Read Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body Online
Authors: Susan Bordo
Amaury deRiencourt,
Sex and Power in History
(New York: David McKay, 1974), p. 319. The metaphorical dimension here is as striking as the functional, and it is a characteristic feature of female fashion: the dominant styles always decree, to one degree or another, that women
should not take up too much space,
that the territory we occupy should be limited. This is as true of cinchbelts as it is of footbinding.
Quoted in deRiencourt,
Sex and Power in History,
p. 319.
Kathryn Weibel,
Mirror, Mirror: Images of Women Reflected in Popular Culture
(New York: Anchor, 1977), p. 194.
Christy Ferguson, "Images of the Body: Victorian England," philosophy research project, Le Moyne College, 1983.
Quoted in E. M. Sigsworth and T. J. Wyke, "A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease," in Vicinus, ed.,
Suffer and Be Still,
p. 82.
See Kate Millett, "The Debate over Women: Ruskin vs. Mill," and Helene E. Roberts, "Marriage, Redundancy, or Sin: The Painter's View of Women in the First TwentyFive Years of Victoria's Reign," both in Vicinus, ed.,
Suffer and Be Still.
Gay,
The Bourgeois Experience,
p. 197; Millett, "Debate over Women," in Vicinus, ed.,
Suffer and Be Still,
p. 123.
Vicinus, "Introduction," p. x.
Lasch,
The Culture of Narcissism,
p. 343 (emphasis added).
Chernin,
The Obsession,
p. 148.
Charles Gaines and George Butler, "Iron Sisters,"
Psychology Today
(Nov. 1983): 67.
Early versions of this essay, under various titles, were delivered at the philosophy department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Massachusetts conference on Histories of Sexuality, and the twentyfirst annual conference for the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. I thank all those who commented and provided encouragement on those occasions. The essay was revised and originally published in Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds.,
Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
Mary Douglas,
Natural Symbols
(New York: Pantheon, 1982), and
Purity and Danger
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
Pierre Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 94 (emphasis in original).
On docility, see Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish
(New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 13569. For a Foucauldian analysis of feminine practice, see Sandra Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in her
Femininity and Domination
(New York: Routledge, 1990); see also Susan Brownmiller,
Femininity
(New York: Ballantine, 1984).
During the late 1970s and 1980s, male concern over appearance undeniably increased. Study after study confirms, however, that there is still a large gender gap in this area. Research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 found men to be generally satisfied with their appearance, often, in fact, "distorting their perceptions [of themselves] in a positive, selfaggrandizing way" ("Dislike of Own Bodies Found Common Among Women,"
New York Times,
March 19, 1985, p. C1). Women, however, were found to exhibit extreme negative assessments and distortions of body perception. Other studies have suggested that women are judged more harshly than men when they deviate from dominant social standards of attractiveness. Thomas Cash et al., in "The Great American ShapeUp,"
Psychology Today
(April 1986), p. 34, report that although the situation for men has changed, the situation for women has more than proportionally worsened. Citing results from 30,000 responses to a 1985 survey of perceptions of body image and comparing similar responses to a 1972 questionnaire, they report that the 1985 respondents were considerably more dissatisfied with their bodies than the 1972 respondents, and they note a marked intensification of concern among men. Among the 1985 group, the group most dissatisfied of all with their appearance, however, were teenage women. Women today constitute by far the largest number of consumers of diet products, attenders of spas and diet centers, and subjects of intestinal bypass and other fatreduction operations.
Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality.
Vol. 1:
An Introduction
(New York: Vintage, 1980), pp. 136, 94.
On the gendered and historical nature of these disorders: the number of female to male hysterics has been estimated at anywhere from 2:1 to 4:1, and as many as 80 percent of all agoraphobics are female (Annette Brodsky and Rachel HareMustin,
Women and Psychotherapy
[New York: Guilford Press, 1980], pp. 116, 122). Although more cases of male eating disorders have been reported in the late eighties and early nineties, it is estimated that close to 90 percent of all anorectics are female (Paul Garfinkel and David Garner,
Anorexia Nervosa: A Multidimensional Perspective
[New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1982], pp. 11213). For a sophisticated account of female psychopathology, with particular attention to nineteenthcentury disorders but, unfortunately, little mention of agoraphobia or eating disorders, see Elaine Showalter,
The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 18301980
(New York: Pantheon, 1985). For a discussion of social and gender issues in agoraphobia, see Robert Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow,
Women Who Marry Houses: Panic and Protest in Agoraphobia
(New York: McGrawHill, 1983). On the history of anorexia nervosa, see Joan Jacobs Brumberg,
Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
In constructing such a paradigm I do not pretend to do justice to any of these disorders in its individual complexity. My aim is to chart some points of intersection, to describe some similar patterns, as they emerge through a particular reading of the phenomenon—a political reading, if you will.
Showalter,
The Female Malady,
pp. 12829.
On the epidemic of hysteria and neurasthenia, see Showalter,
The Female Malady;
Carroll SmithRosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in NineteenthCentury America," in her
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Martha Vicinus, "Introduction: The Perfect Victorian Lady," in Martha Vicinus,
Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. xxi.
See Carol Nadelson and Malkah Notman,
The Female Patient
(New York: Plenum, 1982), p. 5; E. M. Sigsworth and T. J. Wyke, "A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease," in Vicinus,
Suffer and Be Still,
p. 82. For more general discussions, see Peter Gay,
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.
Vol. 1:
Education of the Senses
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 10968; Showalter,
The Female Malady,
esp. pp. 12144. The delicate lady, an ideal that had very strong class connotations (as does slenderness today), is not the only conception of femininity to be found in Victorian cultures. But it was arguably the single most powerful ideological representation of femininity in that era, affecting women of all classes, including those without the material means to realize the ideal fully. See Helena Mitchie,
The Flesh Made Word
(New York: Oxford, 1987), for discussions of the control of female appetite and Victorian constructions of femininity.
SmithRosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct,
p. 203.
Showalter,
The Female Malady,
p. 129.
Erving Goffman,
The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life
(Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Doubleday, 1959).
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1962), p. 36. The theme song of one such show ran, in part, "I married Joan . . . What a girl . . . what a whirl . . . what a life! I married Joan . . . What a mind love is blind . . . what a wife!"
See I. G. Fodor, "The Phobic Syndrome in Women," in V. Franks and V. Burtle, eds.,
Women in Therapy
(New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1974), p. 119; see also Kathleen Brehony, "Women and Agoraphobia," in Violet Franks and Esther Rothblum, eds.,
The Stereotyping of Women
(New York: Springer, 1983).
In Jonathan Culler,
Roland Barthes
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 74.
For other interpretive perspectives on the slenderness ideal, see "Reading the Slender Body" in this volume; Kim Chernin,
The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness
(New York: Harper and Row, 1981); Susie Orbach,
Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphorfor Our Age
(New York:
W. W. Norton, 1985).
See "Hunger as Ideology," in this volume, for a discussion of how this construction of femininity is reproduced in contemporary commercials and advertisements concerning food, eating, and cooking.
Aimee Liu,
Solitaire
(New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 123.
Striking, in connection with this, is Catherine SteinerAdair's 1984 study of highschool women, which reveals a dramatic association between problems with food and body image and emulation of the cool, professionally "together" and gorgeous superwoman. On the basis of a series of interviews, the high schoolers were classified into two groups: one expressed skepticism over the superwoman ideal, the other thoroughly aspired to it. Later administrations of diagnostic tests revealed that 94 percent of the prosuperwoman group fell into the eatingdisordered range of the scale. Of the other group, 100 percent fell into the noneatingdisordered range. Media images notwithstanding, young women today appear to sense, either consciously or through their bodies, the impossibility of simultaneously meeting the demands of two spheres whose values have been historically defined in utter opposition to each other.
See "Anorexia Nervosa" in this volume.
Dianne Hunter, "Hysteria, Psychoanalysis and Feminism," in Shirley Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprenger, eds.,
The (M)Other Tongue
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 114.
Catherine Clement and Hélène Cixous,
The Newly Born Woman,
trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 42.
Clement and Cixous,
The Newly Born Woman,
p.
95.
Seidenberg and DeCrow,
Women Who Marry Houses, p.
31.
SmithRosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct,
p. 208.
Orbach,
Hunger Strike,
p. 102. When we look into the many autobiographies and case studies of hysterics, anorectics, and agoraphobics, we find that these are indeed the sorts of women one might expect to be frustrated by the constraints of a specified female role. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, in
Studies on Hysteria
(New York: Avon, 1966), and Freud, in the later
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
(New York: Macmillan, 1963), constantly remark on the ambitiousness, independence, intellectual ability, and creative strivings of their patients. We know, moreover, that many women who later became leading social activists and feminists of the nineteenth century were among those who fell ill with hysteria and neurasthenia. It has become a virtual cliché that the typical anorectic is a perfectionist, driven to excel in all areas of her life. Though less prominently, a similar theme runs throughout the literature on agoraphobia. One must keep in mind that in drawing on case studies, one is relying on the perceptions of other acculturated individuals. One suspects, for example, that the popular portrait of the anorectic as a relentless overachiever may be colored by the lingering or perhaps resurgent Victorianism of our culture's attitudes toward ambitious women. One does not escape this hermeneutic problem by turning to autobiography. But in autobiography one is at least dealing with social constructions and attitudes that animate the subject's own psychic reality. In this regard the autobiographical literature on anorexia, drawn on in a variety of places in this volume, is strikingly full of anxiety about the domestic world and
other themes that suggest deep rebellion against traditional notions of femininity.
Kim Chernin,
The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity
(New York: Harper and Row, 1985), esp. pp. 4193.
Mark Poster,
Foucault, Marxism, and History
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 28.
Liu,
Solitaire, p. 99.
Brett Silverstein, "Possible Causes of the Thin Standard of Bodily Attractiveness for Women,"
International Journal of Eating Disorders
5 (1986): 90716.
Showalter,
The Female Malady,
p. 48.
SmithRosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct,
p. 207.
Orbach,
Hunger Strike,
p. 103.
Brownmiller,
Femininity,
p. 14.
Toril Moi, "Representations of Patriarchy: Sex and Epistemology in Freud's
Dora,"
in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds.,
In Dora's Case: Freud HysteriaFeminism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 192.
Foucault,
Discipline and Punish,
p. 136.
Foucault,
Discipline and Punish,
p. 136.
A focus on the politics of sexualization and objectification remains central to the antipornography movement (e.g., in the work of Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon). Feminists exploring the politics of appearance include Sandra Bartky, Susan Brownmiller, Wendy Chapkis, Kim Chernin, and Susie Orbach. And a developing feminist interest in the work of Michel Foucault has begun to produce a poststructuralist feminism oriented toward practice; see, for example, Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby,
Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).
See, for example, Susan Suleiman, ed.,
The Female Body in Western Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Mitchie,
The Flesh Made Word,
p. 13.
Mitchie,
The Flesh Made Word,
p. 149.