The female body.
I mean, a body belonging to a female. Not an objective thing I’m gazing at, but something I’m emphasising as ‘being owned’ by a female subject.
I’m reading loads about feminist perspectives on the body, and it seems to follow a U pattern.
Feminists liberate their bodies and burn bras, throw away lipsticks, and claim independance from phallogocentric culture in this way. Then theorists decide that this dissociation of the self from the body is disempowering for women, and they take to the idea of women ‘dressing for themselves’ and for eachother, and see the cultural adapted female body as empowering again. Now, they seem to be devaluing those conceptions and going back to the idea that the female body is objectified from a male perspective, for a male perspective.
This is all seems, to me, to collectively group women together and debase their automony throughout all these shifts in feminist ideology. I find it really uncomfortable reading about ‘women’ as seen through the eyes of ‘authoritative women’. The female voice in feminist theory is an empirical voice. It’s the voice of ‘dictators’ - females said to know.
Women of tumblr I hope that none of you ever find your own identities caught in this theoretical debate. It’s a debate that uses shifting theories to gain the credence of the theorists themselves. Some take the female form and objectify it themselves on your behalf, and use their ‘changing’, often radical and dangerous, perspectives on the female form in a political way in which to further their own academic careers.
While it is discouraging that women theorists must commodify their own theories in this way to gain credence, such is the academic world.
To encourage non-collective ideologies across a board of automonous, individual women - to encourage women to theorise their bodies for themselves - wouldn’t get a writer into many academic anthologies. But, personally, I think that’s what the world requires these days. I’m all for academic thinking that promotes lived experience and the freedom of self-reliance, rather than collectivity which in turn promotes normativity and the ‘otherness’ that is imposed upon subjects who choose not to follow such ideologies.
Queer theory has taken a turn towards being seen as absurd and flashy/hollow - but I’m all for it.
Detach, detach, detach. Detach and become neutral, detach and avoid re-attachment to trendy, collective groups of ‘otherness’. I can’t help but see collectivism as restrictive and normative. Sure, no detachment will incur an academic career for anyone, but in order to reach the utopic soceity all these people crave I see it as, not the only but, a good way.
