Friday, 3 March 2017

Susan Bordo, The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity

Once again, all direct quotes.

Bourdieu and Foucault argue the body is a practical, direct locus of social control.  Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, … culture is 'made body', … converted into automatic, habitual activity.  Foucault reminds of the primacy of practice over belief.  Not via ideology, but through the organisation and regulation of the time, space and movements of our daily lives.  For women… are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time.  …In fashion - female bodies 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 and normalisation of the female body has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control.  … Contemporary preoccupation with appearance affects women far more than men.

Foucault says we must first abandon the idea of power as something possessed by one group and levelled against another … but think of the network of practices, institutions and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain.

We need an analytics … to describe a power whose central mechanisms are … constitutive, a power bent on generating forces, making them grow and ordering them.  Particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power from below. Of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our conceptions or normalcy and deviance.

We need a discourse… that insists on … objective analysis of power relations, which will allow us to confront the mechanisms by which the subject becomes enmeshed …. with forces that sustain her own oppression.  … Our culture still widely advertises domestic conceptions of femininity, ideological moorings that cast woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer.  The rules for this construction of femininity require that women learn to feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self-nurturance as greedy and excessive.  [This type of femininity] develops a totally other-oriented emotional economy. … That female hunger - for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification - be contained and the public space that women b allowed to take up, be circumscribed.

Young women today .. are taught traditionally 'feminine' virtues, … that the professional arena is open to them, they must also learn to embody the 'masculine' language and values of that arena.  - self conrol, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery etc.  Female bodies now take on their slender spare shape, and the currently fashionable men's wear look. ... The new Macho Woman - the young hero falls in love with the heroine - "she has all the best things I like in girls, and all the best things I like in guys - she's tough and cool, but warm and alluring. … The result is a parody.  In our image bedazzled culture, we find it increasingly difficult to discriminate between parodies and possibilities for the self.

In the late 60s/70s the objectification of the female body was a serious political issue.  All the cultural paraphernalia of femininity, of learning to please visually and sexually, … were seen as crucial in maintaining gender domination.  (By whom?) … Feminist 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 it's not about what we look like, it's about what we do!).

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