Transcript Postmodern bodies: Consumption, Body modification and self

Postmodern bodies:
Consumption, Body
modification and self
identity.
Lecture Eight
Inscribing the Body
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Scarification- a social process whereby human bodies are
inscribed marked or painted.
Examples-make-up, foot binding, shaving, tattooing,
piercing
Almost universal tendency for humans to 'mark' their
bodies.
Even clothing has deep symbolic significance.
Marking body says something about who we are and our
social roles.
Affects ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of body.
Socialisation and enculturation - processes of scarification.
We are coded or inscribed with culture and identity by
social processes.
Muscle, Utopian Bodies and
Body Projects.
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Perfection of the body central in contemporary culture.
Body building, liposuction, breast implants, face-lifts, nose
jobs
Cultural processes lead to modification of a biological body.
Connell (1983) - 'transcendence' - describes how culture
can modify a biological body.
A means of resistance?
Samuel Fussell (1991) Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely
Bodybuilder.
Quest to build the utopian body.
A postmodern art form
An exagerrated form of hypermasculinity.
The modification of a ‘natural’
body.
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Does augmentation of the body have a biological
basis?
Augmentation for sexual display?
Looking good feeling bad?
Manipulations of the biological body reflect
commitments to ideals of youth and beauty that
cross lines of gender.
‘Natural’ body is as a malleable substance
Perfecting body an attempt to resolve or avoid
problems of own identity and purpose (Fussell
1991).
Internally distressed but externally perfect.
The Anorexic Body –
postmodern illness?
Susie Orbach (1993) -Anorexia describes
the condition of women who 'have become
scared of food and what it can do to them'
(1993).
 Szasz (1974) 'Addiction, obesity and
anorexia are political problems, not
psychiatric; each condenses and
expresses a contest between the
individual and some other person or
persons in his environmnet'
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Taking Control Through Eating
Disorders?
 Szasz-
Individuals with overbearing,
over controlling parents are likely to
develop eating disorders as a means
of wrestling back control over their
bodies.
 Starvation a means for acquiring
greater autonomy and selfhood.
 BUT- mostly a disease of affluent,
western societies.
Background.
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First noted in 1870's in US, France and Britain.
Explosion of eating disorders iusually dated to last four
decades of the 20th century.
In US that between 1-4% of US females in high school and
college suffer.
Competition between disposable incomes and choices and a
desire to keep the body slim.
Tension between food imagery and ethos of avoidance and
self control
Susan Bordo - a link between eating disorders the
incitement to consume.
A gendered phenomenon, 9 out of 10 sufferers are women.
Increasingly cross class phenomenon.
Less prevalent among men and black women
Explanations.
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Onset of sexual maturity- a rejection of emerging
femaleness (Neuman 1983, Fraad 1990, Bruch)
Appropriation of male body. (Oliver Bruch)
Paradox xelf control but also a form of self
loathing
A hatred hatred of the weak self.
Thinness is seen as symbolically signifying a well
managed self
Also purveys a message of a self out of control.
Prevalence of images of 'ideal bodies' in the
media.
Explanations2
 Question:
Why arent black women
as susceptible? Why aren't men as
susceptible?
 Internalisation of a discourse of
bodily perfection.
 impact on how we see ourselves.
Biological explanations
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form of auto-addiction caused by a
reaction to brain opiates produced in
the process of starvation.
 neurochemical changes
 biological processes and
modifications reinforce the trajectory
‘Faulty’ Bodies.
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Re-cap.
Cosmetic surgery, tattooing, piercing, etc imply a degree of
choice with regard to bodily performances.
Bodies can be produced by the individual and society
Discourses inscribe the body with meaning.
Power, language and the body.
Civilized or socialized body through the work of Norbert
Elias.
Natural body?
Bodies both material and cultural things (Shilling)
Little in the analyses above about the experience of being a
body- the lived experience of embodiment.
Being Bodies.
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Experience of embodiment heightened when we undergo
some sort ‘deviation’ from the ‘norm’.
Weight gain, accident, illness, question around gender
identity, disfigurement, impairment.
Society excludes those with bodily ‘differences’
Emphasis on bodily perfection in contemporary culture.
Bodies that do not conform considered to be ‘faulty’ bodies
Faulty bodies hidden
Susan Wendell, Judith Butler - disabled women in Western
societies face particular difficulties because bodily
perfection is so often equated with health and success.
Bodies and Difference
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Ideal unattainable for most women
‘Othering’ of ‘different’ bodies.
Faulty bodies are ascribed or inscribed with difference both
externally and internally.
Eg. Disability is viewed negatively in Western culture.
Few disabled bodies in the media.
Disabled people doubly silenced
Stereotypical representations perpetuate "otherness"
Jenny Morris -mainstream society -low expectations of disabled
men and women.
Pressure on disabled people to conform
Individuals with disabilities may try to compensate for their
disabilities by striving to look as close to the non-disabled "norm"
as possible.
Some disabled girls and women may try to hide their bodies or
change how their bodies look. Manipulation of body through
continuous dieting, plucking, shaving, cutting, and constricting.
Medicalising Disability
Mike Oliver -Parsons ‘Sick Role’ Theory.
 Disabled people expected to cultivate
dependency and vulnerability.
 Perceived in a state of perpetual illness.
 Expected to assume the position of patient
 Dependency upon medical experts.
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By adopting particular conceptions of
normality, people with disabilities are
defined according to the criteria they do
not meet, rather than those they do. They
are defined in relation to what they are
not.
 ‘In short, they are the product of the
`psychological imagination' constructed
upon a bedrock of `non-disabled'
assumptions of what it is like to
experience impairment. The realisation of
impairment is presumed to involve some
form of loss or `personal tragedy'. Oliver
(2002)
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Medicalising Disability
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Sick role theory also significant because disabled
people are perceived as being free from social
obligations and responsibilities.
Deviance and disability?
Disability indicates the intersection between the
material and the cultural body
Subjectivity of disabled people structured by
biological and social factors.
To suggest that the body is entirely socially
constructed implies that we can escape from our
bodies if we just change cultural attitudes and
behaviours
The Cyborg Body
Donna Haraway - cybernetic organism
 A mixture of organic and mechanical parts
 A super-enhanced being
 Technologies make us cyborgs.
 Pacemakers, clothing, contact lenses,
contraceptive implants, voice recognition
software, prosthesis, metal limbs.
 Cyborgian bodies- modern technologiesespecially those that are inside the body
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Nature, Cultureand
Cyborgianism.
 Cyborg
is a metaphor for exploring
ways of breaking down the
nature/culture opposition.
 Dissolution of nature -culture borders
-new ways of acting politically.
 Identity constructed, fluid, and
fractured.
 Cyborg ost-gender -an identity that
can be embraced by all.
Cyborgs ‘Otherness’ and
Resistance
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Cyborg identity is constructed.
Cyborgs create themselves out of what is not other.
An ‘Oppositional identity’
A framework for those who do not fit into the natural
categories of race, gender, class, physical perfection.
Resistance of normalising discouses
Construction of new categories of identity
Accepting partiality and contradictions
Overturning of what has been defined as "natural" and
normal.
New order based on affinity.
Cyborg identity about choices and attractions.
Transgressing Boundaries.
 Transgression
of boundaries and
categories.
 Man/ animal, animal/ machine,
physical/ non-physical, nature/
culture.
 Pleasure in ‘confusion of boundaries’.
 Technology an extension of our
bodies.
Freedom or control?
 Cyborg
identity Janus faced (Wild
2003)
 Human /machine subjectivity at once
liberates us and controls us.
 Freedom from the limits of our
bodies but new possibilities for
control.