gender equality and social justice

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gender equality and social justice

• The Disciplinary Power of Beauty

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• Sex
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Homophobia/Heterosexism Heteronormativity
• Transphobia/Gender Transgressions
• IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THE BODY
• Q? What is the transphobic or heteronormative
  body?

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Who has a body?
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What kinds of bodies are there?
Who is this?
What does his wife look like?
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What does Susan Wendell mean when she says that
some bodies are idealized and/or objectified
while other bodies are rejected? How, for
Wendell, is the rejected body both certain bodies
and aspects of bodies or bodily experiences?
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• The rejected or negative body refers to those
  aspects of
• Bodily life
• (illness, disability, weakness, dying)
• 2) Bodily Appearance
• (deviations from the cultural ideals of the body)
• 3) Bodily Experience
• (including most forms of bodily suffering)
• that are feared, ignored, despised, and/or
  rejected in a society and its culture (276).

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How do we treat/manage/discipline bodies?

• How does our sense of embodiment
• change over time?
• Child body/Adolescent body
• /Adult Body/Elder Body
• So, our bodies are also cultural productions.
• And were instructed in very particular ways
  about how to manage our bodies.
• There are ideals of appearance, strength, energy,
  movement, function, and proper control.

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• Idealizing bodies does what?
• Objectifying bodies? (Read p. 276)
• Disciplining normality
• Those of us who can learn to be or seem normal
  do so, and those of us who cannot meet the
  standards of normality usually achieve the
  closest approximation we can manage (277).

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What do rich bodies look like? Top RICHEST
AMERICANS
William Gates Net Worth 48.0 billion Self-made
Microsoft
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Self-made Microsoft

• Paul Allen Net Worth 20.0 billion

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Warren Buffett Net Worth 41.0 billion Self-mad
e Investments.
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WAL-MART Dynasty
Inherited. Though not active in company, Jim is
president of Arvest, Arkansas' biggest bank.

• Jim Walton Net Worth 18.0 billion

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WAL-MART Dynasty
Serves as Wal-Mart Director

• John Walton Net Worth 18.0 billion

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WAL-MART Dynasty
Serves as Wal-Mart Chairman

• S. Robson Walton Net Worth 18.0 billion

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• Michael Dell Net Worth 14.2 billion

Self-made Dell Computers
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Self-made software, Oracle.

• Lawrence Ellison Net Worth 13.7 billion

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What do beautiful bodies look like? Top ranked
models
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Who gets paid the most to photograph their bodies?
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What kind of body is this?
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Are beautiful bodies racialized?
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Do these women represent a diversity of bodies?
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Or are Barbies white features the gold
standard that measures all women? (More on this
in coming weeks.)
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The Barbie Phenomenon
Research has shown that Barbie is an anatomical
impossibility and would not be able to walk were
she a real person.
So is Barbie just a toy? Or is she also a lesson?
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Which bodies are heard?
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Which bodies get sexier with age?
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CONSIDER
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This was her peak
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This body is not worth as much
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Which bodies are reasonable?
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Whats wrong with this body?
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It doesnt look like this. (From Makeover)
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The Business Womans Body?
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Working girls body?
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The accessory body?
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Whose nudity is hyper-sexualized?
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Whos naked body is funny?
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What about the idealized naked male body?
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Could this womans body be idealized?
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PostSecret.blogspot.com
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There are 3 billion women who dont look like
supermodels and only a few who do.
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• What are the consequences of thinking/feeling
  that your body is wrong?

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The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf

• At the base of the beauty myth is the idea of
  stifling social and political agency the beauty
  myth, according to Wolf, is designed and enforced
  so as to disempower women in the world, both
  rendering them socially impoverished unless
  stereotypically attractive, docile,
  submissive, and unthreatening.
• In our culture, representations of bodies (what
  weve just been looking at) tells us what kinds
  of bodies are valued and which are not.

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The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf

• Lets elaborate Wolfs argument
• The Beauty Myth is one of the most powerful
  covertly sexist ideologies within twentieth
  century Western culture.

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So, for Wolf, the beauty myth

• Is one of the most profound examples of COVERT
  IDEOLOGY (a way of valuing people and the world
  in ways that arent obvious or straightforward).
  After the womens rights and civil rights
  movements of the 60s and on, covert forms of
  power became more prevalent. Law might have
  started to say that women and people of colour
  were of equal worth as white men, but the culture
  found ways to counter-balance these gains. Wolf
  argues that the beauty myth had been instrumental
  in counter-balancing advancements made by women.

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Naomi Wolf

• 'Beauty' is a currency system like the gold
  standard. Like any economy, it is determined by
  politics, and in the modern age in the West is
  the last, best belief system that keeps male
  dominance intact.

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In short, the Beauty Myth.

• Is part of a widespread ideological shift to
  counteract the gains made by the civil rights and
  white womens rights movements using images and
  media to enforce privilege through visual
  markers.

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• What do you see when you look in the mirror? Who
  tells you what you should be looking at? So whos
  really looking at you in the mirror? You, or
  someone else? Who is this someone else?

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THE GAZE on WOMENS BODIES
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A womans body should look great from any angle
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Compare These? Both unrealistic, both punishing,
but is there a still a difference and is gendered?
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• Not eating to be small.
• Or, eating to be big?
• Either way, its disordered eating.
• But is there a difference between being told to
  take up more room in the world versus less?
• To eat more than you want to versus less?
• To have more muscle mass versus less?
• So bodies are gendered into different ideals with
  some similar and some very different results.

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Disciplining Bodies

• In mid-November of 2006, a major study into
  female attitudes toward thin fashion models found
  that the images can lower levels of self-esteem
  and lead to higher levels of depression.
  Published in the journal, The Psychology of Women
  Quarterly, the research found that exposure to
  "thin-ideal" advertisements increased body
  dissatisfaction.

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you want the good onesfrom Maxim Online guide
how to date a model

• As a player, you're looking for fun,
  self-confident women to have sex with -- that's
  what you are (or are becoming), and that's what
  it takes to expose oneself to a woman to that
  degree without a commitment. Once you become
  confident enough with the ladies, no woman is too
  hot to approach.

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• "Models are Kleenex, there's always another
  pretty 17-year-old girl just dying to be a model.
  They're infinitely replaceable so the people in
  the industry don't care. They're not people,
  they're hangers.
• Michael Gross , author of "Model The Ugly
  Business of Beautiful Women"

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• 37 of Canadian females age 11, 42 of Canadian
  females age 13 and 48 of Canadian females age 15
  say they need to lose weight. Health and Welfare
  Canada. The health of Canada's youth, views and
  behaviours of 11-, 13- and 15-year-olds from 11
  countries. (1992). Anonymous. Ottawa ON Minister
  of Supply and Services. H39-239/1993.
• 47 of Canadian females age 11, 58 of Canadian
  females age 13, and 55 of Canadian females age
  15 say they would change how they look if they
  could.Health and Welfare Canada. The health of
  Canada's youth, views and behaviours of 11-, 13-
  and 15-year-olds from 11 countries. (1992).
  Anonymous. Ottawa ON Minister of Supply and
  Services. H39-239/1993.
• 50 of girls with healthy weights in two Canadian
  high schools were dieting because they saw
  themselves as "overweight". (CMAJ, 1986).
• 81 of 10-year-olds restrict eating (diet). At
  least 46 of 9-year-olds restricted eating.
  Mellin, Scully and Irwin, Paper presented at
  American Dietetic Assoc. Annual Meeting, October
  1986. (Berkley study)

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• 52 of girls begin dieting before age
  14.Johnson, et al, Journal of Youth and
  Adolescence, 1984, 13.
• 71 of adolescent girls want to be thinner
  despite only a small proportion being over a
  healthy weight.Paxton et al (1991). Journal of
  Youth and Adolescence, 20, 361-379.
• The fear of being fat is so overwhelming that
  young girls have indicated in surveys that they
  are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of
  cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents.Lisa
  Berzins, Dying to be thin the prevention of
  eating disorders and the role of federal policy.
  APA co-sponsored congressional briefing. USA.
  11/1997.

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• More than 90 percent of those who have
• eating disorders are women between
• the ages of 12 and 25.
• US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
  Administration
• Up to 80 percent of women exhibit signs of an
  eating disorder at some stage.
• Eating Disorders, the Journal of Treatment and
  Prevention

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The Beauty Myth is not just an external thing

• The Western, European beauty myth is
  concerned not only with external and objective
  attributes but also with subjective
  representations of physical appearance beliefs,
  feelings, sensations, and perceptions about the
  body (Garner, Cooke).
• Standards of beauty proscribe behaviour, not
  just appearance.

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The Beauty Myth

• Is about training women not to be empowered.
• Says there is something fundamentally wrong with
  the female body and it's natural to be unhappy
  with it.
• Says that a natural body is one that needs to
  be perpetually worked at and struggled for.

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The Normal.

• The beauty myth is one example of a cultural norm
  (normal) that has been naturalized, resulting
  in a wide range of effects.
• As Susan Wendell explains, there are rules at
  work that tell us what is NORMAL or NATURAL, but
  those of us who can like to forget about these
  rules.
• Can you connect this point to our discussions
  last week?

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• The Beauty Myth is very lucrative.
• Pornography
• Cosmetics
• Plastic Surgery
• Beauty Magazines
• Fashion
• Diet Industry

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• Conditions womens priorities.
• Promotes competition among women.
• Maintains white privilege.
• Threatens womens physical and mental health.
• Infantilizes women.
• Silences women.
• Objectifies women and thus promotes violence
  against women.

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The Beauty Myth

• Helps to prevent female solidarity. The more
  social power white women have achieved in Western
  cultures, the more of a threat their unity
  becomes. Therefore, to have women constantly
  policing each others bodies, to have their worth
  in patriarchy be determined by their dress size,
  means to create profound rifts between women.

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• How many of you have
• -Had people comment on your weight?
• -Been told you look good when you loose weight?
• -Been told youre so lucky to be skinny?
• -Been told you need to loose weight by a parent,
  relative, friend, partner?

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How women relate

• How many times have you had to convince your
  friends that their bum is not as big as they
  think it is? How many times have you had
  conversations about your bodies?
• If one was to say, if asked, that she was
  completely happy with her body and wouldn't want
  to change it, shed be viewed as arrogant.

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The beauty myth is a counterforce to human rights
movements

• As white women (of certain privilege) released
  themselves from the feminine mystique of
  domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost
  ground, expanding as it waned to carry on its
  work of social control (Wolf 12).

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From the 50s to the new millennium..

• the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy
  housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood

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Today, the average fashion model is 16-17 years
old. Average height? 510.
Average weight? 110lbs.
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How old are these woman?
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Why from this to this?
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In the end

• We become heavily policed individuals, whose
  bodies are conditioned to see and feel the world
  in very particular and highly controlled ways.
• This system of beauty mythology is connected to
  capitalism and to patriarchy.
• The body becomes a commodity, to be controlled,
  decorated, exercised desperately, over-fed,
  under-fed, poked, prodded, pulled, plucked, torn
  apart and pieced back together in different ways.

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But who decides whats sexy?
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Are these the most naturally beautiful bodies?
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Theres something wrong with this woman.
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Thats better.
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• Who mutilate their bodies to fight aging?

To be old and ugly for a woman usually mean
being invisible.
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The Beauty Myth

• Teaches women to treat their bodies like objects.
• Teaches men to treat womens bodies like objects.
• Teaches men to desire objectified bodies, not
  human beings.
• Teaches women to desire men who desire them as
  objectified bodies.
• Is a function of capitalism used to police and
  discipline all bodies, and to greater and greater
  extents, to do what?

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Susan Wendell

• Our real human bodies are exceedingly diverse
  in size, shape, colour, texture, structure,
  function, range and habits of movement, and
  development and they are constantly changing
  (276).
• Clearly, idealization of the body is related in
  complex ways to the economic processes of a
  consumer society. Idealization now generates
  tremendous profits, and the quest for profit
  demands that people be reminded constantly of
  existing body ideals and presented regularly with
  new ideals. Moreover, never before in history
  have images of real people who meet the latest
  cultural ideals of beauty, health, and physical
  performance been so often presented to so many
  people (276).

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• Now it is possible for the images of a few
  people to drive out the reality of most people we
  actually encounter (276).
• What we see as normal, by virtue of our seeing
  it over and over again, doesnt exist!

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• What is beauty?
• Reflections on Beauty

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Lets go back to Susan Wendell

• Wendell connects standards of body beauty and
  body normalcy to concerns about the perception
  and experience of the disabled body.
• We connect beauty to ideas of health, but rarely
  do our images of health connect to real bodies.

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What does it mean to be fit or in shape?How
we define heath has profound impacts on
disabled people.It is not easy to distinguish
standards of physical normality from ideals of
health, appearance, and performance (277).