Susan Bordo illuminates the idea of the function of the body as a text for culture. She considers the body a “practical, direct locus of social control” that is “regulated by the norms of cultural life.” Over ideology, our rituals and behaviors shape and train our bodies. Studies reveal that women are spending an increasing amount of time managing their bodies; simultaneously, women have more options in public life. She notes that this bodily obsession “appears diversionary and subverting.” She refers to the female body as a “docile body” because it is controlled by external regulation, subjection, transformation, and “improvement.” It seems as if we see our body as our identity and we learn to never think it is good enough. To continue, Bordo defines the idea of power as “the network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain.” She proposes the need to understand mechanisms that do not repress but rather “shape and proliferate desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance.” Also, she says we need to understand how someone gets caught in self-sustaining oppression.
However, in this chapter, “Reproduction of Femininity,” she focuses on the gender-related and historically localized disorders of hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia nervosa by considering the role our bodies play in symbolizing and reproducing gender. She argues that these disorders may provide an example of potential resistance being “utilized” in maintaining and reproducing power relations. These disorders seem to be constraining, enslaving, and even deadly, yet they become experienced as liberating, transforming, and life giving.
“All have symbolic meaning, all have political meaning under the varying rules governing the historical construction of gender,” says Bordo. The body of a disordered woman “demands” to be read as a cultural statement about gender. During their historical era of prevalence, the disorders are characteristic of what was considered to represent normal femininity. She mentions that hysteria was subtle compared with the literalism of agoraphobia or anorexia. She argues that the literal symbolism of the more modern agoraphobic and anorexic can be linked to the idea that femininity is examined through bodily discourse instead of verbal descriptions. With the feminine ideal returning to dependency and domesticity in he 1950’s and 60’s, agoraphobics literally embodied the idea of being “content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies and home.”
The anorectic embodies the idea of slenderness idealized in the construction of the contemporary woman. In part, the idea of slenderness is historically tied gender. She argues that the contemporary construction of femininity involves roles that “require that women learn to feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self-nurturance and self-feeding as greedy and excessive.” In contrast, they’re also taught to embody the “masculine” traits of professional life—“self-control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery, and so on.” She argues that anorexia is a battle between the male and female side of the self, caused in part by contemporary efforts to combine the historically male and female virtues.
She argues that these disorders are embodied protests that are unconscious and counterproductive political statements. For example, the anorectic body is an expression of what the person is not able to say in words; she is in a culture that “suppresses her female hunger, makes women ashamed of their appetites and needs, and demands that women constantly work on the transformation of their body.” However, these disorders reinforce the order that the sufferer is protesting because the symptoms make the sufferer weak and isolated. Interestingly, the anorectic has a perceived, illusory sense of self-mastery and self-transcendence—characteristic of privileges of the male world—by, paradoxically, using behavior that perfects her body as an object. Really, an anorectic is not in control of their life.
Susan Bordo admits to the benefits of a healthy diet and exercise, but recognizes the need to work to make sure that daily practices serve in resistance to gender domination. Then, she says what may be my favorite thing I have read all semester: “This work requires, I believe, a determinedly skeptical attitude toward the routes of seeming liberation and pleasure offered by our culture. It also demands an awareness of the often contradictory relations between image and practice, between rhetoric and reality.”
I find it undeniable and disturbing how obsessed our culture is with objects, material goods, and appearance. The “advancement” of our culture has produced more “needs” (i.e. we all “need” phones, wardrobes catering to various social situations, and so on). It seems that a lot of people do not fully understand or adopt the idea about not judging a book by its cover. We are conscious and can avoid this superficial behavior, but many people do not take interest in or even think of doing so. I seem to see that those who tend to create superficial labels spend a lot more time creating their own superficial appearance. In a nation so controlled by consumerism and appearance, conscious decisions need to be made in order to avoid—or at least reduce—this tragedy.
While Americans’ are caught up in a “time famine” because they feel as if they can barely fit what they “need” to into their day, mindfulness and volition are, I am convinced, necessary for liberation, for peace. This idea is not only applicable to the superficiality epidemic, but many other constructs or behaviors that are hindering our social, mental, and even biological health.
So, we create culture and culture creates us. This fact is vital to recognize so that we do not merely “go with the flow” of culture. The visual texts we see in culture have power. I am not sure how many people have a sense of harmony in their life by abusing their bodies in the way it seems modern culture is demanding (I would say none): It tells us to look like the airbrushed models in magazines—knowing that they are airbrushed does NOT make us discard the visual image. It creates cognitive dissonance. It gives us visual images that fuel a nation that largely shapes its recreation around abuse of alcohol and drugs, yet it also offers us food at every street corner in large portions that most of us are desensitized to and this, in part, contributes to the obesity epidemic. There are many conflicting forces and this can lead to extreme behaviors that are unhealthy. For example, I should be thin and beautiful and look like this celebrity, but there is food everywhere and our nation is largely obese; therefore, I must be very careful not to overindulge. In some cases, the self-monitoring derived from this cognitive dissonance is part of the reason women and men develop eating disorders. Images and our interpretations of them play a powerful role in guiding pathological behaviors.
Bordo discusses how several disorders--particularly, historically "feminine" disorders--are constraining, enslaving, and even deadly, yet they become experienced as liberating, transforming, and life-giving. Perhaps we should ask ourselves how we can participate in habits and behaviors that are healthy, liberating, transforming, and life-giving in and of themselves:
“This work requires, I believe, a determinedly skeptical attitude toward the routes of seeming liberation and pleasure offered by our culture. It also demands an awareness of the often contradictory relations between image and practice, between rhetoric and reality.”
Until next time...CELEBRATE. Loving God, Loving Other.
