The Body and Reproduction of
Femininity
Susan Bordo
Thesis
• This essay focus on the analysis of one particular arena
•
•
that the interplays of several dynamics is striking and
exemplary.
Disorders like anorexia, hysteria and agoraphobia may
be resistance that undercuts and is utilized as a
reproduction of power relations.
With her central mechanism involving a transformation
of meaning, Bordo intends to exemplify that various
contemporary critical discourses can be joined and
generate an understanding of the unwitting role which
our bodies play in the symbolization and reproduction of
gender.
Reconstructing Feminist Discourse
on the Body
 The concept of “body” – a medium of
culture
– The body is more than a text of culture.
According to Bourdieu and Foucault, it is a
practical, direct locus of social control.
 An effective political discourse expected
The Concept of “body”
• Body as a medium of culture
• Bourdieu: culture as a made body, can be
converted into automatic, habitual activity.
• Foucault: the primacy of practice over belief is not
chiefly through ideology, but through the
organization and regulation of the time, space and
movements of our daily lives. These means make
our bodies trained, shaped, and impressed with
prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire,
masculinity, femininity.
The Concept of body
• Body as a medium of culture
• Docile bodies –
– Female bodies forces and energies are habituated, to
external regulation, subjection , transformation and
“improvement.”
– “Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet,
makeup, and dress, women are rendered less socially
oriented and more centripetally focused on selfmodification.”
– “The discipline and normalization of the female body[…]
has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and
flexible strategy of social control.”
Reconstructing Feminist Discourse
on the Body
An effective political discourse expected
– In the era that appearance is the
contemporary preoccupation, when applying
Foucault’s idea, it is important that we think
of the network of practices, institutions, and
technologies that sustain positions of
dominance and subordination in a particular
domain.
Reconstructing Feminist Discourse
on the Body
 An effective political discourse expected
– We need an analytics to describe a power, not
repressive but constitutive.
– We need a discourse to “account for the subversion of
potential rebellion”; a discourse that not merely insists
on objectively analysis on power relations, social
hierarchy, political backlashes, but also confronts the
difficulty and entrapment that “the subject” at times is
trapped in sustaining “her own oppression.”
The Body as a Text of Femininity
 History of female disorder and “normal”
feminine practice
Disordered body as a text – Reading of
the slender body
A double bind
History of female disorder and
“normal” feminine practice
• Symptoms of disorder
– Among most close reading or analysis of
disorder, women appear to be apparently
much more vulnerable (than men).
• 19th Century – Neurasthenia and hysteria
• 20th Century – Agoraphobic, anorexia nervosa,
bulimia
History of female disorder and
“normal” feminine practice
• Symptoms could be regarded as the text and be
analyzed as a textuality
– Symptoms of disorders contain symbolic or political
meanings that can be taken as reflections upon the
constructed and existed gender roles
– Examples
• Women are expected to fee, to serve, to sacrifice; they
starve themselves and whittling down the space they/their
bodies take up.
History of female disorder and
“normal” feminine practice
• Symptoms could be regarded as the text and be
analyzed as a textuality
– An ideological construction of femininity
• Femininity is constructed and the definition of
femininity is homogenized and normalized
disregard of race, class and other differences.
• Disordered female bodies – aggressive
texts/graphics for interpreters
History of female disorder and
“normal” feminine practice
• Historical “normal” feminine practice
– 19th Century: the definition of “lady” and the
traits of a “lady”
• Delicacy, dreaminess, sexually passive, charmingly
labile and capriciously emotional
History of female disorder and
“normal” feminine practice
• Historical “normal” feminine practice
– In various literary texts and scientific reports,
the term “hysteria” becomes
• interchangeable with the term “feminine”
• formalized and scientized in male theorists’ works
(Norton 2366)
History of female disorder and
“normal” feminine practice
• Historical “normal” feminine practice
– Femininity is constructed through stadardized
visual images.
• Femininity: a matter of constructing
• Femininity: the appropriate surface presentation of
self
– Example: 1950s~1960s agoraphobia
Disordered body as a text –
Reading the slender body
• 1950s~1960s – agoraphobia
– emerged at a period of reaffirmation of domesticity
and dependency as the feminine ideal
– “career women” – a dirty word
– movie and screen images as examples
• The emaciated body of the anorectic
– “a caricature of the contemporary ideal of
hyperslenderness for women, an ideal bodily form l
for women nowadays still
A Double Bind
• Women – emotional and physical nurturer
– “The rules for this construction of femininity […]
require that women learn to fee others, not the
self”(2367).
– Self-feeding is taken as greedy and excessive for
women who are expected to develop an otheroriented emotional economy.
A Double Bind
• Femininity + Masculinity  the anorexic
as an extreme performer
– Women are continually taught “feminine” virtues and
are also expected (simultaneously) to learn the
“masculine’ language and value.
• Popular images of femininity and
masculinity
– The androgynous ideal hence tears the subject into
two.
Protest and Retreat in the Same
Gesture
• Muteness as a way to protest
– A feminine slim body that demonstrates well-control
and self-mastery
– American and French feminists interpret the hysteric
speaking as a protest through their muteness.
• Dianne Hunter and other Lacanian feminists’ view on the
hysteric’s regressive and expressive articulation to patriarchal
thought
– Catherine Clement – the hysterics accuse and points
– Helene Cixous – Dora as an example
Protest and Retreat in the Same
Gesture
• Muteness as a way to protest
– Literary protest
• Robert Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow as examples
• Carroll Smith Rosenberg
• Susie Orbach – the anorectic uses “hunger strike”
to express a “political discourse”
Retreat
• Kim Chernin
– By intervening personal development, the anorexic
may assuage the guilt and separation anxiety:
• Of being surpassed their mothers (in terms of freedom?)
• Of living freer lives ( Is that possible?)
• Agoraphobia
– usually happens shortly after marriage
– a way to weld dependency and attachment
Retreat
• The self-destructing nature of the protest
–
–
–
The symptoms of disorders actually isolate and
weaken the sufferer.
The life of the body becomes the anorectic’s fetish.
For the hysterics:
•
•
•
They use their bodies to express.
Muteness turns them into silent and uncomplaining woman.
Their muteness can be regarded as a gesture of
–
–
rejecting the symbolic order of the patriarchy;
Recovering a lost world of semiotic, maternal value.
Collusion, Resistance, and the Body
• A Social Formation
– During historical periods of cultural backlash,
which challenges reorganization and
redefining male and female roles, hysteria and
anorexia come across to their peak.
– Female pathology which is a form of social
formation later presses potential resistance
and rebellion to maintain the existed
gendered order.
Collusion, Resistance, and the Body
• A Social Formation
– No matter what sort of objective social
condition/formation create the female pathology,
the subject is the one that always produces the
symptoms.
– The body is invested with various meanings by
the individual/subject.
– By embodying the body with meanings, we may
perceive how the subject’s dream and desire are
weaved into the matrix of the power relations.
Collusion, Resistance, and the Body
• Anorectic’s body – Anorexia is a feminine
practice
– Anorexia began as moderate diet regime.
– Anorexia came out as a conventional feminine
practice, often undertaken by patriarchal
remarks.
– Female finds the way to control the need and
the want, a sense of triumph is thus formed
Collusion, Resistance, and the Body
• Anorexia as a feminine practice
– Finding the idea that self-mastery and selftranscendence, expertise and power over the
body are regarded as superior will and control
is appealing, a habit is hence formed by female.
– Anorectics enjoy their slender bodies admired
and viewed as a project of self-mastery.
– The anorectic realizes that a female body is
vulnerable and at times treated as a child’s
body.
Collusion, Resistance, and the Body
• Anorexia as a feminine practice
– The Anorexic’s experience of power is illusory
• Reshaping the body does not mean they are
able to gain male power or privilege.
• “To feel autonomous and free while
harnessing body and soul to an obsessive
body-practice is to serve, not transform, a
social order that limits female possibilities”
(2373).
Textuality, Praxis, and the Body
• A tension between the meaning and the
practical life of he disordered body
• Two different bodies under the same
discourse
• A possible suggestion to the further
development of feminism
• Conclusion
Two different bodies under the
same discourse
• The intelligible body
– Scientific, philosophic, and aesthetic
representations of the body
• The useful body
– The one that is shaped and trained by
practical rules and regulations in the
presentation of cultural conceptions of the
body
Two different bodies under the
same discourse
• Cooperation of these 2 bodies
– 19th Century the ideal female body of
“hourglass” figure:
• intelligible symbolic form that represents a
domestic and sexualized ideal of femininity
• became a useful body through feminine
praxis
– 17th Century concept of the body as a
machine
Two different bodies under the
same discourse
• Contradiction of these 2 bodies
– “Exposure and productive cultural analysis of
such contradictory and mystifying relations
between image and practice are possible only
if the analysis includes attention to and
interpretation of the ‘useful’ […] the practical
body” (2375).
– Images and presentation of pop culture
A possible suggestion to the further
development of feminism
• Comparison of two feminist praxises
Advantage
French Feminist
U.S. Feminist
Provide a powerful
understanding on the
phallocentric and
dualistic culture on
gendered body
Flourishes in the
study of cultural
representations of
female body
Limit/
Fail to offer concrete
disadvantag analysis of the female
body as a “locus of
e
practical cultural
control”
Fail to consider the
relation between this
cultural
representations of
the female body and
the practical lives of
these bodies
A suggestion to the further
development of feminism
• Helena Michie’s The Flesh Made Word
– makes metaphorical connections between
female eating and female sexuality
– discusses female hunger as “unspeakable
desires for sexuality and power”
– A lack: eating disorder that has inchoated
from 19th Century as yet is not mentioned.
Conclusion
• Bordo views bodies as “site of struggle”
where we must work on so as to carry on
daily practices that resist gender
domination, docility and gender. She
suggests that we ought to be more aware
of the existing contradictions “between
image and practice, rhetoric and reality”
(2376).