorrection to norms. Thus, as Foucault writes, "there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself."
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Now, not all female submission is best understood in terms of such a model; women are frequently physically and emotionally terrorized and financially trapped in violent relationships and degrading jobs. But when it comes to the politics of appearance, such ideas are apt and illuminating.
30
In my own work, they have been extremely helpful both to my analysis of the contemporary disciplines of diet and exercise and to my understanding of eating disorders as arising out of and reproducing normative feminine practices of our culture, practices which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands while at the same time being
experienced
in terms of power and control. Within a Foucauldian framework, power and pleasure do not cancel each other. Thus, the heady experience of feeling powerful or "in control," far from being a necessarily accurate reflection of one's social position, is always suspect as itself the product of power relations whose shape may be very different.

Foucault also emphasized, in later developments of his ideas, that power relations are never seamless but are always spawning new forms of culture and subjectivity, new opportunities for transformation. Where there is power, he came to see, there is also resistance.
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Dominant forms and institutions are continually being penetrated and reconstructed by values, styles, and knowledges that have been developing and gathering strength, energy, and

distinctiveness "at the margins." (This is why, I would argue, affirmative action should not be understood as only about redressing historical exclusions in the interests of justice to those groups excluded, but as essential to the diversification and reinvigoration of the dominant culture.) Such transformations do not occur in one fell swoop; they emerge only gradually, through local and often minute shifts in power. They may also be served, paradoxically, through conformity to prevailing norms. So, for example, the woman who goes into a rigorous weighttraining program in order to achieve the currently stylish look may discover that her new muscles give her the selfconfidence that enables her to assert herself more forcefully at work. Modern powerrelations are thus unstable; resistance is perpetual and hegemony precarious.

Within a Foucauldian/feminist framework, it is indeed senseless to view men as the enemy: to do so would be to ignore, not only power differences in the racial, class, and sexual situations of men, but the fact that most men, equally with women, find themselves embedded and implicated in institutions and practices that they as individuals did not create and do not control—and that they frequently feel tyrannized by. (The best work being done out of the men's movement today explores this enmeshment;
32
unfortunately, it has frequently been eclipsed by bestselling and sensationalistic "reclamations" of masculinity.) Moreover, such a framework forces us to recognize the degree to which women collude in sustaining sexism and sexist stereotypes. For example, the continued popularity of the soapopera villainess, mentioned earlier, is insured by the thousands of female viewers who delight both in the power and agency such characters manifest
and
in their inevitable neutralization (either through defeat or through personality conversion) by the forces of more conventional female behavior.

Many, if not most, women also are willing (often, enthusiastic) participants in cultural practices that objectify and sexualize us. Here, in its failure to admit female responsibility, I do think that much feminist analysis has been, and continues to be, inadequate though understandably so, given the swiftness with which the acknowledgment that women
participate
in reproducing sexist culture gets converted to the ideas that we "are our own worst enemies," "do it to ourselves," "ask for it." In this climate of sedimented sexist ideology ready to become activated on the shallowest pretext, certain

important discussions may become
verboten
because so strewn with dangerous mines threatening to go off. For example, I have always felt extremely torn, discussing
The Accused
in class, about how to deal with Jodie Foster's erotic dance in the bar. On the one hand, I think it is extremely important that we understand how beauty and sexuality can function as a medium of power and control for the otherwise powerless, and the scene provides an opportunity to discuss this. On the other hand, I
know
that as soon as we begin to discuss the dance in such terms, many students will immediately see this as corroborating that the woman was indeed a sexual temptress who led these men to rape. In the face of such crude but culturally powerful ideas, the relevant distinctions which I would then make stand a good chance of being utterly lost on my students.

The valuable reconceptualization of power suggested by Foucault should not be interpreted as entailing the view that all players are equal, or that positions of dominance and subordination are not sustained within networks of power. Men are not the enemy, but they often may have a higher stake in maintaining institutions within which they have historically occupied positions of dominance over women. That is why they have often
felt
like "the enemy" to women struggling to change those institutions. (Such a dual recognition seems essential, in particular, to theorizing the situation of men who have been historically subordinated on the basis of their race, class, or sexuality.) Moreover, the fact that cultural resistance is continual does not mean it is on an equal footing with forms that are culturally entrenched. It is simply absurd to suggest, as Dianne Johnson does in reviewing Naomi Wolf's
The Beauty Myth,
that the development of a "Happy to Be Me" Barbie style doll of nonanorexic proportions signifies that feminist concerns over the cultural tyranny of slenderness are "out of date."
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In "'Material Girl'" I strongly argue, against proponents of the absolute heterogeneity of culture, that in contemporary Western constructions of beauty there
are
dominant, strongly "normalizing'' (racial and gendered) forms to contend with. To struggle effectively against the coerciveness of those forms it is first necessary to recognize that they
have
dominance, and not to efface such recognition