Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (16 page)

The future of
Roe v. Wade
is now the central cultural arena for the battle over reproductive control. In this essay, however, I have emphasized the necessity of locating the struggle for abortion rights in a broader context. What gets obscured when abortion rights are considered in abstraction from issues involving forced medical treatment, legal and social interference in the management of pregnancy, and so forth, is the fact that it is not only women's reproductive rights that are currently being challenged but women's status as
subjects,
within a system in which—for better or worse the protection of "the subject" remains a central value. What also may get obscured are the interlocking and mutually supporting effacements of subjectivity that are involved when the woman is perceived as a racial or economic "other" as well. So long as the debate over reproductive control is conceptualized solely in the dominant terms of the abortion debate—that is, as a conflict between the fetus's right to life and the woman's right to choose—we are fooled into thinking that it is only the fetus whose ethical and legal status is at issue. The pregnant woman (whose ethical and

legal status as a person is not constructed as a question in the abortion debate, and which most people wrongly assume is fully protected legally) is seen as fighting, not for her
personhood,
but "only" for her right to control her reproductive destiny.

The nature of pregnancy is such, however, that to deprive the woman of control over her reproductive life—whether by means of involuntary or coerced sterilization, courtordered cesarean, or forbidden abortion—is necessarily also to mount an assault on her personal integrity and autonomy (the essence of personhood in our culture) and to treat her merely as pregnant
res extensa,
material incubator of fetal subjectivity. Unfortunately, feminists have in the past sometimes colluded in such constructions, arguing that reproduction and pregnancy are "functions" that are disengagable from the being of the subject and—like all alienated labor—amenable to being sold or rented to another. Over time, the severe limitations of this model, crystallized for many feminists by the "Baby M"/Mary Beth Whitehead surrogacy case, have become clear. It is crucial, I believe, that we now shift our discourse and strategies away from an abstract rhetoric of choice to one focused on (1) exposing the contradictions in our legal tradition regarding bodily integrity and insisting that women's equal protection under the law requires that they be resolved,
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and (2) challenging the fetal—container conception, by reclaiming (from the right wing, which now holds a monopoly on such ideas) the view of pregnancy and abortion as
experientially
profound events. Only on the basis of such a reclamation can we assert women's moral authority, not only by virtue of our distinctive embodiment but also by virtue of our social histories, to adjudicate the complex ethical dilemmas that arise out of our reproductivity.

The foregoing contains several notions that may give contemporary feminists pause, and that require some further explanation. First, there is the problematic notion of women's "experience," and the concomitant danger of essentializing the experiences of some groups of women while effacing the histories and experiences of others. Although I acknowledge that danger, I believe that invoking women's embodied experience need not be equivalent to an alliance with "essentialism," so long as we remain mindful of the historical, racial, and cultural diversity of that experiencefor example, so long as we recognize the different social histories within which the

freedom and economic conditions that permit women to
have
children have been as tenuous as the right
not
to have them. At the same time, consciousness of our diversity ought not to be permitted to dilute recognition that,
as women,
we
all
have an "authority of experience" that men lack, and that gives us "a privileged critical location from which to speak" concerning reproduction.
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Women's varied historical experiences of reproduction and birth—such as those described by Emily Martin
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and Angela Davis,
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and including the experiences of the infertile and the voluntarily childless provide such locations of authority for us. So, too, do more philosophical, reconstructive accounts, such as Iris Young's study of "pregnant embodiment."
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Feminists may be made queasy, too, by the idea of emphasizing the experiential significance of pregnancy and birth, out of a fear of the conceptual proximity of such notions to constructions of mothering as the one true destiny for women. I believe, however, that we stand a better chance of successfully contesting such ideology if we engage in the construction of a public, feminist discourse on pregnancy and birth rather than leaving it in the hands of the "prolifers." It now seems to me, for example, that feminists should never have permitted debate over the status of the fetus to have achieved center stage in the public imagination, but ought, rather, to have attempted to preempt that debate with a strong
feminist
perspective acknowledging and articulating the ethical and emotional value of the fetus.
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(I suspect that we would have developed such a perspective if African American women, with their historical experience of having not only their bodies but their children

appropriated from them, had played a more central role in framing the rhetoric and arguments of earlier feminist politics.) Granting value, even personhood, to the fetus does not make social control of women's reproduction any less problematic, as I have argued in this essay. Attempts to
devalue
fetal life, on the other hand, have fed powerfully into the rightwing imagination of a possible world in which women would be callously and casually scraping fetuses out of their bodies like leftovers off a plate. This image—so cruelly unrepresentative of most women's experiences—must be challenged, must be shown to be a projection of "evil mother" archetypes, reflective of deep cultural
anxieties
about women's autonomy rather than the
realities
of its exercise.

And, finally, there is the currently problematic status of concepts such as authority and the subject, concepts which have played a crucial role in Western modernity but are now in various philosophical and literary quarters being declared decentered, dying, or dead. This is not the place to detail those arguments. But it is easy, I believe, to call for the wholesale deconstruction of concepts such as subjectivity, authority, and identity only so long as we remain on the plane of high theory, where they function as abstractions. Once we begin to examine the role played by such concepts as they are institutionally and socially embodied in contexts such as law and medicine, in which the philosophical blueprint is transformed into real social architecture, a different agenda may suggest itself. This is what I have argued in this essay with regard to the politics and rhetoric of subjectivity as they are played out in the arena of the current legal and social battle over reproductive control.

Within this battle, we cannot afford, whether in the interests of theoretical avantgardism or political correctness, to abandon conceptions such as subjectivity, authority, embodied consciousness, and personal integrity. But this does not mean that we will be reproducing them in precisely the form in which we have inherited them. We need to remember that when poststructuralist writers declare that the "author" or "man" (or "metaphysics" or "philosophy") is dead, they refer to conceptions that were historically developed by European men, under conditions of their cultural dominance. Under those conditions, subjectivity took a very particular form by virtue of the experiences excluded from it. Iris Young's study of pregnant embodiment, for example, suggests that pregnancy makes uniquely available (although it does not guarantee) a very different experience of the relationship between mind and body, inner and outer, self and other than that presumed by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and other architects of the modernist subject. The conception of autonomy assumed by that model, for example, is challenged by an embodiment that literally houses ''otherness" within the self.

Young's argument makes us aware of the fact that invoking the authority of marginalized subjects may ultimately result in a reconstruction of subjectivity itself. This is not to say that the (historical) subjectivities of subordinate groups have developed fully
outside
of or unaffected by dominant constructions of the subject. (It

is not as though, for example, women have not sought autonomy or cherished possibilities for individuation and selfdevelopment.) But our relation to these values has been different: more ambivalent, less purely identified; one could even say, less oppressed.
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Historically excluded from participation in the making of philosophy, law, and politics, we have nonetheless created culture in our own assigned "spheres," and these cultures now provide a valuable resource for us as we begin to make philosophy, law, and politics in the public arena.

In a television commercial, two little French girls are shown dressing up in the feathery finery of their mother's clothes. They are exquisite little girls, flawless and innocent, and the scene emphasizes both their youth and the natural sense of style often associated with French women. (The ad is done in French, with subtitles.) One of the girls, spying a picture of the other girl's mother, exclaims breathlessly, "Your mother, she is so slim, so beautiful! Does she eat?" The daughter, giggling, replies: "Silly, just not so much," and displays her mother's helper, a bottle of FibreThin. "Aren't you jealous?" the friend asks. Dimpling, shy yet selfpossessed, deeply knowing, the daughter answers, ''Not if I know her secrets."

Admittedly, women are continually bombarded with advertisements and commercials for weightloss products and programs, but this commercial makes many of us particularly angry. On the most obvious level, the commercial affronts with its suggestion that young girls begin early in learning to control their weight, and with its romantic mystification of diet pills as part of the obscure, eternal arsenal of feminine arts to be passed from generation to generation. This romanticization, as often is the case in American commercials, trades on our continuing infatuation with (what we imagine to be) the civility, tradition, and savoirfaire of "Europe" (seen as the stylish antithesis to our own American clumsiness, aggressiveness, crudeness). The little girls are fresh and demure, in a way that is undefinably but absolutely recognizably "European"—as defined, that is, within the visual vocabulary of popular American culture. And FibreThin, in this commercial, is nothing so crass and "medical" and pragmatic (read: American) as a diet pill, but a mysterious, prized (and, it is implied, ageold) "secret," known only to those with both history and taste.

But we expect such hype from contemporary advertisements. Far more unnerving is the psychological acuity of the ad's focus, not on the size and shape of bodies, but on a certain
subjectivity,
represented by the absent but central figure of the mother, the woman who eats, only "not so much." We never see her picture; we are left to imagine her ideal beauty and slenderness. But what she looks like is not important, in any case; what is important is the fact that she has achieved what we might call a "cool" (that is, casual) relation to food. She is not starving herself (an obsession, indicating the continuing power of food), but neither is she desperately and shamefully binging in some private corner. Eating has become, for her, no big deal. In its evocation of the lovely French mother who doesn't eat much, the commercial's metaphor of European "difference'' reveals itself as a means of representing that enviable and truly foreign "other": the woman for whom food is merely ordinary, who can take it or leave it.

Another version, this time embodied by a sleek, fashionable African American woman, playfully promotes Virginia Slims Menthol (Figure 7). This ad, which appeared in
Essence
magazine, is one of a series specifically targeted at the African American female consumer. In contrast to the Virginia Slims series concurrently appearing in
Cosmo
and
People,
a series which continues to associate the product with historically expanded opportunities for women ("You've come a long way, baby" remains the motif and slogan), Virginia Slims pitches to the
Essence
reader by mocking solemnity and selfimportance
after
the realization of those opportunities: "Why climb the ladder if you're not going to enjoy the view?" "Big girls don't cry. They go shopping." And, in the variant depicted in Figure 7: "Decisions are easy. When I get to a fork in the road, I eat."

Arguably, the general subtext meant to be evoked by these ads is the failure of the dominant, white culture (those who
don't
"enjoy the view") to relax and take pleasure in success. The upwardly mobile black consumer, it is suggested, will do it with more panache, with more cool—and of course with a cool, Virginia Slims Menthol in hand. In this particular ad, the speaker scorns obsessiveness, not only over professional or interpersonal decisionmaking, but over food as well. Implicitly contrasting herself to those who worry and fret, she presents herself as utterly "easy" in her relationship with food. Unlike the FibreThin mother, she eats any

Image has been removed. No rights.

time she wants. But
like
the FibreThin mother (and this is the key similarity for my purposes), she has achieved a state beyond craving. Undominated by unsatisfied, internal need, she eats not only freely but without deep desire and without apparent consequence. It's "easy," she says. Presumably, without those forks in the road she might forget about food entirely.

The Virginia Slims woman is a fantasy figure, her cool attitude toward food as remote from the lives of most contemporary African American women as from any others. True, if we survey cultural attitudes toward women's appetites and body size, we find great variety—a variety shaped by ethnic, national, historical, class, and other factors. My eightyyearold father, the child of immigrants, asks at the end of every meal if I "got enough to eat"; he considers me skinny unless I am plump by my own standards. His attitude reflects not only memories of economic struggle and a heritage of JewishRussian preference for zaftig women, but the lingering, well into this century, of a once more general AngloSaxon cultural appreciation for the buxom woman. In the midnineteenth century, hotels and bars were adorned with Bouguereauinspired paintings of voluptuous female nudes; Lillian Russell, the most photographed woman in America in 1890, was known and admired for her hearty appetite, ample body (over two hundred pounds at the height of her popularity), and "challenging, fleshly arresting" beauty.
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Even as such fleshly challenges became less widely appreciated in the twentieth century, men of Greek, Italian, Eastern European, and African descent, influenced by their own distinctive cultural heritages, were still likely to find female voluptuousness appealing. And even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton began to set a new norm for ultraslenderness, lesbian cultures in the United States continued to be accepting—even celebrating—of fleshy, spaceclaiming female bodies.