WGST 1808 Chapter 11: READING NOTES - From Airbrushing to Liposuction; The Technological Reconstruction of the Female Body (Fabienne Darling-Wolf)

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Women's and Gender Studies
• Course: WGST 1808
• Professor: Aalya Ahmad

Document Summary

Beauty rituals can be a means of connecting w/ other women, even across differences of race, class, culture, or age. Conscious awareness that female body was a source of pleasure & source of social control, discrimination, and oppression. Feminist scholars recognize the female body as a crucial site on which culture & ideology are inscribed, as well as a site of struggle against dominant ideology. Organ transplants, life-extension machinery, microsurgery, & artificial organs are commonplace new ideal of human freedom from bodily determination. Proliferation of products & images offered as an array of subjectivities to choose from. Postmodern ideology rejection of the belief in all-encompassing forces in favor of an understanding of power as increasingly fragmented & dislocated constructs body as under human control. Body becomes a crucial site for experimentation either with or against the laws of nature. Anne balsamo female body = site for technological intervention.