I love Belle’s latest blog entry:
Here are a couple of images of body parts: one with a certain context, one without:
The first is the cover of Feministing blogger Jessica Valenti’s new book.
The second is a picture of Keira Knightley’s collarbone.
Yes, these images are related, and not just because they’re both cross-sections of slender female bodies.
I am more troubled by the first image because it is more than visual: it is expressive. It is an image in the service of textual speech, and it is a confusing message. But before I get into that, I’ll offer you some other people’s thoughts on this cover.
From Blackademic:
im sorry. this is wack. for a number of reasons. why not just call it a young WHITE womans guide to WHITE feminism? why the WHITE NAKED torso of a woman? of course, i wouldn’t have prefered a black body, or any other woman of color either. my question is though, why the naked body of a woman at all? is it to sell more books? there are a number of other ways to visually depict an image of “feminism” - i am not sure why a naked body, reminiscent of the glossy images of tabloid trash had to be the way to go.
why does feminism have to be so overtly sexualized? (even the title is called “Full Frontal” - wow) is it because THE PATRIARCHY, which weyou are all so trying to defeat, really, has a stake in what books are being published on feminism? you know it’s true.
as feminists, we you guys are always up in arms about how women’s bodies are portrayed, and to go and reproduce those same images is ridiculous. is this what feminism is these days? is that what white feminism is these days?
From the Feminist Review by Ama Lee:
If you’re truly looking to find out why feminism matters, you’d be better served to flip to the booklist in the back of Full Frontal Feminism and read some of the titles listed there - including Colonize This!, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Generation, To Be Real, and The Fire This Time - because cool packaging is really great, but if there’s nothing of substance inside then what you are selling is just the packagings.
And what does the floating collarbone have to do with this? Well, read this article by the NY Times:
As the rest of women’s bodies recede in spring fashions, the clavicles, or collarbones, and the upper chest between them, is rising to prominence. Toned shoppers who want to show off their self-discipline in the face of dessert are choosing dresses with a low, but not plunging neckline, a look that is transforming the area above the breasts into an unlikely new subject for women to obsess over.
Some people think of it as an erogenous zone; others think it is noteworthy only as a barometer of whether a woman is at a healthy weight or has become too skinny.
This region has been emphasized by the skinny celebrity acolytes of the stylist Rachel Zoe, including Nicole Richie and Keira Knightley. Their ubiquitous deep V-neck tops show off sometimes skeletal frames, and other actresses have taken their cue and sized down as well, to the point that the Internet teems with fashion and celebrity bloggers and message board posters carping about protruding A-list clavicles.
Why the new emphasis on a body part most women — and more men — have paid little attention to in the past? Credit a swing of the fashion pendulum, and a malaise over “Girls Gone Wild” style.
Showing off your clavicle is “the opposite of showing your thong,” said Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.
Courtney E. Martin, the author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body” (Free Press, 2007), said that many of the girls and women she interviewed for her book “talked about how far their collarbone stuck out” with pride, as an indicator of their skinniness.
Ms. Martin contends that a generation of young women raised after Title IX and the women’s movement pursue slender figures with the same rigor as they pursue admission to an Ivy League university.
No, these two images aren’t linked by the game of Six Degrees of Ann Althouse, although Althouse did blog about the both the clavicle article and Jessica Valenti’s breasts (starting a small blog war of sorts).
Rather, it’s the not-so-novel idea that women’s bodies will be continued to be divided and dissected into parcels for commodification and sexualization, and this is done by women themselves. And it is supposed to be feminist or a repudiation of the fetishization of the overtly sexual body parts! Oh wait, but dysmorphia is the replacement for feminism in the wake of Title IX! Now that we have rights, we can start dieting again!
This ridiculousness not at all a new idea to those familiar with feminist theory. But it’s strange to admit that it continually surprises me year after no-more-eating-disorder-year, how many different parts of the body I am invited to self-fetishize, and who is doing the inviting. And I’m kind of sick of this.
read more of Belle’s blog…
Great post.
As much of a sticky topic as this is (the wonder woman icons on this page, for example, are hardly asexual), it’s pretty clear and egregious that feminism is being morphed into what I’ve heard people describe as “femininism”.
A related trend can be found in the PETA campaigns that utilize lithe nude women, and sponsor public “tofu wrestling” matches between women in bikinis (I’m not making this up). Ick.
-daraka