Literary Theory

Series 1: Handout #22

Susan Bordo (1947-): Foucault-influenced, post-feminist or “third-wave feminist,” gender studies and body studies; believes in writing clearly for larger audience in order to have impact.

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1989): The body is a “medium of culture,” a text, “a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and reinforced.” It is also a site of political regulation; the backlash against feminist gains is manifested in the disciplining of women’s bodies to conform to an aesthetic ideal; nevertheless, this is not result of unidirectional gender-based oppression of women by men: it is an internalized response by women. Anorexia, bulimia, and other medical disorders are ideological, political, and textual—they are manifestations of the construction of gender, the origins of which go back at least as far as the Victorian cult of domesticity; yet anorexia is an illusory form of female empowerment, “self-mastery” coded as “male”; it gives women power over others, a feeling of sexual invulnerability.

Q. How are women’s bodies “disciplined” by our culture (if we can say “our”)? How can we characterize the “ideal”? Who is enforcing this discipline?

Q. How are men’s bodies “disciplined”? What is the masculine “ideal”? Do men and women have different body ideals for themselves, for each other? What is the role of same-sex body discipline?

Q. How have male and female ideals changed in the last 100 years? Why did they change? Who changed them?

Q. What would the undisciplined male or female body look like? Is there such a thing as a “natural” body?

Q. What about homoerotic/lesbian body aesthetics? Are bodies not subjected to opposite-sex “gazing” idealized differently? What is the lesbian ideal of female beauty? The gay male idea of male beauty? How do these differ from hetero-erotic beauty?

Q. Are men and women “hardwired” to be attracted to certain kinds of bodies? Is this OK if it’s “natural”? Is all erotic attraction oppressive, or just some kinds (male-female, female-male, male-male, female-female, androgyne-androgyne)? What is the alternative?