Kyle Kavully Professor Ainsley Lesure POLS 1825O 14 April 2024 The Phenomenology of Female Autonomy: Breaking the Chains of Patriarchal Bodily Comportment. Women have been socialized as others to the man, therefore defined by how they look and feel to others rather than to themselves (Lorde 64). Their bodies are viewed as objects through which people, specifically men, can project identities and ideas of how they should behave. Because of such socialization, women’s identities have developed relational to the man and this strict characterization has led to problematic ideas of feminity and bodily autonomy (Young 138). Such limits inhibit them through a patriarchal lens and have become adopted principles for men and women, alike. But, when …show more content…
This internalized oppression reinforces the disconnect between women and their bodies, which Audre Lorde wholeheartedly opposes in detailing her battle with cancer, a battle which spurred another fight with gendered expectations. Lorde's Cancer Journals poignantly illustrates how patriarchal norms dictate women's bodily attire, particularly in the context of illness. In the latter pages of Cancer Journals, Lorde details an experience post-mastectomy during which she felt most confident after dressing up meticulously and going to the medical offices. Rather than being met with words of affirmation, a staff member expressed her great discomfort with the missing prosthetic breast Lorde chose not to wear and dampened Lorde’s healing process (58). A woman who intended to find confidence after a painful and tolling procedure was painted as invalid for doing so because she failed to meet her gendered expectations. Is the point of recovery for a breast cancer patient to perceive a false body part or come to love her body in its absence? The patriarchal gaze has convoluted the importance of owning the female body beyond male expectations. The pursuit of a woman's desires can thus be seen as a double-edged sword in the context of bodily autonomy. On one hand, asserting one's …show more content…
She demonstrated how neglecting societal expectations of beauty during her battle with cancer can help a woman discover what feels good to them and how that pleasure should derive from the self. Rather than ignoring it, Lorde has included her amputation into her lived experience (16), embodying what has happened as a uniquely feminine experience. Her positionality as a Black, queer woman post-mastectomy provides an opportunity for margin-to-center analysis of femininity. While women may not share experiences with Lorde, her argument that the physical and mental needs of women following such a procedure far exceed aesthetics helps build an argument surrounding their objectification. In denying the prosthetic, she expands female conformity because the prosthesis does not make her feel confident, accepting her womanhood without breasts does. Her motivation stems from wanting women to escape from deeply ingrained patriarchal beliefs that seek to maintain the status quo and uphold traditional gender roles. While it may create discursiveness amongst other women, it is solely because they have not been allowed to embody themselves as such. In choosing to accept her body, Lorde affirms the importance of bodily autonomy and self-love in shaping
Like a blueprint or instruction manual, the objective of a rhetorical analysis is to dissect a written argument, identify its many parts, and explain how all of them come together to achieve a desired effect. Susan Bordo, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, wrote “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, published in 2003 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her essay examines how the media plays a pervasive role in how women view their bodies to the point where we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders. In “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, Bordo not only effectively incorporates numerous facts and statistics from her own research and the research of others; she also appeals to emotional realities of anxiety and inadequacy felt by women all over the world in regards to their body image. Ultimately, her intent is to critique the influence of the media on self-confidence and body image, and to remind her audience of the overt as well as subconscious messages they are receiving on a daily basis.
My mother was taught, as her mother before and so on, that these conversations are to be kept private and talked about quietly. In response to this, the power of men has an increasingly strong hold on the ideal physical beauty and how the changes of the body, such as menstruation, are in private and never spoken of. The Body Project gives a disturbing look at how women in the past few centuries and the present should act, look like, and keep hidden in response to what men think is most desirable. No matter how free women think they are, we are still under the control of men, even if it is not directly. This book opens the conversation on the problems that are still plaguing women and how society needs to change to have a healthier environment for women to be comfortable in their skin.
In this piece, Grealy describes the influence of her experiences of cancer, its treatments, and the resulting deformity of her face on her development as a person. She explores how physical appearance influences one's sexual identity and over all self worth. She also explores how one's own interpretation of one's appearance can be self fulfilling. Only after a year of not looking at herself in the mirror, ironically at a time when she appears more "normal" than ever before, does Grealy learn to embrace her inner self and to see herself as more than one’s looks or physical appearance.
Over time, the image of men has changed. This is due mostly to the relaxation of rigid stereotypical roles of the two genders. In different pieces of literature, however, men have been presented as the traditional dominate figure, the provider and rule maker or non-traditional figure that is almost useless and unimportant unless needed for sexual intercourse. This dramatic difference can either perpetuate the already existing stereotype or challenge it. Regardless of the differences, both seem to put men into a negative connotation.
Seeing femininity as a social construct is important in understanding how it is controlled and shaped by society. This concept is
The reading assigned titled “The Socially Constructed Body” by Judith Lorber and Yancey Martin dives into the sociology of gender with a specific focus on how the male and female body is compromised by social ideals in the Western culture. She introduces the phenomenon of body ideals pressed on men and women by introducing the shift in cosmetic surgery toward body modifications.
First Mock discusses Jenner’s ability to successfully navigate the media maelstrom of being the largest symbol for the trans community. Mock compares this to her own experience of being a trans woman in the media. She also pays credit to Christine Jorgenson who formed the mold of what it was like to be the first person crossing the gender barrier under the media’s shallow lens. Next Mock interplays the ideas of glamour with privilege by illustrating Jenner’s ability to use her wealth and fame to put her in a position to choreograph her glamour to embody the cis-normative beauty ideal. She states that for many trans women, presentation as a woman by using glamour is a matter of safety in order to blend into a gender binary society filled with resentment and intolerance for the trans society. This leads into the disassociation most trans people who are transitioning face when dealing with healthcare. For most, this is a resource that is widely unavailable. However, due to Jenner’s privilege, she is able to have access to all the best healthcare for gender affirming procedures. Jenner was able to transition swifty, but this experience does not relate for most who often spend decades accumulating the funds necessary for the costly medical care. Finally Mock summarizes by saying that the trans community is fortunate to have access to the experiences documented during Jenner’s transition process so that more people come away with a greater understanding of the practices
Cox’s work is exactly the type of discussion that is needed to move the discourse on black women’s bodies from being regarded as part of a stereotype to being regarded as individuals with beautiful differences. This is not a ‘re-mirroring’ of the ‘un-mirrored,’ but rather a creation of a new image, void of previous misconceptions but filled with individuality. The stereotypes concerning black women’s bodies needs to be abolished, not reinvented like Hobson suggests in “Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture.”
This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...
Deborah Tannen (2013) illustrates that everything a woman wears or says is a statement and thus defines who that woman is in her piece “There Is No Unmarked Woman.” These unfair demands are rooted in all forms in society: pronoun usage, such as ‘he’ referring to all, women’s surnames, and a fixed title of ‘Mr.’ for men and variants such as ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Ms.’ for women. Ralph Fasold, a professor of linguistics, stresses in his book The Sociolinguistics of Language that “language and culture are particularly unfair in treating women as the marked case because biologically it is the male that is marked” (As cited in Tannen, p. 555). Biologically, men could not exist without women. Two Y chromosomes are unable to produce a child, while two X chromosomes and an X and a Y chromosome can make offspring. Fasold further asserts that “girls are born with fully female bodies, while boys are born with modified female bodies” (As cited in Tannen, p. 555). If women, by nature, are the norm, then why is it that women are marked and men are treated as more superior? Tannen reflects on how all women feel being placed in a society pitted against them, stating that “some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you’re a woman, you can’t, because there is no unmarked woman” (p. 556). Unlike men, women are degraded and treated poorly in day-to-day life based on their gender. Everything a woman does is a statement in comparison to her male counterpart, leading to harsher judgement and
Prior to the 1970s when the theme of gender issues was still quite foreign, the societal norm forced female conformity to male determined standards because “this is a man’s world” (Kerr 406). The patriarchal society painted the image of both men and women accordingly to man’s approach of societal standards that include the defining features of manhood that consist of “gentil...
Although contemporary society is not as patriarchal as it was in the past, that male dominance still exists today. Young’s description of a self-imposed “I cannot” can be supported with common real life examples today. The “I cannot” comes from a woman’s insecurities, fear of getting hurt, and underestimating their bodily capacities. In a sexist society, these factors of the self-imposed “I cannot” would lead to
Reclaiming Women's Bodies: Colonialist Trope or Critical Epistemology? by Kathy Davis delves into the relationship between power, knowledge, and women's agency, contrasting Foucauldian perspectives with the approach taken by Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS). Davis states, "Feminist scholars such as [Smith, Kruks, Mohanty,] and others have argued that the focus on agency as an artifact of discourse can obstruct our ability to understand how women actively gain, evaluate, and critically interpret knowledge about themselves, their lives, and the world around them" (Davis 19). This highlights the challenge of reconciling agency with women's capacity for rational reflection and critical interpretation of cultural discourses. In contrast, OBOS has the
Excerpt from K. Conboy, N. Medina and S. Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (401-17). NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Exact Beauty: Exploring Women's Body Projects and Problems in the 21st Century. Mandell, Nancy (5th ed.). Feminist Issues: Race, Class, and Sexuality (131-160). Toronto: Pearson Canada, Inc. Schulenberg, Jennifer, L. (2006).