"Docile Bodies" and the Pursuit for Impossible Bodies

In the past couple years magazines and advertisers have come under fire for how much they alter photos to sell products. As a result there is also a new trend of making videos showing the transformation photoshopped photos undergo before they are put in magazines. This video shows a woman who is prepped for the photoshoot with extensive hair and makeup, and then altered even more by Photoshop, by the end of the process she looks like a completely different person.

But how does Photoshopped pictures relate to “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”? The section of the article that really got me thinking about these Photoshop videos was section II, where Bartky talks about exercise.  I was struck by her observation that dieting is a form of disciple that makes the body into the enemy. I can recall countless diets that a various family members and friends have tried out throughout the years and just how often these diets made eating restrictive, and difficult. I remember most of my family going to weight watchers will I was growing up and just how often the process of tallying up points and managing how many points they had left made eating stressful. I was also reminded of the several diets that I have attempted throughout my life, and how whenever I was on a diet, suddenly my body did become the enemy, and eating become difficult and painful, as I had to strictly monitor and restrict what I could and could not eat. Not to mention that following the diet plan or not, eating often felt shameful and considering what to eat always require a lot of before hand planning.

However, what really got me thinking about those Photoshop videos was the comment about spot-treatment, and how we have been taught that it is possible to focus on and exercise one particular part of your body, such as your stomach. Bartky points out that spot-treatments are scientifically unsound. This made me question how often we as women feel that we need to strive for an image or idea that might be impossible to reach. For example, no one will ever look like that woman at the end of that video, the original model, and looks almost nothing like the woman at the end of that video. That woman is not modeled after a person, she has been created using technology and there is no way anyone will look exactly like her. How often are we monitoring and changing ourselves to try and look like or conform to an image that is impossible to reach?

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 In section IV when Bartky talks about all the beauty rituals we undergo because it is expected that women just want to or are required to do these things in order to be a women; I was thinking about the articles we read for Tuesday’s class about being a Gender Outlaw. Barky at the end of the section points out that makeup is often celebrated as a form of expression, or art. However, unlike typical forms of art, like watercolor, when a woman chooses to not use makeup she receives backlash for not making herself look more feminine. There is a lot of disgust towards women who do not present themselves in a feminine way. For me this adds a new layer of thought to people who are Gender Outlaws. Part of being a “docile body” is that you learn to inscribe gender on yourself from a young age, not only through expression, but also through body language. Through the amount of space you take up and the way you walk. 

These actions and postures are taught from a young age and are often done subconsciously, because of that they can be hard to change. We prescribe gender on to almost everything, how someone looks, how they talk, their body language, the way they treat you. Because of this being a Gender Outlaw takes on a new level of difficulty. Although an individual make identify as a Gender Outlaw, and may present themselves in a gender-neutral way, the rest of the world is going to prescribe a certain gender to them. If that gender is girl than they will be expected to participate in being feminine. As Bartky says “femininity as spectacle is something in which virtually everyone woman is expected to participate in”. If you do not participate, you are incorrectly being a woman, or even perhaps incorrectly being human.

     However, I was thinking that even if one is a Gender Outlaw there is still a lot of body discipline that goes into living and presenting as someone who does not conform to either girl or boy. This discipline of course is not routinized or pushed on you by society the way that femininity is, however, I think it does point out that escaping the tendency to police and alter your body is almost impossible. Changing the way our bodies look and being aware and conscious of how we sit or talk is a large part of how we are raised and how we live. As Foucault pointed out we, regardless of our gender, are regulated by society. From a very young age we are taught to regulate and discipline ourselves. Because of this I think it is currently very difficult and counter intuitive for women to trying and make their bodies fit a certain mold. It is also almost impossible for us to not participate in some form of regulation as it is what we have been doing since childhood.  To change this pressure and regulate our bodies to a certain standard we have to change the system that creates this pressure. We have to change society so that we do not feel as though we always have to monitor and change ourselves to fit in.