Bodies, body work and gender: Exploring a Deleuzian approach

Abstract

This article is concerned with the relationships between the body, gender, and society. Body work, which involves a range of practices to maintain or modify the body's appearance, is central to the way the body is experienced in a Western, industrialized, and consumerist society such as Australia. Through body work practices, gender is continually reasserted and reconstructed. Examining body work is a way of exploring the ways that gender is embodied and lived. Body work must be understood as embodied processes which move beyond binarized analyses of the body in society. In this regard, embodiment and Deleuzian frameworks which focus on ‘becomings’ provide important analytic insights. Drawing on 22 qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in 2010 with men and women aged 18–35 in Melbourne, Australia, this article explores the ways that body work and gender can be understood as relations through which bodies ‘become’. There were contrasts and similarities between the male and female participants' experiences of feeling pressure to change their bodies. Most women recognized the social pressure guiding expectations of their bodies, and although many felt that this was inappropriate, this did not lessen the pressure they experienced to ‘work on’ their bodies. A number of men too described feeling pressure to attain, or maintain, the ideal body but were less critical of this pressure. Body work must be understood as embodied processes which move beyond binarized analyses of the body. In this regard Deleuzian frameworks that focus on ‘becomings’ provide important conceptual developments.

Keywords:

• body
• body work
• gender
• event
• embodiment
• Deleuze
• becoming

Notes

 1. Feminist critique of the Cartesian dualism of mind/body is well established (Grosz 1994, Bray and Colebrook 1998). Dualisms of subject/object and structure/agency are associated with the founding mind/body binary, as this binary has historically located ‘women outside of the realm of the subject’ (Budgeon 2003, p. 37). The opposition of subjects and objects is argued to depend on ‘a masculine notion of the subject as secure and stable and able to forge relations with objects’ (Coleman 2009, p. 9). Budgeon (2003) and Coleman (2009) have argued that understandings of bodies which rest on a separation of subjects and objects are not sustainable, and subjects and objects should be understood as irreducible, and entwined through each other. The subject/object binary is also related to materiality/representation. Bray and Colebrook argue that ‘the female body is considered as that which has been belied, distorted, and imagined by a male representational logic’ (1998, p. 35). There is a problem, however, in the argument that ‘representation intervenes to objectify, alienate, and dehumanize the body’, because such a view of representation unintentionally recreates a dualism in which the body is essentially made passive and is overcoded by an ‘an all-pervasive, repressive, and dichotomous phallic logic’ (Bray and Colebrook 1998, p. 37). The structure/agency relationship has also been widely debated in sociology and feminism (McNay 2000), as there is a tension inherent in understanding the ways social action and social structures are ‘mutually constitutive’ without privileging one above the other (Davis 2003). This tension is particularly apparent in exchanges between Davis (2003) and Bordo (1997) on women's involvement in the ‘beauty system’ and cosmetic surgery practices. Rose (1996), Bray and Colebrook (1998), and Barad (2007) challenge the ontology underpinning debates on structure and agency. They argue that the body is not a ‘prediscursive matter that is then organised by representation’ (Bray and Colebrook 1998, p. 36), and, similarly, agency is not prediscursive matter inherent in the body that is then organized by representation and social structures.

 2. The National Advisory Group on Body Image was set up by the Australian Government to find strategies of addressing the problems associated with body image. Freedman, the chair of the Advisory Group, writes: ‘Whether it's girls comparing themselves with the unrealistic images they see in the media and thinking they're not tall or skinny enough or boys feeling they need to bulk up or slim down. All too often this translates to feelings of inadequacy and, in some cases, mental illness’ (National Advisory Group on Body Image 2009). Images of ‘unhealthy’ bodies in the media are said to be a major cause of ‘unhealthy’ body image in young people, linked to psychological problems. Similar concerns about images in the media negatively impacting the ‘body image’ of young people have been raised in the United Kingdom. In 2000, the Body Image Summit was held by the British Government to explore the links between the media and fashion industries and the effects associated with the unhealthy body image of young people, specifically girls, such as poor self-esteem and eating disorders. More recently, in 2011 the UK government launched the ‘Body Confidence Campaign’, and in February 2012 a UN Summit was held on body image in the international media and was the first international event discussing the ‘problem’ of body image. A key argument around ‘body image’ is the extent to which images cause poor body image and impact health. Coleman (2008, 2009), however, has criticized the simplistic ‘cause and effect’ model underpinning this understanding of bodies as the effects of culture. See: http://www.youth.gov.au/bodyimage;www.cabinet-office.office.gov.uk/women's-unit/WhatWeDo/BodyImage;http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/equalities/equality-government/body-confidence/;http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/media-centre/news/UN-summit.

 3. Becoming should not be thought of as the opposite to being, as this would mean we are still working within a dualist paradigm. Coleman (2009, p. 20) explains that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming intends to disrupt the binary oppositions that have underpinned Western philosophy, particularly the notion of ‘Being’ as ‘one or the other’. Similarly, Colebrook (2002) argues that although ‘being’ seems to belong to the ‘real’ world and ‘becoming’ seems valued over ‘being’, these concepts should not be understood as two sides of a coin. Colebrook argues that Deleuze specified ‘there is nothing other than the flow of becoming. All “beings” are just relatively stable moments in a flow of becoming-life’ (2002, p. 125). Thus, being and becoming are not a binary pair; both are processual.

 4. There is tension between feminist criticisms of Deleuze's notion of becoming, more specifically ‘becoming woman’, and other feminist work which emphasizes the potential for feminism in Deleuze's work to move beyond the dichotomy of man/woman, masculine/feminine (Coleman 2009). Put simply, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘becoming woman’ is the fundamental move to get ‘outside the dualisms’ (1987, p. 277) of the sexed and gendered body (Coleman 2009, p. 21). This concept has been particularly problematic and controversial for feminists because it is seen to ‘take the specificity of women away from women’ (Driscoll 2000, p. 21). Braidotti (2011) thoroughly critiques and extends Deleuze's concept of becoming woman in the context of feminist nomadism. Following Patton (2000), Braidotti argues that becomings should not be read as ideally leading to the destruction of gender. Rather, the ‘processes of undoing, recomposing and shifting the grounds for the constitution of sexed and gendered subjectivities’ are central to becomings (Braidotti 2011, p. 279). Becomings ‘aim at nothing’, and are ‘open to all at any time’ (Patton 2000, p. 83), which means for Braidotti that ‘it is consequently futile to try to index processes of becoming to the general aim of human or women's liberation’ (2011, p. 280). Braidotti sensitively synthesizes feminist and Deleuzian approaches to bodies.

 5. Potential participants received a short advertisement prior to signing up to be involved in the study. This advertisement described the study, and said volunteers would be asked about their perspectives on what their body means to them, and what they think about other people's bodies in a conversation-style interview arranged around their availability.

 6. These themes were cross-checked and discussed with other researchers at the Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne.

 7. To begin a discussion of body work practices, I asked participants to describe what they perceive ‘ideal’ men's and women's bodies to look like. I followed up by asking if what they described is ideal to them or not, to open a space where they may critique the ‘dominant ideal’.

 8. I have not interpreted the participants' descriptions of their bodies and body work as ‘representations’ of them, or as providing access to their ‘authentic’ experiences (Sandelowski 2002). Rather, in analysis I have paid particular attention to the ways they describe connecting with other bodies and social relations, and how these connections affect them.

 9. An Australian women's clothing size 8 is equivalent to a US size 4 or a European size 32/34. When Kate gives the size range ‘6 to 16’, this range is US size 2–12 or European size 30/32–40/42; she restricts ‘everyone has a beautiful body’ within these parameters.

10. One of the most important aspects of understanding bodies as processes of becoming is that there is no ontological separation between bodies and discourse; both are understood as processes which do not pre-exist their encounters (see Barad 2007).

11. Although the neo-liberal logic of late capitalism invites people to reflexively ‘self-fashion’ their bodies and selves, the concept of becoming does not operate along these lines. Becoming is not voluntary; ‘bodies do not become what they want’ (Coleman 2009, p. 215). See discussions by Rose (2000) and Deleuze (1995) on the particular conditions of consumer capitalism and neo-liberalism in the ‘control society’.