ﾠ
ﾠ[1]
Professor Laurie E. Hicks
University of Maine
All scholarship builds on the work of
others.ﾠ Sometimes the debts are purely
personal, as when one person draws inspiration from the work of another
scholar.ﾠ Sometimes the debts are
broader, more institutional, as when the evolution of an entire discipline is
influenced by the work of some specific scholar or group of scholars.ﾠ I believe that debts are owed to June King
McFee and Vincent Lanier in both these senses.ﾠ
Not only has my own thinking been richly influenced by the work of McFee
and Lanier, but also the discipline of art education itself has evolved in ways
that can be traced back to their research and teaching.ﾠ What exactly did June McFee and Vincent Lanier
contribute to art education?
Perhaps
the most central contribution, which they both made, has to do with a
recognition that art education should not limit itself to studying paintings
and prints hung on walls, or sculptures placed on pedestals, but should also
investigate aesthetic experience in the mundane world around us.ﾠ Art, as McFee would say, is a culturally
constituted form of communication.ﾠ To
understand art fully, therefore, we must investigate art forms in their
cultural and community-based contexts, see how they function in everyday life,
and interpret their ability to form and transform human identities.ﾠ Lanier too pushed outwards from the
traditional canon to confront the diversity of visual and material
culture.ﾠ He talked not just about
paintings and sculptures, but also about clocks, cars and motorcycles,
advertising, television, architecture and clothing.ﾠ Art education, for both McFee and Lanier, was
concerned with learning to think critically about all aspects of our visually
designed experience.
I
began to feel the influence of these key ideas early on in my educational
career.ﾠ It was in June McFee's "Art in
Society" course where I first gave voice to my growing interest in body
adornment and its cultural implications.ﾠ
And it was in Vincent's course on "The Teaching of Art Criticism" that I
began to flex my contextualist muscles in order to understand more fully how we
come to see and engage the world through the interpretive filters of our
cultural and community-based experience.ﾠ
Since that time, I have returned again and again to my experiences in their classrooms and to their published work.ﾠ I have used McFee's and Lanier's insights as I tried to understand how we make sense of natural and built environments and our experiences as we move through them (Hicks, 1992/1993), and, perhaps more importantly, how we come to care about and be care-givers to the environments we inhabit (Hicks, 1996).ﾠ I have also looked to them as I struggled to understand and overcome what I see as the limitations of contemporary art education and to articulate the need to expand its possibilities through the metaphor of play (Hicks, 2004).
But
in many ways, it is in my efforts to explore and talk about the visual and
material culture of the designed body and its implications for our
understanding of self and other, that I continue to carry with me the work of
McFee and Lanier.ﾠ Their influence frames
what seems to be my perennial fascination with the diverse forms of visual and
material culture that are written on the human body.ﾠ Let me turn, then, to this topic of the
aesthetic construction of the human body, with particular emphasis on women's
bodies.ﾠﾠ This is a project I dedicate to
the work and teachings of June King McFee and Vincent Lanier.
Feminist
writers have frequently drawn our attention to the importance of understanding
how the body communicates symbolic meanings and plays a role in constructing
power relations between individuals.ﾠ
Historically and cross-culturally, the body is marked, adorned and
formed in accordance with prevailing human ideologies and social
convictions.ﾠ Through a variety of
aesthetic devices, the body has become a surface upon which humans inscribe and
reinforce cultural rules, hierarchies and commitments.ﾠ The purpose of this project is to explore how
the design of human bodies in general, but womens bodies specifically, are
imbued with social and political meaning.ﾠ
My primary focus is on how women challenge existing notions of physical
beauty and power through aesthetic decisions about adornment and through the
physical practices of bodybuilding.
Even though I am primarily
interested in the altering of women's bodies and how some womenﾠ intentionally design their bodies not as a
means of submission, but as a vehicle for self empowerment, I would first like
to say something about the aesthetics of body manipulation more generally. Body
manipulation is nothing new.ﾠ The body
has always been marked, adorned, and sculpted in reference to existing human
beliefs and social conventions both in western cultural traditions, and in
others.ﾠ Tattoos, piercings, and other
forms of body customization have long been a part of the human aesthetic
landscape. These alterations of the body's appearance are clearly aesthetic
practices, that is, practices aimed at creating a particular visual and tactile
self-presentation.ﾠﾠ
In Phenomenology of Perception
(1962) Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that the "body is to be compared, not to a
physical object, but rather to a work of art... it is a focal point of living
meanings..." (p. 150-151).ﾠ By assimilating
the body to a work of art, Merleau-Ponty argues that our understanding of the
body should not be relegated merely to the realm of biology and the physical.ﾠ The body is also a powerful aesthetic form
embued with personal and cultural meanings.ﾠ
As such, the body becomes a visual artifact that reflects human
aesthetic impulses, as well as the symbolic and coded system through which we
present these impulses to the world.ﾠ As
Freud (1931) tells us "there can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for
art's sake.ﾠ It worked originally in the
service of impulses" (p. 97).ﾠ The human
body is clearly the oldest and most persistent medium through which we express
these aesthetic impulses.ﾠ
Even knowing this, we
sometimes make the mistake of thinking that aesthetic experience is something
to be relegated to the museum, concert hall, or artist's studio.ﾠ But in fact,ﾠ
as McFee and Lanier remind us, aesthetic encounters are an essential and
unavoidable part of our everyday lives.ﾠ
They are not limited to the formal, institutional realm of art, but are
integral to our daily undertakings and interactions with the world.ﾠ As such, aesthetic experiences and
expressions are a powerful force in the development and maintenance of our
individual and cultural identities.ﾠ In Experience
as Art: Aesthetics in Everyday Life (1983), Joseph Kupfer writes that it is
through everyday aesthetic encounters that we develop a relationship of
exchange with the world.ﾠ He calls
attention to the role aesthetic experience plays in the individuals capacity
for social participation (p. 2). Of particular interest is the fact that
personal and social expressions are not seen as something separate from who we
are as physical beings, but as a kind of aesthetic "ritual of the body"
(Kupfer, p. 113).ﾠ This ritual is a
process of making visible the "inner self on the outer skin" (Wilton, 1991, p.
86), or, in other words, marking the body as an art form.
Anthropologists and sociologists have long studied the varied and complex
marks humans make upon their bodies. Elizabeth Reichel-Dolmatoff (1998)
observes how the skin, as the "slender layer that separates the self from the
outside world" (p. 12) is
individually and socially marked and inscribed with meaning.ﾠ She goes on to note that manipulation of the
bodys appearance shows "the inter-relationship between the individual and
society and at the same time demonstrates...personal self-awareness and
creativity" (p. 12).ﾠ However, it is only
recently that we have taken such marks seriously as a form of art, as a process
within which cultural, community and personal identity is etched on the body
through aesthetic decisions of adornment and body customization. When we see
women changing the appearance of their bodies, therefore, we ought to be
curious to know whether and how they think these changes reflect changes in
their interrelationships with other individuals or society at large.ﾠ In my experience, women frequently do intend
their body manipulations to have both a social meaning as well as an aesthetic
form.ﾠ Significant changes in aesthetic
self-presentation, like those we see taking place now in women's use of tattoos
and piercings, are due to women's changing conceptions of themselves and of
their place in society.
It is no accident, in my view, that the
choice of tattoos and piercings as the vehicle for the expression of changing
social constructions of gender comes at a time of increasing attention to
cultural diversity and a globalization of world cultures.ﾠ Young women and men are more and more aware
of traditions of body adornment from cultural and community settings different
from their own and are challenged to adopt and adapt those traditions to their
own needs.ﾠ In this way, they both join
and contribute to a long-standing, cross-cultural recognition of the body as a
site for the inscription of meaning.ﾠ
From a contemporary feminist point of view, the aesthetic
alteration of the body is a subject that provides significant insights both
into the mainstream understanding of women and into women's efforts to critique
mainstream expectations and create alternatives.ﾠ According to French sociologist, Collette
Guillaumin, for example,
"physical interventions upon the body, most often
mutilations, are generally aimed at the female body, or at least affect it most
profoundly, and include modifying the body with surgery, or with the use of
tools or objects that induce and maintain certain corporal transformations."
(1993, p. 42)ﾠ It is well known that
feminine beauty in patriarchal cultures often come at a very high cost in terms
of the health and integrity of women's bodies.ﾠ
One thinks particularly here of female genital mutilation in North Africa,
footbinding in China, or of corsets and the surgical removal of rib bones in
Victorian England and America[2].
With this as background, let us
look more specifically at ways in which women are using tattooing and piercing
as forms of expression and as emblems of self-validation.ﾠ Tattooing and piercing are not of interest
only to younger women, but they have become a significant form of expression
through which many younger women seek to express both their sense of
individuality and, by contrast, their sense of belonging to a group or
community. These forms of expression are often intended to reestablish a sense
of normalcy and control in a world experienced by many of them as foreign
(Martin, 1997) and, quite often, they are used to give voice to defiance.ﾠ The expression of these needs is often
reflected in the nature of their imagery.
In
discussing the development of imagery among adolescents and young adults,
Judith Burton (1999) points to an emergence of challenging, frightening and
potentially for some, offensive representations of their experiences. She notes
that such images reflect the confusions, fears and responses of adolescent
experience, and are greatly influenced by the materials available to them for
public expression.ﾠ Though Burton
is primarily interested in the use of materials such as clay or fiber, her
description of the images of adolescents and young adults has a place in our
discussion of tattoos.ﾠ Young women often
combine tattoos of skulls, teardrops, barbed wire, cut and bleeding hearts, or
spiders, with the names of their boyfriend, gang or favorite rock bands in the
designs they proudly wear on their bodies.ﾠ
However, they often do so in conjunction with images of Valentine
hearts, unicorns, fairies, flowers, cartoon characters, rosaries, crosses, and
other familiar, and perhaps less challenging, symbols.
This "confusion" of imagery may reflect the struggles of young women who are trying
to find a place for themselves in an ambiguous social world.ﾠ While drawing on conventional and familiar
visual references, these women use the imagery in ways that deny their normal
meanings.ﾠ By tattooing their bodies with
these images, they both acknowledge conventional imagery while denying the power
of the surrounding society to fix and control its meaning for them.ﾠ In Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History
of Tattoos and Women (1997), Margot Mifflin states "tattoos serve as
&visual passkeys to the psyches of women who are rewriting accepted notions of
feminine beauty and self-expression." (p. 9) If Mifflin is right, tattoos
become what philosopher Christine Braunberger (2000) describes as points of
introjection, as "mediating site[s] between ones psychic interior and cultural
exterior." (p. 4) Tattooing thereby becomes a powerful act of contextual
self-definition; to use Guillaumin's (1993) phrase, tattoos become an act of "rapport with the world" (p. 47).
Whether
through tattooing or through their style of hair, dress or jewelry, young women
play out the human need to define an identity by altering aesthetic appearance.
Theo Kogan, actress and lead singer in the New York
band Lunachicks, sees her tattoos as "primal," as both physical and as a link
to one of the oldest of human cultural practices. Kogan says "Theres something
very primal about it because it is such an old art" (in Mifflin , 1997, p.
136).ﾠ In situating tattoos within human
tradition, Kogan offers adolescents something that many contemporary cultural
practices do not, a degree of permanence.ﾠ
However, Kogan wonders if the magnetic appeal of these practices is more
associated with the fact that "we don't expect to live so long...because of AIDS
and drugs and the fucked up world we're in" (p. 136) Like Kogan, Mifflin (1997)
speculates that "shortsighted kids living in a disposable culture simply dont
consider the long-term implications of an indelible fashion statement" (p.
136).
In an effort
to better understand this, I once asked several of my students who had been
tattooed in their late teens, how they felt about the issue of permanence.ﾠ Each of them indicated that they had indeed
thought about what it might mean later in their lives, but decided that
regardless of how they thought about it later, it was important to them now,
important in their efforts to "reclaim" their bodies and "to express who [they
were] now."
The power of
tattoos to signify self and membership among young women can be seen in
research done on gang members in several US
cities.ﾠ Research shows the use of ear
and nose rings or specific tattoo designs to be typical ways by which members
identify themselves and others.ﾠ Tattoos,
visibly situated, remind gang members of their affiliation and allegiance to a
particular gang.ﾠ When gang members
describe themselves, they most often do so by reference to their rings, brands
or tattooed markings.ﾠ The power of these
marks can be understood by the lengths people will go to, to have them removed.
Through the X-Tattoo Program, in Phoenix,
for example, medical volunteers use modern laser technology to help ex-gang
members in their efforts to rid themselves of gang markings.ﾠ For many ex--gang members, freedom from the
control of gang life is only possible once the markings, the signs of gang
membership, are removed.
The use of tattoos
to represent relationships or communal connections can also be seen in tattoos
that illustrate relations of a more intimate nature.ﾠ These include familial as well as romantic
relations.ﾠ One of my students described
for me the primitive she had tattooed around her left bicep.ﾠ For her, the significance of the tattoo did
not lie in the design but in its placement on her arm.ﾠ She told me how her grandfather would reach
out and lightly take hold of her arm as he spoke with her and how he had done
this for as long as she could remember.ﾠ
Upon his death, she acquired the tattoo as a memorial to her love for
him.
Like
tattooing, piercing has emerged as one of the latest forms of body practice
among young women.ﾠ Unlike the traditions
of body piercing in many aboriginal societies, this new appropriation is
intended to throw off, to reject, tradition and society's control over one's
own body.ﾠ In The Body Project
(1997), Joan Brumberg describes what I have seen in my students, that most use
the perforation of their bodies as a provocative symbol of their right to do as
they please with their own bodies. Several of my female students have told me
that the act of piercing is a way of asserting their own identity regardless of
the expectations and standards of their parents or the society at large as to
what it means to be a girl, especially a "good girl."ﾠ This image comes from a long tradition of
imagery that clearly articulates standards of womanhood and 'femininity' and is
promoted through the power of contemporary video, print and electronic
media.ﾠ They see the act of piercing as
an "act of art," an act that clearly is intended to confront and liberate them
from what Simone de Beauvoir calls 'biological ideology.'ﾠ In The Second Sex (1953), de Beauvoir
says
As against the
dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women, mythical
thought opposes the eternal Feminine, unique and changeless.ﾠ If the definition provided for this concept
is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who
are wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false entity, but that the
women concerned are not feminine. (p. 237)
Thus in the eyes of my
students, the piercing of navels, tongues, eyebrows, nipples and other areas of
their bodies can be understood as an attempt to throw-off, as de Beauvoir calls
it, the "eternal Feminine, unique and changeless."ﾠ This taking charge of one's own body, of
altering it so as to make it clearly one's own, is also evident as motivation
in the tattoos of many older women.
While
the previous examples show body manipulation as a strategy for asserting and
defining identity in younger women, many women are taking to heart Adrienne
Rich's challenge to reclaim our bodies by regarding the physical as a "resource, rather than a destiny" (1976, p. 13).ﾠ Rich notes that many women are alienated from
their bodies both in wishing they weren't there, and at the same time in
feeling "incarcerated" in their bodies.ﾠ
By "appeal[ing] to the physical," many women reassert control over an
identity they feel has been lost to wider cultural and community-based forces.
This is clearly
illustrated in women who tattoo over mastectomy scars. These women embrace
their physicality as a form of aesthetic resource.ﾠﾠ They appear to take seriously Foucault's
characterization of the body (1984) as an "inscribed surface of events," "totally imprinted by history" (p. 83).ﾠ
For these women, both the mark left by the surgeon's knife and the
tattoo itself are such imprints.ﾠ Both
marks represent efforts to save a woman's life - one her physical life, the
other her emotional life.ﾠ While the scar
left by the surgery remains as a reminder of her threatened past, the marks of
the tattoo signify a process of reclamation and recovery that open up to the
future.ﾠ Both sets of marks highlight the
relevance of Foucault's particular view of the body as a surface upon which "patterns of significance" are inscribed.ﾠ
Mifflin (1997) offers
two examples of women who have survived breast cancer and turned to tattoos as
a medium for reclaiming their bodies.ﾠ In
1980, Marcia Rasner underwent a double mastectomy.ﾠ After years of struggling with her scarred
body and "wounded self-image," Rasner submerged her mastectomy scars in "life-affirming organic imagery." (p. 8)
This tattoo was not her first, but was dramatically different in
intent.ﾠ While Rasners previous tattoos
were intended to express a sense of self, her most recent marks speak to a
process of self-transformation.
Mifflin quotes Rasner as
saying, "I have a picture of me taken before and after, and I can see the
change in my eyes in those pictures.ﾠ
It's a feeling of having taken something essentially negative and turned
it into something beautiful" (p. 8).ﾠ
Toward this same end, Andree Connors had a rose tattooed over her
mastectomy scar.ﾠ Connors' tattoo was an
attempt to aesthetically and politically mark her body.ﾠ Mifflin cites Connors as saying "This is an
invisible epidemic: everybody looks 'normal' 'cause they're wearing prostheses.
So the message does not get across to the world that we are being killed off by
breast cancer" (p. 152).ﾠ
As both Rasner
and Connors point out, this process of inscription is a process of private and
public ritual that commemorates the passage from one state to another.
Tattooing in such cases becomes a "defining" or "redefining" aesthetic for
these women, no less than for younger women dealing with the concerns of
adolescence and young adulthood.
My goal in this paper so
far has been to show that women's body adornment and modification is a fruitful
object of study for arts professionals interested in exploring the political
and aesthetic dimensions of the body within community and cultural
contexts.ﾠ Expanding this discussion to
include the practice of bodybuilding may offer us additional lessons about the
politics and aesthetics of the body.
Let me start with a very brief
clarification concerning different forms of body practice within the realm of
weight lifting. Bodybuilding is the act of altering the form and size of ones
muscles through the process of weight training to achieve a particular body
shape or aesthetic semblance.ﾠ
Bodybuilding is different from power lifting. According to the students
who workout in the weight room in my university gym, power lifting is a process
of performing three movements: a bench press, a dead lift and a squat.ﾠ Bodybuilding, on the other hand, is the use
of repeated weight lifting to build muscle and, as a result, change one's
physical and aesthetic appearance.ﾠ
Bodybuilding as a cultural phenomena
came from the practices of professional strong men and weight lifters in the
late 1800's.ﾠ These men performed on stage,
in circus sideshows and at rodeos.ﾠ As a
result of existing social views of appropriate female roles and behavior, women
were usually precluded from participating.ﾠ
This did not, of course, prevent women from building muscle, becoming
physically strong and altering their physical appearance.
Despite the presence of highly
muscled women, there has existed an insidious belief in the inferiority of
women's bodies and a cultural insistence on controlling women's place in
society.ﾠ The following quote is from an
early 1900's text:ﾠ "Both womens unique
anatomy and physiology and their special moral obligations disqualify them from
vigorous physical activity.ﾠ Women have a
moral duty to preserve their vital energy for childbearing and to cultivate
personality traits suited to the wife-and-mother role.ﾠ Sport wastes vital forces, strains female
bodies and fosters traits unbecoming to 'true womanhood.'"ﾠ Even though these beliefs have faded slowly
over time, organized women's bodybuilding did not develop until the 1960's and
70's and women bodybuilders are still seen as outside the norm today.
It
is clear that we construct our bodies within a complex and, in many ways,
inescapable system of power relations. This is particularly true for women
whose construction of self is dominated by the male gaze. Many feminists have
sought to challenge the power of such constructions, looking for subversive and
liberating images of women.ﾠ The work of
philosopher Honi Haber[3]
is of particular interest within the context of this paper. In an unpublished
presentation, "Muscles and Politics: Shaping the Feminist Revolt" (1991)
presented at the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, Haber talks
about the importance of liberating images, images that "problematize seeing and
assimilation" (p. 6) and subvert the restraints of patriarchial power. In her
work, Haber sees the images of muscled women as possessing such "liberating
subversive" potential and as opening up the possibility for women to resist "readings of timidity, weakness, and inferiority, by creating her body as her
own interpretation...and in doing so, force[ing] cultural reinterpretations."
Similarly,
Leslie Heywood (1998) describes women bodybuilding as a creation of subversive
monstrosity. Bodybuilders "aspire to be monsters, to become the dictionary
definition: 'one unusually large for its kind; extraordinary and often
overwhelming in size.' Bodybuilders want to stand out, have no one take them at
face value" (p. 8). Sam Fussell, in Muscle,
Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder (1991), agrees with Heywood, "Shock
value is all. It's saying, or rather screaming, 'more than anything else in the
world, whatever it takes, I don't want to be like you.ﾠ I don't want to look like you. I don't want
to talk like you. I don't want to be
you." (p. 137).
However,
women bodybuilders are faced with more than the goal of becoming something that
everyone else is not.ﾠ Women's
bodybuilding, having emerged from athletic and aesthetic structures that are
defined within the context of masculinity, is by nature a contested terrain.ﾠ Body building, as an aesthetic and cultural
form of athletic prowess strives to represent the other, the extraordinary, the
monstrous.ﾠ This is made clear by the
behavior of the male bodybuilders who inhabit the gym where I workout.ﾠ They grunt and strut with a clear sense of
pride in the physique they have created through the practice of weight lifting.ﾠ Among bodybuilders, a desire for sleek,
contoured muscles is only surpassed by the desire for immense size.ﾠ But women bodybuilders must also be
feminine.ﾠ Women bodybuilders must be
both monstrous and feminine, a clear aesthetic contradiction.ﾠ As a result, women bodybuilders strive to
achieve the aesthetic norms of femininity while at the same time, pushing
against them as they develop the size associated with the expectations of
bodybuilding.ﾠ Heyward describes this as
a process of using "their bodies to depart from as well as incarnate the norm"
(p.11)
This
inherent conflict has played itself out at various levels in women's
bodybuilding.ﾠﾠ In George Butler's and
Charles Gaines' 1985 film, Pumping Iron
II: The Women, American bodybuilder, Rachel McLeash comes face to face with
Australian power-lifter and bodybuilder Bev Francis.ﾠ McLeash enters the competition with an
aesthetic form that is athletic and feminine. In comparison, Francis' highly
sculpted and incredibly muscled body reflects not the expectations of
femininity, not even muscled femininity, but those of bodybuilding more
generally.ﾠ Her aesthetic presence pushed
against the societal norm for women, yet is fully in accordance with the
existing expectations of a (male) bodybuilder.ﾠ
As the film showed, the judges were not yet prepared to treat women's
bodybuilding on a par with men's.ﾠ The
idea of highly muscled women was "a contradiction to, even an attack on, our
sense of reality" (Dobbins, 1994, p. 8).ﾠ
The image of Bev Francis was an unwelcome subversion of established
cultural norms of a feminine aesthetic. In this case, aesthetic judgments,
informed by expectations of how a real woman should look, blocked official
recognition of Bev Francis' efforts to sculpt her body solely according to the
established criteria of the sport itself.ﾠ
She placed eighth in the competition even though she more than any other
participant, embodied the aesthetic expectations of bodybuilding.
Bev Francis' fate in that
competition was not entirely surprising.ﾠ
Bodybuilders, both male and female, challenge culturally defined
aesthetic norms by their shear physical presence.ﾠﾠ Bodybuilders "take up space" - more space
than the 'normal' person; they insert themselves more forcefully than others
into the public sphere. As a result, they may be perceived as engaging in a
kind of trespass: taking up space that is not theirs.ﾠ For some bodybuilders this trespass is a
conscious act of defiance, an intentional breaking of the norm in order to
assert a form of physical liberation through aesthetic self-transformation.ﾠ While this is true for both men and women,
the cultural context of female trespass imposes different meanings on the
bodies of women bodybuilders.ﾠ Taking up
space, too much space, has a particular cultural meaning for women who have
been expected to remain in the background, deferential, and physically
ineffective.ﾠ The cultural challenge
embodied in Bev Francis' self-transformation inevitably attracted resistance.
Women's bodybuilding is, thus,
another intersection point where aesthetic practices and cultural, as well as
community-based, norms come together.ﾠ
The practice both challenges existing social norms and brings them
visibly to the surface.ﾠ Women bodybuilders
catalyze a kind of cultural reaction, making gender expectations visible by
their transgression.ﾠ Whether this, or
any other form of transgressive body practice, will be liberating for women in
general can never be entirely certain.ﾠ
Much depends on how the society assimilates their challenge.
My goal in this paper has been to open
up an area of the everyday to aesthetic investigation.ﾠ Following the lead set by McFee and Lanier, I
want to emphasize the legitimacy of studying the ways in which everyday
aesthetic practices intersect with cultural meanings, political power, and opportunities
for liberation.ﾠ As I have suggested,
aesthetic alteration of the body is a primary means of gendering the human
body.ﾠ Both men and women participate in
practices of body transformation in response to their cultures and communitys
expectations of how women and men should look.ﾠ
While the inclination to use the body to express personal and cultural
meanings is not itself restricted to one gender, the implications of particular
body practices may differ, depending on who is engaging in them.ﾠ Playing with gender boundaries or with
culturally imposed limitations on a particular gender inevitably manifests
itself in practices of the body.ﾠ It is
through the body that we come to subscribe to or rebel against, appropriate or
challenge, particular social meanings in the broader communities to which we
belong.ﾠ It is for this reason that an
understanding of our body practices is so essential to a feminist approach to
women's aesthetic experience today.
The act of
altering the appearance of one's physical form transforms the body from biology
into cultural artifact.ﾠ As a result, the
markings and transfigurations of the body enable it to become a potential site
for asserting, maintaining, and challenging social relations.ﾠ Unlike the students of Susan Bordo, however,
whom she describes (1988) as seeing the body as "the enemy, to be beaten into
submission," (p. 92) the women I have been discussing have embraced and
celebrated their physical presence in the world through adornment and
self-transformation.ﾠ Kim Hewitt (1997)
refers to this as "an act of reclamation" (p. 79), a liberatory process of
women laying claim to their own bodies.ﾠ
I believe that it is in this spirit that feminist scholars and arts
professionals should continue to study the body manipulations of women of all
ages, celebrating both the creative impulse that informs body practices, and
participating in the re-thinking of the social relationships that these body
practices symbolize and help to make possible.
[1] The
initial research work on this project was supported by a Faculty Summer
Research Grant from the University of Maine in 1999.ﾠ
[3]ﾠ Honi Fern Haber died of cancer in 1995 at the age of 37. She was
thirty-seven and had spent much of her adult life creating and studying
muscled bodies. She was fascinated by the aesthetic and political potential
of women's bodybuilding and was herself a dedicated amateur bodybuilder.
I dedicate my work on the aesthetics of muscled women to her.ﾠ Her
contributions were significant.
ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ
References
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Laurie E. Hicks is associate professor of art in the Department of Art at the University of Maine. Her research and publications focus on feminism, cultural theory and environmental design. Her most recent publication explores the concept of play in the construction of a socially responsible approach to art education. She teaches courses in art education theory and practice, as well as in art history and museum education.ﾠ Professor Hicks served as President of NAEAs Womens Caucus and was the founding editor of the Journal of Gender Issues in Art and Education.
