Bodies as Culture

1. Bodies as Culture

2. Today’s Goals • Recognize the body as a site of culture & cultural practices • Understand the mind/body dualism • Appreciate how desires operate as disciplines

3. Why is the body a site of culture? • Bodies are prominent mediated images • Bodies are prominent in philosophy • As animal • As appetites • As deceiver • As prison of the soul

4. Bodies as culture • “Our bodies, no less than anything else, that is human, are constituted by culture.” • Plato, Augustine, Descartes – ultimate aim of philosophy is to learn to live without the body, to achieve intellectual independence from the body’s illusion, distractions, hungers and desire.

5. The Mind/Body Dualism • Women cast as the body • Men as the ‘inevitable (i.e., a pure idea) • Imbedded in medicine, law, literature • Sustained through popular culture • Obsessed by bodies, even as we do not accept them

6. Female body as desire • Women as alluring is women tying to lure men to arousal • Disclaims male ownership of the body • Explains arousal as the result of female manipulation

7. Female body as desire • Even when women are silent, their bodies seen as “speaking” a language of provocation. • Anorexia nervosa, manifested after sexual abuse or humiliation, can be seen as a defense against the ‘femaleness’ of the body and a punishment of its desires.

8. Female body as desire • Desires culturally represented through the metaphor of female appetite. • Denial of appetite provides two options: • Transcend the body totally, becoming pure ‘male’ will or • Capitulates to the degraded female body 1

9. Beyond the oppressor/oppressed model • Representations homogenize Smoothes racial, ethnic and sexual differences – differences that disturb ‘traditional’ heterosexual expectations

10. Beyond the oppressor/oppressed model • Homogenized images normalize They function as models against which the self continually measures, judges, disciplines, and corrects itself Normal images of female bodies 12

11. Foucault/Power/Norms • Power not in possession of people • Expressions of power have particular effects (not purely random) • Power works from below – via individual self-surveillance & self-correction to norms

12. Foucault/Power/Norms • No need for physical force – the gaze is enough • Dominant forms constantly penetrated and reconstructed by values, styles, & knowledges that have been developing & gaining strength at the margins 12

13. Food /Hunger/Control • Hunger as ideology • Increasing universality, with Western cultures, of the relationship between slenderness & beauty • Trope of control • Women need to reassert • Sense of male control

14. Hunger • When women are positively depicted as voracious about food their hunger for food is employed as a metaphor for sexual appetite • Food constructed as sexual object of desire • Eating legitimated as much more than nutritive • Food becomes sensual • Eating becomes the sexual act

15. Obsession & Binges • Language of obsession suggests binge behavior • Invoking the rhetoric of indulgence • Unrestrained appetite as inappropriate & a private, transgressive act • Makes restriction & denial of hunger central features of the construction of femininity • Binging becomes inevitable 1

16. The disciplining of hunger • Social control of female hunger operates as a practical ‘discipline’ that trains female bodies in the knowledge of their limits and possibilities. • Denying oneself food becomes the micro-practice in the education of feminine self-restraint & containment of impulse. 12

17. The disciplining of hunger • The only way to win to go beyond control, to kill off the bodies desires entirely • Thinness represents triumph of will over the body and the thin soul is associated with purity & intellectual strength 12

18. Women’s status & women’s bodies • Slenderness / masculine norms • Self-control • Determination • Emotional discipline  • Pursuit of slenderness & denial of appetite intersects new requirement to embody the masculine values of the public arena.

19. Thin as success/ Fat as failure • Firm body symbol of the correct attitude • One cares about oneself & how one appears to others • Suggests willpower, energy & ability to ‘shape your life’ • Fat perceived as: • Indicative of laziness • Lack of discipline • Unwillingness to conform

20. Male Bodies – ‘Cult of hardness’ • Need for male form to express strength & hardness at core - • Clinton as soft body_ • Soft body as undisciplined, needy, needy, hungry little boys • Impotence threatens the whole body

21. First steps • Recognition of dominance of coercive forms • Enhanced understanding of the power, complexity and systematic nature of culture

22. Slender consumers • Slender body codes ideal of well-managed self, despite the temptations of consumer culture. • Lean body of today’s career businesswomen symbolizes social neutralization • Consumption/production axis is overlaid by the dualism of (female) body & (male) will.

23. Today’s Goals • Recognize the body as a site of culture & cultural practices • Understand the mind/body dualism • Appreciate how desires operate as disciplines