Academic literature on the topic 'Ideal feminine body-subject'

This visual essay presents four of the author’s artistic projects, which respond to prevailing eastern European neo-liberal conceptions of the human body and the subjects it produces. The first project is concerned with the use of human skin as an organic material donated by its ‘owner’ for the manufacture of a corset and belt, which become parts of a new costume. The second project explores the characteristic of the ‘ideal’ neo-liberal human subject by means of the costume produced by manipulating the author’s own blood. The third project highlights the cultural norm according to which one is expected to present oneself to the known and especially unknown others in line with the dominant standards of feminine beauty ‐ erotically attractive, healthy, youthful and slim. The fourth project focuses on the almost obsessive endeavour to preserve or rather achieve ‘the perfect skin’, as evident in countless beauty advertisements and artificially ‘optimized’ selfies.

In this article, I demonstrate that Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy represents a first major step toward a rejection of the humanist subject and therefore was influential for the development of contemporary posthumanist material feminism. Specifically, her unprecedented attention to embodiment and biology, in The Second Sex and other works, as well as her notion of ambiguity, serve to challenge the humanist subject. While I am not claiming that Beauvoir was a posthumanist or material feminist thinker avant la lettre, I show that she is an important precursor to some of their key ideas. Indeed, her thinking about the body, sex, gender, and the importance of embodiment and situation constitutes a challenge to the subject of humanism, thereby opening up a path for thinkers that follow to push Beauvoir’s critique and articulate a posthumanism that does away with the subject of humanism.

In the health-risk society, food choice is framed through public health nutrition and dietary risks which are produced through nutritionism and econutrition. Dietary guidelines recommend the consumption of functional foods to target bodily health (Scrinis 2013; Mudry 2010), whereas ecological nutrition pushes sustainable diets for planetary health (Mason & Lang 2017; Friedberg, 2016). These healthy eating discourses construct dietary food risks and reorient ideas about what constitutes good food and eating right. This paper explores how food risk discourses extend the moralizing of healthism through emerging public health nutrition discourses and the ‘new public health.’ I suggest that in considering what constitutes eating right, dietary health risks extend individual responsibility for bodily health to increasing responsibility for the health of our environment or ecosystems, exercised as choice over the foods one chooses to eat. The feminine-citizen-subject is particularly targeted because as Moore (2010) contends, hegemonic femininity is constructed through beliefs about health and the healthy body. Thinking through feminist intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) however, I draw attention to the limits of choice and individualized approaches to managing food risk given the structural constraints of food and health.

This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and “prosthetic” pregnancy, it asks whether the “monstrous” can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and potential power of the pregnant subject.

Since 2012 there has been a heightened presence of the body positive movement on Instagram. Women who occupy non-normative bodies use the platform to post selfies to challenge dominant ideals of feminine beauty, including the demands to produce smooth skin, adhere to body size norms, and avoid bodily fluids. This has been accompanied by a barrage of media outlets advising their readers on the top body positive accounts they need in their life to boost their body confidence, and how to be body positive on Instagram for more self-love (Irish Examiner, 2016; Burke 2015; Vino, 2015; O'Reilly, 2016). News media circulated articles across social media platforms with stories heralding women who, through the use of selfies, open up about their experiences with eating disorders, shut body shamers down, challenge "bikini body" myths, and confront expectations directed at women's post-pregnancy bodies. Women who share the same experiences of and frustration with dominant ideals of femininity have identified with and participated in this movement through the use of body-positive hash tags, captions, and subject matter. However, as the popularity of the body positive movement and the influence of advocates grew, corporations began commoditizing the body positive advocates and using their influence to push products, capitalizing off of the movement. During the commodification process, the body positive advocates lose sight of their purpose and reproduce dominant capitalist ideologies, objectify their own bodies, and accept beauty modification practices.

AbstractThe aim of this article is to present a less negative and more rounded analysis of the potential contribution of postmodernism to social policy than that presented by Taylor-Gooby (1994) in this journal entitled ‘Postmodernism: A Great Leap Backwards?’. It covers four major themes. First, it examines Foucault's ideas on power/knowledge, the body, discipline and surveillance. Second, the article explores the connections between feminism, postmodernism and social policy. Third, it analyses theories of the poststructural state. Fourth, it considers a neglected topic in the subject of space and assesses the contribution of postmodern discourses of spatiality and their relevance to social policy. The article acknowledges the contradiction arising from post-modernism's critique of meta-theory and mainstream social policy's commitment to universalism, but concludes that the answer does not lie in the universal rejection of postmodernism but in the use of the ideas and insights to move the discipline in new directions.

Abstract In this article we draw together the histories of rejuvenation and cosmetic use in order to examine discourses of “soft rejuvenation” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While rejuvenation has typically been considered in relation to transnational medicalized attempts to restore youthful vitality and virility, we suggest that the logic of rejuvenation was feminized through the promotion of cosmetic and daily self-care regimens in this period. Drawing on material from British, American, and Canadian contexts relating to beauty and hygiene, we suggest that daily practices of caring for and disciplining the white female body, especially through cosmetic use, were legitimated, in part, using the rhetoric of rejuvenation. The article considers how the transnational, the modern, and the propagation of whiteness in the early twentieth century were mobilized in these ideas of how daily bodily work could preserve the (white) youthful face and body, which was understood to embody health and vigor. This discourse was significant for young women, who were subject to male control over their bodies as they began to be employed in nontraditional workplaces; however, we also argue that these cosmetic practices can be understood as a component of girls’ and women’s own self-fashioning of modern identities.

Through qualitative interviews with eleven people who have investments in girliness, feminism, and fashion, the article centres around the concept of “wilful girliness,” understood as a constructed phenomenon, which focuses on ideas about girliness in relation to consciousness, and in relation to empowerment. This approach to the subject is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting (dis)empowerment within a person’s body, and towards seeing and acknowledging the embodiment of a (feministic) conscious girliness as a historical construction rather than a personal quality. It argues that a wilful girliness is temporarily stabilised through a set of contingent exclusions and should be understood as a consistent site of contest, an active process without origin and end, that takes shape within a specific context, deeply entangled and inseparable from existing power structures. The article highlights the importance of acknowledging the body and its abilities as a crucial starting point in the conditional activity of the negotiation of wilful girliness. It goes on and untangles the responsibility of embodying this fluctuating construction from the girly individual. The article concludes by suggesting the importance of interrogating the mere fact that a wilful girliness is sought after and used as a dominant reference point and criteria in regard to girliness per se and calls for a more varied understanding of girliness.

Sport is still understood as a traditional bastion of masculinity that exalts physical qualities such as strength and speed, and psychological traits such as aggression and perseverance, deeming women’s participation undesirable and unnecessary. Nevertheless, women for decades, in strict separation from men or within so-called “women’s sports”, were achieving results worthy of the attention of even the fiercest sceptics. Because of its nature founded in physicality, sport is still relatively seldom the area of political struggle for gender equality, although female athletes have occasionally done more for positive outcomes of that struggle than is acknowledged. In this paper, I discuss the ambivalent nature of sport contributing, on the one hand, to the essentialisation of genders in their differences and the petrification of power relations between them, and containing, on the other, indications of destruction or at least of corruption of the traditional, hierarchically established gender norms. The paper consists of four parts. In the first introductory part, I explain the reasons for concentrating my discussion on formalised competitive sports and approaches I am using. While emphasising the biopolitical aspects of the subject, I start my analysis with the description of a proclaimed guiding principles of contemporary sports contained in the spirit of Olympism. In the second part, I discuss the ontology of sport contained in the ideas of the founder of the modern Olympic Games Baron Pierre de Coubertin and the consequential factors influencing women ‘s participation in sports. These range from the perception of women’s allegedly debilitating physical and psychological traits, through hypersexualisation of female athletes’ body, or the attitude that it is not feminine enough, to the accusations that female athletes harm their health jeopardising, for example, the basic feminine duty – that of motherhood. In the third part, I put de Coubertin’s arguments in the contemporary context emphasising the relevance the concept of hegemonic masculinity has on the contemporary understanding of masculinity and the role of sport in maintaining it. In the last, fourth part, I discuss emancipatory aspects of sports, concluding on their ability to disrupt both essentialised femininity and essentialised masculinity.

The decades before the Great War were a period of exciting cultural creativity and great social upheaval. Both men and women cultivated a great range of interests in ethical, feminist, mystical, spiritualist and sexual ideas and practices. Max Weber referred to this diversity as a ‘department store for worldviews’. Recent historiography has dubbed this period ‘the age of nervousness’ or ‘the quest for purity’. New fascinations held many people in their thrall: the culture of the body and, more specifically, the Life Reform movement. Some felt inspired by their ethical hero Count Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer and pacifist. Tolstoyan colonies based on his philosophy of back-to-nature simplicity were founded in several European countries. One of the places where Tolstoyans experimented with new practices of asceticism was the Monte Verità near Ascona, a village on the Lago Maggiore in the Swiss region of Ticino. This article deals with the transformation of this Tolstoyan colony into a nature cure sanatorium, inspired by ethical and aesthetic values. As a case study it addresses crucial, but ambivalent, aspects of modernity in the ‘natural’ life of nude sunbathing, vegetarian meals, walking barefoot, living in wooden light-and-air cabins and free love marriages. However, this microcosm of Belle Époque Europe has also been the subject of much mythification. The article argues that these forms of myth-making reveal different narratives and models of identification. Deconstruction of Monte Verità myths reveals their popularity as counter-culture narrative (discourse) in the historiography of the 1970s. During the last decade, a comparison between the elitist, artistic lifestyle experiments on Monte Verità and trends in our modern, mass culture (referring to ‘personal authenticity’ or to Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’) seems to be gaining in influence.

This study focuses on three young women in their final year of school using data gathered during a year-long process of individual conversational interviews, the contents of which were largely determined by their interests. Three themes arise from critical incidents during this year - the debutante ball, teenage pregnancy and dieting. These themes are used to focus wide ranging explorations of what it is to be a young woman at this particular time. The broader cultural production of discursive positions available to, and developed by, these young women as part of their identity formation is discussed. Methodological issues concerning power relationships between research participants are also the focus of critical attention. It is considered that young women's bodies and bodily practices are central to understanding the processes involved in their identity formation. It is in this context that the focus turns to bodies that matter. In contemporary Western cultures 'adolescent bodies' could be said to matter 'too much' in the sense that they are increasingly the focus for disciplinary practices in institutions such as schooling, the church, the family, health care, health promotion and the media. This disciplining is legitimised because adolescence is socially constructed as a 'becoming'. In this case it is a matter of 'becoming woman'; a sort of apprenticeship which allows for knowledgeable others to provide not only guidance and nurturance, but discipline. Using insights gained from feminist poststructuralist theory and cultural feminism this thesis argues that the discourses and practices generated within and across institutions, which are normalised by their institutional base, are gender differentiated. The focus is on young women's embodied subjectivity and how the discourses and practices they engage with and in work to construct an ideal feminine body-subject. The discursive production of a gendered identity has a considerable impact on young women's health and their health-related behaviours. This is explored specifically in the thesis in relation to sexuality and the cultural production of the 'ideal' female body. It is argued that health education and health promotion strategies which are designed to influence young women's health related behaviours, need to consider the forms of power, knowledge and desire produced through young women's active engagement with institutionalised discourses of identity if they are to have an ongoing impact

This thesis examines contemporary musical and literary representations of female fatness in the Hispanic Caribbean. Chapter I explores the stereotype of a greater acceptance and valorization of fatness within the African Diaspora using contemporary feminist scholarship on cultural aesthetics and the body. Fatness is discussed as being both sexually transgressive and traditionally feminine. Chapter II juxtaposes male representations of “la gorda” in the lyrics of popular music of from Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico with the feminist politics of underground hip hop. Chapter III analyzes Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s hyperbolic representation of La Estrella, his fictionalization of Cuban bolero singer Fredy Rodriguez, in Ella cantaba boleros y “Metafinal” (1996). The aquatic subtexts and grotesque characterization of La Estrella’s body construct her as an icon of musical authenticity and exceptionality as well as a symbol of strength and resistance.