The Power Of The Gaze (Foucault and Fat Politics)

"Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward; the female gaze

is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The "nice" girl

learns to avoid the bold and unfettered staring of the "loose" woman 

who looks at whatever and whomever she please."

(Bartley, p.82)

In her essay titled Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Power, Sandra Lee Bartley introduces a very interesting take on feminism by examining it through the lens of Michel Foucalt's idea of docile bodies. Although Bartley's main point is focused on how feminism is constructed and defined, she tip toes around the extreme effects of this phenomena on overweight people. There is an affirming connection of Bartley's discourse of femininity to that of Kathleen LeBesco's discourse of fat people in Revolting Bodies. Bartley talks about "the new discipline [that] invades the body and seeks to regulate its very forces and operations, the economy and efficiency of its movements." This is remnant of LeBesco's assertion that the body is part of a political allegiance, but Bartley pushes the concept a bit further. The body is definitely seen as a tool of labor, but in our modern times, it's more than that.

There is institutional control over all of the body's functions, activities and appearances. Everything conducted in the external world is subject to the power of the gaze; this patriarchal entity watching you from a theoretical distance waiting for you to make a mistake by somehow disrupting the space you are taking up. This gaze is the gate keeper of the status quo, ready to shame and laugh at any person that physically violates the rules. Both LeBesco and Bartley would agree, the status quo for women is thinness. But the gaze is not a tangible thing, which is why it is so easy for people to say things like "you don't have to hate and obsess over your body, you're doing it to yourself." It's hard to argue against this because generally, individuals don't call others out on being overweight, at least not in our adult world. There is an illusion of choice in the way we think, an illusion that we can dictate for ourselves how we feel about ourselves, but the individual is often powerless when confronted with large institutions and systems that make a profit from our insecurities.

It's easy to demonize civilians and place them at the center of social injustices, but in a world of celebrity, mass-media, and bombarding advertisements, literally everything we are predisposed to by way of being born is telling us how to feel and think, on top of telling us exactly what about our bodies is wrong or right. In a profit-based world, selling one's product has turned into selling one's soul. These companies telling us that we need this night cream, or that revolutionary weight loss program, do the bitting of the monstrous gaze.

Unlike Focault, LeBesco calls for a complete reconstruction of what it means to be beautiful--not feminine--but beautiful. She asserts that fat people become a threat to society simply because their bodies aren't asking to be sexualized. These bodies are overriding the power of the gaze. This is why there are industries centered around making fat people feel bad about themselves without anyone realizing. They make it seem as though fat people hate their bodies by nature, as opposed to the self perpetuating ideals set forth by they themselves for years. LeBesco wants to put the blame on citizens, and although there is some responsibility there, we have to remember that The Man is watching. It is lurking and it is waiting to inflict a life of misery upon people with alternative physical features by way of propaganda and consumerism.

It could be argued that this monstrous gaze is God himself, and a lot of people would hold true this argument to justify their discomfort with fat people. Gluttony, after all, is one of those deadly sins. The Christian/Catholic church is the most ancient source of influence in our American society and holds great influence in our political structure in arbitrary ways. Yes, there is an illusion of separation between church and state, but let's not forget that Obama had to undergo great lengths to prove his christianity and win the presidency. Gluttony, although having many implications on the basic idea of wasting resources on yourself by taking in too much of anything, is always superficially connected to fatness. Interestingly, there is a connection that fat people eat "too much" and take up "too much" room. Even in Dante's inferno, the punishment for gluttony is described as a giant obese looking creature that has you for dinner over and over again for all eternity. The truth of the matter is, however, that gluttony has not much to do with food as it does have to do with basic overindulgence in absolutely anything. Someone who is obsessed with running and does it excessively is, by definition, a glutton, but it is hard to get that across anyone's mind. Some would cry vanity, but why is it that an overindulgence in things that are considered "progressive" by some mythical standard, different than overindulging in things that are considered "transgressive"? Why is the obsession with fitness not as condemned as the obsession with junk food and binge watching Netflix?

This could be linked back to the power of the gaze and its mythical implications that makes it difficult to pinpoint, makes it difficult to lay blame. It's hard to understand why the world is the way that it is, and historical discourses never convince me, leaving me with a slight understanding and a lingering feeling that there is so much more at play that I could never articulate or even begin to process. But thanks to Foucault, we can kind of begin to comprehend the forces that are out there brainwashing our minds into the reconstruction of the body. We can blame the media, we can blame people, we can blame the bible. But something is missing.


Side Note: After reading the Sandra Lee Bartly piece, I was inspired to write a poem. Here's the link if anyone is interested. Only posting it because I realize this entry has a lot of not fully-formed thoughts and I think the poem says a lot more about this than what I've written above.