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"The woman who goes into a rigorous weight-training program in order to achieve the currently stylish look may discover that her new muscles give her the self-confidence that enables her to assert herself more forcefully at work"
--- Susan Bordo, Various
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Critique of Body Image Research
The body: the subject of the gaze
"Although body image experiments are presented as neutral, objective scientific practices, these experiments do not occur in a social vacuum. They are a social practice which reproduces women’s bodies/subjectivities within gendered power relations. The positioning of the women who are the object of these investigations vis-á-vis the researcher has particular effects for the knowledge that is produced. The body image experiment has at least two effects for the women subjects. By normalizing the practice of self-surveillance, experiments encourage women to view themselves as the objects of their own gaze. Second, the social context of the experiment reproduces gendered power relations via the masculine gaze of the experimenter/scientist.
Michel Foucault’s (1990) concept of the Panopticon and disciplinary power remains the most insightful frame for arguing that body image investigations, rather than being simply an objective search for knowledge about womens bodies/ subjectivities, are instead disciplinary and normalizing practices. Foucault points out that power is not primarily located externally to individuals or groups — that power relations come into being via the actions of individuals as they discipline themselves, in accordance with dominant norms and ideals. It is self-surveillance which ‘assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1990: 201).
So much, like during the day at work I think, ‘Right, I’ve got to cover myself up, there can’t be any breasts or bulges so I’ve got to have buttons, you know up to my neck more or less, or if not certainly decent so that no-one is distracted by anything. You know it’s constantly an issue of ‘how can I cover up and look noticeably smart but not noticeable in a funny sort of a way?’
... Feminist writers such as Sandra Bartky have highlighted some of these differential effects, particularly the constant self-surveillance and the disciplinary practices in which Western women often engage in pursuit of the ‘right’ body size and shape. Bartky argues:
The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in the woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or excite. There has been induced in many women, then, in Foucault’s words, a ‘state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’.(Bartky, 1988:81
There are parallels between the self-surveillance practised by many women in their daily lives and the self-surveillance re-enacted in the laboratory under the instruction and gaze of body image researchers. Both the researcher and the women subjects are to see her body as an object. They must scrutinise her body size and shapc, and make ‘accurate’ and ‘objective’ estimations of the width of her face. chest, hips and thighs. Women must be able to make accurate estimations repeatedly over time and rationally appraise their body size and shape and ‘get it right’.
These practices must be carried out under the gaze of the usually male researcher. It is in these practices legitimated as scientific research that the surveillance of women by men is normalised. (Male) researchers position themselves within a scientific discourse as arbiters of the truth about their subjects — in this case. women’s bodies/subjectivities. Body image research normalises and reproduces those gendered social practices where men look at women’s bodies/subjectivities and pass judgement on them...
Norris’ (1984) study... provides an evocative example of gendered relations in an experimental context. In his study, ‘...the room lights were switched on and the subject, stripped semi-nude, was made to face a mirror... she was instructed to examine her body in stages from head to foot, noting her body size, running her fingers over the various fleshy and bony contours and outlining the four estimated diameters with her hands... throughout the entire experiment the tester adopted a completely neutral attitude... no reasons were given for the mirror confrontation and no comments were made about her body or any feelings she expressed’ (Norris, 1984: 836—38). If we assume that the testers are male, we are left with an entirely distasteful image of a semi-nude woman 'running her fingers' over her body under the gaze of a silent man. Resonances with peep-shows and sexualised voyeurism cannot be avoided. While the same sexualised gaze may not always occur with a female tester, the sense of the always scrutinised body as a (possibly imperfect) object is projected powerfully in the above account.
Seeing and being seen are never neutral activities, despite the ‘neutral’ researcher in the laboratory, looking at the woman’s body. This issue - the effects of being looked at — is not raised by the experimental researchers. As Radley (1991) points out, ‘an understanding of who sees, of how they see and of the significance of seeing in the social world is absent from psychological theory’ (1991:75). I would argue that the gaze in the body image experiment is masculine, not only because the researchers in this field are mostly male, but also because the idea of (women’s) bodies as objects of perception, observed as it were from the ‘outside’, is an idea that derives from a ‘masculine’ point of view - necessarily ‘outside’ women, looking at them. Certainly women can and do learn to see their bodies as objects (take a masculine position, or take on a male gaze), but their experience of embodiment is necessarily more than this (something I discuss further). The gaze of psychology — in the sense of the theoretical ‘spectacles’ through which the subjects of psychology are ‘seen’ — is most certainly a male gaze (Gergen. 1996).
The significance of the male gaze to body image investigations is totally effaced. Claims to neutrality and value-free science extend to include the researcher as someone who exists outside of culture (including race and gender) and ‘above the babble of politics’ (Gergen, 1996). The claims of science to neutrality and to being value-free serve to mask the identity and the role of the ‘expert’ in constituting its object, in ibis case, women’s bodies/subjectivities.
Feminist theorists (e.g. Gillian Rose, 1993) have argued that the form of rationality which underlies and forms science is masculine. Man is held to be the embodiment of reason, the one capable of rational thought in relation to the body of the Other (historically women, and Blacks, and working-class people), who is irrational, not capable of knowing. The researcher can come to know the Other/her through his neutral gaze. His ability to objectively perceive is not challenged, because (white) masculinity and neutrality are seen as synonymous.
It has been argued that masculine rationality is a form of knowledge which assumes a knower who believes that he is separate from his body, his emotions and values. He has no history. He and his thought are autonomous, objective and unitary. The assumption of an objectivity untainted by his social position(s) (as masculine, white, scientist) enables the knowledge produced via this kind of rationality to claim itself as universal and exhaustive. Both men and women scientists are trained to take the rational masculine position.
Within this discourse, men’s bodies, represented by the body of the researcher, are produced as invisible. Because of his rational capacity for knowing, associated with the mind, the male/scientist is able to transcend the bodily aspect of his being."
--- Body Work: The Social Construction of Women's Body Image / Sylvia K. Blood
So, to replace people trying to find out about the world through empirical research, we have feminists pulling theories about oppression out of their
Reading crap like this, you understand why rationality is masculine.
