![]() ![]() Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity-a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashion-female bodies become docile bodies-bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, “improvement.” Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress-central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women-we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification. In a decade marked by a reopening of the public arena to women, the intensification of such regimens appears diversionary and subverting. For women, as study after study shows, are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time. Such an emphasis casts a dark and disquieting shadow across the contemporary scene. It is also, as anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher Michel Foucault (among others) have argued, a practical, direct locus of social control. ![]() The body-what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body-is a medium of culture. ![]() The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (Chapter 5 from Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body ). ![]() “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” 1989. ![]()
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