Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (3 page)

reproduction. According to the Aristotelian version, the conception of a living being involves the vitalization of the purely material contribution of the female by the "effective and active" element, the male sperm:

[T]here must needs be that which generates and that from which it generates; even if these be one, still they must be distinct in form and their essence must be different If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute . . . would not be semen but material for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, for the catamenia [menstrual materials] have in their nature an affinity to the primitive matter.
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So conceptually powerful (and perceptually determinative) was this view of things that when Leeuwenhoek in 1677 first examined sperm under the newly invented microscope, he saw tiny "animalcules" in it—the form of the future being, to be pressed out of the shapeless dough of the menstrual matter.

The dualism of male activity and female passivity is differently (but not incommensurably) represented by Hegel through an analogy with animals and plants:

The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling Women are educated—who knows how?—as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion.
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Now, notice how these dualities—of male as active, striving, conscious subject and female as passive, vegetative, primitive matter—shape the following contemporary depiction, from Alan Guttmacher's drugstore guide to
Pregnancy, Birth, and Family Planning:

Some of the sperm swim straight up the oneinch, mucusfilled canal with almost purposeful success, while others bog down on the way, getting hopelessly stranded in tissue bays and coves. A small proportion of the total number ejaculated eventually reach the cavity of the uterus and begin their upward twoinch excursion through its length.

Whether this progress results solely from the swimming efforts of the spermatozoa or whether they are aided by fluid currents

and muscular contractions of the uterus is still unknown. The undaunted ones, those not stranded in this veritable everglade, reach the openings of the two fallopian tubes The one sperm that achieves its destiny has won against gigantic odds, several hundred million to one No one knows just what selective forces are responsible for the victory.

Perhaps the winner had the strongest constitution; perhaps it was the swiftest swimmer of all the contestants entered in the race If ovulation occurred within several minutes to twentyfour hours before the sperm's journey ends, the ovum will be in the tube, awaiting fertilization; if ovulation took place more than twentyfour hours before insemination, the egg cell will already have begun to deteriorate and fragment, rendering it incapable of being fertilized by the time the spermatozoon reaches it. On the other hand, if ovulation has not yet occurred, but takes place within two or three days after intercourse, living spermatozoa will be cruising at the tubal site.
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So entrenched is our expectation that the male will be the "effective and active" element and that the female must be the one to passively wait for him, that my students were shocked to discover that on most occasions when fertilization occurs it is actually the
egg
that travels to rendezvous with sperm that have been lolling around, for as much as three days, waiting for
her
to arrive. Guttmacher, indeed, refuses to describe the sperm as "waiting" and depicts them instead as "cruising"—cruising down the strip, as it were, looking to pick up chicks. Such metaphors are continually reinforced by popular representations of conception such as the opening credits of
Look Who's Talking,
which depict the perilous race of ''the undaunted ones" to the tune of "I Get Around" and personify the one sperm "who achieves his destiny," having him provide a running oral commentary on his progress. The graphic simulates the consequences of an act of intercourse at ovulation (our imaginal paradigm, though by no means true of the majority of fertilizations); there at the end of the journey is the giant beach ball of an egg, languorously bobbing, awaiting the victor's arrival. Since the voice of the triumphant sperm is the same as that of Mikey, the baby who is conceived, Aristotle is confirmed: the male really
does
provide the form of the individual.

Clearly, then, mind/body dualism is no mere philosophical position, to be defended or dispensed with by clever argument. Rather, it is a
practical
metaphysics that has been deployed and socially embodied in medicine, law, literary and artistic represen

tations, the psychological construction of self, interpersonal relationships, popular culture, and advertisements—a metaphysics which will be deconstructed only through concrete transformation of the institutions and practices that sustain it. As a final illustration of how culturally sedimented (and often "innocently" and covertly reproduced) are the gendered dualities that I have discussed in this section, consider a Kmart advertisement for boy's and girl's bicycles. The ad describes three levels of bikes: one for toddlers (three wheelers), one for preteeners, and one for teenagers. Each model has a boy's version and a girl's version, each with its own name. The toddler's models are named "Lion" and "Little Angel"; the preteeners, "Pursuit" and ''St. Helen." But while the duality of male activity and female passivity is thus strikingly mapped onto preadolescence, once sexual maturity is reached other dualities emerge: the teenager's models are named "Granite Pass" and "White Heat"!

The gendered nature of mind/body dualism, and its wide ranging institutional and cultural expression, is a recurring theme of many of the essays in this volume. In "Are Mothers Persons?" I explore how—despite an official rhetoric that insists on the embodied subjectivity of all persons—Western legal and medical practice concerning reproduction in fact divides the world into human subjects (fetus and father) and "mere" bodies (pregnant women). In "Hunger as Ideology" I consider how representations of men and women eating (for example, in contemporary advertisements) exhibit a dualistic pedagogy instructing women and men in very different attitudes toward the "heavy bear" and its hungers: women's appetites require containment and control, whereas male indulgence is legitimated and encouraged. In this essay, in "Anorexia Nervosa," and in "Reading the Slender Body," "the devouring woman" is seen to be as potent an image of dangerous female desire (particularly in contemporary culture) as the sexual temptress. I explore, as well, the social contexts that have encouraged the flourishing of this imagery.

In the latter two essays dualism is explored not only via gendered representations but as a more general contemporary construction of self that shapes male experience as well as female. Dualism, of course, was not invented in the twentieth century. But there are distinctive ways in which it is
embodied
in contemporary culture, giving the lie to the social mythology that ours is a bodyloving,

derepressive era. We may be
obsessed
with our bodies, but we are hardly accepting of them. In "Anorexia Nervosa" I consider the way in which an agonistic experience of mind/body regulates the anorectic's sense of embodiment, as well as other obsessive body practices of contemporary culture. My aim, however, is not to portray these obsessions as bizarre or anomalous, but, rather, as the logical (if extreme) manifestations of anxieties and fantasies fostered by our culture. I develop this theme further in "Reading the Slender Body," where I decode the meanings of
fat
and
thin
in our culture to expose the moral significances attached to them, revealing the slender, fit body as a symbol of "virile" mastery over bodily desires that are continually experienced as threatening to overtake the self. This construction of self is then located within consumer culture and its contradictory requirement that we embody both the spiritual discipline of the work ethic and the capacity for continual, mindless consumption of goods.

Today, one often hears intellectuals urging that we "go beyond" dualisms, calling for the deconstruction of the hierarchical oppositions (male/female, mind/body, active/passive) that structure dualism in the West, and scorning others for engaging in "dualistic thinking." But it is not so easy to "go beyond dualism" in this culture, as I argue in a variety of ways in this volume. In "'Material Girl' " and in "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism'' I consider postmodern culture, poststructuralist thought, and some aspects of contemporary feminism as embodying fantasies of transcendence of the materiality and historicity of the body, its situatedness in space and time, and its gender.

Considering the pervasiveness of associations such as those discussed in the preceding section, it is no surprise that feminist theorists turned to Western representations of the body with an analytic, deconstructive eye. From their efforts we have learned to read all the various texts of Western culture—literary works, philosophical works, artworks, medical texts, film, fashion, soap operasless naively and more completely, educated and attuned to the historically pervasive presence of gender, class, and race

coded dualities, alert to their continued embeddedness in the most mundane, seemingly innocent representations. Since these dualities (although not these alone) mediate a good deal of our cultural reality, few representations—from high religious art to depictions of life at the cellular level—can claim innocence.
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Feminists first began to develop a critique of the "politics of the body," however, not in terms of the body as represented (in medical, religious, and philosophical discourse, artworks, and other cultural "texts"), but in terms of the material body as a site of political struggle. When I use the term
material,
I do not mean it in the Aristotelian sense of
brute
matter, nor do I mean it in the sense of "natural" or "unmediated" (for our bodies are necessarily cultural forms; whatever roles anatomy and biology play, they always interact with culture.) I mean what Marx and, later, Foucault had in mind in focusing on the ''direct grip" (as opposed to representational influence) that culture has on our bodies, through the practices and bodily habits of everyday life. Through routine, habitual activity, our bodies learn what is "inner" and what is "outer," which gestures are forbidden and which required, how violable or inviolable are the boundaries of our bodies, how much space around the body may be claimed, and so on. These are often far more powerful lessons than those we learn consciously, through explicit instruction concerning the appropriate behavior for our gender, race, and social class.

The role of American feminism in developing a "political" understanding of body practice is rarely acknowledged. In describing the historical emergence of such an understanding, Don Hanlon Johnson leaps straight from Marx to Foucault, effacing the intellectual role played by the social movements of the sixties (both black power and women's liberation) in awakening consciousness of the body as "an instrument of power":

Another major deconstruction [of the old notion of "the body"] is in the area of sociopolitical thought. Although Karl Marx initiated this movement in the middle of the 19th century, it did not gain momentum until the last 20 years due to the work of the late Michel Foucault. Marx argued that a person's economic class affected his or her experience and definition of "the body." . . . Foucault carried on these seminal arguments in his analysis of the body as the focal point for struggles over the shape of power. Population size, gender formation, the control of children and of those thought to be deviant

from the society's ethics are major concerns of political organization—and all concentrate on the definition and shaping of the body. Moreover, the cultivation of the body is essential to the establishment of one's social role.
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Not a few feminists, too, appear to accept this view of things. While honoring French feminists Irigaray, Wittig, Cixous, and Kristeva for their work on the body "as the site of the production of new modes of subjectivity" and Beauvoir for the "understanding of the body as a situation," Linda Zirelli credits Foucault with having "showed us how the body has been historically disciplined"; to AngloAmerican feminism is simply attributed the ''essentialist" view of the body as an "archaic natural."
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Almost everyone who does the "new scholarship" on the body claims Foucault as its founding father and guiding light. And certainly (as I will discuss later in this introduction) Foucault did articulate and delineate some of the central theoretical categories that influenced that scholarship as it developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "Docile bodies," "biopower," "micropractices"—these are useful concepts, and Foucault's analyses, which employ them in exploring historical changes in the organization and deployment of power, are brilliant.
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But neither Foucault nor any other poststructuralist thinker discovered or invented the idea, to refer again to Johnson's account, that the "definition and shaping" of the body is "the focal point for struggles over the shape of power."
That
was discovered by feminism, and long before it entered into its marriage with poststructuralist thought.

"There is no private domain of a person's life that is not political and there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal. The old barriers have fallen." Charlotte Bunch made this statement in 1968, and although much has been written about "personal politics" in the emergence of the second wave of feminism, not enough attention has been paid, I would argue, to its significance as an
intellectual
paradigm, and in particular to the new understanding of the
body
that "personal politics" ushered in. What, after all, is more personal than the life of the body? And for women, associated with the body and largely confined to a life centered
on
the body (both the beautification of one's own body and the reproduction, care, and maintenance of the bodies of others), culture's grip on the body is a constant, intimate fact of everyday life. As early as 1792, Mary