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In Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power by Sandra Bartky, the writer examines the disciplinary practices which produces a body that gesture and appearance is feminine. Bartky challenges the social construction of femininity by revealing how feminine serves the interest of domination. She talks about apparatus of discipline, the disciplinarians that discipline. According to her, it is a system of micro power that is essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical. Taking into consideration one of the concepts of her analysis, feminine bodily discipline is something imposed on subjects and at the same time something that can be sought voluntarily. I will base my analysis on these dual characters and I will demonstrate that the production of femininity is more like something imposed …show more content…
As a woman of color who has always been a big girl, I started struggling with my body image when I reached my adolescence years. Growing up, I did not realize that my body was abnormal and unacceptable. I saw myself just like other peers and age group. My experience of body dissatisfaction first started within my own family. I got teased about my size by family members. My parents, especially my mother, reminded me constantly about how obese I was. Reaching a certain age, she started controlling my food intake and she made sure I ate no more than three times a day. With all those disciplinary actions from my mother and the pressure I felt from family, I started noticing of external standards of beauty and body image. In this lens, one can see that body image is influenced by many factors and my mother became a structure that carried out directives. This example demonstrates that feminine body is socially constructed and taught to us. When this ideal body image or feminine body gets inculcated in us at a young age, it becomes internalized discipline that enables one to distinguish herself from other
Self-objectification leads to body dissatisfaction which is recognized through the constant evaluation and criticizing of one’s and others size, shape, and weight and diminishes woman’s sexual health through the hypersexualization and sexual objectification of the female body. I argue that self-objectification is a social problem that instills in body dissatisfaction from the perpetuation of the thin white female image in the media.
While her mother may intend this pressure for good, to help her daughter mature into a wonderful woman, her mother’s method’s generate nothing but negative attitudes within the mother-daughter relationship. After a study conducted at Tel-Hai Academic College, this was concluded: “The current research findings emphasize the importance of the mother-daughter relationship and the mother’s emotional support in forging a positive body image. They also show that the girl’s perception of her body image significantly affects her sense of wellbeing” (Walter 555). Connie’s mother provides no emotional support and degrades Connie’s prettiness, which would lead to negative effects on Connie. All of the reproach Connie faces induces exasperation leading her to wish, “her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over” (Oates 422). The pressure Connie faces to conform to her mother’s will adds to her internal conflict and further demonstrates the lack of respect she
Accordingly, I decided the purposes behind women 's resistance neither renamed sexual introduction parts nor overcame money related dependence. I recalled why their yearning for the trappings of progression could darken into a self-compelling consumerism. I evaluated how a conviction arrangement of feeling could end in sexual danger or a married woman 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, regardless, ought to cloud an era 's legacy. I comprehend prerequisites for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the area of women into open space and political fights previously cornered by men all these pushed against ordinary restrictions even as they made new susceptibilities.
The writings of Foucault, Bartky, Butler, and Bordo are significantly separate from each other in the issues that they grapple with within the body of their texts but their also overlap on major points, as is to be expected when many people write on the same subject. Each of these writers is concerned with different aspects of power and how that power is used and how it operates within our society. Most of these writers are feminist theorists and concerned with the ways that the female body is affected by power used against her while Foucault is less concerned with how power affects female bodies specifically but that can be seen as a result of his lack of connection to feminist thought. If Foucault mentions women and how they are affected
Her chief arguing points and evidence relate to the constriction of female sexuality in comparison to male sexuality; women’s economic and political roles; women’s access to power, agency, and land; the cultural roles of women in shaping their society; and, finally, contemporary ideology about women. For her, the change in privacy and public life in the Renaissance escalated the modern division of the sexes, thus firmly making the woman into a beautiful
The sociocultural approach to the issue of body image among women states that women receive harmful and negative cultural messages about their bodies. These messages can come from the media as well as from family and peer influences (Swami, 2015). By promoting the thin ideal for attractiveness, the media contributes to women rating their bodies more negatively and thus increases their likelihood of developing eating disorder symptoms (Spitzer, Henderson & Zivian, 1999). In a meta-analysis studying the effects of media images on female body image, Groesz and Levine (2002) found that women’s body image was significantly more negative after viewing thin media images than after viewing average or plus size models. Harmful body messages from family can be direct, such as verbal criticism or teasing, or in...
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age- Frank Lloyd Wright
Women in our culture today have developed an obsession with body image and weight that has contributed to the development of eating disorders. The media portrays super-thin models and women take that as the ideal of what they “should” look like. This can have a tremendous impact on their self esteem, and on both the low and high end of the BMI scale, a measure of body fat calculated using your height and weight; whether it be a woman with anorexia, or a woman with obesity. Men also experience this pressure to be muscular and tall, yet it is small compared to what women face. Statistics of college men show that 25% binge eat, 24% diet and 3% purge (Cain, Epler, Steinley, and Sher, 2012). Studies show that people with higher BMI’s experience more body dissatisfaction and and negative body image than people with lower BMI’s (Duncan, al-Nakeeb, and Nevill, 2013). When people feel bad about their body they can experience low self esteem: when a person feels inadequate and lacks respect for the self (Mäkinen, Puukko-Viertomies, Lindberg, Siimes, & Aalberg, 2012). Someone with low self esteem is more at risk for experiencing body dissatisfaction, which can lead to abnormal eating habits (Mäkinen, Puukko-Viertomies, Lindberg, Siimes, & Aalberg, 2012). This can take two forms, dietary restraint and binge eating. High and low BMI has a negative impact on self esteem and body image of women due to the pressure to be perfect in today’s society. The presentation of the following studies of children and adults will seek to understand the differences in men and women and their relationship with BMI, self esteem, and body image through its effect on eating disorders, body dissatisfaction, and the thin-ideal portrayed by the media.
Through the society imaginations of genders, the society character can be depicted and captured in this imagery. This virtual representation, the study of an enduring public attitude deceptive in the widespread images of a gender and the ways of representing gender, has proved a productive and enlightening field of research. The stylistic dynamics at work in the genesis and propagating of gender images in the linguistic discourses, and their explicit function, and how they are received is a crucial source in forming a base for the female status in any society. Simone De Beauvoir (2011) addresses the ambiguous imagined femininity by saying “to be considered [as women] she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity”. Such ‘mysterious and threatened reality’ is indeed independent of facts as this paper shall revel, and they neither mirror the female reality nor provide a truthful reflection of the female, but purely part of the cultural imagination.
In this essay, I will give an overview of Iris Marion Young’s Throwing Like a Girl and by using the examples provided by Young, set out the main argument of her essay. Then I will explain the application of Young’s ideas with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment followed by explaining the difference between her ideas and Simone de Beauvoir’s rejection of a “feminine essence.” Lastly, I will give reasons in favor of Young’s position. Young argues that that “throwing like a girl” has no relation to a “feminine essence” but is rather due to women’s situation of being conditioned by their actions in a patriarchal and sexist society.
A recent study shows that women’s body dissatisfaction is influenced by peer competition with others rather than depictions of women in the media. Muoz and Ferguson (2012) developed a study in order to further understand the influence of inter-peer pressure on body dissatisfaction. Body dissatisfaction refers to any "negative self-evaluation of one’s own appearance and the desire to be more physically attractive. " The problem of body image has long been shown to be a concern for the American Psychiatric Association or APA, (Muoz & Ferguson, 2012, p. 383). It raises so much concern because an unsatisfying body image has been known to cause problems such as eating disorders, depression and self-esteem.
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
Throughout history when we think about women in society we think of small and thin. Today's current portrayal of women stereotypes the feminine sex as being everything that most women are not. Because of this depiction, the mentality of women today is to be thin and to look a certain way. There are many challenges with women wanting to be a certain size. They go through physical and mental problems to try and overcome what they are not happy with. In the world, there are people who tell us what size we should be and if we are not that size we are not even worth anything. Because of the way women have been stereotyped in the media, there has been some controversial issues raised regarding the way the world views women. These issues are important because they affect the way we see ourselvescontributing in a negative way to how positive or negative our self image is.
The overwhelming idea of thinness is probably the most predominant and pressuring standard. Tiggeman, Marika writes, “This is not surprising when current societal standards for beauty inordinately emphasize the desirability of thinness, an ideal accepted by most women but impossible for many to achieve.” (1) In another study it is noted that unhealthy attitudes are the norm in term of female body image, “Widespread body dissatisfaction among women and girls, particularly with body shape and weight has been well documented in many studies, so much so that weight has been aptly described as ‘a normative discontent’”. (79) Particularly in adolescent and prepubescent girls are the effects of poor self-image jarring, as the increased level of dis...
Introduction: I will never forget one of the times, yes I only said one of the times, I was bullied in high school. I went to Mc Donald’s with a friend for lunch and had a salad. After we got back to school, I went to my locker to get my books for my next class. As I opened my locker, a note fell out. I opened it and it read “I know you went to McDonald’s but how much did you eat?” Every time I was bullied in high school, it was related to my body image and to this day, I still tend to struggle with it, just not as much. Just bringing