Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (6 page)

through a facile and abstract celebration of "heterogeneity," "difference," "subversive reading,'' and so forth.

Recognizing that normalizing cultural forms exist does not entail, as some writers have argued, the view that women are "cultural dopes," blindly submitting to oppressive regimes of beauty.
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Although many people
are
mystified (insisting, for example, that the current fitness craze is only about health or that plastic surgery to "correct" a "Jewish" or "black" nose is just an individual preference), often there will be a high degree of consciousness involved in the decision to diet or to have cosmetic surgery. People
know
the routes to success in this culture—they are advertised widely enoughand they are not "dopes" to pursue them. Often, given the racism, sexism, and narcissism of the culture, their personal happiness and economic security may depend on it.

In 1990 I lost twentyfive pounds through a national weightloss program, a choice that some of my colleagues viewed as inconsistent and even hypocritical, given my work. But in my view, feminist cultural criticism is not a blueprint for the conduct of personal life (or political action, for that matter) and does not empower (or require) individuals to "rise above" their culture or to become martyrs to feminist ideals. It does not tell us what to
do
(although I continually get asked such questions when I speak at colleges)—whether to lose weight or not, wear makeup or not, lift weights or not. Its goal is edification and understanding, enhanced
consciousness
of the power, complexity, and
systemic
nature of culture, the interconnected webs of its functioning. It is up to the reader to decide how, when, and where (or whether) to put that understanding to further use, in the particular, complicated, and everchanging context that is his or her life and no one else's.

The goal of consciousnessraising may seem, perhaps, to belong to another era. I believe, however, that in our present culture of mystification—a culture which continually pulls us away from systemic understanding and inclines us toward constructions that emphasize individual freedom, choice, power, ability—simply becoming
more conscious
is a tremendous achievement. (As Marx insisted, changes in consciousness
are
changes in life, and in a culture that counts on our remaining unconscious they are political as well.) Feminist cultural criticism cannot magically lift us into a transcendent realm of immunity to cultural images, but it ought to help

guard against the feeling of comfortable oneness with culture and to foster a healthy skepticism about the pleasures and powers it offers. I know, for example, that although my weight loss has benefited me in a variety of ways, it has also diminished my efficacy as an alternative role model for my female students. I used to demonstrate the possibility of confidence, expressiveness, and success in a less than adequately normalized body. Today, my female students may be more likely to see me as confirmation that success comes only from playing by the cultural rules. This may affirm some of them, but what about those who cannot play by the rules? A small but possibly important source of selfvalidation and encouragement has been taken from them. Even though my choice to diet was a conscious and "rational" response to the system of cultural meanings that surround me (not the blind submission of a "cultural dope"), I should not deceive myself into thinking that my own feeling of enhanced personal comfort and power means that I am not servicing an oppressive system.

The "old" feminist discourse may have been insufficiently attentive to the multiplicity of meaning, the pleasures of shaping and decorating the body, or the role of female agency in reproducing patriarchal culture. What it did offer was a systemic critique capable of rousing women to collective actionsomething we do not have today.

True, women are mobilizing around other issuesreproductive rights, for example. But on the sexualization and objectification of the female body contemporary feminism (with some notable exceptions)
35
is strikingly muted. Some forms of postmodern feminism (as I argue in "'Material Girl' ") are worse than muted, they are distressingly at one with the culture in celebrating the creative agency of individuals and denying systemic pattern. It seems to me that feminist theory has taken a very strange turn indeed when plastic surgery can be described, as it has been by Kathy Davis, as
"first and foremost . . .
about taking one's life into one's own hands." I agree with Davis that as an
individual
choice that seeks to make life as livable and enjoyable as possible within certain cultural constraints and directives, of course such surgery can be experienced as liberating. But since when has the feminist critique of normalizing beauty practice ever been directed against individuals and their choices? Unlike Davis, I do not view cosmetic surgery as being first and foremost "about" selfdetermination
or

selfdeception. Rather, my focus is on the complexly and densely institutionalized
system
of values and practices within which girls and women—and, increasingly, men and boys as well—come to believe that they are nothing (and are frequently treated as nothing) unless they are trim, tight, lineless, bulgeless, and sagless. In a cultural moment such as the present, within which a high level of physical attractiveness is continually presented as a prerequisite for romantic success and very often is demanded by employers as well, I believe that we desperately need the critical edge of systemic perspective.

My analysis of eating disorders—the core of the critique of normalizing practices presented in this book—is deeply informed by my experiences as a woman who has herself struggled with weight and bodyimage issues all her life. However, I do not recount that personal story in any of my pieces; I was trained as a philosopher, and that mode of writing does not come easily to me. Instead, I try to preserve the critical edge of the "old" feminist discourse, while incorporating a more postmodern appreciation of how subtle and multifaceted feminist discourse must be if it is to ring true to the complex experiences of contemporary women and men
and
provide systemic perspective on those experiences. Rather than attempt to "explain" eating disorders through one or another available model, I construct what Foucault has called a "polyhedron of intelligibility." I explore facets and intersections: cultural representations of female hunger and female eating, the role of consumer culture, long standing philosophical and religious attitudes toward the body, similarities to other predominantly female disorders (agoraphobia, hysteria), connections with other contemporary body obsessions, continuities with "normal" female experience in our culture, and so forth. Each of these explorations is systemically located. I do not want the reader to lose sight of the fact that the escalation of eating disorders into a significant social phenomenon arises at the intersection of patriarchal culture and postindustrial capitalism.

My analysis is in this way "political." It is not, however, reductionist, and I hope it will help dispel the misperception, fostered by Joan Brumberg
36
and others, that the feminist cultural model reduces eating disorders to a simple pursuit of slenderness. Rather, such feminist/cultural analysis as Susie Orbach's
Hunger Strike
and Kim Chernin's
The Obsession
and
The Hungry Self
has always stressed

the intersection of culture with family, economic, and historical developments and psychological constructions of gender.
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Insofar as what Chernin first named the "tyranny of slenderness" has been seen as crucial to understanding eating disorders, that tyranny has rarely been viewed by feminists simply as a matter of arbitrary media images but has, rather, been seen as requiring cultural and historical analysis and interpretation. I deal more fully with the feminist paradigm, competing models, and ongoing resistance to the cultural perspective on eating disorders in the essay "Whose Body Is This?"

Taken together, the feminist critiques of gendered representations and of the politics of the material body can also be seen as an extended argument against the notion that the body is a purely biological or natural form. In this way, American feminism has contributed significantly to what is arguably a major transformation in Western intellectual paradigms defining and representing the body. Within the traditional paradigms, despite significant historical variations certain features have been constant. First and foremost, the body is located (whether as wild beast or physiological clockwork) on the nature side of a nature/culture divide. As such, it is conceived as relatively historically unchanging in its most basic aspects, and unitary. That is, we speak of "the Body" as we speak of "Reason" or "Mind"—as though one model were equally and accurately descriptive of all human bodily experience, irrespective of sex, race, age, or any other personal attributes. That model is assumed to be a sort of neutral, generic core.

Over the past hundred and fifty years, under the influence of a variety of cultural forces, the body has been forced to vacate its longterm residence on the nature side of the nature/culture duality and encouraged to take up residence, along with everything else that is human, within culture. Karl Marx played a crucial role here, in reimagining the body as a historical and not merely a biological arena, an arena shaped by the social and economic organization of human life and, often, brutalized by it. Marx cut the first great slice into the unitary conception of "the Body" assumed by those who preceded him. It makes a difference, he insisted,
whose
body you are

talking about—one that tills its own field, or one that works on an assembly line all day, or one that sits in an office managing the labor of others.

Gender and race, too, make a difference. The "generic" core is usually in reality a white or male body passing as the norm for all. For example, when the department of health lists "dairy products" as one of the four major food groups essential to health for all people, it excludes from its conception of the human norm those populations (African American, Mexican American, Asian Americans) among whom large numbers of individuals are lactose intolerant. (Advising the inclusion of
calcium
in the diet would be less ethnocentric.) The definition of the "normal" human body temperature as 98.6 excludes most women during their fertile years for about two weeks every month (before ovulation, when progesterone levels should be low and body temperature below 98.6). Even the representation of groups who are themselves frequently rendered invisible in cultural constructions—as, for example, in assumptions of heterosexuality in discussions of sexuality, marriage, and

parenthood—exhibit additional effacements of race and gender. Controversial findings on possible genetic factors in male homosexuality, for example, have continually been misrepresented in massmedia headlines as proposing a genetic basis for all homosexuality. A 1992
Newsweek
cover story, for example, depicts two men holding hands; but the bold type asks the uninflected question, "Homosexuality: Born or Bred?"

The old metaphor of the Body Politic presented itself as a "generic" (that is, ostensibly human but covertly male) form. (It is interesting to note, however, that when the
natural
world was likened to a body—as it is in Plato's
Timaeus
and in many other ancient creation stories—it is gendered, and frequently female. It is only when a manmade rational form like the state is symbolized, a cultural invention imagined to bring order to the chaos of the "natural," that the fiction of genderlessness comes into play.) A good deal of feminist scholarship has focused on exposing such fictions and revealing their specificity (as white, male, historically located in various ways, and so forth). Others have focused on the cultural construction and historical experiences of the
female
body. The critique of cultural representations, discussed in the first section of this introduction, has also contributed to the feminist relo

cation of the body to the culture side of the nature/culture dualism. For one effect of this critique of the pervasive dualisms and metaphors that animate representations of the body is to call into question the assumption that we ever know or encounter the body—not only the bodies of others but our own bodies—directly or simply. Rather, it seems, the body that we experience and conceptualize is always
mediated
by constructs, associations, images of a cultural nature.

In various ways, all the essays in this volume exemplify a cultural approach to the body. My analysis of eating disorders, most explicitly, offers such a cultural perspective. The relevant essays span almost a decade of my thinking about anorexia, bulimia, and related issues and reflect different stages of information and understanding (both my own and the culture's). But although my analysis came to incorporate new elements over time (for example, my earliest essay, "Anorexia Nervosa," reflects my initial lack of knowledge about nineteenthcentury anorexia), my understanding of eating disorders as complex crystallizations of culture has remained unaltered. Indeed, the more we learn about eating disorders and about women and their eating problems, both in the nineteenth century and today, the more the cultural model has been borne out, as I argue in "Whose Body Is This?"

In the case of eating disorders, the cultural evidence is by now so overwhelming, and by itself so overdetermines the phenomena, that the hunt for biological
explanations
(I do not deny that there are biological dynamics and effects involved) can only be understood as blind allegiance to the medical model. However, although I am convinced that anorexia and bulimia (as mass phenomena, not as the isolated cases that have been reported throughout history) have been culturally produced, I resist the general notion, quite dominant in the humanities and social sciences today, that the body is a tabula rasa, awaiting inscription by culture. When bodies are made into mere
products
of social discourse, they remain bodies in name only. Unless, as Richard Mohr argues, we are willing to grant that our corporeality is more than a "barren field," an "unchalked blackboard," "ineffective" apart from the social forces and discourses that script and shape it, then
those
forces are the "true body," and they—let's face it—look suspiciously more like ''mind" than body, "emanating" (as Mohr describes it) "from the gas cloudlike social