Feminists decry 'The Swan' reality show
By Paige Eve Chant and Patrick Ishizuka
According to the National Eating Disorders Association, as many as 11 million people in the United States are fighting life and death battles with eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia; ninety percent of these people are women or girls. 80% of women say they are dissatisfied with their appearance.
Apparently, this dissatisfaction begins at an early age: 42% of 1st through 3rd grade girls want to be thinner, and 51% of 9- and 10-year-old girls feel better about themselves if they are on a diet. Ã Additionally, 81% of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat, and 46% of 9 to 11-year-old girls are "sometimes" or "very often" on a diet.Ã
Are these figures evidence of women's "natural" inclinations to obsess over body and physical appearance? Or, rather, do they indicate the radically different pressures and expectations that we, as a society, place on men and women? Ã
From birthâ€"â€"and the subsequent shift from an "it" to a "he" or a "she"â€"â€"gendered language and other practices (such as the codification of blue as "masculine" and pink as "feminine") construct a distinct gender identity.
Judith Butler, renowned feminist theorist, refers to this phenomenon as the "'girling' of the girl" â€" meaning specifically the imposition of gendered discourses that from birth onward are continually inscribed on the body and on the psyche. The body is an object of discourse, a site of struggle, a locus of social control â€" always mediated through cultural representations. Our gendered identities and the symbolic coding of the social, significantly affect the ways in which we see the world and, just as significantly, the ways in which society sees us. Ã
The Swan, a new television series on Fox, reinforces dominant societal notions of gender, and in so doing, serves to perpetuate unequal power relations between men and women.
Contestants selected from videotaped submissions undergo a three month "transformation" process of plastic surgery, diet, and exercise, during which they are prohibited from seeing themselves in the mirror until they are unveiled to viewers on the episode's premiere. Those judged to have made the greatest "transformation" are chosen to compete in a "beauty" pageant at the series' conclusion.
The show's website describes its contestants as "women seeking a second chance in life," powerfully demonstrating the centrality of women's physical appearance in our society.Ã The current physique these women possess necessitates a "second chance in life" reveals the obsessive emphasis placed on women's appearance.
The self-proclaimed mission of The Swan, "to take average women and transform them into extraordinary women," is founded on the premise that the only or primary way in which a woman can become "extraordinary" is through her appearance, rather than through her accomplishments, her personality or her intellect.Ã It also assumes that beauty is based on conformity to a homogeneous and coercive ideal of femininity. This is an arbitrary social and cultural construction, rather than a "natural" or "inherent" ontological category. Ideas of femininity and of feminine beauty are historically and culturally contingent, not universal.
The ideological construction of femininityâ€"â€"and of feminine "beauty"â€"â€"and the dominant cultural representations of the female body in the United Statesâ€"â€"as evidenced by The Swanâ€"â€"continue to subjugate women, in spite of frequently made claims that we live in a "post-feminist" era. Certainly, there have been significant advances in legal and formal equality as a result of the struggle of dynamic feminist movements; however, the subjugation of women through the social and discursive construction of femininity and the body points to the necessity of a counter-hegemonic feminism that challenges this very notion.
The normative definition of the female body can be read as a cultural text: rather than something "natural" or given, the female body is continually produced and constructed through discourse and implementation of gender norms.
Because the construction of gender must be performed, it is never fully complete, grounding a space for resistance and agency. Rather than modify our bodies, we should work to modify the norms of femininity and gender, creating a space in which people are valued not on the basis of their physical appearance, but for their contributions to the betterment of society for all peopleâ€"â€"both men and women.
û Paige Eve Chant is a junior English and religious studies major. Patrick Ishizuka is a senior philosophy major.