Feminine Body Research Articles

The Beautiful and the Abject

Recent sociological and anthropological approaches to the social construction of bodies have argued that the `materiality of the body' and its symbolic and cultural construction are in fact inseparable and must be understood within the context of the power relations — primarily, those of class, race, gender and sexual orientation — of a particular social order. Furthermore, in contemporary `postmodern' societies, questions of body image and bodily practices are increasingly experienced and recognized as central elements in processes of the construction of identity. They have become the site of numerous social struggles in which identities — as well as a wide range of social and symbolic resources — are disputed and negotiated. Drawing on research on women in sport, on the identities and experiences of transgendered people and on identities and representation of the body among fashion models in contemporary Brazil, the authors reflect upon these struggles — as they come up against, attempt to transform or work to reproduce hegemonic definitions of `the beautiful' and `the abject'. The authors focus, among other issues, on the way gender and sexuality are implicated in these definitions — from the intensive `discursive production' that encourages women of different ages to place the construction of `perfect' feminine bodies at the centre of their identities, to the `transgressive' construction of feminine bodies by travestis and male-to-female transsexuals, or the possibility that particular sporting practices break with aspects of normative femininity and encourage women to define identity in ways that may be empowering. Key theoretical sources include Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Judith Butler, Susan Bordo and Sander Gilman; anthropological and historical work on gender, culture and the body in Brazil are also incorporated.

Notações para uma história da pintura na América Latina

This article is constituted by three notations to an Art History in Latin America, considering the pictorial arsenal produced in the XIX century and in the first half of the XX century. This is the first enterprise that intends to sketch some senses to the image, specially considering those works in which the feminine body presents in a more explicit way some sensibilities and perceptions inherent to the plastic thought, as well as to outline a problematic about the imagistic arsenal and its approach possibilities, specially in what refers to questions related to chronology and anachronism, text and context, copy and original, proximity and distance, superficies and depth.

Los discursos de higiene y el cuerpo femenino como metáfora de ingobernabilidad (Puerto Rico, finales del siglo XIX)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how bodies, particularly female bodies, were treated and objectified by hygiene and sanitarians discourses in Porto Rico, at the end of the 19th Century. The paper examines the tensions and troubles raised by physicians and intellectuals in their effort to eradicate some forms of knowledge that they considered to be an obstacle to expand the new science of medicine in a power-knowledge relation. The article focuses, particularly, on the way that feminine bodies were portrayed as ungovernable, connecting with their anxieties about ruling the Ireland.

PERCEPÇÕES SOBRE O CORPO FEMINO: UM ESTUDO COM AS SUBJETIVIDADES DAS ACADÊMICAS DE UM CURSO DE EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA

The present study aims to analyze how the images used in the media influence the construction of the subjectivities. The research envolved 25 graduate students, 19 to 24 years old. Nine pictures of women evidenced in the media were used, all of them actresses, models or dancers. Among the results, the data which more came into attention was the presence of concerns about “morals”, “good habits” and the exploration of the body as a consumption object in the graduate students’ speeches. However, in spite of the conscience of these speeches, the students let reveal that they are avid consumers of these corporal models. KEY-WORDS: feminine body – subjectivities – speeches

Invoking the feminine physical ideal: bitch-slapping, she-men and butch girls

This paper presents the results of research on the discursive construction of one aspect of gender identity: the female physical ideal. Applying Butler's (1993) theory of performativity to a real-life local context, it critically analyses how a group of young South African women discursively construct and perform the notion of the ideal feminine body in conversation with their female friends. Furthermore, it uses elements of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework (Fairclough, 1992; 2001) to provide a linguistic analysis of the ideologies which underlie this construction. Recognising that ideologies are unstable and dynamic, it seeks to account for the ideological tensions and ambiguities in the discourses surrounding the feminine body.

L’autonomie des femmes : quelques réflexions-bilan sur un objectif

The author reflects on women's reproductive autonomy and raises questions on the true significance of advancements in feminism in recent years. Does today's context of social interaction between sexes not promote a biologistical femininity characterized by a negative perception of the feminine body and of its reproductive potential? Does women's "liberation" not imply the rejection of the feminine body and of its difference? In order to avoid the perverse effects of the search for autonomy, it is not more appropriate to redefine the feminine body with reference to women instead of with reference to the male universe, as it seems to be the case today?

The ‘Non‐dit’ in the Zenana: representations of Muslim women in Islamic canonical texts, the neo‐colonial imagination and a feminist response from Bangladesh

This essay recognizes that representations of the ‘Muslim woman’ as the Othered ‘object’ of the ‘Western’ gaze and the domesticated ‘object’ which the Islamic apologists strive hard to defend, are both constructions and false antitheses of each other. It seeks not the ‘truth’ regarding the Muslim women in the world of social reality but to examine how various representations of the women are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized. The essay proceeds in three stages. The first stage shows how the patriarchy mobilizes the Qur’an and the Hadith in order to construct the woman as the negative, the inessential and the abnormal of the man so as to exert complete subordination over her. However, the very act of attempting to mute the woman in Islam is the most strident proof that she is engaged in resistance against patriarchal control and the degree of resistance must be judged by the degree of patriarchal control. The second stage demonstrates how patriarchy operates in colonial and neo‐imperial landscape: it legitimizes the appropriation of Muslim woman ‘possessed’ by the Other (as exemplified by the orientalist seduction fantasy in William Dalrymple’s The White Mughals), but, haunted by the fear of rape and anxieties regarding the sexuality of the White woman possessed by the Self, it attempts to maintain strict control over her (as in the cases of Miss Wheeler in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and Private Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War). This struggle over the feminine body is perfectly in line with Islam’s hyper‐anxiousness to hide the female body and rigorously ensure monopolic possession over her. The third stage shows how Taslima Nasreen, a late‐20th century feminist from Bangladesh, speaks the unspoken and thereby attempts to subvert the normative representation of the muted women in her autobiographical novella, entitled Āmār Meyebelā. In thus examining the representations of the Muslim women, this essay seeks an alternative ‘third space of enunciation’ and takes a distinct political stand located outside of the axis of the dichotomy of the ‘Western’ gaze and the construction of the Islamic theologians.

Aesthetic surgery as false beauty

This article identifies a prevalent strand of feminist writing on beauty and aesthetic surgery and explores some of the contradictions and inconsistencies inscribed within it. In particular, we concentrate on three central feminist claims: that living in a misogynist culture produces aesthetic surgery as an issue predominantly concerning women; that pain - both physical and psychic - is a central conceptual frame through which aesthetic surgery should be viewed; and that aesthetic surgery is inherently a normalizing technology. Engaging with these ‘myths’, we explore the tensions uncovered through a historical analysis of the practices of aesthetic surgery as well as the challenges to feminist claims offered by post-feminism. In particular we seek to destabilize the connection in feminist writing between beauty and passivity. We argue that through aesthetic references to denigrated black and working-class bodies, young women may mobilize aesthetic surgeries to reinscribe active sexuality on the feminine body.

When a Body Meets a Body: A Neo-Kleinian View of Language and Bodily Experience

“We used to be baffled by Kikongo words with so many different meanings: bangala, for most precious and most insufferable and also poisonwood. That one word brought down father’s sermons every time, as he ended them all with the shout ‘Tata Jesus is bangala!’” In The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998), Leah, one of four sisters, is describing her experience of a paranoid, grandiose, intellectualized missionary father intent on subduing the body Africa through the ritual of baptism. The Poisonwood Bible is a story told in five voices, a postmodern version of A. Kurosawa’s (1950) film Rashomon. It is not simply the same events described through different eyes, but a whole tapestry of the growing up together of a mother and four daughters that articulates subjective experience as much different as it is similar. Mother Orleanna Price, Rachel, the twins Leah and Adah, and the youngest, Ruth May, are seared by their experience of the Reverend Price, an increasingly mad evangelical preacher, and by the experience of living in Africa. Africa may be seen as symbolic of the body of the mother, the embodiment of nature and of real bodily experience that both resists the laws of culture and gives rise to the laws of culture. The Reverend Price’s increasingly manic attempts to impress the Law of the Father onto the land may be seen as a great Lacanian failure to instantiate the domination of the paternal order onto the feminine body. Obsessed with defeating the flesh, and with bringing his form of salvation to a people he refused to allow to touch his own soul, he retreats further and further into stereotypical language and behavior, mistaking the toxic poisonwood for a simple weed, pulling it out

From Palaeolithic “Venus” up to the anthropomorphic statue-menhir: The ideological evolution of the human body in prehistoric art

The Human Body as an artistic topic nearly appears at the same time with the awakening of human being. Testimony are the Upper Palaeolithic paintings and graffiti engraved, scratched and coloured on every imaginable material support. To the end of the eighteenth century, the Malesian Archipelago tribes accused the western missionaries to have carried in their culture not the “notion of spirit” that they already possessed but that one of “body”. In fact, for the prehistoric man, the body was not anatomically separated and isolated from the rest of the objective and identified world like an individual. For them, the body and, in particular, the feminine body are the center of symbolic irradiation (cf., Cave of Cussac, France 25000 a.C.); that is, the “space” within the signs are thicker in the cosmic order. The prehistoric mentality, in fact, perceives the human body through the procedures of transformation and transmutation of the figures. Wanting to operate in an analytical way, the “body immaginery” is necessary to group the artistic production made in three layers: 1. Feminine bodies, a tutto tondo, appeared as the “Venus”, the “Neolithic Matrone” with great buttocks evidenced and breasts, often embellished with of the signs as V, W, zigzag, moon scythe, symbols of fecondation, fertility and regeneration; 2. Feminine male bodies o/e, Early Bronze Age Statue-Menhir (cf., III millennium, Lunigiana, Italy) hybrid expression of the Neolithic Atlantic megalitism and the Balkan-Danube one; 3. Male and/or feminine bodies as “praying man” type (cf., Nacquane, Valcamonica, Italy), appeared in the Neolithic and perduring until the maturity of the Greek world classic, full loads of movement, freedom and dynamicity.

Deleuze and the Body Without Organs

This article examines the possibilities for resistant feminine body identity through the lens of Deleuzian feminism. To do this, the author relies on Deleuze's critique of philosophical thought that constructs identity as a series of dichotomous oppositions. According to Deleuze, this process takes place within three dominant strata—organism, significance, and subjectification—that limit the creative potential of theorizing bodily identity. The author further examines Deleuze's alternative, positive approach to disreading bodily identity through such concepts as plane of consistency, assemblange, and the Body without Organs. Finally, the author aims to illustrate the usefulness of Deleuzian philosophy to researchers of sport and exercise through an application into women's fitness practices. More specifically, the author analyzes how Pilates, as a set of exercise practices, might assist in a creation of a Body without Organs.

L'Enfant noir by Camara Laye (review)

Book Reviews153 focus, Katharine Conley examines Brassard's use ofspatial poetics and the hologram as figures ofcreative potential in the quest to depict the feminine body and desire in writing. In "Our Last Chance for Silence," Catherine Campbell gives a nuanced reading of the tension between language and silence in Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn. The hologram returns in Susan Knutson's welcome comparison of Brassard's and Donna Haraway's interest in women's relationship with science, a comparison motivated by the fact that "they have both responded critically but without denial to the scientific and technological revolution that has changed what we as human beings are" (174). The final three articles bring together several of Brossard's works to illuminate specific themes. Susan Holbrook uses Kristeva's delirium to approach the trope oftranslation central to Brossard's aesthetics since the mideighties . Godard's recent translation of Journal intime provides the springboard for her sweeping look at Brossard's "Life (in) Writing," from Un livre (1970) to Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman (1998). Finally , Lynette Hunter examines the fascination and exigencies of writing the inédit, underscoring the moral action and agency that such a project implies. In any collection ofthis nature, some essays are more descriptive than analytical , more reverent than revealing. This is not unexpected in a volume that seeks to pay homage to a writer ofBrossard's exceptional and challenging caliber . What is missing here is a greater sense ofher vocation and profile as a poet, since most of the essays focus on prose. This is another reason why Dupré's contribution is so important, for her analysis points most clearly to Brossard's incomparable poetic oeuvre, which critics have yet to honorwith such an anthology . One can only hope that this useful volume for undergraduate and graduate programs alike will be joined by a companion collection that illuminates Brossard's poetic trajectory equally as well. Miléna SanteroGeorgetown University Laye, Cámara. L'Enfant noir. Myrna Bell Rochester and Natalie Schorr, eds. Newburyport, Massachusetts: Focus Pub./R. Pullins and Co., 2005. Pp 232. ISBN 1-58510-153-2. $14.95. This new student edition of Cámara Laye's L'Enfant noir, prepared by Myrna Bell Rochester and Natalie Schorr, is a welcome addition to the sorely limited selection of full-length texts in French published with materials for use in the second-language classroom. The autobiographical L 'Enfant noir is particularly well suited to high school and college age learners of French, as it deals with such topics as family, school, and choosing a career—topics which are ofhigh interest at this point in students' lives, and which they have the vocabulary in French to discuss. I often teach literary texts in intermediate-level French courses, as they not only build reading skills but also give students a taste ofwhat it means to study 1 54Women in French Studies literature in French. I recently taught L 'Enfant noir in a fourth-semester college French course. Although I initially feared the text would prove too difficult, in fact, the students rose to the task and the novel worked remarkably well—due, in large part, to the pedagogical apparatus provided in this new edition. The edition includes a detailed introduction with information on the author and the text, the Guiñean context, the négritude movement, and stylistic elements. Glosses and notes (in French) appear throughout the text, and a series ofmultiple-choice and open-ended questions accompany each chapter. The editors have also provided topics for discussions and essays, a bibliography, and suggestions for other books, films, and musical recordings to complement L 'Enfant noir. Finally, there is a lengthy vocabulary list to facilitate discussions of literature. These pedagogical aids are tremendously helpful; the one complaint I heard from students was that the glossed words were not as useful as they could have been, because the most relevant words were not always glossed, and the definitions sometimes seemed too roundabout. As an instructor, I appreciated the fact that definitions were given in French rather than English. In L'Enfant noir, the narrator tells ofhis experiences growing up as the...

Corps codés, corps filmés : le contrôle du corps des femmes dans le cinéma de la République islamique d’Iran

Since 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian Regime enforces an original cinematographic code of censorship. It’s meant to control the women’s body in every circumstance -the body of the female characters, of the actresses, of the women moviegoers. This control has major effects in the making and receiving of movies, as well as in their aesthetics. Nevertheless, while obeying these complex rules of control, a few film directors have succeeded in the process of revealing an intense sensual presence of the feminine body, beyond censorship. Recording the physical presence of women’s body related to real time and real space, these directors managed to generate a relation between each viewer and the actress’ body, whatever the story would be. Therefore one may build the hypothesis of a specific ability of cinema to overcome any censorship code, on the condition that the directors’ answer to the imposed rules is based on the recording of reality more than on storytelling or any attempt to pass-by the rules. A first part of this text is dedicated to the specificity of the Iranian cinema code and its effects on the representation of women’s body on screen. A second part underlines some directors’ «cinematographic resistance».

Família: maternidade e procriação assistida

O presente trabalho trata das transformações que se operam na idéia de família que desenvolvemos no Ocidente. Tais mudanças se devem, entre outros fatores, aos diferentes lugares que a mulher passou a ocupar na família e na sociedade e à constituição de sua identidade pela via da maternidade. Isso também é acompanhado pela decadência do modelo patriarcal, o que gera intensas discussões a respeito de um possível fator de feminilização da cultura e declínio da função paterna. A essas questões somam-se os avanços tecnológicos no campo da medicina da reprodução e as intervenções sobre o corpo feminino, o que tem proporcionado tanto mudanças quanto reforços no modelo de família tradicional ocidental.

Christine de Pizan: A Casebook (review)

Reviewed by: Christine de Pizan: A Casebook Stephanie Downes Altmann, Barbara and Deborah McGrady , eds, Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, New York, Routledge, 2003; hardback; pp. xiii, 296; RRP £65; ISBN 0415939097. This collection of essays edited by Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah L. McGrady embraces Christine de Pizan in all her guises: poet, polemicist, feminist, politician, historian. In their introduction, the editors suggest that the 'challenge' for twenty-first century scholars of Christine 'is to nuance our understanding of her uniqueness' (pp. 1-2). This carefully worded exhortation avoids casting Christine in any one critical mould, and alludes instead to the fluidity with which sheherself navigates theoretical boundaries. The Christine that emerges from this volume is distinguished chiefly by her 'unique'ability to elude categorisation. The Casebook also professes its own 'uniqueness', as a collation of previously unpublished articles at the forefront of post-millenium Christine scholarship. The collection begins with a brief review of the critical reception of Christine in the twentieth century: Charity Cannon Willard's anecdotal and entertaining foreword maps out her scholarly interest in Christine in the twentieth century with a light, personal touch. Altmann and McGrady acknowledge this legacy of academic study in their introduction, but stress that the volume's intention is to reflect, and even to generate, a 'new shift in Christine studies' (p. 2). Part I, 'Christine in Context', proposes readings of Christine's oeuvre within the historical, social and political context of fifteenth-century France. It includes instructive essays by major scholars Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinsksi, Lori J. Walters and Earl Jeffrey Richards. Margarete Zimmerman's intriguing 'Christine de Pizan: Memory's Architect' concludes the first section by exploring Christine's attention to memoria, and her promotion of her work, both textually and visually, to secure its future survival. Part II reviews the feminist approach to Christine, with a particular emphasis on feminine space: Rosalind Brown-Grant reminds us that the defense genre provides the foundation of the Cité des dames, while Roberta L. Krueger accentuates the [End Page 187] female domestic sphere in her examination of the link between the spiritual and economic well-being of women in the Livre des trois vertus (also known as the Tresor de la cité des dames). The exploration of feminine space culminates with Judith L. Kellogg's article, 'Le livre de la cité des dames: Reconfiguring Knowledge and Reimagining Gendered Space', which focuses on Christine's representation of a feminine body politic, where the physical space in which the City of Ladies is constructed is ultimately grafted onto the female body. The miscellany of textual analysis of Christine's works in Part III, 'Christine's Writings', lacks the engaging internal unity of Parts I and II. But the collective eclecticism of the contributions, might be interpreted as indicative of Christine's versatility in her own century, as well as in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship. Tracy Adams's article, which focuses on the Cents balades,sees Christine channelling her own experience in life and love stylistically into her ballade cycles. Marilynn Desmond re-examines the three letters Christine contributed to the early fifteenth-century epistolary debate, the Querelle de la rose, arguing for their significance in relation to Christine's corpus and to the Early Modern Querelle des femmes, while Andrea Tarnowski elucidates Christine's deliberate representation of herself as both a 'fictional character' and a 'producer of texts' (p. 182) in the oft-appraised Chemin de long estude. Liliane Dulac and Christine Reno's article on the Livre de l'advision Cristine expicitly articulates the generic elusiveness of Christine which underpins the volume: 'The autobiographical and political dimensions of the Advision are thus inextricably linked to such a degree that it is impossible to classify the work neatly according to a single genre that would exclude or downplay the importance of one or the other' (p. 209). It seems to me that the same could be said of the collection as a whole. Willard's intimate prefatory remarks spill over into the collection itself, and the result is an attempt to cancel out anachronism by recovering Christine on a personal level. The foreword resonates throughout the entire volume, but perhaps...

“Tuning into One’s Self:” Foucault’s Technologies of the Self and Mindful Fitness

This article explores the application of Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self—practices of freedom that are characterized by ethics of self-care, critical awareness, and aesthetic self-stylization. Foucault’s argument states that the technologies of self can act as practices of freedom from disciplinary, discursive body practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines the intersections of Foucault’s theory with commercial fitness practices to identify possibilities for changing the dominant, feminine body discourse. The focus is on fitness practices collectively defined as mindful fitness and specifically one hybrid mindfulfitness form that combines Pilates, yoga, and Tai Chi with western strength training. Through in-depth interviews with the instructors of this hybrid form, this study analyzes the possibilities for mindful fitness to act as a practice of freedom by detailing what can be meant by critically aware, self-stylized fitness professionals for whom ethical care of the self translates to ethical care of the others.

The New Political Infamy and the Sacrilege of Feminism

Abstract: This essay is about women being crucial to the constitution of the state and the construction of the ideal of the nation. It argues that the role of actual women as reproducers of the nation and as iconic representations of mythological figures at the helm of nation building is bound up with a certain psychical fantasy of woman. It argues further that Women in Black and other political activist groups have developed embodied feminist politics that not only bring the feminine body into public view during wartime but also undermine the place of the good woman as the reproducer of the nation who mourns only for the lost soldiers of her people.

The Voice of the Feminine Body: Espronceda's Poetry in Be´cquer's Rimas LV, LX, and LXXXV

(2003). The Voice of the Feminine Body: Espronceda's Poetry in Be´cquer's Rimas LV, LX, and LXXXV. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 163-177.

The Female Body and Its Meanings

A renewed interest within psychoanalysis in sexuality and the body has stimulated a reexamination of the female body and its relationship to concepts of “femininity” and feminine body image. The role of the genitals in determining female self-concept needs to be expanded to include object relations and cultural and personal meanings. Nevertheless, specific aspects and determinants of the female body and female anatomy such as the capacity for reproduction do influence female psychology and determine experiences. These are explored in the light of recent contribution.

Gender and body hair: constructing the feminine woman

Women's body hair removal is strongly normative within contemporary Western culture. Although often trivialised, and seldom the subject of academic study, the hairlessness norm powerfully endorses the assumption that a woman's body is unacceptable if unaltered; its very normativity points to a socio-cultural presumption that hairlessness is the appropriate condition for the feminine body. This paper explores biological/medical, historical and mythological literature pertaining to body hair and gender, as well as feminist analyses of the norm for feminine hairlessness. Much of this literature both reflects and constructs an understanding of hairlessness as ‘just the way things are’. Taken-for-granted, hairlessness serves, this paper argues, both to demarcate the masculine from the feminine, and to construct the ‘appropriately’ feminine woman as primarily concerned with her appearance, as ‘tamed’, and as less than fully adult.