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

in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her motility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

    In our culture, not one part of a woman's body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement From head to toe, every feature of a woman's face, every section of her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This alteration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to the economy, the major substance of malefemale differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking, painting and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of makeup and costuming caricature the women they would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct. 24
    Here, feminism inverted and converted the old metaphor of the Body Politic, found in Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and many others, to a new metaphor: the politics of the body. In the old metaphor of the Body Politic, the state or society was imagined as a human body, with different organs and parts symbolizing different functions, needs, social constituents, forces, and so forth—the head or soul for the sovereign, the blood for the will of the people, or the nerves for the system of rewards and punishments. Now, feminism imagined the human body as itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control—from footbinding and corseting to rape and battering to compulsory heterosexuality, forced sterilization, unwanted pregnancy,
    and (in the case of the African American slave woman) explicit commodification: 25
    [H]er head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina. Her back and muscle were pressed into field labor where she was forced to work with men and work like men. Her hands were demanded to nurse and nurture the white man and his family as domestic servant whether she was technically enslaved or legally free. Her vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital investment—the capital investment being the sex act and the resulting child the accumulated surplus, worth money on the slave market. 26
    One might rightly object that the body's literal bondage in slavery, described above by Barbara Omolade, is not to be compared to the metaphorical bondage of privileged nineteenthcentury women to the corset, much less to the twentiethcentury "tyranny of slenderness." No feminist writers considered them equivalent. But at the heart of the developing feminist model, for many writers, was the extension of the concept of enslavement to include the voluntary behaviors of privileged women. Problematic as this extension has come to seem, I think it is crucial to recognize that a staple of the prevailing sexist ideology against which the feminist model protested was the notion that in matters of beauty and femininity, it is women alone who are responsible for their sufferings from the whims and bodily tyrannies of fashion. According to that ideology, men's desires bear no responsibility, nor does the culture that subordinates women's desires to those of men, sexualizes and
    commodifies women's bodies, and offers them little other opportunity for social or personal power. Rather, it is in Woman's essential feminine nature to be (delightfully if