Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (49 page)

This piece originally appeared in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds.,
Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science
(New York: Routledge, 1989). I wish to thank Mary Jacobus, Sally Shuttleworth, and Mario Moussa for comments and editorial suggestions on the original version.

1. See Keith Walden, "The Road to Fat City: An Interpretation of the Development of Weight Consciousness in Western Society,"
   Historical Reflections
   12
   ,
   no. 3 (1985): 33173.
   

2. See Michel Foucault,
   The Use of Pleasure
   (New York: Random House, 1986).
   

1. See Rudolph Bell,
   Holy Anorexia
   (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Caroline Walker Bynum,
   Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 3148.
   

2. See Kim Chernin,
   The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness
   (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).
   

3. See Thomas Cash, Barbara Winstead, and Louis Janda, "The Great American Shapeup,"
   Psychology Today
   (April 1986); and "Dieting: The Losing Game,"
   

   Time
   (Jan. 20, 1986), among numerous other general reports. Concerning women's preoccupation in particular, see note 24 below.
   

4. See Mary Douglas,
   Natural Symbols
   (New York: Pantheon, 1982); and her
   Purity and Danger
   (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
   

5. This approach presupposes, of course, that popular cultural images
   have
   meaning and are not merely arbitrary formations spawned by the whimsy of fashion, the vicissitudes of Madison Avenue, or the logic of postindustrial capitalism, within which (as has been argued, by Fredric Jameson and others) the attraction of a product or image derives solely from pure differentiation, from its cultural positioning, its suggestion of the novel or new. Within such a postmodern logic, Gail Faurschou argues, "Fashion has become the commodity 'par excellence.' It is fed by all of capitalism's incessant, frantic, reproductive passion and power. Fashion
   is
   

   the logic of planned obsolescence—not just the necessity for market survival, but the cycle of desire itself, the endless process through which the body is decoded and recoded, in order to define and inhabit the newest territorialized spaces of capital's expansion." ("Fashion and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernity,"
   Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11
   ,
   no. 12 [1987]: 72.) While I don't disagree with Faurschou's general characterization of fashion here, the heralding of an absolute historical break, after which images have become completely empty of history, substance, and symbolic determination, seems itself an embodiment, rather than a demystifier, of the compulsively innovative logic of postmodernity. More important to the argument of this piece, a postmodern logic cannot explain the cultural hold of the slenderness ideal, long after its novelty has worn off. Many times, in fact, the principle of the new has made tentative, but ultimately nominal, gestures toward the end of the reign of thinness, announcing a "softer," ''curvier" look, and so forth. How many women have picked up magazines whose covers declared such a turn, only to find that the images within remained essentially continuous with prevailing norms? Large breasts may be making a comeback, but they are attached to extremely thin, often athletic bodies. Here, I would suggest, there are constraints on the pure logic of postmodernity—constraints that this essay tries to explore.
   

6. See Robert Crawford, "A Cultural Account of 'Health'SelfControl, Release, and the Social Body," in John McKinlay, ed.,
   Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care
   (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 60103.
   

7. Ira Sacker and Marc Zimmer,
   Dying to Be Thin
   (New York: Warner, 1987), P. 57.
   

1. Dalma Heyn, "Body Vision?"
   Mademoiselle
   (April 1987): 213.
   

2. See Lois Banner,
   American Beauty
   (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 232.
   

3. Banner,
   American Beauty,
   pp. 5355.
   

4. See Walden, "Road to Fat City," pp. 33435, 353.
   

5. I thank Mario Moussa for this point, and for the Heather Locklear quotation.
   

6. Sacker and Zimmer,
   Dying to Be Thin,
   pp. 14950.
   

7. Foucault,
   The Use of Pleasure,
   pp. 6470.
   

8. See Douglas,
   Purity and Danger,
   pp. 11428.
   

9. See Crawford, "A Cultural Account of 'Health.'"
   

10. John Farquhar, Stanford University Medical Center, quoted in "Dieting: The Losing Game,"
    Time
    (Feb. 20, 1986): 57.
    

11. See Marcia Millman,
    Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America
    (New York: Norton, 1980), esp. pp. 6579.
    

12. Millman,
    Such a Pretty Face,
    p. 77.
    

13. Sacker and Zimmer,
    Dying to Be Thin,
    p. 32.
    

14. These quotations are taken from transcripts of the "Donahue" show, provided by Multimedia Entertainment, Cincinnati, Ohio.
    

15. The discrepancy emerges very early. "We don't expect boys to be that handsome," says a nineyearold girl in the California study cited above. "But boys expect girls to be perfect and beautiful. And skinny." A male classmate agrees: ''Fat girls aren't like regular girls," he says. Many of my female students have described in their journals the pressure their boyfriends put on them to stay or get slim. These men have plenty of social support for such demands. Sylvester Stallone told Cornelia Guest that he like his woman "anorexic"; she immediately lost twentyfour pounds
    (Time
    [April 18, 1988]: 89). But few men want their women to go that far. Actress Valerie Bertinelli reports
    (Syracuse PostStandard)
    how her husband, Eddie Van Halen, "helps keep her in shape": "When I get too heavy, he says, 'Honey, lose weight.' Then when I get too thin, he says, 'I don't like making love with you, you've got to gain some weight.'"
    

16. The most famous of such studies, by now replicated many times, appeared in
    Glamour
    (Feb. 1984): a poll of 33,000 women revealed that 75 percent considered themselves "too fat," while only 25 percent of them were above Metropolitan Life Insurance standards, and 30 percent were
    below.
    ("Feeling Fat in a Thin Society,"
    

    p. 198). See also Kevin Thompson, "Larger Than Life,"
    Psychology Today
    (April 1986); Dalma Heyn, "Why We're Never Satisfied with Our Bodies,"
    McCall's
    

    (May 1982); Daniel Goleman, "Dislike of Own Body Found Common Among Women,"
    New York Times,
    March 19, 1985.
    

17. On cultural associations of male with mind and female with matter, see, for instance, Dorothy Dinnerstein,
    The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
    (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Genevieve Lloyd,
    The Man of Reason
    (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
    

Press, 1984); and Luce Irigaray,
Speculum of the Other Woman
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

1. Bram Dijkstra,
   Idols of Perversity
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 29.
   

2. "Mutable Beauty,"
   Saturday Night
   (Feb. 1, 1892): 9.
   

3. Mary Jacobus and Sally Shuttleworth (personal communication), pointing to the sometimes boyish figure of the "new woman" of late Victorian literature, have suggested to me the appropriateness of this interpretation for the late Victorian era; I have, however, chosen to argue the point only with respect to the current context.
   

4. Dinnerstein,
   The Mermaid and the Minotaur,
   pp. 2834. See Chernin,
   The Obsession,
   for an exploration of the connection between early infant experience and attitudes toward the fleshy female body.
   

5. Historian LeeAnn Whites has pointed out to me how perverse this body symbolism seems when we remember what a pregnant and nursing body is actually like. The hourglass figure is really more correctly a symbolic advertisement to men of the woman's reproductive, domestic
   sphere
   than a representation of her reproductive
   body.
   

6. See Banner,
   American Beauty,
   pp. 28385.
   

7. It is no accident, I believe, that Dolly Parton, now down to one hundred pounds and truly looking as though she might snap in two in a strong wind, opened her new show with a statement of its implicitly antifeminist premise: "I'll bust my butt to please you!" (Surely she already has?) Her television presence is now recessive, beseeching, desiring only to serve; clearly, her packagers are exploiting the cultural resonances of her diminished physicality. Parton, of course, is no androgynous bodytype. Rather, like Vanna White of "Wheel of Fortune" (who also lost a great deal of weight at one point in her career and is obsessive about staying thin), she has tremendous appeal to those longing for a more traditional femininity in an era when women's public presence and power have greatly increased. Parton's and White's large breasts evoke a nurturing, maternal sexuality. But after weightreduction regimens set to anorexic standards, those breasts now adorn bodies that are vulnerably thin, with fragile, spindly arms and legs like those of young colts. Parton and White suggest the pleasures of nurturant female sexuality without any encounter with its powers and dangers.
   

8. The Waist Land: Eating Disorders in America,
   1985, Gannett Corporation, MTI Teleprograms. The analysis presented here becomes more complicated with bulimia, in which the hungering "female" self refuses to be annihilated, and feminine ideals are typically not rejected but embraced.
   

A version of this essay originally appeared in Linda Nicholson, ed.,
Feminism/Postmodernism
(New York: Routledge, 1989); most of it has been re

printed here virtually unchanged. However, the last section of the essay has been substantially expanded to include a discussion of the dramatic and highly publicized Thomas hearings (and to a lesser extent the Tyson and Kennedy Smith trials) of the fall and winter of 199192; these events seemed to me to illustrate strikingly some of the central points made in the original essay. Parts of this discussion originally appeared in Susan Bordo, "'Maleness' Revisited,"
Hypatia
7, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 197207. The ideas of "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism" were brewing in my mind for a long time before I actually set pen to paper, and thus they have been affected by many conversations, in particular those in which I engaged while a visiting scholar in Alison Jaggar's seminar at Douglass College in 1985 (and especially my talks with Alison Jaggar and Ynestra King), those that occurred while I was a Rockefeller HumanistinResidence at the Duke University/University of North Carolina Center for Research on Women in 198788, and those that have continuously taken place with Lynne Arnault and LeeAnn Whites. For comments on earlier drafts, I thank Patrick Keane, Ted Koditschek, Edward Lee, Mario Moussa, Linda Nicholson, Jean O'Barr, Linda Robertson, Bruce Shefrin, Lynne Tirrell, Jane Tompkins, and Mary Wyer.

1. Jean Grimshaw,
   Philosophy and Feminist Thinking
   (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
   

2. Susan Suleiman, "(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism," in
   The Female Body in Western Culture,
   ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 24.
   

3. This is not to say that I disdain the insights of poststructuralist thought. My criticism here is addressed to certain programmatic uses of those insights. Much poststructuralist thought (the work of Foucault in particular) is better understood, I would argue, as offering interpretive
   tools
   and
   historical
   critique rather than theoretical frameworks for wholesale adoption.
   

4. My discussion here is focused on the emergence of gender analytics in North America. The story if told in the context of France and England would be different in many ways.
   

5. Carol Gilligan,
   In a Different Voice
   (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). It must be noted, however, that Gilligan does
   not
   view the different "voices" she describes as essentially or only related to gender. She "discovers" them in her clinical work exploring gender difference, but the chief aim of her book, as she describes it, is to "highlight a distinction between two modes of thought" that have been culturally reproduced along (but not only along) gender lines (p. 2).
   

6. Dorothy Dinnerstein,
   The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
   (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Nancy Chodorow,
   

The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Gilligan,
In a Different Voice.

1. Thomas Nagel,
   The View from Nowhere
   (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
   

2. Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," in Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith,
   Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on AntiSemitism and Racism
   (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1984), p. 18.
   

3. At the 1988 Eastern meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, D.C., I presented a paper discussing some consequences of the fact that the classical philosophical canon has been dominated by white, privileged males. But these men have also, as was pointed out to me afterward by BatAmi Bar On, overwhelmingly been Christian. Although I am Jewish myself, I had not taken this into account, and I had to think long and hard about what
   that
   exclusion of mine meant. I was grateful to be enabled, by Ami's insight, to do so. This is, of course, the way we learn; it is not a process that should be freighted (as it often is nowadays) with the constant anxiety of "exposure" and political discreditation.
   

4. Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory,"
   Feminist Studies
   14, no. 1 (1988): 6769.
   

5. Grimshaw's
   Philosophy and Feminist Thinking
   is an example of work by a feminist who expresses these theoretical concerns through the categories and traditional formulations of problems of the AngloAmerican analytic style of philosophizing rather than those of Continental poststructuralist thought.
   

6. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," in Nicholson, ed.,
   

   Feminism/Postmodernism,
   p. 35.
   

7. Fraser and Nicholson, "Social Criticism Without Philosophy," p. 29.
   

8. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," in Nicholson, ed.,
   Feminism/ Postmodernism.
   

9. Fraser and Nicholson, "Social Criticism Without Philosophy," p. 35.
   

10. Friedrich Nietzsche,
    On the Genealogy of Morals
    (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 119.
    

11. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," interview with Foucault in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
    Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
    (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 232.
    

12. The Fraser and Nicholson article, which exhibits a strong, historically informed appreciation of past feminist theory, is fairly balanced in its critique. In contrast, other travels through the same literature have sometimes taken the form of a sort of demolition derby of previous feminist thoughtportrayed in reductive, ahistorical, caricatured, and downright distorted terms and presented, from the enlightened perspective of advanced feminist method, as hopelessly inadequate.