Book reviewed in this article: Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. By Kathy Davis.

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity.

Iris Marion Young, On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, reviewed by Ariella Binik.

This study explored the relationship between both overall television viewing and romantic youth drama viewing, as well as of females’ concerns about boys’ attractiveness expectations on the one hand, and body image dissatisfaction on the other. Participants were 411 adolescent girls who completed self-report measures on body dissatisfaction, television viewing, and concerns about appearance expectations. Our results indicated that there was both a direct and indirect relationship between romantic youth drama viewing and body satisfaction. Girls who spent (...) more time watching romantic youth drama displayed lower levels of body satisfaction. In addition, romantic youth drama viewing had a significant positive impact on concerns about boys’ attractiveness expectations, which had an indirect effect on body satisfaction. (shrink)

The authors challenge the Cartesian emphasis on mind that characterizes much feminist theory, offering instead a perspective that conceives of mind and body as a unity. They examine the construction of terrorized female bodies, how this construction is affected by age, class, race, and sexual preference, and how women who resent the status quo are developing themselves physically. They conclude by proposing a politics of feminist embodiment in which women use collective "care-of-the-self" practices that empower both their bodies (...) and their minds. Extensive interviews with women involved in bodybuilding, self-defense training, and similar activities provide the empirical context of this original theoretical analysis. (shrink)

The contentious topic of female circumcision brings together medical science, women’s health activism, media, and national and international policy-making in pursuit of the common goal of eradicating such practices. Referring to these diverse and heterogeneous practices as ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM), eradicators have then condemned them as ‘barbaric’ and medically harmful to female bodies and sexuality. In presuming that bodies can be separated from their cultural contexts, the anti-FGM discourse not only replicates a nature/culture dualism that has (...) been roundly questioned by feminists in science studies and cultural studies, but has also perpetuated a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular western image of a ‘normal’ body and sexuality in its quest to liberate women and girls. I use my own story as a circumcised woman to highlight the entanglements of body and culture as presented in these feminist theories of female bodies. (shrink)

The human body can be regarded in at least two ways: objectively, as a physical and organic body; and subjectively, as the center of orientation and lived affective unity. However, this distinction can lose sight of the fact that the ‘lived body’ is not reducible to subjective idiosyncrasies. Trans-individual norms are embodied too, as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have shown. Phenomenological investigations of normalization and habitualization help bring these two important dimensions of embodiment together and overcome (...) simplistic oppositions between phenomenological and poststructuralist approaches. These investigations lead into issues of female body optimization and control that we take to be characteristic of contemporary neoliberalist embodiment. (shrink)

Futuristic fantasy fiction that is produced for female adolescent readers offers a vision of the relationship between the female body, feminine subjectivity and technology that is both unique and ideologically complex because of the way in which it simultaneously interrogates and adheres to liberal humanist conceptualisations of the subject. This article examines three contemporary works of young adult fiction — Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (2005), The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson (2008) and ‘Anda’s Game’ (...) by Cory Doctorow (2008) — in light of Donna Haraway’s emancipatory vision of the cyborg, investigating how such narratives construct the ideological relationship between technology and feminine subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper makes a number of observations on soteriology, asceticism and the female body in two Indian Buddhist narrative. The first story examined is about the enlightenment of the Buddhist saint Yasas from a collection of verses know as the Anavatapta-gatha, or Songs of Lake Anavatapta. This narrative graphically describes a rotting female corpse and associates this physical corruption with the female body in general. The second story is about a mythical girl from the ancient (...) past found in the Mahayana scripture, the Gandavyuha-sutra. The female protagonist is described as exceedingly beautiful and her beauty functions as a sign of her spiritual superiority and as a means to aid beings. After a summary of these two tales, their soteriological presuppositions are discussed. Next,the effect of Buddhist soteriology upon the construction of gendered bodies in Indian Buddhism is considered. The author argues that the first story represents an ascetic soteriology that sees the female body as corrupt, while the second story displays an alternative devotional soteriology that extols female beauty as linked to virtue and as efficacious for religious development. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the narratives employing the image of the corrupt female body were meant for a male monastic audience; while the Gandavyuha with its devotional soteriology may have been composed with a royal female audience in mind. Thus target audience should be considered when studying Indian Buddhist narratives. (shrink)

Menarche—or a woman's first menstrual period—is a central aspect of body politics. Through explorations of oral and written narratives, I suggest that girls' subjective sense of themselves as maturing women at menarche develops simultaneously with a process of sexualization whereby young women experience themselves as sexualized, and their bodies are produced as sexual objects. While women internalize negative scripts associated with the bleeding female body, they also respond with consciousness and resistance.

In this paper, I offer a situated perspective on the political and semiotic landscapes of the circulation of racist and antiracist images and texts in and around a dark-skinned female character, Adelaide, in the popular Brazilian TV show Zorra Total. I aim to differ and defer the character as a sign, in order to undermine the character’s hegemonic frame of interpretation. First, I contextualize some resources used in a typical episode, including the character’s performance as a trajectory of racist (...) signs about the black woman’s body. Next, I discuss the contemporary circulation of the character, confronted by the experience of discussing this character in an undergraduate classroom. In conclusion, I argue that by exposing trajectories of the black female body, it is possible to gather together its fragmented signs as a multi-layered and overlapping set, and I identify these trajectories as a blind spot in the history of Brazilian racism. (shrink)

This paper reads The Monk by M. G. Lewis in the context of the literary and visual responses to the French Revolution, suggesting that its digestion of the horrors across the Channel is exhibited especially in its depictions of women. Lewis plays with public and domestic representations of femininity, steeped in social expectation and a rich cultural and religious imaginary. The novel’s ambivalence in the representation of femininity draws on the one hand on Catholic symbolism, especially its depictions of the (...) Madonna and the virgin saints, and on the other, on the way the revolutionaries used the body of the queen, Marie Antoinette, to portray the corruption of the royal family. The Monk fictionalizes the ways in which the female body was exposed, both by the Church and by the Revolution, and appropriated to become a highly politicized entity, a tool in ideological argumentation. (shrink)

This article deals with questions concerning the nature of representation of the female body within the so-called `oriental' discourse in Serbian art: Who is the painter? For whom is the work painted? With whom is the work identified? With what other possibilities of identification does the work leave us? In the context of the historical codes, a stance towards a body is seen as a projection of the social, cultural and power impulses. In the first case studied, (...) the artist was a male commissioned by the Serbian court to paint a series of paintings for the indigenous population and foreigners. In the second case, the artist was also male, a Serb working in Vienna, who painted for the audience of the `real Europe' from the position of an identity alteration. The third case focuses on a female artist, Babett Bachmayer Vukanovic, who was born in Germany but after marrying a Serb moved to her husband's homeland. Visual constructions of female bodies are used as the starting point for the deconstruction of ignored gender-related questions in analysing époque. (shrink)

This article analyses Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, discussing its use of the female body as a text and, more specifically, as a palimpsest. The article aims to demonstrate that the novel's genderless narrator uses the beloved's body as a palimpsest since in trying to celebrate it, s/he is unable to depict it as it is and merely inscribes a set of meanings onto it. The female body is described through two major sets (...) of images: as a landscape, via a colonial language, and as a diseased body, via an anatomical language. The article discusses this particular use of the female body as a traditional way of describing it, which is confirmed by the novel's wide use of literary references from canonical texts. The novel, then, appears to be positioned outside a feminist or lesbian tradition, since it is not able to represent the female body in a new and fertile way and draws too much on an all-male literary tradition, configuring itself as a palimpsest just like the body it is trying to describe. (shrink)

Maternity is a biological process that has increasingly changed into an authoritative medicalized phenomenon and requires techno-medical intervention today. Modern medicine perceives women’s procreative functions as pathological that need medical involvement and control. Medical biologists claim that the female body is destined to procreate in which medical sciences can assist them with techniques. But is a woman’s body biologically evolved merely for procreation? Or is it a sexist interpretation of her socially situated self? How can we justify (...) the idea of universality and neutrality of medical sciences in a social context? Arguing against deterministic biology, existential feminists advocate that female body is not merely a biological fact but rather a social situation under which the maternal act has become the essence of being a woman. Social situations influence medicine in a way that they are used as a rhetorical tool to achieve social desires authoritatively. The present paper explores and examines the increasing medicalization of female body and maternity through the lenses of biological determinism and phenomenological existentialism. I argue that medically supported theories of female body are socially interpreted that perpetuate the traditional role of women as mothers instead of emancipating them from their immanence. The paper discusses how the scientific model of medicine is implicitly influenced by socio-cultural forces and, consequently, tries to reduce social phenomena into biological factors to justify women’s inevitable destiny as motherhood. Thus, we need a de-medicalized model of medicine in order to comprehend the true meaning of maternal body and self. (shrink)

The global economy has an impact on female beauty today, regardless of the multicultural and historical factors in its formation and construction, resulting in monolithic crazes in women's fashion and appearance. but female beauty in china has been greatly contested with China's turbulent modern history, and this contestation deserves serious consideration, together with the politics by which the Chinese state apparatus has promoted and regulated female beauty. I argue that certain factors have been constant in contemporary discourses (...) of female beauty. Ideal bodies, in all their specifics, are defined by physical standards very few women can attain. These standards are accompanied by demeaning characterizations of women who fail to achieve them, and who are therefore destined to be discontent. It is now necessary for feminist theorists to examine the social and cultural roles of the body in terms of gender, power, the established patriarchy, and its oppression of women. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 405, June 2012.

L’article, en prenant en compte la littérature médicale des Présocratiques à Galien, présente la façon dont les textes biologiques et médicaux grecs ont construit les corps masculin et féminin. Selon ces biologistes et médecins grecs, cette construction s’opère dès l’embryogenèse et au cours du développement du fœtus. Dans une pensée médicale où prédomine la physiologie, les corps masculin et féminin sont nettement opposés selon des critères connotés : en particulier, le corps de la femme est plus humide et moins chaud (...) que celui de l’homme ; il est, en outre, marqué par une particularité anatomique, l’existence de l’utérus pensé comme un être vivant. La différence entre corps masculin et féminin, qu’elle soit donnée pour radicale (différence de nature) ou relative (plus ou moins grand degré de perfection), est toujours présentée à partir d’un corps de référence, celui de l’homme, par rapport auquel celui de la femme est pensé en termes d’incomplétude ou d’inversion. Elle est par ailleurs porteuse de hiérarchie. (shrink)

This article considers women's use of the body as a site of protest by taking up women's participation in non-mainstream body modification. The use of scarification, multiple genital piercing and other practices by women in the lesbian SM movement has been considered self-mutilative (Jeffries, 1994). This article takes a different, but not uncritical, approach by examining the `reclaiming' discourse surrounding these practices and considering how this discourse reflects the feminist poststructuralist project of identity subversion.

In 2003 and 2004, Aotearoa New Zealand enacted two key laws that regulate two very different ways in which the female body may be commodified. The Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA) decriminalized prostitution, removing legal barriers to the buying and selling of commercial sexual services. The Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act 2004 (HART Act), on the other hand, put a prohibition on commercial surrogacy agreements. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the ethical arguments underlying New Zealand’s legislative (...) solutions to prostitution and commercial surrogacy. While the regulation of prostitution is approached with a Marxist feminist lens with the aim to ensure the health and safety of sex workers, commercial surrogacy is prohibited outright for concerns of negative impacts on present and future persons. I ground the principles of each Act in their ethical foundations and compare these two against one another. I conclude that New Zealand’s legislative approach to regulating the commodification of the female body is ethically inconsistent. (shrink)

Abstract:Ecofeminists have called for adding an ecological dimension to gender research to address various forms of oppression that women experience in their daily lives and to explain how feminine exploitation of the planet results from the same logic of patriarchal domination. Now that the flow of essentialism-phobia (Field 2000, 39) has decreased, it seems that it is time to deal with the risky topic of the body in ecofeminist research and theory to make it more central in feminist epistemologies. (...) Yet feminist theory needs to avoid repeating the past mistakes in theorizing embodiment from an ecofeminist point of view and pay proper attention to the questions of difference and diversity: whose body is being discussed and generalized? This paper builds upon the postcolonial ecofeminist perspectives of embodiment and highlights the diversity of lives and experiences of living in Others of cisgender heterosexual male bodies with a focus on covered raced body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fitness, Fatness, and Aesthetic Judgments of the Female Body:What the AMA Decision to Medicalize Obesity means for other Non–Normal Female BodiesSara R. Jordan“I’ll be happy to refer you to our dietician to get you on a program to help you get your weight under control before it becomes a problem”.As my new physician spun around out of the examination room door, my head spun faster. I (...) had heard the phrase “get your weight under control” twice that morning, but the contexts in which the phrase was uttered could not have been more different.At 7:30 a.m., my fitness trainer was imploring me to get my weights under control as I struggled under a bar, laden with slightly less than my body weight, to do a final set of front squats. At 11:15 a.m., my new general practitioner was imploring me to get my weight under control, by which he meant to learn how to reduce my body mass index (BMI) to match the chart prominently displayed on his office wall. The exhortation to get my weight under control meant such radically different things in these two contexts that it was difficult to comprehend the meaning of the phrase.I am 5’4” and 158 pounds. This gives me a BMI of 27.3, which means that I am considered overweight; right in the middle of the category of overweight. Or, according to the definition of the BMI found on the calculator pinned to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institutes (NHLBI) webpage, I am over fat. If the BMI is, “a measure of body fat based on height and weight that applies to adult men and women” then I carry a health–threatening percentage of body fat. If my fitness trainer, with his 12 point skin–fold caliper test is correct, my body fat percentage of 17% is within the limits expected of female (non–endurance) athletes. In terms of health, then, I am a paradox: according to one standard, I am healthy and fit, according to another, I am unhealthy and fat.As this new physician picked apart my weight, suggesting I should lose between 15 and 20 pounds to bring myself to “full health”, I found myself quite annoyed. He was a small, rail thin, man with greying hair, tired eyes, unpressed khakis, and a beaten pair of black–ish grey “Crocs” on his feet. He looked disheveled and as if he had not seen the inside of a weights room in his life. As I listened to him address my history, current vitals, and how being overweight in my 30s could lead to being [End Page 101] “fat and 40”, I looked him over and made a snap judgment of “I could bench (press) you [right out this window]”. While I was angry with his delivery, I tried to remind myself that he was an overworked physician in a multi–lingual office, trying to operate under a new paradigm in healthcare policy, practice, and diagnostic categories. Specifically, prompted by the medicalization of the condition of obesity by the American Medical Association, my physician was reflecting the professional wisdom that I suffer from a condition needing preventive treatment. He was trying to be a good practitioner to recommend preventive treatment, but to me, he was being a terrible physician.The AMA Declares Obesity a DiseaseThe declaration by the American Medical Association in 2013 that the condition of being obese is one that requires medical treatment is one that I, on the face of it, support. By inviting the medicalization of the condition, the AMA opens the door for individuals who wage a deeply personal battle with their weight to find support in their physicians’ offices and from their insurance companies. Yet, the blunt tools that are used to assess these conditions raise my ire, emotionally and intellectually.Intellectually, the use of the BMI calculator for snap diagnosis of all individuals makes easy sense. It is an easily comprehended tool and, for a normally distributed population, such a simple tool is an excellent choice. But, it stands to treat outliers like me poorly. Outliers, such as particularly fit... (shrink)

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.