Essay for sociology

Hypatia, Inc.

Reading Woman: Displacing the Foundations of Femininity Author(s): Wendy A. Burns-Ardolino Source: Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 42-59 Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810863 Accessed: 15-03-2017 04:45 UTC

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Reading Woman: Displacing the Foundations of Femininity

WENDY A. BURNS-ARDOLINO

I offer here an analysis of contemporary foundation garments while exploring the

ways in which these garments encourage, reinforce and protect normative femininity.

In examining the performatives of contemporary normative, ideal femininity as they

perpetuate inhibited intentionality, ambiguous transcendence, and discontinuous

unity, I look to the possibility for subversive performativity vis-a-vis the strengths of

women in order to proliferate categories of gender and to potentially displace current

notions of what it means to become woman.

As a young girl in elementary school I was allowed to climb trees, hang upside- down on monkey bars, and play rough-and-tumble with boys in a white, work- ing-class neighborhood, but as I hit puberty the demands to behave like a young lady became unbearable. Becoming a woman as Simone de Beauvoir describes it-[as] a habituated and routinized process wherein it is the primary respon- sibility of mothers, aunts, teachers, and other women who are role models to

prepare, train, and initiate a girl into womanhood-resonates quite strongly with my own experience. I can hear my mother in Beauvoir's description of initiation into femininity: "Stand up straight, don't walk like a duck" (1989, 282). I remember being overwhelmed by the rigorous requirements of feminin- ity. I can remember being judged by my looks, my charms, and even my walk. I experienced my feminine clothing-dresses, slips, nightgowns, training bras, tights, and pantyhose-as encumbrances that hindered and deterred me.

Perhaps the seeds of this paper were planted in my adolescence as I began to see the ebb and flow of my physical freedom in connection with the garments that lay closest to my body. I offer here an analysis of contemporary foundation

garments-bras, slimmers, shapers, smoothers-and gendered performativity

Hypatia vol. 18, no. 3 (Fall 2003) ? by Wendy A. Burns-Ardolino

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Wendy A. Burns-Ardolino

while exploring the ways in which these garments encourage, train, and police women's performances of normative feminine motility, spatiality, and comport-

ment. Along with several feminist theorists, such as Leslie Heywood (1998a, 1998b), Iris Young (1989), and Susan Bordo (1993), I maintain that this type of feminine embodiment deters many women from experiencing their bodies as capacities while encouraging women to treat their bodies as objects to be controlled, maintained, and prodded along. In response to this problem, I advo- cate that women actively engage their bodies as capacities in order to disrupt and offset normative modes of feminine comportment, spatiality, and motility that have been reinforced by the habituated practices of wearing foundation garments.

In examining the performatives of contemporary normative, ideal feminin- ity as they perpetuate inhibited intentionality, ambiguous transcendence, and discontinuous unity, I look to the possibility for subversive performativity vis- a-vis the strengths of women in order to proliferate categories of gender and to potentially displace current notions of what it means to become woman. Coming at the problem of becoming gendered through Monique Wittig's (1992) revolutionary turn on Simone de Beauvoir's work (for example, see Beauvoir 1989, 267; and Butler 1987), Judith Butler describes in Gender Trouble how the

repetition of gendered performatives leaves space for gender transformation, as

"the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to reap- pear, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction" (1999, 179). Recognizing Butler's early work in Gender Trouble, I look to other critiques from theorists and practitioners: bell hooks (1992), Leslie Heywood (1998a, 1998b) Judith Lorber (1998), Janice Yoder (1989) and the Body Outlaws (See, for example Aubry 2000), who offer subversive and resistant alternatives to normative, ideal

femininity and who suggest multiple modes of becoming woman. In my own case becoming woman meant losing my ability to connect with

the capacities and strengths of my body. It wasn't until I began waiting tables that I experienced again the real pleasure of engaging my intentionality in the fluid movements of my body as I passed easily through a crowded kitchen and dining room to serve margaritas in top-heavy glasses and steaming fajitas on searing cast-iron skillets. The thrill of enacting my intentions in displays requiring strength (fajita pans aren't light), grace (it's not easy to serve a tray of margaritas without spilling on your customers), and endurance (working sixteen-hour double shifts on Saturdays) drew me into restaurant work. I found physical empowerment in this labor and have returned to waiting tables on and off for the past fifteen years. While I locate this labor as a turning point in my perception, moving from experiencing my body as a thing to be seen to experiencing my body as a capacity to be enacted, I have come to recognize the value of physical empowerment in a range of labor and sport.

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When I lay my own version of gendered initiation against the experience of a

transperson, Riki Anne Wilchins, who remembers the experience of becoming boy/man, I must consider the overwhelming circumstances of habituated gender

performatives wherein girls become women and boys become men. In her book, Read My Lips, Wilchins writes, "My first and best lesson in emotional camou- flage came from boys' locker-rooms. It was normal to engage in pecking-order displays, like put-down fights in which we insulted each other's mothers and sisters with the lewdest possible lines. If I went numb and cold, if I concentrated

on envisioning myself as muscular, angry, and aggressive, I could get by. Guys would leave me alone. The harassment stopped. It was replaced by respect, or at least distance, which was all I wanted from them. Actually it was what I preferred. I had learned to be a 'boy"' (1997, 153). When I examine Wilchins's description of denying the emotional desire to be other than muscular, angry, and aggressive, I can easily see the emotional desire of "the girl" described by Beauvoir to be other than pretty, kind, and timid (1989, 357-58). In either case, however, the performance of gender, the displays of masculinity and femininity,

are those which define and separate the girl child from the boy child, and frame

the initiation of the girl into womanhood and the boy into manhood. These displays-the gestures, the postures, the movements-form the basis

for my interrogation of the issues of spatiality, comportment, and motility of the feminine body. As Wilchins reflects on that locker-room experience, she also realizes that those tools of posturing, learned as a boy, are ones she can take up to defend herself at anytime: "I kept those images in my head for years,

that particular sense of myself. I still use it today when I'm out alone late at night and have to walk in a dangerous neighborhood, or I see someone sizing me up from across a darkened street. That self-image re-emerges forcefully in my stride, in the way I hold myself, clench my fists, and scowl" (1997, 153). Wilchins explores here what it is like to put on a gendered identity at least externally. In fact, this is one of the points of her book-to explain what it is like to operate externally along the lines of genders that have been defined as acceptable by society and culture. What she describes here is a process in which she actually recalls the habituated spatiality, comportment, and motility of her boyhood and is able to activate them as a defense. She is in the moment of defense becoming masculine and hearkening back to those external body signifiers of boyhood masculinity.

In contrast, what I seek to uncover here is an understanding of how spatiality, comportment, and motility are gendered particularly in the feminine, how these

performatives are habituated, and how women are "marked as woman" as they operate their bodies in modes of femininity. As Wilchins explains, there is no choice in terms of display; the cultural requirements of gender displays are uni-

versally understood in the context of U.S. culture: masculine displays indicate power and dominance, while feminine displays indicate submission and vulner-

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Wendy A. Burns-Ardolino

ability (1997, 132). While I concede that even normative, ideal femininity can be pleasurable and enlivening, I agree with Wilchins that there is a quality of vulnerability and submission in most feminine gender displays. Wilchins relays her own frustration in failing to convey these qualities in her own performance.

A butch woman speaks to Wilchins and comments, "You sometimes-I don't want to hurt your feelings-but you sit cross-legged in meetings and sometimes it takes up some of the space of the woman next to you. As a woman, I just wouldn't do that. It's your male training like the men on the subway who have to spread their legs to take up two seats. You don't understand how intimidating to women male behavior can be" (quoted in Wilchins 1997, 42). In this way Wilchins's habituated masculinity gives her away and exposes her.

Pierre Bourdieu describes how these performatives become habituated through imitations of adult gestures, movements, and postures (1977, 87). Bourdieu observes, "The awakening of consciousness of sexual identity and the incorporation of the dispositions associated with a determinate social definition of the social functions incumbent on men and women come hand in hand with

the adoption of a socially defined vision of the sexual division of labour" (93). He articulates that it is precisely by this process of gendering (which Wilchins contests) according to social definitions that women and men are determined, so that they come to understand their separate roles in society. He asserts that it is through "the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners" that the content of the culture is maintained (94). Thus,

Bourdieu concludes that bodily hexis-"treating the body as memory"-oper- ates within the system of the habitus to produce and reproduce culture. The habitus perpetuates and sustains culture "through injunctions as insignificant as 'stand up straight' or 'don't hold your knife in your left hand"' (94). What this means in terms of drawing up the lines for performatives of gender is that

these seemingly insignificant details are involuntarily learned by boys and girls from their parents and other adults, and that they are determined and defined by

socio-historico-cultural definitions of gender in order to perpetuate the divisions

of sexual labor. In this way, Bourdieu confirms and supports both Wilchins's descriptions of learned masculine performatives, whereby boys become men, and Beauvoir's descriptions of trained feminine performatives, whereby girls become women.

However, as I consider these trained gender performatives, I must note how the postures, gestures, and movements of gender come to be constituted as habit. The issues of spatiality and motility are key concepts in making such determinations. If I consider the relationship of the body to motion or space, I must recognize that it is the body that is at work here. Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out, "Consciousness is being towards the thing through the intermediary of the body" (1962, 138-39); however, he also says, "We must avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time" (1962, 139). Thus, it

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is at the level of the body, at the level of performativity where an aim or inten- tionality becomes enacted, that the body becomes at home in the world. The body inhabits time and space and becomes at home in the world in the moment that an intentionality is achieved. This explains how it is that Wilchins can sit cross-legged taking up the space of the woman next to her and not be aware that

this exercise in spatiality is a masculine performative. She is unconscious of what

space her body inhabits. Because this inhabiting occurs at the level of the body and its performativity, it occurs before, beyond, and besides her consciousness. Her body merely inhabits the space on the floor by achieving an intentionality to sit. The performativity that results in the achievement of the aim to sit does

not occur to her. Her body simply aims to sit and does so. In considering intentionality of the feminine body in terms of comportment,

spatiality, and motility, I must recognize that it is able to operate only within its habituated understanding of intentionality and what it is given. The habituation

that makes women feel comfortable is gendered as it is raced and classed, but the way it is gendered for women can be particularly alienating and antitheti- cal to their capacity to act. Beauvoir articulates this rift as she describes how the girl becoming a woman experiences her body as foreign from her during this process of becoming. She explains how a girl experiences her body as a thing that limits her and seems distant from her (1989, 308). This description illuminates the process wherein the girl experiences her body not as a part of her, but as a separate entity which draws attention to her, exposes her, brings her out into the open, the public, the world of men. The intentionality of the girl walking like a woman in a woman's flesh in public is an imitated and trained

performance of the body since the girl is "treated like a live doll and is refused liberty. She is taught that to please she must try to please, she must make herself

an object; she should therefore renounce her autonomy" (Beauvoir 1989, 280). The intentionality is to become a woman, to make herself an object. These intentions are all taken up and put into practice by the body. Her body becomes

the site of alienation as the integrity of perceptual giveness of the lived body is compromised in order to become an object for the male gaze.

This conflict is also taken up by Wilchins, who comments, "What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate and contain what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do" (1997, 87). What is at stake here, then at least initially for the feminine body, is the right to be read as a body having the capacity to act, and having that capacity take precedence over the recognition of the feminine body as object. Iris Young explains in "Throwing Like a Girl" that as a result of this conflict, the feminine body is overlaid with immanence and experiences ambiguous transcendence as woman "often lives her body as a burden which must be dragged and prodded along, and at the same time protected" (1989, 59). Such a disruption is caused by, as Young sug-

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gests, an inhibited intentionality in which the "feminine body underuses its real capacity, both as the potentiality of its physical size and strength and as the real skills and coordination which are available to it" (1989, 59). The feminine

body operates in a state of inhibited intentionality that does not allow the full commitment of the body to a given task-hence the title, "Throwing Like a Girl"; a girl does not use her entire body to put the ball into motion, she only uses those parts of her body that are entirely necessary.' Inhibited intentionality represents the first kind of alienation that woman experiences. I have described it previously in discussions with friends as inefficiency or incompetence. Young

describes it in terms of a woman's distrust of her own bodily capacity. She notes,

"A woman frequently does not trust the capacity of her body to engage itself in

physical relation to things" (1989, 59). Young points out that this inefficiency in performance yields not only an alienation in terms of inhibited intentional- ity, but as women are trained to perform inefficiently as feminine bodies, this training produces a second kind of alienation as it violates their experience of themselves as transcendent subjects (1989, 56).

Young also argues that this inefficiency is experienced by woman in regard to

a division in her "... attention between the task to be performed and the body which must be coaxed and manipulated into performing it" (1989, 61). What this means to me is that woman's intentionality is inhibited by this division, but also that this division is emphasized by woman's awareness of how her body looks as she performs the task. Young states, "Finally, feminine bodily existence

is self-referred to the extent that the feminine subject posits her motion as the

motion that is looked at" (1989, 61). This becomes significant when I consider woman's awareness of her own appearance in performing tasks which are physi-

cally demanding. This is the tension between experiencing the body as subject, an intentionality that reaches out into the world, and experiencing the body as object, a mere thing to be gazed upon. Young confirms that the bodies of men and women carry this double meaning, but with women this experience of the body as both subject and object is simultaneous and therefore debilitating and disruptive of the harmony of the transcendent subject at home in the world.

Thus, I can consider Wilchins's text in yet another light. While she sets up her book in terms of a gender conflict between being read as masculine or as feminine, in many cases it seems that the conflict she describes is in being read

as an object, while seeing herself as a subject. As a man, she most likely did not experience herself simultaneously as subject and object and did not receive the kinds of objectifying attention that she describes experiencing as a transperson. She confides, "What causes me pain is having my body read against me" (1997, 147), but she later goes on to describe what being read as a woman meant to her: "When people started reading me as a woman, I had to very consciously learn how they saw me in order to use the restroom. I had to learn to recognize

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my voice, my posture, the way I appeared in clothing" (1997, 151). Wilchins explains here that she must learn to have her body read as feminine in order to survive in society.

Sandra Bartky provides a framework for understanding Wilchins's dilemma in terms of learning the difference between masculine and feminine motility, spatiality, and comportment because "women are far more restricted than men in their manner of movement and spatiality" (1988, 66). She articulates these restrictions in terms of their limits on woman's spatiality. Bartky notes, "The woman holds her arms closer to her body, palms against her sides; her walk is circumspect. If she has subjected herself to the additional constraint of high- heeled shoes, her body is thrown forward and off balance: The struggle to walk under these conditions shortens her stride more" (1988, 67). Thus, as Bartky and

Young suggest, woman operates within an enclosed space in which she hopes to be protected, but she is simultaneously limited in that space. Bartky describes the contemporary frame for feminine comportment as "a whole new training: a

woman must stand with stomach pulled in, shoulders thrown slightly back and chest out, this to display her bosom to maximum advantage. While she must walk in the confined fashion appropriate to women, her movements must at the same time, be combined with a subtle but provocative hip-roll" (1988, 68). Bartky's description explains the requirements of contemporary, normative, ideal feminine comportment.

However, bell hooks (1992a) hones these feminist critiques of normative femininity described by Beauvoir, Young, Bartky, and Wilchins as she enu- merates the specific oppressions circulating in the myth of woman, the myth of femininity. In her essay, "Is Paris Burning?" hooks critiques the subversion involved in gay black men performing white, heterosexual, ruling-class feminin-

ity (1992a, 148). She suggests that in such parody, these performers pay homage

to an ideal femininity in which whiteness plays the largest role. Her critique moves against Butler's theoretical model as she argues that while gender bend- ing may offset power relations of the phallocratic economy, the balance of white supremacy is not offset (1992a, 147). She concludes that the political implications of a dominant, normative femininity-white, heterosexual and ruling-class-operating hegemonically in the capitalist north serves only to divide and limit the potential for resistant and subversive modes of femininity. hooks points out the reality of the struggle to resist racism, heterosexism, and classism that many women confront daily in their workplaces, communities, families, and relationships.

In Ophira Edut's anthology, Body Outlaws, several young women argue that resistance and the potential for subversive actions rest with ourselves as we recognize our own femininities as empowered and proud while breaking the hold that dominant ideal femininity has on us. Erin J. Aubry's essay, "the butt,"

details the kind of resistance she engages in every day. Aubry comments, "It

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was tricky, but I absorbed the better aspects of the butt stereotypes, especially the Tootsie-Roll walk-the wave, the undulation in spite of itself, the leisurely antithesis of the spring in the step" (2000, 28). Aubry articulates her experience of resisting the ideal feminine comportment that Bartky describes on behalf of a comportment that suits her body, her butt, her situatedness. She explains, "I liked the walk and how it defied that silly runway gait, with the hips thrust too

far forward and the arms dangling back in empty air. That is a pure apology for butts, a literal bending over backward to admonish the body for any bit of unruliness" (28).

However, Aubry acknowledges that this process of embracing the stereo- typical unruliness of her butt as a resistance to the myths of ideal femininity is

not easy. "If we [black women] are always put on the butt defensive, as it were, we'll never have the psychic space to assess how we really feel about wearing Lycra-and a woman with a sizable butt must have an opinion about it" (25). The facts remain, the myth of woman continues, ideal feminine comportment stands as the norm, and subverting the performatives of normative feminin- ity requires vigilant dedication and a willingness to confront the products of the dominant culture-ideal bodies in Lycra power-slips, push-up bras, and microfiber underwear, performing white, ruling-class, heterosexual femininity.

Aubry closes her essay by arguing that the potential for subversion rests with a

willingness to deal with our bodies, to confront the images of ideal femininity in popular culture.2

However, as Aubry and hooks point out, this is difficult work because ideal femininity may be evidenced anywhere in popular culture, and women are constantly reminded of what performing ideal femininity means. This is perhaps

no better demonstrated than in the role of contemporary foundation garments. These bras, bustiers, slimmers, shapers, microfiber underwear, thongs, power- slips, and push-up bras work on the feminine body not only to shape, mould, sculpt, and decorate, thus facilitating the feminine body as object, but these garments also work for the feminine body, keeping it separated and enclosed, confined and protected, thus facilitating the feminine body as subject. Therefore,

the foundation garment frames precariously the feminine subject/object contra-

diction and as such performs itself as a signifier of the oppression of woman who

has been habituated into the performatives of gesture, movement, and motility while confined within the moving frame of varying shapes and sizes.

A contemporary framing is depicted here in an advertisement from a Vic- toria's Secret catalog (see fig. 1).3 The model wears what is called "The Sensual Shapers" slip which "has tummy control insets to cinch the waist... [and] lace trim with hidden elastic for a stay put fit." This image illustrates precisely the stance that Bartky outlines, but what is perhaps more noteworthy is that, as the image in the advertisement suggests, it is the foundation garment, "The Sensual Shapers" slip, that manipulates the body into its correct feminine posture.

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This controlled, contained, and restricted feminine posture serves to enclose the feminine body in a protective move, to shield it from the gaze, or as Bartky

points out, to prevent an assault on female genitalia: "The fact that women tend to sit and stand with legs, feet, and knees close or touching may well be a coded declaration of sexual circumspection in a society that still maintains a double standard, or an effort, albeit unconscious, to guard the genital area" (Bartky 1988, 74). This posture is demonstrated here in a Victoria's Secret advertisement, where the sitting posture of a woman in a satin corset reflects the posture that Bartky articulates (see fig. 2). The model appears with shoulders

back, stomach pulled in, and chest out-in a move that suggests an invitation for objectification-while her legs and knees are positioned close together, almost touching-in a move that suggests, as Bartky does, the need to guard the female genitals. However, the model's feet are far apart, which I might take as the advertisement's suggestion of an allowable degree of provocative femininity.

What I wish to point out in incorporating these foundationwear advertise- ments into this analysis is an understanding of how these garments support and

facilitate notions of restricted feminine comportment; however, I do not simply

argue that these garments serve to limit woman's performativity. I argue that they work to maintain a social control of feminine comportment that operates whether women wear these garments or not-and, perhaps more complexly, that part of the rationales for women wearing such garments stem from an unconscious idea that the feminine body in general, and the female genitals in particular, must be protected. If I add to this analysis a recognition that there has in recent years been a resurgence of foundation garments in fashion, the suggestion that women are coming back to these garments in response to a conservative social backlash complicates the role of foundationwear not only in terms of restricting the feminine body but also in terms of protecting it (see Workman 1996, 61-73).

However, in recognizing woman's desire to protect the feminine body by enclosing and restricting it, whether in terms of foundation garments or the comportment they serve to reinforce, I must also be concerned with the conse- quences of limiting the feminine body in this way. Susan Bordo comments on the significance of foundation garments in their reinforcement of the cultural

contrast between the male and female forms in the nineteenth century: "Con- sider this particularly clear and appropriate example; the nineteenth-century hourglass figure, emphasizing breasts and hips against a wasp waist, was an intel- ligible, symbolic form, representing a domestic, sexualized ideal of femininity. The sharp cultural contrast between the female and male form, made possible by the use of corsets and bustles, reflected in symbolic terms, the dualistic divi-

sion of social and economic life into clearly defined male and female spheres. At the same time, to achieve a specified look, a particular feminine praxis was required-straitlacing, minimal eating, reduced mobility-rendering the female

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body unfit to perform activities outside its designated sphere" (1993, 181). As Bordo points out, it is the performativity that must be altered to coincide with the body ideal that renders the feminine body inefficient outside its own sphere

of operation. To my mind this phenomenon as described by Bordo continues to threaten women because contemporary notions of ideal bodies have and continue to determine normative femininity in spite of the fact that dimensions

of shape and size demanded of the feminine form have varied historically (see Melinkoff 1984 and Presley 1998).

In her book, Fifty Years of Fashion, Valerie Steele states, "From stiletto heels

and waspie girdles to white gloves and aprons, women's fashion promoted restric-

tive images of femininity .. ." (1997, 29). Steele also cites Anne Fogarty's 1959 book, Wife Dressing, wherein Fogarty compares girdle wearing to Chinese foot binding, and confirms that in the fifties she favored wearing "cocktail dresses so

tight that sitting was impossible.... "You're not meant to suffer," she reassured her readers, but the feeling "should be one of constraint rather than comfort" (Fogarty 1959, 47). However, if in recognizing that women are no longer obli- gated to wear cocktail dresses so tight they can't sit down I argue that women have been released from these body ideals and their physical constraints, I am forgetting that now as ever women are chasing after changing feminine body ideals. They continue trading their ability to use their bodies to their fullest capacities on behalf of meeting conventional beauty standards.4

As Leslie Heywood suggests in her book, Bodymakers, patriarchal notions of ideal femininity and its rigid body ideals continue to limit what women can do: "Seeking beauty, denying strength women line up at the Stair Masters in the gym in pursuit of the hot fitness body; the corset and the Wonderbra have come back, implants and plastic surgery are presented as avenues to individual power, [and] advertisements are fond of corpses" (1998a, 55). Heywood conveys the degree to which women's bodies have become so thin as to be corpselike. She explains how the fitness movement has eclipsed female body building in a move that eliminates the option of a visibly muscular body ideal for women in favor of a lean-looking one. Heywood expresses this exchange in the terms "seeking beauty and denying strength."

This lean ideal body can be seen in an advertisement for the Miracle Bra in the Victoria's Secret Catalog (see fig. 3). The ad simply reads, "The Miracle Bra: some curves you just can't get from working out." It depicts an extremely thin or lean-bodied woman whose breasts are supported by "dramatic, push-up shaping with revolutionary padding that's actually contoured to fit ... [her] shape." What Heywood suggests is confirmed by the advertisement; the cur- rent feminine body ideal, the "hot fitness body," is so thin, so flabless, that it is necessary to rely on synthetic mechanisms to create the illusion of breasts.

In her essay, "Part Animal, Part Machine," Leigh Shoemaker agrees with Heywood's assessment that while body ideals change historically, one form

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of bodily constraint is exchanged for another. Shoemaker adds that advertis- ing typically proffers freedom while substituting one kind of social constraint for women for another. She concludes, "Thanks to the second wave feminist analysis of beauty culture, we can see that fashion gives us corsets, hose, high heels, underwire bras; the 'health and beauty' industry gives us paints, pow- ders, dyes, silicon, liposuction; 'nutrition' centers offer diets and other ways to become smaller and less present while remaining in continual states of paralyzing obsession; the mental health industry offers Xanax, Valium, and Ativan; and advertising tells us, 'You've come a long way, baby,' pretending to offer freedom by actually turning the key on a new form of imprisonment. Femininity now, as in the second wave and before, is about constriction" (1997, 112). Shoemaker articulates the reality of contemporary American society in which women are bombarded with images of what they are supposed to have come a long way to be.

These images serve only to reify the feminine body as a manageable and alterable site, one that is kept under control through a myriad of bodily disci- plines that subjugate the feminine body, keeping it captive in its own habitual practices. As Bartky notes, "The influence of media is pervasive, too, construct- ing as it does an image of the female body as spectacle, nor can we ignore the role played by 'beauty experts"' (1988, 74). The proliferation of beauty experts in television programs such as "Fashion Emergency" suggests the extent to which women are subjected to a constant barrage of fashion do's and don'ts, but much of the advice of "fashion and beauty experts" goes beyond the surface

of the body. This advice operates on the body itself. It attempts to reconstruct the ideal body while coping immediately and directly with design flaws in the lived body.

This fixation with reconstructing the feminine body is exemplified in a "Fashion 101 Lesson" from the magazine In Style, and is entitled "Problem Solv- ers" (see fig. 4). This article/advice column gives advice to women regarding what they can do in order to solve "bra problems." The language reads, "bra problems," but the majority of advice blocks focus on "breast problems"-two different sizes, small breasts, large breasts, breasts far apart." These bras are specially made to work on the breasts that do not fulfill the requirements of the ideal feminine body. In this way, the "experts" tell women what form of discipline is appropriate for their particular flawed body.

This is further demonstrated in a "Fashion 101 Lesson" (see fig. 5) two years later from In Style in which thongs are expressed as "problem solvers [which] do

more than eliminate panty lines. The thongs are touted as "all-reason thongs" and are made to deal with every problem from pregnancy to tummy control. New microfiber materials make these thongs and the majority of "light to heavy

control" seamless underwear "invisible under clothes. Women are encouraged to wear thongs because they are sexy, they eliminate panty lines and they can help to solve body problems.

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Bordo explains this fixation on self-modification as "the pursuit of an ever- changing, homogenizing elusive ideal of femininity-a pursuit without termi- nus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashion-female bodies become docile bodies-bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation.. ." (1993, 166). Thus, women engage in the habituated practices and performatives of regulating their bodies, of making them satisfactory for cultural consumption. Bartky confirms this notion of self-regulation as she maintains, "The disciplinary techniques through which the "docile bodies" of women are constructed aim at a regulation that is perpetual and exhaustive-a regulation of the body's size and contours, its appe- tite, posture, gestures and general comportment in space and the appearance of each of its visible parts" (1988, 80). What Bordo and Bartky both conclude is that such extreme regulation of the feminine body keeps woman occupied with achieving an ideal femininity always kept just beyond her reach.

Thus, as Beauvoir and Young have suggested, woman is encouraged to take up the body as a mere thing in order to achieve or attain her desire. An example

of this can be seen in another "Fashion 101 Lesson" from In Style entitled "Sexy Looks" (see fig. 6). The article advises, "A bra is one of your most functional garments, but never forget that it can also be your most enticing. Besides the obvious sex appeal of a push-up, details like embroidery, lace, feminine colors and appliques can make your bra a tool of seduction that won't be denied." The article encourages women to take up the performativity of bra wearing, in a move that exhibits the body as sex object. The body becomes sexually enticing as it is prepared as an object for consumption. The breasts are pushed-up and decorated with "embroidery, lace, feminine colors and appliques." These bras are tools of seduction that render the feminine body as object when applied to it.

That women's bodies have been exploited as commodities for centuries is a well-known fact. That images of women have circulated in the media as "sex symbols" is similarly understood; however, the fact that more and more women

"are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time" is perhaps a lesser known fact (Bordo 1993, 166). "New too is the spread of this discipline to all classes of women and its deployment throughout the life cycle. What was formerly the specialty of the aristocrat or courtesan is now the routine obligation of every woman, be she a grandmother or a barely pubescent girl" (Bartky 1988, 81). The proliferation of the demographic groups of women engaged in disciplining the feminine body, coupled with the proliferation in the amount of time spent engaged in such disciplining, constitute the present crisis of/for the feminine "docile body."

As Bartky notes, "The disciplinary power that is increasingly charged with the production of a properly embodied femininity is dispersed and anonymous; there are no individuals formally empowered to wield it; it is as we have seen, invested in everyone and in no one in particular" (1988, 80). Bordo concurs and notes, ". .. we must abandon the idea of power as something possessed by

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one group and leveled against another; we must instead think of the network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain" (1993, 167). Thus, as women continue to sit in the precarious and dangerous position of simultaneous subject/object, they must choose the correct performative in a given moment to ensure survival.

But women should be doing more than surviving in society. They should not be reduced or limited by conditions in which the habituated practices and performances of everyday life subsume them. They should recognize that their repeated gendered performatives have the capacity to proliferate subjectivities. As Butler argues in Gender Trouble, "The task is not whether to repeat, but how

to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to

displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself" (1999, 189). What I suggest with regard to Butler's call to action is an enactment of our bodily

capacities. We should open up and inhabit a space in which we can experience ourselves in terms of our intentionalities and aims. I suggest a return to the 1968 feminist protest of the Miss America Pageant in which women removed their bras in an effort to confront the physical oppression of restrictive gendered

clothing. We should wear sports bras or go braless5 instead of wearing push-up bras while engaging in the repetitions of lifting, carrying, stretching, walking,

running, and overall strength training. This does not come in response to notions that women should attempt to be muscular like men, but that women should aspire to be strong like women by engaging their bodies to their fullest capacities and using feminine strengths-lower body strength, flexibility and endurance-to achieve aims and accomplish objectives.6

Lorber details such an example of subversive performativity in her article "Believing is Seeing: Body as Ideology" (1998): "When women were accepted as West Point cadets, it became clear that the tests of physical competence, such as rapidly scaling an eight-foot wall, had been constructed for male phy- siques-pulling oneself up and over and using upper-body strength" (1998, 19). The women's answer to this challenge was, however, not to go over the wall like

the men, but to figure out a way to use their own strengths to get over. Yoder observes, "I was observing this obstacle one day, when a woman approached the wall in the old prescribed way, got her fingertips grip, and did an unusual thing: she walked her dangling legs up the wall until she was in a position where both her hands and feet were atop the wall. She then simply pulled up her sagging bottom and went over. She solved the problem by capitalizing on one of women's

physical assets: lower-body strength" (1989, 530). Women's lower body strength facilitated completion of the same obstacle that men used upper body strength to overcome. This example serves to explain how women can use their bodies to achieve aims in ways that are different from men. Women do not have to

become like men to be physically efficient, capable, or confident. They must simply find their own ways to achieve their own goals.

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My recommendations for women to actively strengthen their bodies, to engage in the subversion of women's docile bodies-bodies that are only con- sidered fit in terms of appearance-stems from the work of Lorber 1998, Yoder 1989, and Heywood 1998a, 1998b. Heywood adds to the work of Lorber and Yoder that recognizes the subversive capacity of the feminine body to achieve physical goals vis-a-vis a deployment of innovative feminine performatives. Heywood argues that through strength training, women can engage in subver- sion of feminine body ideals such as "the hot fitness body"-the feminine body as lean, but weak. She also argues, perhaps most significantly, that women who strengthen their bodies also raise their capacities to do and to be: "I have seen them go out of the gym with their shoulders back and their heads held high, a little bit more confident about their positions in the world, a little less bounded

by limits that they've internalized from years of absorbing cultural mytholo- gies that impose drastic limits on women's strength and potentials" (1998a, 59-60). In merging the work of Lorber, Yoder, and Heywood, I can recognize my own response to the physical empowerment I experienced waiting tables. I can understand how focusing on the physical strengths of women-lower body strength, endurance, and flexibility-have the potential to displace feminine gender norms and constitute a very different kind of subjectivity. Being at home

in our bodies and enacting our intentionalities should be the goal whether we are tootsie-rolling walkers, baby-carrying moms, tray-toting servers, wall- climbing cadets, or weight-lifting scholars. Engaging in these performatives may not seem subversive at all; however, if women can experience their bodies as capacities, they can inhabit a space of healthy subjective empowerment. As Heywood points out, "[weight] Lifting can make a woman who has been culturally devalued in any of the usual ways-'You throw (or talk or act) like a girl'-feel stronger, more certain of herself and her place in the world, the right she has to take up space" (1998a, 187).

Women who can: take up space, live in harmony with their bodies, be at home in the world, operate their bodies to their fullest capacities-these are not the representations of most women we see on television or in magazines. Most of the images we see are of women who: constrain their bodies-through dieting, wearing foundation garments, and even undergoing surgery-to present themselves in feminine postures and gestures that render them objects, enclose their bodies within the same garments to maintain any small measure of sub- jectivity, control and manage their docile bodies in a race toward an elusive femininity that is perpetual and exhaustive. We have been taught to desire to be the women we see most in the media, but we want to be constituted as women of the first set, the ones we do not see as often. We want to be able to

engage in repeated subversive performatives that displace notions of norma- tive femininity and proliferate gender norms so that it becomes possible for us to be who we are, ourselves. We do not want to exchange one ideal body for

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another, which is the trap that seems to be laid for us in so many gym and fit-

ness advertisements. We do not desire a body like the one on television or in magazines. We want our bodies to be reflections of ourselves, empowered by our

intentionalities and imaginations. In wanting this, in moving toward this, we must be critical of the demands of normative, ideal femininity and choose to parody those performatives that have disciplined us. In her book, Pretty Good for a Girl, Heywood finds subversion in her weight-lifting repetitions. "Each rep. Yes. Here I go. Here's one for all the times someone told me a girl should be

feminine and petite, that I'd better watch out or I'd get too big. Here's another for each time I spoke or screamed and my voice spun through the air like dust. And here's my last tortured rep for those who said they could love me if only I

could be just a little bit nicer and quieter, please, not quite so intense. Here we go, 205 to the sky: feel much better baby" (1998b, 194).

While I maintain that a deployment of physical empowerment via a focus on the strengths of women-lower body strength, flexibility, and endurance-and a removal of confining contemporary foundation garments are moves to displace gender norms, what I really am calling for here is a raising of consciousness, a critical eye toward feminine performatives, and a recognition that the feminine

body cannot continue to bear the weight of culture upon its embattled frame. Foundation garments may cover the wounds and seem to protect the body, but underneath it all, the feminine subject is in crisis. We cannot continue to allow ourselves to be habituated as weak, diminutive, docile. By removing the strictures of normative feminine performatives and ideal bodies, we make the move of freeing ourselves from structures that limit our intentionalities, reduce

our capacities, and stymie our imaginations. Ultimately, we free our embodied subjectivities by displacing the foundations of femininity.

Disclaimer: The author apologizes for not including reproductions of figures 1-6. Both Victoria's Secret and In Style Magazine refused permission. Victoria's Secret specifically refused permission to reprint the images on the basis of the context of the article as a critique, and In Style gave no explanation for its refusal.

Readers can find the images as referenced: Fig. 1: Sensual Shapers Slip. Advertisement. Victoria's Secret Catalog Fall

1999, Vol. II. No.2.

Fig. 2: The Satin Corset. Advertisement. Victoria's Secret Catalog Fall 1999, Vol. II. No 2.

Fig. 3: The Miracle Bra. Advertisement. Victoria's Secret Catalog Fall 1999, Vol. II. No 2.

Fig. 4: "Problem Solvers: Fashion 101," In Style. Feb. 2000. Fig. 5: "All-Reason Thongs: Fashion 101," In Style. Feb. 2002. Fig. 6: "Sexy Looks: Fashion 101," In Style. Feb 2000.

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NOTES

I would like to personally thank Debra Bergoffen for her diligence and persistence in pushing me to revise this piece as well as my own perceptions of feminine embodied experience. I am also grateful for advice and comments given to me by Gail Weiss, Iris Young, Susan Bordo, Riki Wilchins, and Leslie Heywood. It seems important to note that I see a strong connection between feminist theories of the body and women and sport, and I am equally indebted to those who publish in each field.

1. This is not to say that women cannot overcome this condition, nor that there are women who may not experience their bodies in this way. I agree with Young that women frequently underuse the capacities of their bodies; however, many women-ath- letes and those who labor with their bodies-may not experience immanence and or inhibited intentionality in the moment of performance of a specified or repeated task. Yet, athletes are particularly susceptible to other kinds of alienation. For more informa- tion on women athletes, "feminine apologetic" and "muscle gap," see Nancy Theberge 2000 and also Susan K. Cahn 1998.

2. For a discussion of representations of raced bodies in high fashion magazines and catalogs, see hooks 1992.

3. For a comparison of class in the catalogs of Victoria's Secret and Frederick's of Hollywood, see Valdivia 1997.

4. For a discussion of the use of plastic surgery to achieve dominant ideal beauty, "which is male-supremacist, racist, ageist, heterosexist, anti-Semitic, ableist and class- biased," see Kathryn Pauly Morgan 1998, 156.

5. I agree that women can and should, of course, choose not to wear bras if they feel comfortable doing this. A good friend of mine offered that if we lived in a culture

where elongated breasts were valued, she would not wear a bra at all. For a preview of sports bras designed for comfort, see the Title Nine Sports Catalog at www.title9sports .com (referred to me by the same friend).

6. See Gloria Steinem's "The Politics of Muscle" (1994) for a discussion of the importance of physical empowerment and the women's movement.

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