This article was extremely interesting as it presents the problems in today’s society past society and how it affects women. Bordo talks about three main afflictions to the female population: hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia nervosa. She goes into great detail about how many women just “don't feel good enough.” These diseases mainly afflict white upper and middle class women and although they are concentrated in different areas of time, its not to say that all three did not exist at the same time.
Hysteria was seen in the 19th century, however it was seen that a lady was idealized in terms of delicacy and dreaminess, sexual passivity, and a charmingly unbalanced and unpredictable emotionality. This can be seen in the way that they drifting and fogging of perception, the nervous tremors and faints, etc. These are all the symptoms of hysteria and yet these were the qualities that society valued in women.
The 1950s and early 1960s were the time period where Bordo
concentrates on agoraphobia. I believe the best way to explain this section is that “content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies and home!” These women were taught to
stay home, that men would go out into the world and make the money while the women stayed at home all day cooking, cleaning and taking care of the kids.
Anorexia is more of a recent development and it generally is created because of the idea that women should be extremely slim, it is the norm these days. Society is teaching women to feed others and not themselves and these rules are constantly reinforced by commercials and such. “A number of feminist writers have interpreted anorexia as a species of unconscious feminists protests.” These women, however, don’t even know that they are creating a protest. I don’t think I agree with that statement.
These women are those who are obsessed with their practices, which create these afflictions, they are simply unable to create the necessary change in their life. Bordo mentions that there are two different types of bodies, the intelligible body and the useful body. “The intelligible body includes our scientific, philosophic and aesthetic representations of the body. These are our cultural conceptions of the body, norms of beauty, models of health, and so forth.” The useful body is basically the practical rules of society, the “ trained, shaped, obeys, responds.” These two bodies often support each other and mirror one another.
Power and slenderness are sometimes associated with one another. When women with an eating disorder speak about their illness they always say that it had something to do with the power they held over it. However, women with anorexia has nothing to do with strength and they are not in control.
Bordo ends her piece by explaining that our bodies are a site of struggle and that “we must work to keep our daily practices in the service of resistance to gender domination, not in the service of “docility” and gender normalization.” We must be aware of the contradictions of image and practice, rhetoric and reality and that we must “restore a focus on female praxis to its formerly central place in feminist politics.”
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
From what I gathered it seems like Bordo is saying that hysteria, agoraphobia, anorexia, and bulimia are a direct result of women exaggerating their roles in their time period. These conditions are definitely extreme. I find it hard to understand how hysteria could become what doctors call the "norm".
Today women are told that they have to be skinny and beautiful. We see it all over magazines and television so it's easy for me to understand how that could escalate into an eating disorder.
Instead of going to the extremes I think Bordo is suggesting that women focus on what they want and not what the world is telling them they should want.
I too agree that this was an interesting article. The article touched on many issues that I am aware of, but have never thought about them in great detail. Being a woman, it was fascinating to take a closer look at the lives of women, disorders and all. It is almost depressing to think that these traditionally “feminine” virtues are still being taught to young women today. You would think that with all we know now about disorders and the effects of gender biases, we could attempt to erase these old expectations, and stop making excuse for them by looking for the positives within them. Disorders are not normal behaviors, so why should it be a normalized characteristic for women then?
Personally, when I think of hysteria, such as tremors, fainting, etc., I don’t think of it as a positive quality to posses. At the same time, I don’t view the fear of leaving the house, or starving oneself to be positive either. Who on earth decided that these awful disorders could be an acceptable and feminine trait for women? I can somewhat understand decades ago when disorders were more hush-hush, therefore labeling these disorders as just a feminine characteristic, or a female norm was more appropriate for that time. The fact that society continues to distill these characteristics among its youthful women does not seem appropriate. It is unfortunate that women seek power and control only by becoming anorexic. Shouldn’t we be teaching women to use their energy and power elsewhere? When it comes to body management as Bordo states, “We all want to have it all.” In the attempt to have it all, we often find ourselves tired in the struggle. This then cause women to then fit back into the stereotype of being dependent on others, men. I agree with Bordo that women must be resistant to becoming the social norm that is put upon women.
I really enjoyed reading this article by Bordo. One of the things that she focused on was the fact that this body issues that women are having could actually be political statements even if the women aren’t aware of it. I had never really thought of eating disorders that way. I agree 100% with what she was saying about how in society as a women, we are supposed to deny ourselves, and that to indulge in something (for a women) would be disgusting. She mentioned how on TV for example in the Andes candy commercials that “one bite” should be enough to satisfy. That is how things are marketed to women. I was flipping through one of my dads GQ magazines not that long ago and there was a section on all these crazy, 5,000 calorie sandwiches, they were the ultimate “man” sandwiches. You would NEVER see anything like that in a woman’s magazine… EVER! All we have in our magazines is “How to loose 5lbs this week”, “Walk to loose weight.” Unfortunately we are using our bodies as a text and some of us are trying to loose the feminine characteristics we have because we have been taught that masculinity is better, more powerful. Its so sad that 4th grade girls are counting calories and dieting. The images displayed on TV and various other media sources make it clear what is sexy and attractive to men and it is unrealistic. It always gets me that a guy can be kind of overweight, maybe have a little bit of a beer gut going on and still be considered attractive and everyone just overlooks the little physical flaws but God forbid a woman have a little chub going on in the middle. She would immediately be labeled unattractive and people wouldn’t just “overlook” her physical flaws. ANYWAY, I felt that this article really nailed a lot of the problems with the way women are viewed in our society today.
You did a lot better at summing up this chapter than I would have. I definitely didn't get that much out of it as you did. Therefore, your commentary was very well written and very helpful.
I must say I enjoyed this piece as well. To use the body as a metaphor was very creative and very easy to understand. However the most I got out of it was that there is a certain type of body, what a "lady" is supposed to be and if you do not have that body, you have to find a way to get that, may it be anorexia or bulimia.
It was kind of like "wow" a woman actually realizes this about what she is herself.
I also liked how she wrote a lot about how we learn the way to look at be through images, may it be television or magazines, we still are taught to look a certain way and dress a certain style.
However, that is all I got out of it, but once again, your cemmentary made me look a little deeper into what she was talking about.
Post a Comment