Women's Bodies: Cultural Representation and Identity

Rating:
Summary: on one essay in this volume
Review: In "'Doing Looks': Women, Appearance and Mental Health," Liz Frost addresses the troubled relationship between feminism and physical appearance, explores the possibilities of pleasure and power a woman might (or might not) harness by lavishing attention on her own attractiveness, and deplores the lack of discursive space for a woman to articulate her appreciation of her appearance. Instead of reading that attention-which she calls "doing looks"-as vanity or as the coerced obedience to misogynistic patriarchy, both models that induce shame and guilt and cast the woman in the role of passive consumer, Frost emphasizes the potential satisfaction of a woman's active involvement with her appearance. She contrasts second-wave feminism's criticism that "doing looks" signals conformity with mandated gender roles against psychiatric discourse that celebrates meeting those norms as a gauge of mental health and a means to repairing the fragmented relationship with the self. Her argument relies, perhaps too heavily, on an optimistic desire to locate agency and self-respect in the act of assimilating to cultural norms, as when she counters de Beauvoir and Mulvey by speculating "Could the internalized other of this version of gendered subjectivity perhaps be instead [of the beauty-fashion complex] the introjected loving parent, adoring boyfriend, benevolent woman friend or friendly mirror telling me I look great, and hence offering a considerable degree of narcissistic pleasure?"

Rating:
Summary: on one essay in this volume
Review: In "'Doing Looks': Women, Appearance and Mental Health," Liz Frost addresses the troubled relationship between feminism and physical appearance, explores the possibilities of pleasure and power a woman might (or might not) harness by lavishing attention on her own attractiveness, and deplores the lack of discursive space for a woman to articulate her appreciation of her appearance. Instead of reading that attention-which she calls "doing looks"-as vanity or as the coerced obedience to misogynistic patriarchy, both models that induce shame and guilt and cast the woman in the role of passive consumer, Frost emphasizes the potential satisfaction of a woman's active involvement with her appearance. She contrasts second-wave feminism's criticism that "doing looks" signals conformity with mandated gender roles against psychiatric discourse that celebrates meeting those norms as a gauge of mental health and a means to repairing the fragmented relationship with the self. Her argument relies, perhaps too heavily, on an optimistic desire to locate agency and self-respect in the act of assimilating to cultural norms, as when she counters de Beauvoir and Mulvey by speculating "Could the internalized other of this version of gendered subjectivity perhaps be instead [of the beauty-fashion complex] the introjected loving parent, adoring boyfriend, benevolent woman friend or friendly mirror telling me I look great, and hence offering a considerable degree of narcissistic pleasure?"