Welcome back, I hope you have had a bit of
a break.
Let us continue in today's discussions to
our next topic of interest.
And this is related to what kind of body?
And let us begin with the kind of body that
is most familiar to a number of us when we
think about women and women's issues in the
contemporary world: the beautiful body.
“In our culture, not one part of a woman's
body is left untouched, unaltered.
From head to toe, every feature of a woman's
face, every section of her body is subject
to modification.”
Clearly familiar, clearly more familiar than
we would like.
Let us take a look at beauty and the body
in feminist theory.
And in relation to this, what I want to do
is read to you from a very important text
in relation to beauty, Naomi Wolf’s, The
Beauty Myth.
So work with me here.
Let us see what are the multiple ways in which
we can understand theory as working through
concepts of beauty?
Wolf writes – “At last, after a long silence,
women took to the streets.
In the two decades of radical action that
followed the rebirth of feminism in the early
1970s,..” and you will recognize Wolf is
talking about second-wave feminism here, “Western
women gained legal and reproductive rights,
pursued higher education, entered the trades
and the professions, and overturned ancient
and revered beliefs about their social role.
A generation on, do women feel free?”
Here is an important question, because Wolf
is asking this in relation to the third-wave
of feminist movements.
She is asking, after all of these forms of
progress, now that we have all forms of rights,
do women feel free?
“The affluent, educated, liberated women
of the First World, who can enjoy freedoms
unavailable to any women ever before, do not
feel as free as they want to.”
Do you hear strains of Betty Friedan and the
feminine mystique?
“And they can no longer restrict to the
subconscious their sense that this lack of
freedom has something to do with --- with
apparently frivolous issues, things that really
should not matter.
Many are ashamed to admit that such trivial
concerns --- to do with physical appearance,
bodies, faces, hair, clothes --- matter so
much.
But in spite of shame, guilt, and denial,
more and more women are wondering if it isn’t
that they are entirely neurotic and alone
but rather that something important is indeed
at stake that has to do with the relationship
between female liberation and female beauty.”
Now remember, Wolf is writing at a point when
it is important that these considerations
come to the fore.
We are still not at that point that we referenced
in third-wave feminism where women were embracing
girliness as an antidote to the kind of second
feminist disavowal of everything that was,
quote unquote, “feminine.”
Here she is asking an important question.
She is saying, is there a relationship between
female liberation and female beauty without
really telling us whether it is a positive
or a negative association.
She calls this, as the title of the book says,
The Beauty Myth.
The beauty myth tells a story.
The quality called beauty objectively and
universally exists.
So see where the object of this book lies.
It is moving from this question of women feeling
oppressed by certain kinds of questions such
as physical appearance, bodies, faces, hair,
clothes, and moving it to the question of
what this universal standard a female beauty
may be.
“The beauty myth tells a story.
The quality called “beauty” objectively
and universally exists.
Women must want to embody it and men must
want to possess women who embody it.”
Even as I am saying it, I despair because
I wonder how will we ever get rid of this
standard.
Women must want to embody it, women universally
must want to embody beauty of the universal
kind and men must want to possess women who
embody it.
And this comes up again and again and again
where celebrity men are asked about the women
they are married to, “how does it feel to
be married to the most beautiful woman in
the world?”
The question itself is such a leading endorsement
of this beauty standard.
“This embodiment is an imperative for women
and not for men, which situation is necessary
and natural because it is biological, sexual,
and evolutionary.
Strong men battle for beautiful women, and
beautiful women are more reproductively successful,”
as if this is a natural given in society.
Are you able to make the connection between
Simone de Beauvoir’s text and Naomi Wolf's
contention of this kind of beauty myth?
Because she is talking about the building
blocks of myth-making.
It is biological, it is sexual, it is evolutionary.
Of course, it is a given, beautiful women
give birth to better looking children who
have better chances in the world or some such
myth.
“Strong men battle for beautiful women,
beautiful women are more reproductively successful.
Women's beauty must correlate to their fertility,
and since this system is based on sexual selection,
like in some kind of mythical animal kingdom,
it is inevitable, and changeless.”
Wolf goes on to say, “None of this is true.
Beauty is a currency system like the gold
standard.
Like any economy, it is determined by politics,
and in the modern age in the West it is the
last, best belief system that keeps male dominance
intact.”
There is her argument.
She argues that the kind of myth-making around
beauty is merely a kind of weapon meant to
keep male dominance intact and it is justified
through these kinds of arguments about nature.
“In assigning value to women in a vertical
hierarchy according to a culturally imposed
physical standard, it is an expression of
power relations in which women must unnaturally
compete for resources that men have appropriated
for themselves.”
Here is a completely different story of beauty
that Wolf is constructing for us.
In this world, where men have appropriated
resources for themselves, how is it that women
are allowed to compete?
They are allowed to compete for these resources
by competing for the men through attributes
that they have no control over, such as the
beauty myth.
The beauty myth in Wolf’s understanding
is a culturally imposed physical standard.
And the moment you define beauty like this,
you take away from its seeming inevitability,
its seeming universality, so on and so forth.
“If the beauty myth is not based on evolution,
sex, gender, aesthetics, or God, on what is
it based?
It claims to be about intimacy and sex and
life, a celebration of women.
It is actually composed of emotional distance,
politics, finance, and sexual repression.
The beauty myth is not about women at all.
It is about men's institutions and institutional
power.”
And after making this argument, Wolf goes
on to elaborate.
“The beauty myth is actually always prescribing
behaviour and not appearance.
Competition between women has been made part
of the myth so that women will be divided
from one another.
Youth, and until recently, virginity have
been beautiful in women since they stand for
experiential and sexual ignorance.
Aging in women is unbeautiful since women
grow more powerful with time, and since the
links between generations of women must always
be newly broken.
Older women fear young ones, young women fear
old, and the beauty myth truncates for all
the female life span.
Most urgently, women's identity must be premised
upon our beauty so that we will remain vulnerable
to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive
organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.”
Look how damning this argument is.
Does any of this make common sensical meaning
to you?
Look what she is saying, aging in women is
unbeautiful.
The aging woman is not a beautiful entity
in society.
She has lost the one currency that makes her
desirable to men, and since men are the ones
that have power, she no longer has access
to power.
At the same time, you want to be able to divide
up women into different communities.
So beauty becomes the currency through which
they compete with one another.
Older women fear young ones, young women fear
old, the beauty myth truncates for all the
female life span.
It truncates possibilities of being anything
besides a contender in this beauty contest.
Most urgently, women's identity must be premised
upon our beauty, beautiful or not, good looking
or not, so that we will remain vulnerable
to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive
organ of self-esteem, exposed to the air.
Our identities will always be dependent upon
being identified by somebody else as worthy
of the beauty market.
Another interesting point that Wolf then goes
on to make is to say that “(m)ost of our
assumptions about the way women have always
thought about beauty date from no earlier
than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity
was first consolidated and the beauty index
invented.”
Now this might seem strange to people.
Surely even before that time, there were ideas
of beautiful women but that is precisely what
Wolf is trying to say.
The universal standard of beauty in any time
and place is not universal.
It changed over time, it was meant to do different
things.
Beauty as such in any time and age, might
have operated in exactly the same fashion,
but our assumptions about beauty are very
modern.
And this is why you see different standards
of beauty even in the current moment across
the world.
However, they all seem to conform to particular
kinds of stereotypes about physical appearance
and the female body.
“For the first time, new technologies could
reproduce in fashion plates, daguerreotypes,
tintypes, rotogravures; images of how women
should look.
In the 1840s the first nude photographs of
prostitutes were taken; advertisements using
images of beautiful women first appeared in
mid-century.
Copies of classical artworks, postcards of
society beauties and royal mistresses, Currier
and Ives prints, and porcelain figurines flooded
the separate sphere to which middle-class
women were confined.”
These were clues, these were suggestions for
middle-class women confined to homes in the
new cult of domesticity, that this is what
you have to strive to become; these work prescriptions
for beauty practices.
“The resulting hallucination materializes,
for women, as something all too real.
No longer just an idea, it becomes three-dimensional,
incorporating within itself how women live
and how they do not live.
It becomes the Iron Maiden.
The original Iron Maiden was a medieval German
instrument of torture, a body-shaped casket
painted with the limbs and features of a lovely,
smiling, young woman.
The unlucky victim was slowly enclosed inside
her; the lid fell shut to immobilize the victim,
who died either of starvation or, less cruelly
of the metal spikes imbedded in her interior.
The modern hallucination in which women are
trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid,
cruel, and euphemistically painted.
Contemporary culture directs attention to
imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring
real women's faces and bodies.”
And this is all too familiar to us right now.
In fact, also familiar, our advertising campaigns
which claim to show real women, even they
seem to have suspiciously unattainable standards
of beauty that are still meant to be, standards
to be achieved, that are still meant to be
something out of the reach of everyday women
in the world.
Let me show you a few examples, even though
I know you are surrounded by these pretty
much everywhere.
Think, for example, of a very, very standard
Google search.
List of the 10 most beautiful women in the
world, rank and rank.
Think already of how this kind of competition
is now blatantly out in the world where we
are surrounded by images of beauty, we are
given rankings, we are given competitive enticement
to say who is it that is most beautiful?
People are even jubilant, oh, an Indian woman
has made the list as opposed to a British
woman.
There are all sorts of strange discourses
floating around that only seemed to emphasize
exactly what Wolf is arguing.
Think also of covers of fashion magazines,
which are some of my most favourite places
to apply analysis.
Cosmopolitan, Alia Bhatt, Radhika Apte; two
completely different kinds of actors who are
now on the covers of magazines speaking about
the big beauty issue, your fashion edit, new
flirting strategy, genius dating trick that
is in your wardrobe.
Also check this out, Alia Bhatt on sudden
success, working with Karan Johar, and having
to lose 16 kilos.
I will not say much about what these beauty
standards are about, but clearly the idea
of thinness, the idea of light skin, the idea
of fashion, all of these are part of this
complex that we seem to intuitively understand
as beauty.
Wolf continues, when the beauty myth was analysed
in the early nineties, and this is from a
new introduction to a new edition.
She says, “The ideal was, as I have noted,
quite rigid.
Older women's faces will almost never portrayed
in magazines, and if they were, they had to
be airbrushed to look younger.
Women of colour were seldom shown as role
models unless they had, like Beverly Johnson,
virtually Caucasian features.
Now, there is much more pluralism in the myth;”
And this is a nice turn of phrase, ‘more
pluralism in the myth’.
“It is now, one can almost say, many beauty
myths.
A seventeen-year-old African American model,
with African features and dark skin, is reported
in the New York Times as being the face of
the moment.
In the same vein, Benetton ads feature models
in a rainbow of skin hues and with a myriad
of racial and ethnic features.
A fiftyish Cybill Shepherd is a cover girl,
and adored plus-size model Emme hosts E’s
Fashion Emergency.
Women of colour feel freer to wear traditional
ethnic hairstyles and clothing in professional
settings, and the straightening comb is not
the obligatory burden it was in the early
nineties.
Even Barbie has been redesigned with a more
realistic body type and now comes in many
colours.
Looking around, there is a bit more room today
to be oneself.”
And yet these two are at odds with one another,
there is pluralism in the myth, one can be
oneself.
I want you to pay attention to the ways in
which the body moves through these discourses.
In one set of arguments as Wolf argues, there
seems to be no escape, that there can be only
one universal standard of beauty that is floating
around as a myth that we need to all aspire
to.
At the other end, Wolf is now claiming that
with this pluralism, we can now be oneself.
However, I still urge you to ask the question,
what are the ways in which body and beauty
are still entangled in some kind of irrevocable
hole that exerts pressure on the female body?
And what would feminist theory have to say
about it?
I also want to speak a little bit about the
ways in which what Wolf is speaking about:
feeling freer to wear traditional ethnic hairstyles,
not needing the straightening comb.
In other words, owning heritage, owning tradition,
having multiplicity of race and other kinds
of features, are part of this plurality in
beauty.
Let me take you through an important case
study.
This, as people might well know, is Kim Kardashian.
Kim Kardashian’s iconic image on the cover
of Paper, reminded many of the iconic drawing
of Saartjie Baartman.
Saartjie Baartman’s story is very, very
familiar to readers of feminist theory.
And let me read to you an excerpt from an
article on Saartjie Baartman and Kim Kardashian
titled “Kim Kardashian’s Nude Photos and
Saartjie’s Choice: History's problem with
Fascinating Bodies” by Jordyn Blaise in
Time Magazine, November 14th, 2014.
So the link is available for those who want
to go read the entire article.
But the article speaks about how Saartjie
Baartman was a colonized body or the body
of a woman who was paraded throughout Europe
as the Hottentot Venus, as a freak body.
Unnatural, freakish African body who was paraded
through Europe as a freak show, and how she
signified the greatest sort of most egregious,
immoral excesses of European colonialism inflicted
on racialized female bodies.
What does it say then?
That Kim Kardashian body mimics it for purposes
of capitalist consumption.
I am not going to offer you an analysis, I
just thought it was something important to
show you in order for you to see how complicated
this idea of plurality in beauty can also
be.
The other kind of body that I want to move
on to, to sort of segue from this understanding
of Kim Kardashian is something that I think
will be well introduced through the idea of
cosmetic surgery, which is such a raging feminist
issue.
Should women have the right to modify their
bodies given the availability of technology
in order to conform to beauty myths?
Does it give them more power and more currency
in a system that is any way rigged against
them?
Or does it signify to us the capitulation,
the increasing capitulation of certain kinds
of privileged women to these beauty myths,
thereby producing for the public standards
that others will never be able to meet?
In other words, are they rigging the system
further?
But cosmetic surgeries also then are on the
fine line between the beautiful body and the
medicalized body.
What do we mean by the medicalized body?
Since the second half of the nineteenth century,
there has been a focus on women's bodies as
problems.
We already gestured to this a little bit in
relation to the Contagious Diseases Act, but
the focus on demographics, as we mentioned
early, and hence reproduction also brought
about a renewed focus on motherhood, contraception,
eugenics, reproductive processes, sexuality,
and the endocrine system.
In other words, all the ways in which the
female body was considered to be radically
different than the male body.
Remember the dyad that Simone de Beauvoir
suggests, think about the medicalized body
as precisely occupying that dyad, where there
is a fetishized attention that is given to
reproduction, sexuality, and the endocrine
system, which are so different than men's
bodies, that they must be controlled, or they
must be medicalized or treated as diseases.
I want to read to you from a document online
titled, “The Medicalization of Women”
by Sybil Shainwald, who is a Women's Health
Advocate.
Now the reason why I wanted to pick from a
non-academic source is to also speak to you
about the ways in which others are concerned
about this state of women's health and the
medicalization of women's bodies.
Shainwald says, “According to the Western
medical model, premenstrual syndrome is a
disease, menstruation is a disease, pregnancy
is a disease, childbirth is a disease, and
menopause is a disease.
From this model, I have reached the conclusion
that being a woman is a disease.”
I have just put down for you some excerpts
from this address, and here is the link in
case you want to go and read it in its entirety.
“Another phenomenon of modern medicine is
the medicalization of mood variations in the
menstrual cycle.
There is no doubt that fluctuations in hormone
levels can influence mood and behaviour.
However, it would appear that men's peaks
and valleys of mood and impulsivity are similar
to those of women; but they are simply not
cyclical.
At some more or less arbitrary point, a function,
mood, or behaviour becomes a disease.
Since hormones do affect mood and behaviour,
there are probably some individuals whom they
affect more intensely than others.”
Here Shainwald is disaggregating hormones
as merely the property of women and locating
them in bodies’ writ large.
And she's saying, “Given how there seems
to be broad cultural agreement about women's
moodiness before menstruation,” how is it
that we try and understand this in relation
to women's bodies?
And by emphasizing that hormones affect some
more intensely than others, she is removing
it as the exclusive property of women.
She is also arguing additionally, that of
course men also have moods, just not cyclically,
men's bodies are not affected in the same
fashion, but moodiness is clearly a problem
of the human population, except because it
is not identified in relation to bodily properties,
it is considered to be a personality quirk
and never marked.
So lo and behold, again, you have unmarked
behaviour in men, as opposed to clearly marked
behaviour in women that is treated as a disease.
“The effects of “male” hormones.
Most or all hormones are found in both sexes,
though in different quantities and proportions
-- are much less studied and attended to.
There is probably a causal link between surges
in testosterone in adolescent boys and their
tendency to have motor vehicle collisions,
but attempts to modulate testosterone would
be experienced as castrating, and the very
idea rouses terror and indignation.
The treatment of premenstrual syndrome or
premenstrual dysphoric disorder, in contrast,
is a growth industry.”
So interesting!
So you have the idea of male and female hormones,
except in one it is PMS, whereas in the other,
via testosterone, it is merely maleness.
And this is what the author is trying to emphasize
for us.
Additionally adding that the treatment of
this disorder is a growth industry.
There are increasing calls for medication
to regulate women's moods premenstrual onset.
However, she is asking why is there no medication
to regulate testosterone, normally in everyday
lives in the ways in which it can be studied
to establish a link between motor vehicle
collisions in adolescent boys and testosterone
levels.
And she is suggesting that should this be
the case, it would be experienced as castrating,
because it would hit at the heart of maleness.
“Premenstrual syndrome,” she continues,
“is perhaps the only psychological disorder
that boasts more claimants than suffers.
When women self-referred for premenstrual
symptoms are required to keep prospective
daily ratings of the symptoms, and then compare
them with the menstrual cycles, most prove
to have symptoms completely unrelated to hormonal
status.”
In other words, she is saying that premenstrual
symptom or premenstrual syndrome has become
such a culturally accepted understanding of
women's bodies by women themselves, that often,
even with lack of evidence at having any kind
of relationality to hormonal levels, you still
feel it.
She is extending for us our understanding
of Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion, that
one is not born, but becomes a woman.
“It is unacceptable, and, for some women,
dangerous, to express justifiable feelings
of irritation or anger in our society, they
feel “not themselves” when such feelings
do manifest.
Sometimes it is easier; and more acceptable
to their male partners and employers, to blame
these episodes on their hormones.”
There is another binary that is also being
re-established in the process, which is the
one of reason versus emotion.
Emotional women are premenstrual, it is a
condition, it is not something that is natural.
This is another level of binary formation
between rational man and irrational premenstrual
woman.
From this analysis of PMS or premenstrual
syndrome in reproductive bodies, Shainwald
then goes on to offer an analysis of the aging
body or its direct opposite, which is the
menopausal body.
She says, “Menopause is described in medical
literature as “the death of the woman in
the woman.”
How does it happen that the natural occurrence
in life drives us to the doctor's office in
such numbers?”
And tracing the history of menopause, she
speaks about how “[n]ot all nineteeth-century
physicians shared their peers’ negative
views of menopause.
One trend-breaker dared to refer to menopause
as “a period of increased vigor, optimism
and even of physical beauty.”
“Another physician publicly criticized his
medical colleagues,…” and he said he had
“yet to see a woman was made better in health
by the removal of her ovaries.”
In other words, doctors arguing for the prolonging
of women's sexual and reproductive health,
or rather the prolonging of the existence
of organs that signalled that this body is
still a reproductive sexual, healthy female
body.
“By the middle of the twentieth century,
the medical profession switched from looking
upon menopause as the cause of disease and
began to think of it as a disease itself,
a deficiency disease.
This gave doctors the exclusive right to diagnose
menopause and to treat its symptoms with estrogen,
the hormone women was said to be lacking.”
Again, estrogen then becomes the bodily quality
that signifies woman in very, very specific
material terms.
So the location of body then moves from beauty,
or the outward body, to the endocrine system.
“Estrogen was first prescribed for menopausal
symptoms in the 1930s.
It could be taken as a pill, administered
via injection, applied directly to the vagina
as a cream, or even taken as a “pleasant-tasting
cordial,” - 14% alcohol.
But in 1947, an alarming report revealed that
estrogen therapy could seriously disturb the
endometria, thickening the uterine tissue
and ultimately causing cancer.”
Pay attention, the year is 1947 that this
report comes out.
“By 1966, however, these warnings had not
been disseminated.
In Forever Feminine, gynecologist, Dr. Robert
Wilson trumpeted estrogen therapy as an elixir
of youth to protect women from the “living
decay” of menopause.
He declared that estrogen could cure nervousness,
crying spells, memory loss, chronic indigestion,
aching joints, neuroses, and even suicidal
thoughts.
In addition to making his book a best-seller,
these claims also fuelled skyrocketing sales
of estrogen, from dollar 20 million before
1966 to dollar 83 million in 1975.
Not surprisingly, Wilson had received money
from the drug companies for conducting his
so-called “research.”
What does this tell you?
And at some point of time, this was banned,
at some point of time these results were made
public, but not until they had already, they
had already done reasonable amounts of harm
in relation to women's bodies.
But what does this tell you?
It tells you that the beauty myth, this plurality
of the beauty myth also operates at different
levels of what constitutes a suitable female
body.
“Women's bodies, in other words, are constantly
manipulated, fragmented, employed, and raided
in ways altogether different from men's bodies.”
Cosmetic surgeries are only the tip of the
iceberg and they continue in relation to reproduction,
IVF, surrogacy, eggs for surrogate exchange,
so on and so forth.
Medical Science is replete with these examples
of, on the one hand, wanting to prolong women's
youth and beauty, and on the other hand, completely
ignoring symptoms such as period pain, endometriosis,
ways in which women's pain is constantly devalued
as not being something that they are adequately
able to handle, as opposed to investigating
women's bodies in their particularities.
This is why the medicalized body is an important
aspect of study for feminist theory.
Now, between the body possessing beauty and
the medicalized body, we are moving between
two kinds of analysis.
One kind of analysis is about deconstructing
or breaking down what is it that counts as
a female body and then going on to understand
what are the ways in which it is both visible
and not visible in our day to day understanding
of life as we know it.
To this extent, I want to pay brief attention
to this question of women's bodies as valid
bodies in public space.
And this text we had brought up before in
relation to our discussion of space called
why loiter, which is by Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa
Ranade ,and Sameera Khan.
And I want to read you a brief excerpt of
the argument the authors are making as to
why loitering is important.
“In a relative sense the female body, located
properly in the private space of the home,
has the greatest potential to disrupt the
structures of power in public space.”
Here, the authors are making a case for body
quo body, as body is being identified as female
to be visible in public space.
“The bubble of private respectability that
women are expected to cloak themselves in
cannot withstand the act of loitering because
the two are based on contradictory imperatives.
The former, one of maintaining privacy even
in the public and the latter, that of taking
pleasure in the public for its own sake.
The presence of the loitering female body
can then challenge the hegemonic discourse
of gendered public space by reconstructing
the connotative chains of association that
connect loitering, respectability and normative
femininity.
This has the capacity to create a new set
of relationships within and with public space
through the ensemble of practices associated
with women; relationships, which have the
power to not just disrupt the dominant order
in public space but to have a more long-term
impact on how space itself is visualized.”
Now the thrust of the author's attentions
are to gendered public space, but I think
here, we are looking at a different kind of
body, which is also one that is material and
present, and legible, and visible, which by
its very being there changes the dynamics
of public space.
At the same time, this body also interrupts
the norms of normative femininity by loitering,
by just being out in public space, doing nothing,
not being the busy female body that is always
rushing from one space of safety to another,
but merely being a female body in public space.
And from this kind of resolute transgression,
let me move to the last kind of body I would
like to discuss today, which is the living,
legible body on another register.
Here, I want to read to you a little bit from
a pretty interesting book called, Invisible
Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed
for men.
Here, the author Caroline Criado Perez speaks
about the dangers caused by virtue of the
male body being the universal standard.
So an actual material invisibilizing of women
and women's data.
I am reading to you from a review of the book,
which I would encourage you to pick up and
read for your own understanding and your own
analysis.
Elaine Glaser who reviewed the book says,
“It is a smart strategy, therefore, to invite
readers to view this timeworn topic through
the revealing lens of data, bringing to light
the hidden places where inequality still resides.
Criado Perez has assembled a cornucopia of
statistics from how blind auditions have increased
the proportion of female players hired by
orchestras to nearly 50 percent.
Why women take up to 2.3 times as long as
men to use the toilet, most offices, we learn,
are five degrees too cold for women because
the formula to determine their temperature
was developed in the 1960s based on the metabolic
resting rate of a 40-year-old, 70 kg man.
This is a man's world, we learn, because those
who built it did not take gender differences
into account.
Women's metabolisms are slower and therefore,
they are always feeling too cold.
Women in Britain are 50 percent more likely
to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack.
Heart failure trials generally use male participants.
Cars are designed around the body of Reference
Man, so although men are more likely to crash,
women involved in collisions are nearly 50
percent more likely to be seriously hurt.”
Look at the kind of body that appears and
disappears in these sets of observations.
Blind auditions increase the proportion of
female players, meaning people evaluate female
players differently once they know that they
are male or female, so you need the female
body to disappear.
Offices are five degrees too cold for women,
meaning that when you are testing, forming
a universal standard, you need women's bodies
to be present, and included, and valid.
And all of these will outline to you the very
real consequences of life and death, as far
as women's lives in the world are concerned.
This brings us to the end of a broad set of
discussions around bodies in feminist theory,
I will add that I have not covered everything;
this is only a smattering of things in feminist
theory to give you an idea of why the body
matters and what are the ways in which it
can be analysed.
I would encourage you to take it further and
perform other kinds of analysis in relation
to the things that interest you, to see how,
a) women are included or excluded from certain
understandings of the world, and b) to denaturalize
your assumptions of what a woman's body should
be like or indeed, what gendered bodies look
like in common understanding.
In summary, today, we looked at the body in
feminist theory and read from The Second Sex,
in order to try and understand feminist theory’s
assertion that a woman is not born, but made.
We looked at particular forms of bodies, the
beautiful body but also the workings of race
in relation to beauty; the medicalized body;
and the living, legible body, both in terms
of visibility and legibility in public space,
and in relation to the data sciences.
In relation to where to from here, let us
explore that closer to the end of the course
where we bring it all together through learnings
and conclusions.
So, until next week, please go through all
of these case studies and ideas and see how
is it that you can deepen your own understanding
of the feminist body in feminist theory.
Until then...
