The Body as a Battleground

Susan Bordo, in passage from Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, states that “[t]he body, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, 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” (Bordo 2240). This uses the idea that the body is a sign, and that its meaning is filled with the ideologies of its contemporary setting. She paraphrases Pierre Bourdieu’s and Michel Foucault’s argument that “[t]he body is not only a text of culture,” but “a practical, direct locus of social control” (2240).

This brings up the idea that image of beauty is perpetuated by the privileged side of the binary relationship between Man/Woman. To Bordo, “the discipline and normalization of the female body – perhaps the only gender oppression that exercises itself, although to different degrees and in different forms, across age, race, class, and sexual orientation – has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control” (2241). To Bordo and many other feminist analysts, the beauty myth is a construct of a misogynistic and male dominated society. The man has created an expectation of what the woman should look like, and this has translated into a social aspect of control via beauty.

A person can definitely make this read when seeing certain models in advertisements, although there has been somewhat of a rebellion against a model idea of beauty. The restructuring of the Barbie© to reduce breast size and increase her waist can be seen as a way to remove an impossible standard of beauty among the impressionable minds of younger girls. At the same time companies like Dove have come out with a new campaign that uses full sized, or more “normal” body types to sell a beauty product.

Author Chuck Pahliunuk had a short story in his novel Haunted about a transsexual man who is abused by a room full of women for embodying a male’s view on female beauty. (I do not have the text on hand as I write this, so I am unable to quote from it.) This act could be interpreted as a female’s overt reclamation of their own beauty by attacking the standards imposed on them. It mirrors what Bordo has said about the feminine body with a male mind. Everything from the measurements of certain body parts to the make up styles to body language has all been an effort to appease to the male aspect of society.

The idea of sexism is a very complicated subject. Where is the reclamation of the body by it’s physical and metaphysical owner? This could come down to a reader response and semiotic interpretation of the sign. If the woman abides to the standards of beauty imposed about by the male aspect of the binary, is there any empowerment within that act alone? One can view the realization of the role imposed as a stepping stone to assuming power, or ideally, equality within the binary, although this dialogue will continue for as long as people assume the binary exists.

Bordo, Susan. "Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body." TheNorton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second ed. New York: W.W. Norton and, 2010. 2240- 254. Print.