A Path to Self Realization or Victimization: Female Body

This study examines the social construction of female bodies through analyzing anorexia and body building as two crucial bodily performances that challenges the discursively defined, idealized female body and her identity. Fleshy materiality; linguistically and culturally marked surfaces of female bodies that has served for production and continuity of particular culture is replaced by subject’s own corporeality. Butler’s notion of “performativity” is the starting point to discuss the unnatural status of gender; and corporeality of bodies is highlighted through analyzing Todd Haynes’ short film “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” and Ms. Olympia(s); and then in the last part, focus shifts to the Foucault’s definition of “individuality”, which is explained in negative terms, to underline the difference between victimization and / or resistance of female bodies during their performances.

In her book Volatile Bodies, Grosz states that “body is represented and used in specific ways in particular cultures” and therefore human body and its embodiments should be work through discursive performances (Grosz, p.18). In contemporary world, or in terms of Giddens late modernity, without addressing the necessity of the deconstruction of dualistic Western metaphysical perceptions of body, it is no longer possible to take a step to thoroughly conceptualize the contemporary representations of body and identity.

Body and mind do not represent the two distinct categories, and indeed they are mutually theorized the subject’s unity and self realization or emancipation. Since body is a “political field where power relations can be observed”, self control over body is the main tool to reach self realization; and if the body is the field of power and implementation of discourses then resistance is inevitable against the political regulations that take place on the surface of discursively normalized individuals (Foucault, p.173). Female body is a useful site of repression and production since “it is both a laboring, sexual and reproducing body“(Bakare-Yusuf, p.318).

Sacredness or Handicap of Corporeality

Munson points out “the physical traits of sex are culturally elaborated and given meaning within a culture through construction of gender that means people take some cues from their physical characteristics of the bodies with which they are born but they learn to use a variety of signals to demonstrate their similarity to other people in specific gender category.” (Munson, p.127-143) The biological differences that are used to legitimize the women’s limited access to power in society and that are attributing women the passive sexual and / or political role, represents their secondary status to the men. Hence, marginalization of women has been seen as natural and regarded as the fact of their biology. The concept ‘gender’ explains how an individual’s biology is culturally valued and interpreted into locally accepted ideas of what it is to be a woman or a man. That means gender and the hierarchical power relations between men and women are constructed meaning that the associated roles and expectations of gender identities can change from culture to culture. In the first chapter of her book Second Sex de Beauvoir argues that women are biologically disadvantaged compare to men; and it is the reproductive handicap of female body (de Beauvoir, p.35-67). Thus some feminists like de Beauvoir, emphasize the importance of the rejection of the reproductive disadvantage of females’ bodies to gain the similar capacity of power in the context of public life.

In response to this negative attitude towards body and women, Moira Gatens in Power, Bodies and Difference states that, there are also “some feminists advocate the affirmation and celebration of women’s bodies and their capacity to recreate and nurture” (Gatens, p.120-137). Gatens claims that these theories are important responses to the female body and also identity politics however both of them interpret body as something given, innate and territorially defined. While the former response focuses on the sexual equality principle, later one emphasizes an essential sexual difference of the female bodies; thus these responses to corporeality of female preserve the binary oppositions, indeed. Butler gives somehow different explanation to gendered, sexed bodies and identities. “Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre- given sex; gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result gender is not to culture as sex is to nature, gender is also the discursive/ cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “natural sex” is produced and established as “pre discursive”, “prior to culture”” (Butler, p.346)

‘Performativity’ is an important concept for Butler as “the repetition and the ritual of gender performances have an ongoing outcome. They contribute to the naturalising of the bodies, making the cultural fiction of gender appear credible and real.” The gendered body is performative, thus it has no ontological status apart from the acts that constitute its reality. Performativity could be interpreted as a paradigm shift in the study of gender and corporeality, because Butler’s claim about the inscription on the surface of bodies led us to read gender as something “only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.”(Butler, p.173) The examples of anorexia and body building confirm “the play of absence and presence on the body’s surface”, and as a result of minimal or excessive use of body we faced with multiple ways of deconstructing individuality and reconstructing the subjectivity. (Butler, p.172)

An Androgynous Utopia: Gender destruction of Karen Carpenter

“Anorexia … is an obsession evolving out of a complex internal apparatus of resistance and control; it is an addiction and abuse of self control, a fascism over the body in which the sufferer plays the part of both the dictator ad the emancipated victim who she often resembles.” (Film, 23′)

My first example is a short film about an anorexic body and her identity crisis; and I interpret this process as a resistance and protagonist’s death as a way to self realization. The film, Superstar (directed by Todd Haynes ), focuses on Karen Carpenter, who found dead in her parents’ home from anorexia in the 1970s and connections between her illness, family dynamics – controlling mother, celebrity, consumerism, and U.S. politics.

Superstar portrays the reasons to the crisis of the idealized female body in the image of Barbie and conceptions of normalcy trough the examination of Karen, who is sick of consumption and starves herself even as her image is consumed. Karen’s family tries to domesticate her with an organized marriage to reimpose her stable female role both in biological and sexual terms that means her family locates her into an institutional setting to maintain the control over her body. Although, Karen does not internalize the normativity and she resists proscribed ideals of femininity, she could not reject them at all. Hence, the process that what Karen experiences is all about a crisis of identity. She does not know what she should do; she just knows that it is not possible for her to live with her image.

Karen’s anorexic body and her identity crisis are fed by domestic crisis of the Carpenter family and also by political crises that are represented on T.V; they are the images of the Holocaust, the bombing of Cambodia, the Vietnam War, and the White House. As Landy underlines that domestic crisis that disrupt Karen’s integrity, are mother-daughter arguments and mainly about Karen’s career, her clothes, her weight, and her desire for independence, and these scenes of domestic crisis are connected to the public space conflicts. (Landy, p.123-140) After each image, Karen’s bodily performances and her identity become more fragmented and abnormal; and therefore her story shows that bodily boundaries, definitions, gender codes are never sacred since body always exceeds control. Her bodily presence is often relegated to the status of non-existence. Her illness makes her a subject instead of putting her into the place of victim, who suffers because of the physical and psychological pain. She is able to express her bodily absence and the presence of her pain, of what makes her as an agent instead of a normalized individual.

“The imitation that mocks the notion of an original ”: Ms. Olympia

Does femaleness produce femininity? What about the people, who do not fit the strictly defined boundaries of male and female that create a third space within binary oppositions? In what terms those identifications related with gender- a set of signifiers, and its structural units (female- femininity and male- masculinity)? Is it possible to equate high heels, breasts, make up, varnished nails or long hair to vagina? If the answer is yes then we should question about the Ms. Olympia, the idealized female body builders of each year; and try to understand the difference between Lenda Murray, Iris Kyle and their performances as a part of femininity or masculinity since their bodies do not seem that much lack of feminine signifiers. These girls wear high heels during their performances, they have varnished nails, and generally long blond hair; actually they have a dramatic or maybe an absurd charm (Coles, p.68). Being female has its own signifiers however, the female body builders challenge all traditional ideas and signifiers about femininity, and demonstrating that how sex, gender, sexuality served as a natural package, the femininity, the female bodies and even the most and the strongest signifier of maleness – masculinity are constructs.

Ms. Olympia competitions are the publicly constituted spaces where the bodies of female body builders are highly controlled; actually these competitions aims to normalize the “grotesque bodies” of body builders. Castrated feminine markers of body builders are controlled, they are dressing up with feminine signifiers and through their dress code (which are sexy bikinis) and make up, female body builders are allowed to enter in male gaze of heterosexual culture (Schulze, p. 261). Muscularity and power are linked to masculinity and thereby these are the feminizing strategies to make female body builders normal (Ian 1990, p.72). Fetishized feminine curves are eliminated by muscles, since these curves are the signifiers of female sexuality, cancellation of them marks female body builder’s sexuality as indifferent to men. Their bodies are grotesque, perverse and do not look like normalized, discursively individualized feminine bodies; these performers outgrow its own self, transgressing its own body (Bakhtin, p.317). Their performances can be interpreted as a performance of drag since we could argue that she is performing the space of masculinity, and resists traditional reading of her body. Artificial nature of femininity is grotesquely demonstrated through make up, hair, fetishistic dress code and breasts. Thus we could read female body builders image as an example of MTF transsexuals.

To conclude that female body builders’ dragish or MFT styles, mimicries highlights that what we socially, culturally learned and internalized as natural is no longer possible since there is no proper fe/male body that is taken for granted. There is nothing inherently natural to about gender, and gender is a kind of mimicry and when female body builders imitate these roles through their bodies than we meet something highly artificial and grotesque. Their female body is a copy, or imitation and their muscled bodies are the imitations of their imitations. However, through their performances fixed boundaries are blurred, they dismantle the slashes.

There is no power without resistance, and female body is not merely a victim

In Discipline and Punish Foucault explains how disciplinary power creates individuals form a mass of bodies through three elements; hierarchical observations, normalizing judgments and examination. Power relations construct the social reality through the implementation of these three elements as surveillance mechanisms, and people are the objects of the “regime of truth” that is controlled via these processes; and then they are transformed into individuals by experiencing, internalizing the knowledge and/or microphysics of power in everyday life; and since women are their bodies, particularly female bodies are subjected, used, transformed and improved (Foucault, p.136) Bodies are inscribed with power; they are the fields of power relations. Regulation and representation of bodies in social sphere show us the construction processes of useful, normalized bodies within the society (Bird, p.91). Body is rationalized and has become an object of expert mechanisms. Anorexia and body building are responses to overdetermined female bodies appearances as decorative presentations.

Anorexics and female body builders use their bodies in unconventional ways that challenging gender stereotypes. From traditional points of view the body has generally been associated with the innate, immutable, the god given; but these female performers reject the notion of a preexisting body since people are able to intervene their bodies and treat them merely as costumes. On the one hand anorexics’ and female body builders’ projects explore the problem of territorially defined bodies, and on the other hand they rewrite their identities, which are stuck within their bodily boundaries. Therefore, these performers prove how the identity is a fragmented and multiple process of becoming rather than fixed categories indeed. Anorexia or body building could be read as a project that is a path toward self determination for women to gain control over their own bodies.

Minimal or excessive use of bodily performances constitute women as subjects who use their feminine body as a site for action and protest rather than as an object of discipline and normalization. To sum up, woman is the creator not just the creation; not the passive object of another’s decision, and they are not the scopic objects of the “collective male gaze” between private and public spaces, contrarily they are the directors of the voyeuristic terminology over their bodies (Mulvey, 1975).