Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

In this article, we examine the existing sociocultural research and theory concerned with the aging body. In particular, we review the body image and embodiment literatures and discuss what is known about how older adults perceive and experience their aging bodies. We analyse how body image is shaped by age, culture, ethnicity, gender, health status, sexual preference, and social class. Additionally, we critically elucidate the embodiment literature as it pertains to illness experiences, sexuality, the everyday management of the aging body, appearance work, and embodied identity. By outlining the key findings, theoretical debates, and substantive discrepancies within the body image and embodiment research and theory, we identify gaps in the literature and forecast future, much-needed avenues of investigation.

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Aging and the Body: A Review.

Discourses of authenticity are symptomatic of an era of destabilized communication hierarchies, participatory media, and reality television programming. Women's magazines are an apt site to examine articulations of authenticity given the genre's traditional emphases on aspirational consumption and “making up” the external self. This study explores constructions of authenticity in the advertising and editorial content of two top-ranked publications, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. Drawing on a qualitative textual analysis of these magazines, the author conceptualizes three overlapping tropes of authenticity: (a) promoting natural, organic products; (b) the celebration of ordinary-looking women; and (c) the encouragement of inner-directed self-discovery. These striations of real products, real external beauty, and real internal beauty, respectively, allow authenticity to seep throughout the texts without fundamentally disrupting their traditional commercial function.

Manufacturing Authenticity: The Rhetoric of “Real” in Women's Magazines

Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" aimed to widen cultural understandings of diverse bodies and embodied beauty. In this essay, however, I question the ability of the campaign to confront the limits of our current cultural understandings of embodied beauty and diversity. Drawing on feminist-disability theory, I argue that the campaign represented an ideology of naive integration. While the acceptance of diverse physical bodies was espoused by the campaign, the textual and visual discourse simultaneously reflected many traditional beauty standards and practices. I draw key examples from the discourse to support my claims that the campaign's discourse (re)inscribed meaning to the normate body and (re)made the body through traditional beauty practices. The subsequent ramifications of societal understandings of the body and the aesthetic value of women with physical disabilities are discussed.

Locating the Bodies of Women and Disability in Definitions of Beauty: An Analysis of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty

How to Look Good Naked 'on the couch' : psychoanalytic approaches to British makeover television and gender

This article discusses the cultural ideology that permeates our society surrounding female body image by focusing specifically on socially constructed ideals of beauty and identity as they are represented in media texts—those of the makeover programs, A Makeover Story, What Not to Wear, and Extreme Makeover. For this study, we conducted textual analyses of selected episodes of each of these programs to examine the ideological impact of patriarchy, particularly as it relates to female body image.

Lisa Pecot-Hebert

Papers

"You Need a Makeover!": The Social Construction of Female Body Image in "A Makeover Story", W"hat Not to Wear", and "Extreme Makeover"