Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (42 page)

Assessing Butler's work is more complicated, for it has a dual identity. With her keen feminist understanding of how historically normalizing and defining the institutions of phallocentrism and heterosexism are, Butler is strongly attuned to the social world that her parodic bodily "texts" (they are people, after all, not literature) live in. The Derridean/Foucauldian agenda of
Gender Trouble,
however, leads in another direction. Butler's texts become signifiers without context, and her analysis begins to exhibit along with McClary's a characteristically postmodern inclination to emphasize and celebrate resistance, the creative agency of individuals, and the instabilities of current powerrelations rather than their recuperative tendencies.

What is wrong with such a celebration? I want to point to several problems here. Let me first acknowledge, however, that no culture

is static or seamless. Resistance and transformation are indeed continual and creative, and subversive responses are possible under even the most oppressive circumstances. This all seems obvious from history. What Foucault himself recognized and his more postmodern followers sometimes forget is that resistance and transformation
are
historical processes. Instead, intoxicated with the interpretive and creative
possibilities
of cultural analysis, they neglect to ask themselves what is actually going on in the culture around them. Here, the influence of deconstructionism is apparent. I agree with Foucault that where there is power there is also resistance. For Foucault this was a statement of social dynamics, not a formula for reading texts. Analyses and interpretations that go against the grain of dominant readings of literature are powerful to the degree that they excite the intellect and imagination of the reader; the actuality and effectiveness of social resistance, however, can be determined only by examining historical situations. These vary, and therefore so too does the degree to which resistance can legitimately be emphasized in cultural analysis. Failure to recognize this can result in theorizing potentially subversive but still highly culturally contained forms of subjectivity as though they were on an equal footing with historically dominant forms, romanticizing the degree of cultural challenge that is occurring, and thus diverting focus from continued patterns of exclusion, subordination, normalization.

Here, I will shift focus from
Gender Trouble
to consider resistance in the context of other issues raised throughout this book. Just how helpful, for example, is an emphasis on creative agency in describing the relation of women and their bodies to the image industry of postindustrial capitalism, a context in which addictive bingeing and purging, exercise compulsions, and "polysurgical addictions" are flourishing? Do we have a multimilliondollar industry in corrective surgery because people are asserting their racial and ethnic identities in resistance to prevailing norms, or because they are so vulnerable to the power of those norms? My own resistance to being swept up in a celebratory postmodernism is due, in part, to the fact that the particular powerterrain I have been examining in this book does not offer much cause for celebration.

Admittedly, relentlessly focusing on cultural normalization can be depressing. It is exciting and hopeinspiring to believe, rather, that "resistance is everywhere." Moreover, as I have discovered

from the many presentations I have given about our contemporary obsessions with slenderness, youth, and physical perfection, people may feel deeply threatened when their own behaviors are situated within normalizing cultures. They want, understandably, to be able to pursue happiness on the terms of the culture they live in (terms to which we all submit to one degree or another in various areas of our lives). But they also want to feel that they are self determining agents, and some want to be reassured that their choices are "politically correct," as well. It thus becomes very important that they believe their own choices to be individual, freely motivated, "for themselves." Consider, for example, the way seventeenyearold actress Sara Gilbert describes her decision to have her nose "fixed," shortly after her television mom Roseanne Arnold had hers done (because it was too wide, as she told Oprah Winfrey!): "I think it's important to be attractive to yourself. Your body just kind of gets in the way of what you try to do. So if you're concentrating that much energy on your body, then just change it so you can move on and deal with the intellectual."
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Actually, Gilbert's is a pretty reasonable argument. What is lurking unexpressed, however, is acknowledgment of the cultural norms which made Gilbert feel unattractive with the nose she had, as well as the cultural premium on looks which had her "concentrating" on her body all the time. Such elements, as we have seen in this book, are continually mystified in commercial constructions of body alteration as selfdetermination and creative selffashioning. ("The body you have is the body you inherited, but you must decide what to do with it," instructs Nike, offering glamorous shots of lean, muscled athletes to help us "decide.") Some of these ads go so far as to present the normalized body as the body of cultural resistance. "I Believe" is the theme of a recent series of Reebok commercials, each of which features muscled, energetic women declaring their feminist rebellion as they exercise: ''I believe that babe is a fourletter word," "I believe in baying at the moon," "I believe that sweat
is
sexy." The last declaration—which "answers" the man in a "Secret" deodorant commercial who claims that "a woman just isn't sexy when she sweats"—not only rebels against gender ideology but suggests resistance to the world of commercials itself (nice trick for a commercial!).

Figures 54 and 55 present magazine advertisements from the "I Believe" series. In each, a lean, highly toned, and stylishly attractive young exerciser declares her invulnerability to traditional insecurities of women, resistance to gender expectations, and confidence in her own power of selfdetermination. "I believe a man who wants something soft and cuddly to hold should buy a teddy bear" reads the copy in Figure 54. The suggestion is that this woman's own desire to be hard and ripped, rather than her need to appeal to men, has determined the type of body she is working out to achieve. The man who doesn't like it can look somewhere else for someone to hold, she implies. But just how many men in 1992—at least of this young woman's generation—find the ''soft and cuddly" an erotic or aesthetic ideal? My male students (as well as my female students) almost literally swooned over Linda Hamilton's fierce expression and taut body in
Terminator II.
By creating the impression that Sandra Dee is still what men want,
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Reebok is able to identify its product with female resistance to cultural norms of beauty while actually reinforcing those norms.

The copy in Figure 55 reads: "I believe if you look at yourself and see what is right instead of what is wrong, that is the true mark of a healthy individual." Now, those convinced that "resistance is everywhere" might see this ad (along with the one discussed above) as offering a transgressive, subversive model of femininity: a woman who is strong, fit, and (unlike most women)
not
insecure about her body. What this reading neglects is that we have a visual message here as well: the model's body
itself—probably
the most potent "representation" in the ad—is precisely the sort of perfected icon that women compare themselves to and of course see "what is wrong." The ad thus puts "real" women in a painful double bind. On the one hand, it encourages them to view themselves as defective; on the other hand, it chastises them for their insecurities. The offered resolution to this bind, of course, is to buy Reebok and become like the woman in the ad.

One might argue that an adequate analysis of advertisements such as those I have been discussing would take into account both their resistant elements and their normalizing messages. This is an appealingly postmodern solution, which acknowledges the heterogeneous and unstable meanings of the texts. (After all, as was

Image has been removed. No rights.

discussed in the introduction to this book, weighttraining and exercise often do have socially empowering results for women.) I have no problem granting this, so long as the normalizing thrust of these ads visàvis the politics of appearance is not obscured. We need to recognize, in connection with this, that the most obvious symbols of resistance in these ads are included by advertisers in the profoundest of cynical bad faith; they pretend to reject the sexualization of women ("I believe that 'babe' is

a fourletter word") and value female assertiveness ("Coloring my hair with Nice and Easy made me feel more powerful!") while attempting to convince women who
fail
to embody dominant ideals of (slender, youthful) beauty that they need to bring themselves into line. To resist
this
normalizing directive is
truly
to go against the grain of our culture, not merely in textual "play," but at great personal risk—as the many women who have been sexually rejected for being ''too fat" and fired from their jobs for looking "too old" know all too well. Sub

Image has been removed. No rights.

version of dominant cultural forms, as bell hooks has said, "happens much more easily in the realm of 'texts' than in the world of human interaction in which such moves challenge, disrupt, threaten, where repression is real."
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The pleasure and power of "difference," I would once again insist against postmodern theorists, is hardwon; it does not bloom freely, insistently nudging its way through the cracks of dominant forms. Sexism, heterosexism, racism, and ageism, while they do not determine human values and choices, while they do not deprive us of agency, remain strongly normalizing within our culture. The commercial texts that I have been examining, in contrast, participate in the illusion (which they share with other postmodern texts) that our "differences" are already flourishing in the culture as it is, that we are already selfdetermining, already empowered to look in the mirror and see what is right instead of what is wrong. The fact is, we are
not
empowered in this way by our culture; indeed, we are

continually being taught to see the body that reflects back to us in exactly the opposite way—as wrong, defective, "a caricature, a swollen shadow, a stupid clown" (to invoke some phrases from the poem with which I opened this book). To begin to see differently requires, in the nineties even more than in the sixties, that people come together and explore what the culture continually presents to them as their individual choices (or—as in the case of anorexia and bulimia—their "pathology") as instead culturally situated and culturally shared. Such acknowledgment, to my mind, must remain central to a feminist politics of the body.

Portions of this essay grew out of a talk, entitled "Feminism Reconceives the Body," that I delivered for the Women's Studies Inaugural Lecture Series at Bates College. I thank Edward Lee for invaluable comments, suggestions, and encouragement throughout the process of writing this introduction.

1. For elaboration, see Susan Bordo,
   The Flight to Objectivity
   (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
   

2. At first glance it may seem as though in our culture the body, far from being imagined as a drag on selfrealization, is promoted as a central route
   to
   such self realization. Certainly, the training, toning, slimming, and sculpting of the body are frequently depicted in this way: as a current Bally Fitness Center commercial insists, "You don't just shape your body. You shape your life." However, as I argue in several essays in this collection, such images and associations are actually an appeal to the
   will
   (to "will power" and "control") and encourage an adversarial relationship to the body.
   

3. Simone de Beauvoir,
   The Second Sex
   (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 146.
   

4. Dorothy Dinnerstein,
   The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
   (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 133.
   

5. Timothy Beneke,
   Men on Rape: What They Have to Say About Sexual Violence
   (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), p. 43 (emphasis in original).
   

6. My quotation marks indicate my view that not only the ideology but also the very concept of "race" is a cultural construction. From this point on in the book, however, I will omit the quotation marks. I will also frequently employ the racial constructions "black" and "white" (rather than ethnic or national designations of identity), despite their problematic nature. For example, when describing the content of racist ideology, ethnic or national descriptions would be incorrect and misleading. The racial categorization of human beings is a racist invention, but it is an invention that has shaped and bent human history and experience; racial terms are still necessary, in order to describe that experience accurately.
   

7. Quoted in Sander Gilman,
   Difference and Pathology
   (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 85.
   

1. Beverly GuySheftall, "The Body Politic: Black Women and Sexuality," talk given at Bates College,
   1991.
   

2. For discussions of the specific themes mentioned in this introduction concerning the treatment of African American women under slavery, see especially Angela Davis,
   Women, Race, and Class
   (New York: Vintage, 1983), and Barbara Omolade, "Hearts of Darkness," in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds.,
   Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality
   (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).
   

3. Aristotle,
   The Basic Works of Aristotle,
   ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941),
   On the Generation of Animals,
   trans. Arthur Platt, 729a 2530, p. 676.
   

4. Hegel,
   The Philosophy of Right,
   trans. with notes by T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 26364.
   

5. Alan Guttmacher,
   Pregnancy, Birth, and Family Planning,
   rev. ed. (New York: Signet, 1987), pp. 2022.
   

6. See, for example, Catharine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., issue called "Sexuality and the Social Body in the Nineteenth Century,"
   Representations 14
   (Spring 1986); Sander Gilman, "AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease,"
   October
   43 (Winter 1987): 87108; Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds.,
   Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science
   (New York: Routledge, 1990); Kathleen Kete,
   "La Rage
   and the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Context of Rabies in the French Nineteenth Century,"
   Representations
   22 (Spring 1988): 89107; Thomas Laqueur,
   Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
   (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Emily Martin,
   The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction
   (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Margaret Miles,
   Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West
   (Boston: Beacon, 1989); Susan Suleiman, ed.,
   The Female Body in Western Culture
   (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Simon Watney, "Aids, 'Africa,' and Race,"
   Differences
   (Winter 1989): 8386.
   

7. Don Hanlon Johnson, "The Body: Which One? Whose?"
   Whole Earth Review
   (Summer 1989): 48.
   

8. Linda Zirelli, "Rememoration or War? French Feminist Narrative and the Politics of SelfRepresentation,"
   Differences
   (Spring 1991): 23.
   

9. Michel Foucault,
   Discipline and Punish
   (New York: Vintage, 1979);
   The History of Sexuality.
   Vol. 1:
   An Introduction
   (New York: Vintage, 1980).
   

10. Mary Wollstonecraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," in Alice Rossi, ed.,
    The Feminist Papers
    (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 55 57.
    

11. Reproduced in Nancy Cott,
    The Grounding of Modern Feminism
    (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 12.
    

12. Pat Mainardi, "The Politics of Housework," in Robin Morgan, ed.,
    Sisterhood Is Powerful
    (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 44754.
    

13. Williamette Bridge Liberation News Service, "Exercises for Men,"
    The Radical Therapist
    (Dec.Jan. 1971).