Wonder Woman: The Female Body and Popular Culture, by Joan Ormrod; Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, by Barbara Plotz

Abstract

The idea of the female body as a site onto which sociocultural fears and anxieties are projected is well established in feminist theory. Theorists like Laura Mulvey, Kathleen Rowe, bell hooks and Hortense Spillers have created seminal works from their examination of how the body operates, conforms and resists under a patriarchal, heteronormative, white gaze. Discourse around the body—and in particular, the female-coded body—is what aligns the work of Joan Ormrod and Barbara Plotz reviewed here. Although their analyses focus on the body in different contexts (Ormrod charts the cultural icon Wonder Woman, while Plotz examines fatness in contemporary Hollywood cinema), both conduct in-depth examinations of the ways in which ideology can be projected onto the body.