WGST 1808 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Susan Bordo, Mary Douglas, Wgst

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Women's and Gender Studies
• Course: WGST 1808
• Professor: Aalya Ahmad

Document Summary

Mary douglas (on the body) powerful symbolic form; a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, & metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and reinforced through the concrete language of the body. Body is also a practical, direct locus of social control. Through the organization & regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed w/ historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, and femininity. Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity, female bodies become docile bodies bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, and improvement . Disciplines of femininity render us less socially oriented and more focused on self-modification in extreme situations, may lead to demoralization, debilitation, and death. Need an effective political discourse about the female body adequate to an analysis of the insidious/paradoxical pathways of modern social control.