Gender, Sexuality & the Body

 What is the Ideal Body? Why is it so deeply ingrained in our self-image? Read about Mauritania: In Nigeria, the ideal body is FAT (the fatter the better) what are the beauty norms for desert Arabs in Nigeria?  In what ways are these body norms expressed? girth weight stretch marks on your arms In what way are they achieved? forced feeding seclusion and fattening of females for marriage inactivity Symbol & Meaning long neck & no collar bones walking slowly and swaying butt from side to side to show off size womanhood needs girth stretch marks as symbols of beauty Are body ideals "physical manifestations of beliefs and practices that are anchored in a wider set of cultural values"? self-discipline strength industry general virtue where do these body ideals come from? (all cultures have well established and IMPOSED views about the ideal human body). Mende people of Sierra Leone: spend a great deal of time achieving body images, like high buttocks, plump bodies, very dar...

 The Politics and Presentation of Women's Bodies Mammoplasty: Designing Women What/who creates and perpetuates women's body modification? Who exercises the power? Women, Society, or both? Feminist critique: society imposing beauty standards on women (Foucault) False Consciousness : women believe they have agency to do what the "want" but are unaware of where "what they want" comes from. versus free will Male Gaze : objectifies women based on their desires has been critiqued for taking agency away from women highlights the importance of looking and being seen in social construction pornography exemplifies male gaze, in particular in terms of sexuality. lesbianism in male pornography Opposing approaches are too simple (Foucault) Cosmetic Surgery both reifies and constitutes hegemonic femininity women are not forced to undergo cosmetic surgery, rather then internalize as natural and normal the standards of beauty that are pervasive in hegemonic culture (Gramsci...

  "We are born naked and the rest is drag" (Ru Paul) The Social Skin (Turner) Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge.  This objectively universal fact is associated with another of a more subjective nature — that the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well.  The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual; becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing a...

"Get Your Freak On" Sex, Babies and Images of Black Femininity (Patricia Hill Collins) Sarah Baartman, The Hottentot Venus of Sideshows a Khoikhoi woman born in the late eighteenth century in what is now South Africa. Baartman was brought to Europe as a human exhibit after supposedly signing a contract she probably did not sign well-informed and out of her own free will. Placed in front of vast crowds across Europe, Baartman’s large buttocks were presented to millions of European eyes within human “freak show” exhibits. She became infamous and ridiculed. White people would travel long distances and pay fees just to gawk at Baartman’s Black body. “ Her brain, skeleton and sexual organs remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974. Her remains weren’t repatriated [to South Africa] and buried until 2002 Symbolic association of  African Women in the West as "wild" sexual practices in an uncivilized, inherently violent wilderness wrapped up in the notion of freakdom ...