Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues the body is a powerful symbolic form. Foucault argues the body is a practical site of social control. " Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, … culture is 'made body', … converted into automatic, habitual activity". "Foucault reminds us of the primacy of practice over belief. … The organisation and regulation of … our daily lives, our bodies are trained… with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of self hood, desire, masculinity and femininity. … For women, are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long … time. … Through the pursuit of an elusive ideal of femininity, … females bodies have become docile bodies … focussed on self modification. Through these disciplines, we … memorise … the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough.
"The discipline of the female body … has to be acknowledged as a … durable and flexible strategy of social control. Contemporary preoccupation with appearance … affects women far more … than men."
"Power is a network of practices, institutions and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain. We need an analysis adequate to describe a power whose central mechanisms are … constitutive, a power bent on generating forces. Particularly in the realm of femininity where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, … analysis of power from below, … of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate ... desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our … normalcy and deviance.
"We need a discourse, insisting on the necessity of objective analysis of power relations, will allow us to confront the mechanisms by which the subject becomes enmeshed in collusion with forces that sustain her own oppression.
"Our culture still widely advertises domestic concepts of femininity, ideological moorings that cast woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer. Women nurture and feed others not the self, and construe desires for self nurturance … as greedy and excessive . an other-oriented emotional economy. ...That female hunger - for public power, for independence, … - be contained and the public space that women .. take up be circumscribed.
" Young women today ..are taught … 'feminine' virtues, … that they must also learn to embody the 'masculine' language and values of that arena self control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery… men's wear look etc. The 'male' virtues of control and self mastery.
" The young male hero says ' she's tough and cool, but warm and alluring. … Femininity intersects with the masculine values of the public arena … a double bind. The result is a parody. In this image bedazzled culture, we find it increasingly difficult to discriminate between parodies and possibilities for the self.
The intelligible body … (has) a set of practical rules … a useful body. In the early 1970s the objectification of the female body was a serious political issue. The cultural paraphernalia of femininity, of learning to please through the practice of the body … was seen as crucial to maintaining gender domination. (By whom - men or women). The study of cultural representations of the female body has flourished but divorced from consideration of their relation to the practical lives of bodies, can obscure and mislead. (I think this is not about what we look like but what we do. This is where my work moves representation of women forward).
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