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106 11 Fatness (In)visible Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and the Rhetoric of Normative Femininity Christina Fisanick It is estimated that 6 to 10 percent of all women have polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), an endocrine disorder characterized by “obesity,” male pattern hair growth and loss, irregular menstruation and infertility, and skin abnormalities such as skin tags, adult acne, and dark patches of skin under the armpits and between the thighs (Thatcher, 2000). Despite its prevalence, PCOS is often misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all, leading Dr. Samuel Thatcher to dub it “the hidden epidemic” (p. 14). It is difficult to miss the irony (intended or not) in this designation. After all, in our image-obsessed culture, it would be hard to miss a three-hundred-pound, balding woman with a moustache. Reductive though this characterization is, it nonetheless represents a crucial way of thinking about PCOS and the bodies of women who have the syndrome. That is, women with PCOS have highly visible bodies but are coded by normative femininity as invisible. On Be(com)ing a Woman: Negotiating Normative Femininity To understand the ways in which women with PCOS both subscribe to and resist normative femininity, it is important to reiterate the current conversation surrounding femininity. Femininity is not a descriptor, but rather an ideological system in which all people participate. As Sandra Bartky (1997, p. 132) writes, “We are born male or female, but not masculine or feminine. Femininity is an artifice, an achievement , ‘a mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many styles of the flesh.’” The female body, then, is femininity’s site for struggle and its vehicle for expression and coercion. Although corsets have long been banished from our everyday attire, we are faced with a more binding, more constrictive force than just strings and whalebone; we must struggle each day, each moment, within the bounds of an ideology that we can barely render visible, let alone easily resist. Femininity relies on a system of negation—no calluses, no bulges, no hair in Fatness (In)visible 107 the wrong places—and also a system of contradiction—produce children, but do not store enough fat to ovulate or have muscle tone; do not be strong, either. Coupled with its ability to conceal its own genesis and disguise its disciplinarians, femininity is a project doomed to failure. It is in the arenas of negation and contradiction that the PCOS body excels. The PCOS body is at once a condition of excess—too much hair, too much fat, too much testosterone—and a condition of lack—too little hair, too little progesterone, too little ovulation. It is at once the body of the fertility goddess, the mother (large breasts, wide hips, round belly), and infertile. It has too much facial hair and not enough head hair. It is both male (excess testosterone) and female (genitalia). Is there a possibility , then, in this state of excess, of being both hyper-feminine and unfeminine—for women with PCOS and their bodies to subvert the dominant regime of normative femininity? Subverting the System: Revealing the PCOS Body The PCOS body—fat, irregular, infertile, and hairy—attempts to accomplish this subversion , but the body alone is not enough to alter the oppressive system of normative femininity, especially when the body is, as Charisse Goodman calls it, a “full-figured phantom,” invisible in all ways that matter (1995, p. 25). Rather, it takes an actor to effect change by the way the acts are read and repeated. Although there is no doubt that the fat female body and other so-called unfeminine bodies (hairy, disabled, disfigured) resist the norms of femininity by their very existence, I do not think that this resistance alone is enough to make a real difference in the larger project of demystifying and dismantling normative femininity. If demolishing femininity were as easy as simply getting fat, then, according to recent statistics, the problem of femininity would already be resolved, given that millions of American women are considered to be “overweight.” Therefore, dismantling femininity must require much more than simply not looking the part. As Kathleen LeBesco notes, “We need some way of discerning which actions are truly disruptive of socalled normalcy, and which in fact help to maintain the status quo. . . . What performance in what context will help to destabilize naturalized identity categories?” (2001, p. 77). A look at the recent activities of the Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome Association (PCOSA) might reveal the distinction between acts...

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