Reading the Slender Body

Abstract

This chapter analyses the contemporary preoccupation with slenderness as it functions within a modern, normalizing machinery of power general, and, particular, as it functions to reproduce gender-relations. It examines the representational body—the cultural imagery of ideal slenderness—which now reigns, increasingly across racial and ethnic boundaries, as the dominant body-standard of our culture. The moral coding of the fat/slender body terms of its capacities for self-containment and the control of impulse and desire represents the culmination of a developing historical change the social symbolism of body weight and size. The slender body codes the tantalizing ideal of a well-managed self which all is in order despite the contradictions of consumer culture. Thus, whether or not the struggle is played out terms of food and diet, many of us may find our lives vacillating between a daytime rigidly ruled by the performance principle while our nights and weekends capitulate to unconscious letting go.