This week, I decided to focus on body image.
Body image is important because society puts a pressure on us to look a certain way and it should not be this way at all. It should be the opposite. We need to support each other and stop judging. Most important we need to teach the younger generations and our future children to be respectful and how to grow up in a society where they can learn to love their own bodies as well.
Body dysmorphia can lead to mental health disorders, which also a life nobody should live in.
In class we learned about Gender Performance and how this can relate to body image.
- A construct that is socially created – largely through cultural representations
- Dominant forms on institutional power
- Powerful and strong bodies of men → linked to power and leadership
- Frail and slender bodies of women → viewed as incompatible with power
- Everyday beauty routines and adherence to body ideals – especially for those identifying as girls and women
- A form of power that encourages us to regulate ourselves (think the panopticon)
- Women are taught to obsessively worry about food intake, hair removal, and much more and how through repetition, these behaviors seem inevitable and natural
- Indeed, we can often feel ‘yucky’ if we not remove body hair, etc
- Many social sanctions for not abiding to these ideals
- We discussed how not deleting or moving away from disordered eating, as described in one of the articles, can be viewed as a political act; a type of body subversion that says, no, we will not be reduced to our bodies and what is deemed as attractive by a patriarchal society
- Abra Fortune Chernik writes, “gaining weight and getting my head out of the toilet was the most political act I have ever committed”
