From
Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects: New Body Politics in the Spa Trend
Hsaio-chi (Sunny) Wu
Introduction
“The nub of the ‘tropical spa’ assault on the senses lies here in Banyan Tree Spa Bintan’s ‘Tranquil Room’ where the sound is the waves, the view is the seashore, the smell is spicy—burning patchouli, vetiver and clove oils—and the mood is thick with calm. To lay back in here is to let life’s pains evaporate from every pore.” –Banyan Tree Spa Bintan, The Tropical Spa.
“‘Spa’ is the Millennium buzzword for health, beauty and relaxation; it is hip in holiday-speak and a mantra for the growing band of worshippers at the alter of self-preservation” (Benge 9). When people discuss the spa industry as a temporary vogue promoted by both beauty industries and travel agencies; however, it is worth noticing that the “Spa”, in nowadays, is no more simple dictionary definition that sees it as “a place where water with minerals in it bubbles out of the ground. People drink the water or bathe in it in order to improve their health”, nor simply referring to “a place where people go to use facilities such as a pool, a gymnasium, and a sauna in order to improve their health.”[1] Rather, the modern Spa, in broad terms, has developed a prevailing mood for a holistic approach to life. The pursuit of a joyful life-style and gleeful body politics influencing not only the lives of trendsetters, health fanatics or spa-goers but also the public’s philosophy of life.
In contrast to the intense pressure receive in daily lives, the Spa projects new ways of living, thinking and acting that all in all aims for individuals to live a better life. With the vision of Spa in which its emphasis is on the individual’s spiritual well-being, stress-busting therapies and natural curatives, Spa thus soon becomes current popularity and a living ideal attracting people practicing it. As for the spa trend in Taiwan, it becomes popular not only because it is a new mode of health- and beauty-preservation activity imported from foreign countries, but also because of the renewed awareness of leisure reinforced by the two-day weekends (i.e. Friday officially becomes part of the weekend) policy implemented since the year of 1998.[2] However, under the familiar spa’s slogan of “balance of body, mind and soul”, we are always preoccupied with the spiritual and mental relaxation that spa treatments could provide. Nevertheless, hidden under the common advertising sign of spiritual and mental relaxation, what indeed experienced by the customers in the first place are the enjoyments upon one’s own body. Healthful herbal tonics, revitalizing facials, baths and massage oils are but a few of the delightful ways, which directly are received by the customer’s body at the first hand, offered as restorative and stress-busting remedies in the spas. If we look carefully into spa’s image-building among various advertisements, it actually orbits around personal bodily pleasure: This is the primary goal of the spa trend.
Such warmly exalted body-pleasure, or ‘body-hedonism’ in other words, forges a unique body/pleasure positive milieu that makes “Spa” a tantalizing “body work” [3], and the vary positive milieu, obviously, is the prerequisite that makes Spa distinct from other conservative statements which devalue the human bodies as merely a symbolic medium or a subordinated counterpart of mind. Dating back to the mainstream Western philosophy, a clear distinction between mind/body has already been long anticipated in Descartes thought. The Cartesianism indicates that the body is primarily regarded as “an object for the natural sciences”. Further, the Cartesianism regards the body as “an instrument, a tool…at the disposal of consciousness, a vessel occupied by an animating, willful subjectivity.”[4] While mind/body is frequently corrected with the distinction between reason and passion, sense and sensibility, depth and surface, or self and other; these terms, however, function implicitly to define the body in passive and inert terms. Consequently, following Cartesianism’s marked distinction between mind and body, the body is coded in terms that are themselves traditionally devalued.
So far as those traditional devalued body viewpoints are concerned, we further see how the “body works industry” nowadays, such as body sculpturing, body slimming or plastic operation, has been scolded or criticized as individual’s irrational consuming behavior, or illusions fed by the promotions of mass media and businessmen. Therefore, in some feminists discussions of “body works”, there are usually images of insufferable dieting experiences, costly orthopedic surgeries, excessive muscle building, painfully tattooing and piercing, or artificial cosmetic make-up that are described by all as commercially vested and patriarchy served. Thus, taking a more mainstream feminist view on body works, Canadian feminist Kathryn Morgan (1991) argues that although women may feel that they are making a free and informed choice, they are not really free to make a genuine choice because of patriarchal cultural pressures on them; that, although women may say that they are creating a new identity for themselves, they are really conforming to traditional (male-dominated) ideologies of how women’s bodies should look. And she, echoing the mainstream feminists, believes that the rhetoric of choice that is found in advertising materials for body works, e.g. plastic surgery, is “ideological camouflage” which hides the real absence of choice. She believes that plastic surgery can never be an acceptable course of action for an individual woman, since to have plastic surgery is to support a system that is oppressive to women.[5] However, in contrast to the mainstream skeptical feminist understanding of bodyworks as an emulation of male standards or placing female bodyworks under the category of exploitation or of manipulations of female bodies, there are also celebratory supports argues that “women are finally achieving the right to manipulate their bodies however they choose…and that bodybuilding reveals feminine history and power cloaked under a patriarchal cape.” (Pamela L. Moore, Feminist Bodybuilding, 75)[6] Likewise, for supporters like Kathy Davis (1995), she reported women who experienced the decision to have plastic surgery as a way of taking control of their lives, and that cosmetic surgery was something that they had decided upon for themselves, rather than under pressure from partners or scalpel-happy surgeons. Therefore, in Davis’s viewpoints, women under body-working are active and knowledgeable agents who make decisions based on a limited range of available options.[7]
Along the lines of body politics debates, we could see clearly that the themes of female “subjectivity”, “identity” and “agency” are intensely interrelated to the notions of productions and consumptions in relation to the late capitalist society. We have long “known” and been told, by the mainstream skeptical feminists mentioned previously, that our oppression as women is tied to our role as consumers and to the use of our bodies to sell or even to be commodities per se. In this context, anyone who admitted to enjoying consumption was to be either condemned or pitied as a victim of capitalist (and patriarchal) manipulation. Further, while regarding consumption must be subordinated to production, as women are to men, women who undergo beauty-works, would then become “sex objects” living in a patriarchal society in which women continually find themselves subject to the invisible and omnipresent male gaze that is epitomized, and legitimized as well, historically through the disciplinary regime of, in Michel Foucault’s term, the panopticon[8]. However, as the effects of consumption are hardly to escape in the modern society, the skeptical feminists’ understanding of “objectification” of female bodies apparently demonizes all the effects brought by consumer culture and evidently overlooks the “subjectivity” and “agency” of female consumers themselves. On the other hand, turning to the revisionist feminists, although they give a central role to women’s agency, underlining their active and lived relationship with their bodies and showing how they could knowledgeably choose to have body works; it still worth noting that some of the celebratory researches might try to highlight the rosy parts of female autonomy and independence while avoiding mentioning the inevitable influences, e.g. objectification and commodification, on bodies/individuals when women undergo bodyworks in the consumer culture.
As a consequence, my problematic in this thesis would be: Is it possible that female “body-workers” or “body-builders” are able to develop one’s personal body politics so as to construct their own subjectivity and self-identity under the commercialized body/beauty market”? Or, to put it in another way, is it possible that these women could act, embody and most importantly empower themselves, while at the same time, not only put the influences of consumer culture into consideration but furthermore, benefit from the inevitable impacts of the objectification and commodification; namely, a transformation from “sex object’ to “sexual subject” as a female possessing a new body-building-politic?[9] Therefore, while the spa industry is on the rise as a chic body/beauty industry opening up a new aspect of thinking and acting for both beauty industries and females, in the thesis, the burgeoning Spa culture would be thus, an unexplored yet definitely unique case study for female body-building politics. Therefore, my thesis would orbit around three themes: body, subjectivity and agency[10] which are the trajectories running through three chapters, serving to tie them together and helping to make sense of women’s body-building politics in the modern spa trend.
Therefore, in Chapter One, we will begin with observations of the emerging Spa culture. By bringing forth the relevant ads, slogans and literatures of spas, we will see how the construal of spa is basically founded on body/pleasure positive attitudes and how the favorable milieu gives rise to a distinct salutary room for individual woman to embody her desire, pleasure and subjectivity, much more enticingly this time, under Spa’s manifold works and politics of body-building. With regard to the Spa’s “body-building politics”, I will look into the following main concern: Does female body building works maintain and incarnate a new patriarchal cultural ideal, or a challenge to conventional notions of femininity and physicality? I locate the possible answer with the various traditions of contemporary feminist theory on the body and femininity. For some regard women’s body-building works—their caring maintenance of body figure and their pursuits of beauty and being-sexy—are rather brain-washing behaviors under the control of “disciplinary power” which produces a subjected and practiced “docile body” that prey for the man. While some others, in contrast, highlight the parts of female self-determination and self-actualization yet rarely speak squarely well for the women’s bodily experiences and embodied practices not only ingrain in but also thrive on the capitalist body/beauty industry. Therefore, my standpoints here is neither to follow the censuring attitude regarding beauty-industry as another changed form of dominating patriarchal society and taking customers as dominated victim under ubiquitous surveillance, nor innocently or evasively neglect the fact that body/beauty industries are in parts produced by consumer culture. In stead, in this chapter, I will bring forth the beauty-works related issues and discussions to exemplify the easily lopsided reading of manipulations of powers and subjects/individuals. Hereof, I will weave my attitudes into the reading of Foucault’s most recent writings on power, subject and body, as well as the reading of contemporary feminists appropriation of Foucault in terms of female body regimes so as to suggest such body-works in beauty-related trend are rather, in Foucault’s terms as well, a kind of “technologies of self” that could benefit and further empower individual female’s subjectivity and agency through each restorative, reconstructive and rejuvenescent treatment that women take upon their bodies.
To begin Chapter Two, Kathy Davis has elucidated that “the female body is the object of processes of domination and control as well as the site of women’s subversive practices and struggles for self-determination and empowerment” (Davis, Embodied Practices, 7). Yet these still leaves open to discuss: How exactly the female subversive practices and struggles are made in regard to the feminists’ appropriation of Foucault’s framework on power/knowledge discourses? How does the individual woman, as a consumer at the same time, weigh the pros and cons of her bodyworks, submit oneself to and/or make use of the prevailing commercial signs, images, ideologies or products so as to embody her desire/pleasure? How the body/beauty discourses and industries stand, if not an ideological (and patriarchal) camouflage, in the process of women’s body-building politics? It was with these questionings in mind that, in the Chapter Two, following the context of the different feminist scholarship on female body-building politics mentioned above, spa trend is explored as a case study to show how the body-oriented practices in Spa enable female individuals to renegotiate her relationship to her body and through her body to herself, becoming an “embodied subject” rather than “just a body.” When it comes to the notion of “subject”, Foucault points, in the article: “The Subject and Power”, that “there are two meaning of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (212). Thus, it is clearly that the “subject”, or “subjectivity”, although might refers to a subjugating condition; yet, it should by no means overlook the symbiotic sides of “autonomy” and “agency” in the individual female’s body building behaviors. To better understand how spa trend cultivates a body/pleasure-positive milieu and how spa-goers embody and empower oneself through a rather delightful way of “somatic subversion” (Anne Bolin, 1992), I would provide in-depth qualitative interviews with the individuals who had had or were planning to have some form of “body-building” in terms of spa’s body politics. Drawing on Davis’ notion of “embodied theory” that:
Bodies are not simply abstractions, however, but are embedded in the immediacies of everyday, lived experience. Embodied theory requires interaction between theories about the body and analysis of the particularities of embodied experiences and practices. (15)[11]
The personal bodily experiences and embodied practices of the interviewees, ranged in age from a 22-year-old school girl whose first body-building experience was “enlightened” by the ads of TV-Shopping channel, to a middle-aged business woman who has already took the spa-going as a routine habit arranged in her daily life. As such, each interviewee is an active creator/speaker of meaning to demonstrate and to exemplify, firstly, how the burgeoning spa culture/industry supports and/or creates a special “body-hedonism” ambiance for the customers to enjoy treatments with righteousness; secondly, how the spa-goers constitutes one’s subjectivity and confirm one’s agency through the distinct boon ensemble of spa body politics. While their stories involved varied experiences of embodiment as well as different routes toward deciding to have their bodies altered, build or fashioned, they invariably made Spa viewable as an understandable and even irresistible course of action in light of their particular biographical circumstance. By illustrating interviewees’ personal experiences and parallel reading of body-works between Spa context and feminists’ victimized judgments, I will show how the spa practices, especially under the circumstance of the late capitalist society, can be a way for women to take their bodies, and most importantly, their lives in hand.
Lastly, Chapter Three would elaborate from Spa’s primarily body-building politics in terms of Foucault “technologies of self” and “bio-power” and in connection with to Anthony Giddens’ “life politics” set out in his Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991). To Giddens, ‘life politics’ is a politics of lifestyle. It is a politics of self-actualization in a reflexively ordered environment, where that reflexivity links self and body together. With regard to the Spa, it should not only being positioned as a modern and fashionable way of leisure, health and beauty; further, it has brought forth a trend appealing individual women boldly and daringly to seek an uplifting and holistic lifestyle by Spa’s special body/pleasure-positive trait. Accordingly, because as the three themes of my thesis, i.e. body, subjectivity and agency, are being considered and examined in the context of the Spa with the aid of Gidden’s “life-politics”, the Spa culture, with its extension from regimes of body to that of life, will surely offer fantastic and legitimate accesses for individual woman to “do/make her body”, “do/make her pleasure”, and most importantly to “do/make her self”. Such exploration, modification, operation and construction of body/pleasure/self in Spa trend are not only Giddens’s “reflexive project of self”, but also a tantalizing praxis of self-actualization and self-empowerment that transforms women from sex objects into sexual subjects in its politics of body as well as politics of life.
Bibliography
王志弘，性別化流動的政治與詩學，台北：田園城市文化：2000。
卡維波，＜青春睿智的左派？成年癡呆的左派？──青少年通俗文化的左翼政治（上）＞ 1 Dec. 2001. Online: http://intermargins.net/
---，＜青春睿智的左派？成年癡呆的左派？--青少年通俗文化的左翼政治（下）＞，1 Dec. 2001. Online: http://intermargins.ncu.edu.tw/Forum/2001%20Jan-June/Youthful/.
---，＜跨性別美學初探──新性感男人與青少年＞，女「性」主體的另類提問II論文集，中壢：國立中央大學性/別研究室編。
---. ＜老化的媒體批評，弱智的女性主義＞， 1 Dec. 2001. Online: http://intermargins.ncu.edu.tw/Forum/2000/塑身廣告論述/老化的媒體批評.htm
何春蕤，＜色情與女/性能動主體＞，中外文學，第25卷，第4期。1996年9月。6-40頁。
---〈想要碗飯就少吃飯—節食與工作倫理〉，1 Dec. 2001. Online: http://intermargins.ncu.edu.tw/Forum/2000/塑身廣告論述/想要碗飯就少吃飯.htm.>
宋祖慈，性靈感官之旅：11種Spa美麗魔法，台北：行遍天下：1998。
林宇玲，＜從傅柯的權力/知識架構來看台灣「美體塑身」廣告＞，婦女與兩性學刊，7：1996，1-26。
林淑蓉，＜性別、身體與慾望：從瘦身美容談當代台灣女性形象的轉換＞，健與美的歷史研討會論文集，中研院歷史所：2000。
林淑蓉，〈從瘦身美容談台灣女性形象的轉換〉，「健與美」的歷史研討會論文集，中研院：生命醫療史研究室，2000年12月，39-62頁。
柳湘琦，初戀Spa：純淨、自然、活力，台北：宏碩文化，2000。
孫秀蕙，〈解讀美容瘦身廣告—以閱聽人分析為主的個案探討〉，台灣社會研究季刊，第23期，1996年7月，219-253頁。
祝平一，〈台灣塑身美容廣告始終的科學主義與女性美〉，「健與美」的歷史研討會論文集，中研院：生命醫療史研究室，2000年12月，11-38頁。
高美燕，台灣美麗Spa之旅，台北：ToGo旅遊情報：2001。
張君玫譯，Davis, Kathy著，重塑女體：美容手術的兩難，台北：巨流，1997。
張錦華，〈從返老還童廣告看媒體素養教育〉，媒體識讀教育月刊，2001年2月1日。Online: http://www.tvcr.org.tw/
張錦華、黃浩榮，〈還童的女性？弱智的男性？〉中國時報，2001年12月18日。論壇版。
黃宗慧，〈主流性感標準與片面身體解放〉，中國時報，2000年12月22日。
楊希彤，〈全放鬆舒壓Spa旅〉，常春月刊，2001，1月號，84-88。
廖和敏，〈寵愛自己一下：Spa登陸台灣〉，聯合報，1998，10月26日，17版。
認識Spa，亞歷山大健康俱樂部，On-line: http://www.alexander.com.tw/
盧介華，〈Spa座談會專刊〉，民生報，2001，3月2日，D9版。
簡明大英百科全書，台北：台灣中華書局，1988，第17卷。
簡慧鐘，解讀性別化的身體空間—以國際美容事業為例，碩士論文，桃園：私立中原大學室內設計學系，1997。
顧燕翎，＜台灣婦運組織中性慾政治之轉變：受害客體抑或情慾主體＞，思與言，第35卷第1期，1997年3月，87-118頁。
英文部分
Atchison, Cara, Nicola E. MacLeod and Stephen J. Shaw ed. Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995.
Barteky, Sandra L. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of patriarchal power.” The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, appearance, and behavior. Ed. By Rose Weitz. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 25-45.
Benge, Sophie. The Tropical Spa: Asian secrets of health, beauty and relaxation. Hong Kong: Periplus, 1999.
Bolin, Anne. “Flex Appeal, Food, and Fat: Competitive bodybuilding, gender and diet.” Building Bodies. Ed. Pamela L. Moore. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997. 184-208.
Bordo, Susan R. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault.” Gender/Body/Knowledge. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar & Susan R.Bordo. New Jersey: Rutgers. 13-35.
Davis, Kathy. Ed. Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. London: Sage Publications, 1997.
---. Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Driver, Felix. “Bodies in Space: Foucault’s account of disciplinary power.” Reassessing Foucault. Ed. Colin Jones & Roy Porter. New York: Routledge, 1998. 113-131
Evans, Mary. Introducing Contemporary Feminist Thought. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997.
Finkelstein, Joanne. The Fashioned Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Fisher, Leslee A. “Building One’s Self Up: Bodybuilding and the Construction of identity among professional female bodybuilders.” Building Bodies. Ed. by Pamela L. Moore. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997. 135-64.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Afterword. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd ed. Ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rainbow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 208-226.
---. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
---. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press,1991.
Gilman, Sander L. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1999.
Griffiths, Morwenna. Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
---. “Bodies-Cities.” Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 241-253.
Heywood, Leslie. “Masculinity Vanishing: Bodybuilding and Contemporary Culture.” Building Bodies. Ed. Pamela L. Moore. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997. 166-183.
Kelly John R. and Geoffrey Godbey. The Sociology of Leisure. State College, PA: Venture Pub., Inc., 1992
Langman, Lauren. “Neon Cage: Shopping For Subjectivity.” Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption. Ed. Rob Shields. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 40-82.
Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton ed. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publication, 1988.
McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1999.
McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
Meyers, Diana Tietjens ed. Feminists Rethink the Self. Oxford: Westview Press, 1997.
Moi, Toril. “Power, Sex and Subjectivity: Feminist Reflections on Foucault.” Feminism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies II. Ed Mary Evans. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Moore, Pamela. L. “Feminist Bodybuilding, Sex and the Interruption of Investingative Knowledge.” Building Bodies. Ed. Pamela L. Moore. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997. 74-86.
Ramazanoglu, Caroline. Ed. Up against Foucault: Exploration of Some Tentions Between Foucault and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Rogan, Sarah. Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaciton in Men, Women and Children. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Slavin, Sara and Karl Petzke. The Art of the Bath. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997.
Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993.
The Encyclopedia Britannica 15th edition. (1985). Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.
Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Wilshire, Donna. “The Use of Myth, Image and the Female Body in Re-visioning Knowledge.” Gender/Body/Knowledge. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar & Susan R.Bordo. New Jersey: Rutgers. 92-114.
Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” The Politics of Women’s Bodies. Ed. Rose Weitz. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 125-136.
[1] Sinclair, John. et al. Collins Cobuild English Dictionary. (Bermingham: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995): 1597.
[2] The implementation of the two-day-weekends policy in 1998 implies a new manner of work and leisure in the modern Taiwan society. With the increase of leisure time, the manner of recreation would also make changes in terms of the growth and development of the variety as well as category of leisure activities. See further introduction in Yu, Hui-xian. “Comment on Two-day-weekends”, Periodical of National Central Library Taiwan Branch. Vol. 5. No.1. pp.110-112.
[3] When it comes to the “body works”, it includes make-up, orthopedic surgeries, diets, piercing, tattoos, and bodybuilding—the efforts or services we work on our bodies.
[4] There are detailed introduction of Cartesianism’s mind/body distinction in Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994) 8-10.
[5] Morgan Kathryn P. "Women and the Knife: Cosmetic: surgery and the colonization of women's bodies", Hypatia, 1991: 6(3), Fall. Also see the introduction in Sarah Rogan, Body image. (Routledge, 1999); 51-52.
[6] Pamela L. Moore. “Feminist Bodybuilding, Sex, and the Interruption of Investigative Knowledge” Building Bodies. Ed. Pamela L. Moore. (New Jersey and London: Rutgers UP, 1997): 75.
[7] See Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Routledge, 1995. 115-137
[8] See Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (NY: Vintage Books. 1977): 195-228.
[9] The term “body-building” here is used under a relatively comprehensive definition in terms of the cultivation, construction, or composition of the body. Therefore, the “body-building” here is less one-dimensionally referring to muscles-building exercises; rather, it is more an umbrella term that encompass both the inner and exterior way people fashion their body.
[10] The idea of agency here , alike Davis’ in Reshaping the Body, concerns both the problem of giving shape to one’s life under circumstances of social constraint and the degree to which body-building-works may be a resource for empowerment for an individual woman. See Davis, Reshaping the Body, 11.
[11] Kathy Davis. “Embody-ing Theory: Beyond Modernist and Postmodernist Readings of the Body”, Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. Ed. Kathy Davis. (London: Sage, 1997) 15.