Resisting the Male Gaze: Feminist Responses to the "Normatization" of the Female Body in Western Culture
Introduction Power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject's own representation. Michel Foucault (3) The purpose of this study is to discuss some aspects of the representation of female corporeity in Western culture, a representation universally recognized as having been constructed and developed through a gender ideology at the service of the institutions of patriarchy, and covertly disseminated through the imposed and controlling definition of the "ideal" model of the female body. Secondly, the study intends to show how opposition in feminist thought to this patriarchally motivated representation has emerged through a specific discourse of resistance, a re representation of human corporeity, focusing on variations of the notion of hybridity, multiple mixed bodily forms. The first part of this article outlines what I have termed "normatized corporeity" i.e. the media induced promotion of a norm of bodily appearance along with the physical, psychological and social consequences provoked by that normative canon. The second part explores cultural and feminist theory in order to identify some of the avenues for resistance to the imposition of bodily normativity, resistance foregrounded by the awareness of the disciplinary function of the male gaze, the refusal of a univocal model for the female body and, above all, the commitment to the principle of difference. (4) Part I: Normatized Corporeity The Binarized Body Cultural representations of the body have been delineated according to a model for the human subject as male, white, heterosexual, middle class, leading to descriptions of corporeity rotating around a binary framework, an either/or condition, encoding distinctions of gender, race and class: male/female, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, middle class/working class etc. Actually, given that the combination male+white+heterosexual+middle class seems to be the prototype for the human subject, the binary is more rightly defined as male/non male, white/nonwhite, heterosexual/ non heterosexual, middle class non middle class. In other words, there is one polarity of the binary that carries negative social value since it is presented as a "noncondition" as something "missing" or "unachieved" as a "deficit" condition, whereas the positive polarity is erected as norm. It could be added also that in our contemporary times, another descriptor has been added, weight, with the normative condition as thinness and the deficit condition as non thinness. One of the main victims of the strictures of this socially constructed binary is the female part of humanity, the "second sex" to cite the seminal attribute for women theorized by the icon of feminist thought, Simone De Beauvoir. Moreover, women are especially victimized when they possess one or more of these non conditions, i.e. non male, non heterosexual, non white, non middle class (and non thin) etc. The Female Body Feminist scholarship in the Western tradition has constantly denounced the historical invisibility and inaudibility of the female subject. Deprived of voice in culture, society and politics, women have been traditionally confined to the muted corners of domesticity, to the silenced margins of sociality, to the powerless outskirts of politicality. At the same time, female corporeity is intensely visible; exemplary of what Foucault (1980:186) considers a paradox in contemporary culture the simultaneous disappearance and over exposure of the body in culture, institutions, and in the persuasive discourse of social communication. However, this apparently paradoxical condition of the simultaneous presence of corporeal visibility and invisibility, in Foucauldian terms, carries a particularly salient political value when it touches the female subject. The invisibility of women has been accompanied in an extraordinarily inversely proportionate manner by the visual display of her physical appearance, of her body as material object, to be observed, judged, valued, appreciated, rejected, modified and essentially commodified, for socially constructed purposes.