What’s Wrong with Women’s Bodies?

“Normative femininity is coming more and more to be centered on woman’s body—not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and appearance.”

~ Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 80)

Two weeks ago, we began Part 2 of our course, “’Act Like a Lady:’ Constructing Femininity.” We read about and discussed the social institutions and cultural structures that not only create and reinforce GENDER roles and the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM, but also ensure that we each learn do to “do,” or “perform,” the GENDER that is “appropriate” for our biological sex. A male child is expected to become MASCULINE and to “be a man,” while a female child is expected to become FEMININE and to “act like a lady.”

As you read about last week in Weitz’s article on the history of women’s bodies as constructed by Western law and medical science, the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM is based on the “natural” (i.e., BIOLOGICALLY DETERMINED) notion that women are mentally and physically deficient, that they are, quite literally, inferior mutations of men. This was scientific “fact” for hundreds of years, and it was based on the best knowledge that scientists and philosophers had for their time(s). There’s an entire course on this here at MRU called “The History of Sexuality,” and it’s offered through the Humanities Department. But for those of you interested in a crash course right now, check out “A History of Male and Female Genitalia”[K1]  from The Body Project at Stanford University.

The scientific “fact” that women were the result of scientific mutations and “abnormal” deviations that resulted in their biological and psychological inferiority to the “normal” male body was used to justify lots of things, including: why women shouldn’t attend school or university, why they shouldn’t be active in politics, why they are “naturally” better homemakers and caregivers, and so forth. But—and here’s the good news—it also proves that science is, itself, a social construction. As I mentioned in class last week, this concept, although mind boggling (because we have all been taught that science equals “fact” and “truth”) will become increasingly important as we progress in the semester, so start to understand it now.

For the time being, however, we’re working on learning how femininity is constructed (learning about the construction of masculinity will commence in a few weeks). We started this process last week by reading about the politics of sexuality via an examination of girls’ ways of dealing (or not) with menstruation and sexual desire. These biological occurrences are conceptualized in our patriarchal society in largely negative terms, which has huge consequences for girls’ sense of themselves and their bodies as they mature into women and attempt to meet socio-cultural expectations of femininity.

This week, our focus is on the ways in which women’s bodies, which are never quite right, are DISCIPLINED to conform to mainstream social expectations of their appearance and behavior.

Administrative Stuff

But before I say any more about that, I want to remind you of a few administrative things:

• For details about your reading assignment for this Thursday’s class, please check the announcement on Bb and/or your e-mail for the details.

• For some of you, taking a course that meets only once per week may be proving a challenge. Maybe you’re having a hard time remembering what we’re doing from week to week, or perhaps you’re trying to figure out how you can connect one week to the next. This is where you should be using all the strategies and tools provided on the blog to help you read and prepare for class. Remember to read my weekly blog post, use the Weekly Reading Worksheet to guide you as you read, and utilize the handout entitled “Preparing for Class and Creating Study Notes.” And, of course, don’t hesitate to come by during my office hours if ever you have questions or concerns about anything.

All that being said, let’s get down to business.

The Politics of Appearance: Disciplining Female Bodies

In her influential article that you read for last week, feminist theorist Sandra Bartky utilizes and then builds on the similarly influential concepts of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. We’re going to run into Foucault again a bit later in the semester, and, in actuality, we’ve already been using many of his theories (with our own feminist twist) to make sense of some of the stuff we’ve been reading and talking about already this semester. But Bartky’s article is the first place his name and concepts show up explicitly, so it’s important to understand a bit about him.

To say that Foucault is famous and hugely influential in our everyday lives is a vast understatement. I just Googled his name and came up with about 5,460,000 results. This is no joke. He’s a big deal. But, as is clear from Bartky’s article, it’s particularly Foucault’s writings on POWER, DISCIPLINED BODIES, and DOCILE BODIES that have most heavily informed feminist and queer theories of the gendered, raced, classes, and sexualized body.  You saw in Bartky how these concepts have helped her to make sense of how and why women internalize social expectations of femininity and then strive to meet those expectations—often at the expense of their own health and well-being. She describes three different but related types of what she calls “disciplinary practices” (79) that women engage in, and we’ll talk specifically about these in class on Thursday. For the record, they are:

1.   Those that aim to produce a body of a particular size and configuration;  
2. Those that bring forth from that body particular gestures, postures, and movements; and 
3. Those that are directed toward the display of the body as an ornamental surface (79).

Like Bartky, feminist sociologists Gagné and McGaughey also use Foucault in their analysis of women’s elective mammoplasty, but they add a little twist by insisting that women make their own choices—albeit within the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM that insists on an appropriately feminine, disciplined body. They argue that POWER and AGENCY should not be understood dualistically (i.e., as if one can only have one or the other); rather, they contend that “power is exercised on women’s bodies even as they exercise it themselves” (193).

Feminist theorists Collins, Guzman and Valdivia and Pitts make similar arguments in their articles when they discuss, respectively, Black women musicians reclaiming the word “bitch,” Latina movie stars working to reappropriate and wield Latinadad stereotypes for their own purposes, and women using extreme body modification to reclaim their own bodily sovereignty. These are just three of the many explicitly self-conscious ways in which some women respond to and negotiate the sexism and misogyny – and racism and classism – of the sex/gender system that constitutes our lives.

One of the most common-sense ways that I’ve come across for understanding the INTERSECTIONALITY of multiple identities to the construction and performance of GENDER is Bornstein’s notion of the GENDER/IDENTITY/POWER PYRAMID. And it all become clear for me when ze argues that if the pyramid were three dimensional, one side could be gender, another could be race, another class, yet the top of the pyramid would remain the same (46). Check it out; the theoretical concept of INTERSECTIONALITY will becomes increasingly clear! And according to Bornstein, “[t]he point is that as soon as we fall awar to any degree from the established, privileged nomrs, we start to become a less-than-perfect gender; our anxiety to attain that perfection and its attendant power increases as we continues to find ourselves short in any of its defined categories” (62). This creates, in the language of Lee via Foucault in her article on menstruation from last week, ANXIOUS BODIES; we all have all this angst about not being “appropriately” gendered, which leads to a range of DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES.

So, this is where we’re heading this week: Into a discussion of the importance of Foucault for feminist theories of the gendered, sexualized (as well as the racialized and classed) body, but also of how Foucault’s theories don’t quite work, because power and agency are fluid, and women make choices about how to best negotiate for themselves the reality of living as part of the sex/gender system that insists on a particularly DISCIPLINED and DOCILE performance of FEMININITY.

Body Projects: Physical Body Modification

In The Waiting Room, feminist playwright Lisa Loomer focuses on three specific types of body modification that have been used to discipline female bodies in three different times and places: foot binding, corset wearing, and cosmetic surgeries, especially breast augmentation. One of the most important questions we’re going to tackle in class this week is “Themes,” Q#5 from Worksheet #3. so make sure you’re definitely using that Worksheet, and maybe even some of last week’s materials, to guide you as you read the play.

Although it is a form of feminist theory, The Waiting Room is relatively straightforward precisely because it is a genre that is meant for a popular (as opposed to an academic) audience; however, there is a bit of background info that I want to be sure you have as you prepare for class.

What’s wrong with Victoria?

The thing to remember about Victoria is that she lives in late nineteenth-century Britain (i.e., the 1800s) and, like Wanda and Forgiveness, is thus constrained by the laws and customs of her time (review Weitz from Week 3).

1.   Her Corset

Victoria’s first and most obvious problem is that she is subject to the fashion of her time and place and high social class, which include not only incredibly heavy dresses made of many layers of silk or satin, but also a tightly-laced CORSET, which she has likely been lacing herself into (or at least having her lady’s maid do it) since she was a young teenager.

A CORSET is/was as article of clothing worn by women to shape or constrict the torso; it is/was a form of body modification intended to force women’s bodies to physically conform to the standards of beauty in a given historical moment. In the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, it flattened the chest and was reinforced with wood. After 1660, it was shaped to enhance the breasts. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was reinforced with metal or whalebone, and changed with the style of dresses.

In Victoria’s time and place, the objective was to create an hour glass figure. As a rite of passage to adult-hood, a girl often began wearing her first corset at the onset of her menstrual cycle. So, from her pre-teen or early teenage years, a girl would be expected to lace a corset underneath all her dresses to emphasize her hour glass figure.

The problem, though, is that girls aren’t done growing at that early age, so their bodies grew in the shape of the corset—which reflected the displacement of their internal organs, ribcage and pelvis as a result of the constrictions of the corset.

Additionally, corsets compressed the liver, pushing part of it upwards against the lungs, and part of it downwards into the abdomen, so that normal breathing was virtually impossible. They also often restricted blood flow to the heart.

So, have you ever wondered about the stereotype of all those fainting women in the 19^th century? They couldn’t breathe, and their heart wasn’t pumping enough blood fast enough to support them because of their corsets.

The corset was abandoned in the 1920s, when loose-fitting, straight clothes came into fashion. In the 1930s, it was replaced by the brassiere and girdle, made of elastic materials.

For a mini-history of the corset, click here . For a feminist take on the whole situation, check out this website .

2.   She’s been diagnosed with HYSTERIA

Health problems related to the corset were often diagnosed by doctors—including Victoria’s husband—in the 19^th century as a women’s medical condition called HYSTERIA. Hysteria was characterized by frequent fainting and emotional excitability. In Victoria’s case, her hysteria is also in large part related to the fact that she’s trapped in a life she can’t stand.

Fortunately, HYSTERIA, is no longer recognized by medical science as a “legitimate” illness, and contemporary scientists surmise that what was once called HYSTERIA was likely some combination of post-partum depression, anxiety, or just frustration at the legal, social, and economic restrictions placed upon Victorian women’s lives and bodies.

Although it is no longer an official illness, however, the charge of being “hysterical” has evolved directly from this once-common “problem” found only in women. And it is no coincidence that a primary cure for HYSTERIA was a HYSTERECTOMY, a surgical body modification to which Victoria is subjected (unnecessarily by contemporary scientific standards) in The Waiting Room.

19^th Century Women’s Health Care

A bit of background on the sort of medical discourse and health care that Victoria is accustomed to would, I think, be useful here. These are just a few of the highlights:

•  Cliterodectomy (a form of female genital cutting) was often performed by medical professionals on girls and women to prevent them from masturbating.
• In the 19^th C, scientists and doctors believed that menstruation caused blood to flow away from the brain and into the uterus, thus making women unfit for education and a profession, but quite suitable for marriage and child-bearing. 
• Scientists and doctors believed that too much reading and education would make women unable to have children.
• They also though that too much reading and education would cause and/or increase symptoms of hysteria. Consequently, it was thought that the best cure for hysteria was complete rest: no books, no conversation, no visitors, no spicy foods, etc. Nothing that could potentially evoke an emotional response.
• If the rest cure didn’t work (as it has not in Victoria’s case), the more radical course of action was simply to remove the offending reproductive organs: the uterus and the ovaries. This is a complete hysterectomy—a rather extreme form of body modification to get women to conform to normative standards of femininity.

You see how the notion that medical science is socially constructed and changes over time is becoming increasingly important?!

What’s up with Wanda?

In a word, silicon, and Wanda’s paying a high price as a result of her numerous elective breast augmentations.

According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery :

• Since 1997, there has been a 457 percent increase in the total number of cosmetic procedures. Surgical procedures increased by 114 percent, and nonsurgical procedures increased by 754 percent.
• In 2007 (the last year for which the numbers are available), women had nearly 10.6 million cosmetic procedures, 91% percent of the total. The number of cosmetic procedures for women increased 1 percent from 2006.
• By contrast, men had nearly 1.1 million cosmetic procedures, 9 percent of the total. The number of cosmetic procedures for men increased 17 percent from 2006.

For the ins and outs, pros and cons of breast augmentation, check out “Breast Implants and Breast AugmentationSurgery,” an article from SmartpLasticSurgery.com that is, interestingly, sponsored by Nashville-based plastic surgeon, Dr. MichaelHueneke. Also, you might be interested to know that Canada has no central way of tracking cosmetic surgery statistics. For more info, check out this article from the CBC.

What’s going on with Forgiveness?

And here we come to the part where we need to be sure to avoid ethnocentrism. There was a practice common in China called foot binding, which was done only to girls. It caused lots of health issues, some of which Forgiveness is suffering in The Waiting Room. For a quick and dirty tutorial on the details of how, physically, girls’ feet were broken so that they could be kept as small as possible in keeping with fashion and standards of normative femininity, you can have a look at the Wikipedia site. But for a more “legitimate” source of information—and for interviews with some women whose feet were bound when they were young children—check out this feature from National Public Radio, the U.S.’s version of the CBC.

The Waiting Room is one of my very favorite plays; I love it for its macabre humour in the face of what is, at times, overwhelming despair. Still, though, there’s hope at the end. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! Happy reading!