Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (30 page)

It has been amply documented that women in our culture are more tyrannized by the contemporary slenderness ideal than men are, as they typically have been by beauty ideals in general. It is far more important to men than to women that their partner be slim.
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Women are much more prone than men to perceive themselves as too fat.
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And, as is by now well known, girls and women are more likely to engage in crash dieting, laxative abuse, and compulsive exercising and are far more vulnerable to eating disorders than males. But eating disorders are not only "about" slenderness, any more than (as I have been arguing) slenderness is only—or even chieflyabout being physically thin. My aim in this section, therefore, is not to "explain" facts about which so much has now been written from historical, psychological, and sociological points of view. Rather, I want to remain with the image of the slender body, confronting it now both as a gendered body (the slender body as female bodythe usual form in which the image is displayed) (Figure 34) and as a body whose gender meaning is never neutral. This layer of gendercoded signification, suffusing other meanings,

Image has been removed. No rights.
overdetermines slenderness as a contemporary ideal of specifically
female
attractiveness.

The exploration of contemporary slenderness as a metaphor for the correct management of desire must take into account the fact that throughout dominant Western religious and philosophical traditions, the capacity for selfmanagement is decisively coded as male. By contrast, all those bodily spontaneities—hunger, sexual

ity, the emotions—seen as needful of containment and control have been culturally constructed and coded as female.
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The management of specifically female desire, therefore, is in phallocentric cultures a doubly freighted problem. Women's desires are by their very nature excessive, irrational, threatening to erupt and challenge the patriarchal order.

Some writers have argued that female hunger (as a code for female desire) is especially problematized during periods of disruption and change in established gender relations and in the position of women. In such periods (of which our own is arguably one), nightmare images of what Bram Dijkstra has called "the consuming woman" theme proliferate in art and literature (images representing female desire unleashed), while dominant constructions of the female body become more sylphlike—unlike the body of a fully developed woman, more like that of an adolescent or boy (images that might be called female desire unborn). Dijkstra argues such a case concerning the late nineteenth century, pointing to the devouring sphinxes and bloodsucking vampires of
findesiècle
art, and the accompanying vogue for elongated, "sublimely emaciated" female bodies.
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A commentator of the time vividly describes the emergence of a new bodystyle, not very unlike our own:

Women can change the cut of their clothes at will, but how can they change the cut of their anatomies? And yet, they have done just this thing. Their shoulders have become narrow and slightly sloping, their throats more slender, their hips smaller and their arms and legs elongated to an extent that suggest that bed, upon which the robber, Procrustes, used to stretch his victims.
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The fact that our own era has witnessed a comparable shift (from the hourglass figure of the fifties to the androgynous, increasingly elongated, slender look that has developed over the past decade) cries out for interpretation. This shift, however, needs to be interpreted not only from the standpoint of male anxiety over women's desires (Dijkstra's analysis, while crucial, is only half the story) but also from the standpoint of the women who embrace the "new look." For them it may have a very different meaning; it may symbolize, not so much the containment of female desire, as its liberation from a domestic, reproductive destiny. The fact that the slender female body can carry both these seemingly contradictory

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meanings is one reason, I would suggest, for its compelling attraction in periods of gender change.
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To elaborate this argument in more detail: earlier, I presented some quotations from interviews with eatingdisordered women in which they describe their revulsion to

breasts, stomachs, and all other bodily bulges. At that point I subjected these quotations to a genderneutral reading. While not rescinding that interpretation, I want to overlay it now with another reading, which I present in "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture." There, I suggest that the characteristic anorexic revulsion toward hips, stomach, and breasts (often accompanied by disgust at menstruation and relief at amenorrhoea) might be viewed as expressing rebellion against maternal, domestic femininity—a femininity that represents both the suffocating control the anorectic experiences her own mother as having had over her,
and
the mother's actual lack of position and authority outside the domestic arena. (A Nike ad [Figure 35] embodies both these elements, as the "strength" of the mother is depicted in the containing arm that encircles her small daughter, while young women reading the ad

are reassured that they can exercise
their
strength in other, nonmaternal ways.) Here we encounter another reason for anxiety over soft, protuberant bodyparts. They evoke helpless infancy and symbolize maternal femininity as it has been constructed over the past hundred years in the West. That femininity, as Dorothy Dinnerstein has argued, is perceived as both frighteningly powerful and, as the child comes increasingly to recognize the hierarchical nature of the sexual division of labor, utterly powerless.
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The most literal symbolic form of maternal femininity is represented by the nineteenthcentury hourglass figure, emphasizing breasts and hips—the markers of reproductive femalenessagainst a fragile wasp waist.
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It is not until the postWorld War II period, with its relocation of middleclass women from factory to home and its coercive bourgeois dualism of the happy homemakermother and the responsible, providerfather, that such clear bodily demarcation of "male" and "female" spheres surfaces again. The era of the cinch belt, the pushup bra, and Marilyn Monroe could be viewed, for the body, as an era of "resurgent Victorianism."
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It was also the last coercively normalizing bodyideal to reign before boyish slenderness began its ascendancy in the mid1960s.

From this perspective, one might speculate that the boys who reacted with disgust or anxiety to fleshy female parts were reacting to evocations of maternal power, newly threatening in an age when women are making their way into arenas traditionally reserved for men: law, business, higher education, politics, and so forth.
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The buxom Sophia Loren was a sex goddess in an era when women were encouraged to define their deepest desires in terms of service to home, husband, and family. Today, it is required of female desire, loose in the male world, to be normalized according to the professional (and male) standards of that world; female bodies, accordingly, must be stripped of all psychic resonances with maternal power. From the standpoint of male anxiety, the lean body of the career businesswoman today may symbolize such a neutralization. With her body and her dress she declares symbolic allegiance to the professional, white, male world along with her lack of intention to subvert that arena with alternative "female values." At the same time, insofar as she is clearly "dressing up,"
playing
male (almost always with a "softening" fashion touch to establish traditional feminine decorativeness, and continually cautioned against the dire

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consequences of allotting success higher priority than her looks), she represents no serious competition (symbolically, that is) to the real men of the workplace (Figures 36 and 37).

For many women, however, disidentification with the maternal body, far from symbolizing reduced power, may symbolize (as it did in the 1890s and 1920s) freedom from a reproductive destiny and a construction of femininity seen as constraining and suffocating. Correspondingly, taking on the accoutrements of the white, male world may be experienced as empowerment by women themselves, and as their chance to embody qualities—detachment, selfcontainment, selfmastery, control— that are highly valued in our culture. The slender body, as I have argued earlier, symbolizes such qualities. ''It was about power," says Kim Morgan, speaking in the documentary
The Waist Land
of the obsession with slenderness that led to her anorexia, "that was the big thing . . . something I could throw in people's faces, and they would look at me and I'd only weigh this much, but I was strong and in control, and

hey
you're
sloppy."
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The taking on of "male" power as selfmastery is another locus where, for all their surface dissimilarities, the shedding of weight and the development of muscles intersect. Appropriately, the new "Joy of Cooking" takes place in the gym, in one advertisement that shamelessly exploits the associations of female body—building with liberation from a traditional, domestic destiny (Figure 38).

In the intersection of these gender issues and more general cultural dilemmas concerning the management of desire, we see how the tightly managed bodywhether demonstrated through sleek, minimalist lines or firmly developed muscles—has been overdetermined as a contemporary ideal of specifically female attractiveness. The axis of consumption/production is genderoverlaid, as I have argued, by the hierarchical dualism that constructs a dangerous, appetitive, bodily "female principle" in opposition to a mas

terful "male" will. We would thus expect that when the regulation of desire becomes especially problematic (as it is in advanced consumer cultures), women and their bodies will pay the greatest symbolic and material toll. When such a situation is compounded by anxiety about
women's
desires in periods when traditional forms of gender organization are being challenged, this toll is multiplied. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that it is exacted through the simple
repression
of female hunger. Rather, here as elsewhere, power works also "from below," as women associate slenderness with selfmanagement, by way of the experience of newfound freedom (from a domestic destiny) and empowerment in the public arena. In this connection we might note the difference between contemporary ideals of slenderness, coded in terms of selfmastery and expressed through traditionally "male" body symbolism, and midVictorian ideals of female slenderness, which symbolically emphasized reproductive femininity corseted under tight "external" constraints. But whether externally bound or internally managed, no body can escape either the imprint of culture or its gendered meanings.

In 1987, I heard a feminist historian claim that there were absolutely no common areas of experience between the wife of a plantation owner in the preCivil War South and the female slaves her husband owned. Gender, she argued, is so thoroughly fragmented by race, class, historical particularity, and individual difference as to be useless as an analytical category. The "bonds of womanhood," she insisted, are a feminist fantasy, born out of the ethnocentrism of white, middleclass academics.

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A central point of a book by a feminist philosopher is the refutation of all feminist attempts to articulate a sense in which the history of philosophy reveals distinctively "male" perspectives on reality. All such attempts, the author argues, "do violence" to the history of philosophy and "injustice" to the "extremely variegated nature" of male experience. Indeed, any attempt to ''cut" reality and perspective along gender lines is methodologically flawed and essentializing.
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For some feminist literary theorists, gender has become a discursive formation, inherently unstable and continually selfdeconstructing. The meaning of gender is constantly deferred, endlessly multiple. We must "get beyond the number two," as one writer has described it, and move toward a "dizzying accumulation of narratives."
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(A new journal is entitled
Genders.)
Not to do so is to perpetuate a hierarchical, binary construction of reality.

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In the November, 1987, issue of Ms. magazine, an article appeared on the art of Georgia O'Keeffe. It included the text of a letter from O'Keeffe to Mabel Luhan:

I thought you could write something about me that the men can't—What I want written—I do not know—I have no definite idea of what it should be—but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colors as an expression of living—might say something that a man can't—I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore—Men have done all they can do about it. Does that mean anything to you—or doesn't it?

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The article itself, written by a staff reporter, begins:
"Georgia O'Keeffe.
The woman of our century who made it clear once and for all that painting has no gender."

In the 1970s, the feminist imagination was fueled by the insight that the template of gender could disclose aspects of culture and history previously concealed. The malenormative view of the world, feminists argued, had obscured its own biases through its fictions of unity (History, Reason, Culture, Tradition . . . ). Each of those unities was shown to have a repressed shadow, an
"other"
whose material history, values, and perspective had yet to be written.

Today, many feminists are critical of what they now see as the oversimplifications and overgeneralizations of this period in feminism. Challenges have arisen— sometimes emotionally charged targeted at classics of feminist theory and their gendered readings of culture and history. Where once the prime objects of academic feminist critique were the phallocentric narratives of our maledominated disciplines, now feminist criticism has turned to its own narratives, finding them reductionist, totalizing, inadequately nuanced, valorizing of gender difference, unconsciously racist, and elitist. Feminism may be developing a new direction, a new skepticism about the use of gender as an analytical category.