Both Friedan (1965) and Greer (1970) argue that women are encouraged, cajoled and sometimes coerced into making their bodies conform to male dictated ideals. Intrinsic to the feminine mystique is that women are taught to find fulfilment through their bodies. They are encouraged to find themselves by dyeing their hair or having another baby (Friedan, 1965: 55).They are taught to remove their body hair because it is associated with animality and aggressive sexuality; they learn to be ashamed of menstruating. Women become objects of display, showing the status of their men. And the frustration of this position manifests itself in bodily disorders, in wrinkles and excess weight, as women are forced to deny their sexuality and thus become female eunuchs (Greer, 1970).Women’s embodiment is characterized as one of ‘passivity and sexlessness’. However, unlike de Beauvoir, Greer will not regard the female body as disgusting but instead is vituperative about men’s loathing of women, which reduces women to despised bodies. She says a woman is regarded by men as ‘a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spitoon’ (Greer, 1970: 254). Greer plays to the gallery; she likes
to shock, but that does not mean that there is not some truth to what she says. More recent feminist development of ideas about women’s involvement in shaping their bodies has tended to make use of Foucault’s ideas.
Foucault argues that modern forms of power produce certain kinds of embodied individuals, using visibility as one of a number of techniques. Unlike Freud, Foucault does not see power as simply repressive. Systems of power are not simply about saying no to bodily desires (Foucault, 1990/1976) but have come to operate around gaining knowledge of people’s bodies, desires and behaviour and using that knowledge to control populations. To illustrate this he did detailed studies on the development of psychiatry (1967/1961), modern medicine (1973/ 1963), the prison (1979/1975), and sexuality (1990/1976). He argues that power changed from something the sovereign possessed and exercized directly on people and their bodies, to something that operated more subtley as a force which people internalized. For example, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979/1975) he elaborates the shift from monarchs inflicting pain and death on the bodies of those who strayed from the law, to a system of punishment in which people are imprisoned so they can be observed and reformed. Through observation of prisoners, new knowledge about what was ‘abnormal’ could be gained, and knowing that they were watched meant inmates would gradually internalize the rules about ‘normal’ behaviour and discipline themselves to conform to these rules. As Foucault (1979/1975: 233) puts it: ‘penal imprisonment from the beginning of the nineteenth century, covered both the deprivation of liberty and the technical transformation of individuals’. Prisons were designed, both literally and figuratively, in ways that embodied the new principles of power. Foucault outlines how nineteenth-century architect Jeremy Bentham’s designs for a panopticon can be seen as a blueprint for how to construct buildings that would make it easy to control people through an architecture that enforces visibility:
at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extend the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. (Foucault, 1979/1975: 200)
The gaze is therefore central in disciplining bodies, even if not inevitably a ‘male’ gaze (Tseёlon, 1995).All this knowledge, gained by observation, could be used to ‘better’ control people. New forms of power are thus less brutal, but more all-encompassing and wholly entangled with forms of knowledge.
People discipline themselves and their bodies in accordance with powerful ways of thinking and talking about what is ‘normal’. These dominant discourses arose from new ‘scientific’ ways of observing human beings. The development of a medical gaze, in particular, had vast effects (Foucault, 1973/1963). People diet and exercize to try and conform to medically endorsed notions of healthy bodies (for example, see Gimlin, 2001), while psychiatry classifies and defines what divides ‘normal’ sexuality and behaviour from deviant (Foucault, 1967/1961). People’s self-definitions are influenced by the way they internalize and embody social norms. Yet Foucault only rather tangentially deals with gender. In his work on the development of psychiatry and of medicine he touches on the way in which discourses tend to produce women’s bodies as hysterical and faulty compared to a masculine standard of normality (Foucault, 1967/1961; 1973/1963). Others have extended his work to deal more fully with issues of gender.
Bryan Turner’s pioneering (1984) book, The Body and Society, is heavily influenced by Foucault (and Weber) but he differs in identifying patriarchal control of women’s bodies as a key issue in the sociology of the body. This makes sense given that Turner’s argument restates the central sociological problem of social order (how society remains relatively controlled and peaceful) as ‘the problem of the government of the body’ (Turner, 1984: 2). He argues that society has four tasks: the reproduction of populations over time, regulating bodies in space, disciplining interior bodies, and representing exterior bodies. The disorders women suffer in patriarchy are a sign of the problem of control, and relate to these tasks. Drawing on Foucault, Turner argues that knowledge about these new disorders is used to try and control women’s sexuality in the service of order. Hysteria was an illness much talked of at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a label given to women thought to be acting irrationally and the cause was identified as a ‘wandering womb’, which was thought to arise because they had not reproduced. Turner (1984: 102—3) suggests that hysteria was in fact the result of contradictory pressures on women at that time to get married, but to delay marriage in order to slow population growth. Meanwhile, agoraphobia (an intense fear of public spaces) in women is produced by the constant focus on the (sexual) dangers arising from new urbanized life. In addition, Turner uses Goffman to understand how efforts to control women also manifest as anorexia nervosa, a disease which sees prosperous women starve themselves — sometimes to death. This becomes more understandable within a society in which self and public appearance become merged. Turner develops these connections more than Foucault and also specifically engages with feminist explanations for women’s subordination. Feminists have tended to suggest that capitalism reinforces patriarchy. He argues that capitalism actually undermines patriarchy in so far as it encourages an individualism incompatible with patriarchy. However, in the chapters Turner devotes to this discussion, women’s bodily experiences fade into the background. Feminist work has arguably been somewhat more successful in using Foucault to talk about having a woman’s body.
Feminist work that has appropriated Foucault’s ideas about medicine have perhaps been most successful in maintaining a focus on how bodies are experienced and disciplined as gendered bodies (for example, Seymour, 1998; Howson, 2005). A focused example is Alexandra Howson’s (1999) work on cervical screening as compliance and moral obligation. Although cervical screening programmes may have good intentions, her point is that they encourage women to be active in the policing of their own health. Women are expected to participate in smear tests and most feel obliged to do so. Such tests will evaluate them in relation to medical models of a ‘normal’ cervix, and are just one example of an array of ways in which people have come to be considered responsible for monitoring their own health in ways that reinforce particular notions of gendered embodiment. There is also literature on the disciplinary nature of other practices that reproduce feminine bodies such as those around beauty, cosmetic surgery, and other ‘body work’ (see, for example, Black, 2004; Davis, 1995; Gimlin, 2001). Much of this work discusses gender as an effect of social regulation.
Susan Bordo is an American feminist philosopher who also uses Foucault in very sociological ways to understand women’s embodiment as highly regulated and docile. She also draws on his ideas about how power/knowledge shapes women’s bodies via the classification of gender specific bodily disorders such as anorexia nervosa, agoraphobia and hysteria. Bordo, unlike Foucault or Turner, sees these as more than signs of women’s subordination; they all are extreme versions of current cultural expectations about femininity. Women are encouraged to be quiet, to stay home, to not take up too much space. Hysterics, agoraphobics and anorexics are conforming in an exaggerated way to expectations about femininity, but they are at the same time resisting them. By being hysterical, Victorian women were resisting the idea that they should be angels in the house, there to care for others. Agoraphobics cannot perform many of the duties associated with traditional feminine roles, such as doing the shopping or running the children to activities. Anorexics are unconsciously protesting against cultural ideals that encourage women to go hungry, feel ashamed of their appetites and prescribe constant body work to conform to ideals of feminine appearance. Bordo is very clear that these protests are not conscious and that they are extremely self-destructive. Such disorders illustrate the ridiculousness of norms about femininity by showing how dysfunctional conformity to them could be. However, even in extreme conformity there is resistance, although that very resistance may actually help reproduce women’s oppression rather than challenge it (Bordo, 1989). Medicine and the mass media — and the discourses and practices surrounding them — all contribute to disciplining bodies. Women are encouraged to actively work on their bodies to, ‘normalize’ them, but there are narrow ideas about what is ‘normal’; currently in the West these include, amongst other things, being slender and white (Bordo, 1993). Such feminist appropriations of Foucault usefully go beyond thinking about bodies either as passively oppressed or as active sites of (individual) resistance, but they are not without problems.
The Foucauldian emphasis on the discursive production of bodies under-appreciates the messiness and unpredictability of human bodies. Sometimes bodies defy the frameworks which supposedly construct them (Blaikie et al., 2003). For example, there are limits to understanding ageing bodies as socially constructed. Discourses do tend to produce old bodies as abnormal, disgusting, frail, out of control, and these are often inaccurate stereotypes. Nevertheless there are bodily processes that have particular effects as we age and these cannot be entirely ignored. No matter how much we might try to discipline aged bodies to conform to discourses which regard youth, beauty and control as normal, older bodies will at some point most likely be frail, weak, painful, incontinent, wrinkled, dead (Elias, 1985; Hepworth, 1995). Bodies have limits and the subjective experience of human bodies, both in pleasure and pain, may not be simply an illusion of social making. Bodies are not as docile in the taking on of social norms as much of Focault’s early work seems to suggest. Considerations of bodies as something actively used in constructing the self become more evident in his later thinking about ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988). Other feminist appropriations of his work have centrally addressed the issue of agency.
A Foucauldian approach to agency is noticeable in Judith Butler’s (1993) ideas (see Chapter 3) about bodies as socially produced (‘made’) by discourse, but always in gendered terms. She argues that the classificatory relationship between sex and gender produces our bodies. Therefore bodies cannot be understood unless marked by sex/gender. Gender makes human beings culturally intelligible. What she means is that we always make sense of people in terms of gender. If you come across a person whose gender is unclear, you do not know how to interact. This is a useful idea, but Butler and Foucault have been accused of leaving us with a sense of humans as helpless victims of discourse. Her attempts to recognize agency are problematic because of her emphasis on discourse and there being ‘no doer behind the deed’. Certainly sociologists might be sympathetic to her distrust of ‘voluntarism’, by which she means assumptions that human beings can do whatever they choose. Clearly sociology is often an exercise in destroying illusions of individual choice by revealing the determining power of social structures on people’s lives. But it is very difficult to eschew voluntarism while trying to promote some vision of agency. Butler sometimes presents a view of sex/gendered bodies as docile bodies, produced by the social, regulated by discourse. There are alternative ways to consider how bodies play a part in producing the social, without returning to essentialism. Much of the feminist sociology cited so far does this, yet it has often been ignored in favour of more abstract theorizing on gendered embodiment arising from other disciplines (Howson, 2005). Corporeal feminism is one approach that has been seized on.