Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body Read Online Free PDF

August of 1968. The critique presented at that demonstration was far from the theoretically crude, essentializing program that caricatures of that era's feminism would suggest. Rather, the position paper handed out at the demonstration outlined a complex, nonreductionist analysis of the intersection of sexism, conformism, competition, ageism, racism, militarism, and consumer culture as they are constellated and crystallized in the pageant. 21 The "No More Miss America" demonstration was the event that earned "women's libbers'' the reputation for being "braburners," an epithet many feminists have been trying to shed ever since. In fact, no bras were burned at the demonstration, although there was a huge "Freedom Trash Can" into which were thrown bras, along with girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, copies of the Ladies' Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, etc. The media, sensationalizing the event, and also no doubt influenced by the paradigm of draftcard burning as the act of political resistance par excellence, misreported or invented the burning of the bras. It stuck like crazy glue to the popular
    imagination; indeed, many of my students today still refer to feminists as "braburners." But whether or not bras were burned, the uneasy public with whom the image stuck surely got it right in recognizing the deep political meaning of women's refusal to "discipline" our breasts, culturally required to be so exclusively "for" the other— whether as instrument and symbol of nurturing love, or as erotic fetish.

    And "whither the bra in the 90's?" Amy Collins, writing in 1991 for Lear's magazine, poses this question. She answers herself:

    Women are again playing up their bust lines with a little artifice. To give the breasts the solid, rounded shape that is currently desirable, La Perla is offering a Lycra bra with pre formed, pressedcotton cups. To provide a deeper cleavage, a number of lingerie companies are selling sidepanel bras that gently nudge the breasts together. Perhaps exercising has made the idea of altering body contours acceptable once more. In any case, if anatomy is destiny, women are discovering new ways to reshape both. 22
    Indeed. In 1992, with the dangers of silicone implants on public trial, the media emphasis was on the irresponsibility of Dow, and the personal sufferings of women who became ill from their implants. To my mind, however, the most depressing aspect of the disclosures was the cultural spectacle: the large numbers of women who are having implants purely to enlarge or reshape their breasts and who consider any health risk worth the resulting boon to their selfesteem and "market value." These women take the risk, not because they have been passively taken in by media norms of the beautiful breast (almost always siliconeenhanced), but because they have correctly discerned that these norms shape the perceptions and desires of potential lovers and employers. They are neither dupes nor critics of sexist culture; rather, their overriding concern is their right to be desired, loved, and successful on its terms. Proposals to ban or even to regulate silicone breast implants are thus often viewed as totalitarian interference with selfdetermination, freedom, and choice. Many who argue in this way consider themselves feminists, and many feminist scholars today theorize explicitly as feminists "on their behalf." A recent article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, for example, defends cosmetic surgery as being "first and foremost . . . about taking one's life into one's own hands." 23
    I examine this contemporary construction later in this volume. For now, I would only highlight how very different it is from the dominant feminist discourse on the body in the late sixties and seventies. That imagination of the female body was of a socially shaped and historically "colonized" territory, not a site of individual self determination. As Andrea Dworkin described it:

    Standards of beauty describe