{"id":625,"date":"2020-04-05T02:17:53","date_gmt":"2020-04-05T02:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/?page_id=625"},"modified":"2020-04-05T02:17:53","modified_gmt":"2020-04-05T02:17:53","slug":"the-female-body-as-a-site-of-control","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/feminist-perspectives-of-the-body\/the-female-body-as-a-site-of-control\/","title":{"rendered":"The female body as a site of control"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The issue of the body as a source of control and power is central in many works. Mary Douglas (2015) posits that \u201cthe human body is always treated as an image of society\u201d and \u201cbodily control is an expression of social control\u201d in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology<\/em><\/a>. Similarly, many scholars have posited that the root of eating disorders is the desire to take control of the body.<\/p>\n

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Hilde Bruch (2001) claims that anorexics have a history of being \u201cperfect\u201d and their eating \"\"<\/a>disorder is an expression of taking back control of their body in The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa<\/em><\/a>. John Jacobs Brumberg (2001) builds upon this idea of \u201cperfection\u201d in Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease<\/em><\/a> \"\"<\/a>by suggesting that anorexia is a secular addiction that links the desire for external body configuration perfection. This is in contrast to the religious practices of fasting to achieve spiritual perfection. William Rudolph Bell (1987) agrees with Brumberg that fasting is a desire for perfection in Holy Anorexia<\/em>; However, he believes that there is a spiritual connection rather than secular, suggesting that that both thinness and holiness represent ideal states of being.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>As Adrienne Rich ([1976] 2015) stated in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution<\/em> <\/a>\u201cThere is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men. The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.\u201d Many feminist scholars have posited that the female body is both a site of scrutiny and space of control, including Lara Carlson (2016) in Gender and Work: Exploring Intersectionality, Resistance, and Identity<\/em><\/p>\n

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To explore how the female body is a constructed site for power relations, several feminist scholars have turned to Michel Foucault\u2019s<\/a> theories. In The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction<\/em>, Foucault ([1978] 1990) explains the \"\"<\/a>sexual body as both a principle instrument and effect of modern disciplinary power. Foucault\u2019s idea is that sexuality isn\u2019t a natural quality of the body, rather the effect of historically specific power relations. In Janet Ransom and Lois Mcnay\u2019s (1994) article \u201cFoucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self<\/em>\u201d they analyze how \"\"<\/a>Foucault\u2019s ([1984] 1990) works in The History of Sexuality. Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure<\/em> and The History of Sexuality. Volume 3: The Care of the Self\u00a0<\/em><\/a>overcomes the limitations set by his earlier work on the body. Ransom and McNay explore the significance of Foucault\u2019s theory of the body and seeks to show how Foucault\u2019s theory of power and the body indicates to feminists a way of placing the notion of the body at the center of explanations of women\u2019s oppression that doesn\u2019t fall back on essentialism or biologism. Cheryl Cooky (2006) builds upon Foucault, Ransom and McNay\u2019s theories in \u201cStrong Enough to be a Man, but Made a Woman: Discourse on Sport and Femininity in Sports Illustrated for Women\u201d <\/em>to demonstrate how strategies of control of women\u2019s bodies such as cultural representations of femininity designed to control the female body are central to hierarchal social relations.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Another prominent figure who posits that the female body is a source of control is Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin\u2019s ([1981] 1999) view is that the female body is upheld as the standard of beauty<\/a>, which she expresses in Pornography: Men Possessing Women<\/em><\/a>. The female body, materialized as the standard of beauty, has become the standard of compliance, submission and oppression. The patriarchal \/ hegemonic culture has historically sought to regulate and control women\u2019s bodies. Dworkin states,<\/p>\n

“Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jennifer McWeeny (2014) conducted extensive research on the topographies of flesh and the embodiment of connection between women and nonhuman animals. In \u201cTopographies of the Flesh\u201d<\/em>, she highlights the relationships between the types of bodies being oppressed. This duality calls for calls for paying attention to how the rhetoric of bodies are defined in terms of appearance, including body size, ability, gender, ethnicity and health, given that meanings are ascribed to physical appearance. McWeeney draws parallels between animal ontology of the human and non-human connection with feminist studies of the body. There are connections between the oppression of women and the oppression of nature<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The issue of the body as a source of control and power is central in many works. Mary Douglas (2015) posits that \u201cthe human body is always treated as an image of society\u201d and \u201cbodily control is an expression of social control\u201d in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. Similarly, many scholars have posited that the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":632,"parent":587,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-625","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":633,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/625\/revisions\/633"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}