The Body as a Cultural Text

Abstract

In order to position my argument within a cultural context, I begin by offering a brief historical overview of the mythologies, iconography, and ancient narratives associated with women’s bodies, followed by a trajectory of dieting culture in the United States. I am not the first to suggest that female bodies continue to serve as a lightning rod for cultural fears and prejudices. From the earliest philosophers, such as Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes, who linked the masculine to a “higher” plane of spirituality and reason in contrast to the feminine, which was linked to all that was earthly and flesh bound, to the discourse of modern psychology including Freud and Lacan, the female body has always been viewed as problematic, mysterious, and sexually dangerous.¹ Simone de Beauvoir points out in The Second Sex that the philosophical categories of Self/Other have been superimposed on the binary oppositions in Western culture of man/woman. The male Self has traditionally been associated with the mind as something transcendent, while the female Other is trapped in the body, associated with the biological processes of menses and childbirth and therefore defined and evaluated by bodily functions, shape, and size.² It follows logically that fat women are targeted by “weightism” more than men, because according to the aforementioned paradigm, which is at the base of Western philosophy, a woman is her body, her body is her identity, and her fatness points to a multitude of social and cultural transgressions. The fat female form is associated with a myriad of negative connotations as well as with racial and sexual otherness. Her fat body provokes ideological questions of morality, control, and self-discipline.