Society and the Female Body

The above video shows a twenty- year old girl suffering from both bulimia and anorexia nervosa. According to Susan Bordo, a feminist and gender studies writer, women’s bodies are shaped by social forces. Bordo emphasizes the concept that the female body is a “text of culture” in which social and cultural notions are inscribed. Bordo believes that eating disorders which are forms of hysteria are practices of resistance against the cultural order.
In the video we hear the personal story of a girl who despite her shocking thinness, she still views herself as very ugly and very fat. She knows that she is hurting herself and others by doing so, but nothing can change her self-worth. Susan Bordo, in her essay “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body”, believes that “the body_what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body_is a medium of culture.” Michael Foucault also argues in “The History of Sexuality” that “our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, and femininity.” Thus, women through their pursuit of the ideal female body which is reinforced by social and cultural regulations undergo destructive practices such as anorexia and bulimia. In the age of media and television, women are constantly reminded of how an ideal female body should be like. It is evident that the girl’s obsession with slenderness has distorted her reason to the extent that she stopped brushing her teeth fearing the calories found in tooth paste. She stands in front of the mirror and sucks her stomach in because what the mirror reflects back at her is mere ugliness and fatness.

Bordo argues that there are many factors that contribute to the anorectic body. First, the masculine society publicizes the domestic concept of femininity. A woman is not supposed to hunger for power, for sex, or for independence. On the contrary, she is expected to nurture others. Therefore, the woman’s controlling her appetite for food is an expression of that social suppression.
Moreover, Bordo believes that anorexia can be explained as an expression of control. That is, by controlling her appetite the woman gains a sense of mastery at least over her own body. Bordo states, “The young woman discovers what it feels like to crave and want and need and yet, through the exercise of her own will, to triumph over that will, to triumph over that need. In the process a new realm of meanings is discovered, a range of values and possibilities that Western culture has traditionally coded as “male” and made rarely available to women: an ethic and aesthetic of self-mastery and self-transcendence, expertise, and power over others through the example of superior will and control. The experience is intoxicating, habit forming.” This notion also applies to the girl’s case of bulimia and binge eating often followed by throwing up. Hence, throwing is an expression of self-mastery.
Furthermore, Bordo debates that through anorexia the woman gets rid of all the features that bond her to femininity. The more weight she loses, the more the feminine curves disappear and the more lanky and masculine she looks. Thus, losing her limiting feminine features and looking masculine- like gives the woman an unconscious sense of safety. “She begins to feel untouchable, out of reach of hurt.”

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their essay ”The Madwoman in the Attic”, also interpret anorexia as a product of “patriarchal socialization”. It’s the cost of repression enforced by a male-dominated social order.


Works Cited:
-Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2010
-Foucault Michel. The History of Sexuality. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2010
-Gilbert Sandra and Gubar Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2010