Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules

Introduction

1 Introduction Few classroom discussions generate as much enthusiasm as those about the body. Circumcision. Childhood vaccinations. Preschool beauty pageants. Steroids and sports. Designer vaginas. Hair straightening. Drag queens and kings. Burkas. Eyelid surgery. Sexual dysfunction. End-of-life care. Since nearly everyone has a passionate opinion, knows someone who ———, or both, these topics inspire dynamic discussions and spirited disagreements. But despite the widely varying views expressed about “the body,” people tend to agree on this point: when it comes to the body, there’s tremendous pressure to play by the rules. After all, the empirical evidence is compelling that bodies (and the people who inhabit them) are vulnerable to social norms of looking and behaving. There is no shortage of rules dictating what we should or should not wear, inhale, and ingest; the size, shape, and overall appearance of our bodies; and even our gestures, gait, and posture (Bartky 1988). Yet this abundance of norms in no way implies their universality in form, content , and potential embodiment. Norms are complex and varied: an employer’s mandate that women employees wear makeup differs from the unspoken workplace belief that women employees who wear makeup come across as more competent (Dellinger and Williams 1997).1 To be sure, norms vary in form, but they also are dynamic and contingent upon time and place. Norms about natural bodily processes—regulating how we should eat, blow our noses, or even sleep—have evolved throughout the civilizing process, requiring increasingly greater restraint (Elias 2000). Bodily forms deemed “physical capital” are also subject to ongoing re-evaluation in social spaces where groups vie to define which bodily configurations are superior (Bourdieu 1984, 1985). Ideologies and practices of age, class, gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity embedded in these particular times and places inform these sets of expectations. Despite these variations, norms still have the potential to exert control. To state the obvious, norms normalize; they exert a near-magnetic effect on people, compelling them, often unwittingly, to fit in or risk censure, condemnation, and in some instances, danger. As norms press on us, many avenues of action surface. The typical female college student may not be fair skinned, light haired, and thin, but chances are she has observed how others and the media valorize these ideals. She might actively work to lose weight, perhaps even dye her hair or use skin lighteners, in an attempt to conform to this Western beauty imperative. She might also elect not to do such things and instead hide her hips and belly with “slimming” clothes. Then again, she might fully embrace, even flaunt, her body and encourage her friends to do the same. Here’s where it gets interesting. 2 Embodied Resistance Cultural theorists have long asserted that social relations of power produce bodies that are disciplined and resistant (see, e.g., Foucault 1995). Typically through a feminist lens, body studies scholars interrogate embodiment, or the sociocultural relations that act on individual bodies.2 These scholars refer to the “somatic society,” a sociocultural context in which we understand the political and the personal, as well as the passive and the agentic, in and through the body (Turner 1996). In other words, we know that humans can be at once rule-bound and wonderfully inventive agents of social change. We can enact the mandates—trudging along, submitting and rationalizing —but we can also assert ourselves and break away. To quote Arthur Frank (1991, 47), “the ‘government of the body’ is never fixed, but always contains oppositional spaces.” To date, much scholarly analysis has focused on the structural forces that constrain agency. That is, the field has favored the study of the production of disciplined bodies—how bodies are constructed through cultural ideologies and social structures. But what can we learn from the (relatively) undisciplined, the so-called body outlaws ?3 What happens when we scrutinize the body as a site of opposition? A growing body of empirical work examines resistance and the role of agency or “the body reacting back and affecting discourse” (Shilling 1993, 81). For example, researchers of the body have explored the medical power relations between women and their physicians (Davis 1988), the psychological and social tensions of extreme body modification, such as body art and repeat plastic surgeries (Pitts 2003, 2007), the complex interplay of resistance and accommodation with women’s body hair norms (Weitz 2001), and how aerobics classes, hair salons, and fat acceptance organizations reproduce body norms yet simultaneously provide conceptual spaces to challenge...