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 BODY IN TRANSITION: CUT THIS FAT OFF OF ME!
RESEARCH ON THE VISUAL HISTORY OF THE
BODY IMAGE AND AN ATTEMPT TO DECONSTRUCT
THE HATRED IN SOCIETY TOWARDS FAT

This study aims to investigate the issues of fat and obesity and analyze how one
perceives his/her body image and how corpulence is perceived in the society. It
discusses the changes on the representations of the body and how these changes
reflect/affect different socially constructed body perceptions by looking at different
images of the body from pre-historic times to modernity.
Since my interest to research in such an area is based on my long term
problematic relationship with obesity, the study first focuses on how do fat people
understand and conceptualize their corporeal experiences. Traditional studies
approach the issue of fat using either pathological discourses, which treat fatness as a
disease, or psychosomatic discourses, which treat fatness as a symptom of a
psychological disorder by recognizing corpulence as a medical or social problem.
Psychoanalytic theory proves that perception is significant in the formation of the
ego and one's relation to his/her own body. In order to analyze the significant role of
perception in defining the body, beauty ideals of different eras in the history of
Western visual arts are presented in the study. Consecutive studies on beauty ideals
favors that bodies are politically, culturally, and economically constructed. Starting
with the late 1960's, the efforts to liberate the representations of the body image from
traditional bounds multiply as feminist artists' involvement on the issues of the
female body increase. Feminist theories are explained in order to serve as the basis of
my artistic production presented in the last chapter of the study.
Six artworks I produced along with my thesis research are discussed and
exhibited under the name Cut this fat off of me! on August 4th, 2010 at Sabancı
University. Cut this fat off of me! deals with fat concerns from a second-generation
feminist perspective based on deconstruction of the social norms regarding the body.

Bu çalışma, şişmanlık ve obeziteyi, bu sorunları deneyimleyen insanların kendi
vucütlarının görünüşlerini nasıl algıladıkları ve toplumda şişmanlığın nasıl
algılandığı üzerinden araştırmayı amaçlamaktadır. Tarih öncesi zamanlardan
moderniteye kadar vücut şeklinin farklı görsel sunumlarının örneklerine dayanarak,
tarih boyunca görsel sunumlardaki farklılıkların sosyal olarak yapılandırılmış vücut
formu algısını nasıl etkilediği tartışılmaktadır.
Böyle bir alanda çalışma yapma isteğim obeziteyle olan ve uzun yıllar süren
kendi problemli ilişkime dayandığı için, çalışma öncelikle şişman insanların kendi
vücutlarına dair deneyimlerini nasıl anlamlandırdıklarına ve kavramsallaştırdıklarına
yoğunlaşmaktadır. Geleneksel çalışmalar şişmanlık konusuna ya patolojik
söylemlerle yaklaşmaktadır, ki bunlar şişmanlığı bir hastalık olarak tanımlar, ya da
psikosomatik söylemler kullanmaktadır, ki bunlar da şişmanlığı sosyal veya tıbbi bir
problemin psikolojik semptomu olarak tanımlar. Psikoanalitik teori kanıtlar ki, algı
egonun oluşturulmasında ve kişinin kendi vücuduyla ilişkisinde çok önemlidir.
Vücudu tanımlarken algının rolünün önemini araştırabilmek için Batı görsel
sanatlarının değişik dönemlerindeki güzellik idolleri çalışma içinde sunulmaktadır.
Güzellik idolleri üzerine birbirini takip eden çeşitli çalışmalar, vücudun politik,
kültürel ve ekonomik olarak şekillendirildiğini savunur. 1960'ların sonlarına doğru
ortaya çıkan, vucüt imgesini geleneksel algı sınırlarının dışına çıkarmayı hedefleyen
feminist hareketler özellikle feminist sanatçıların da kadın vücuduna dair çalışmaya
başlamalarıyla hızlanır. Tezin son bölümünde açıklanan kendi sanatsal üretimime
temel oluşturması açısından bu feminist teoriler güzellik idolleri tarihi üzerine
yapılan araştırmayı takip edecek şekilde sunulmuştur.
4 Ağustos 2010 tarihinde Sabancı üniversitesinde sergilenmeye başlayan Beni
Bu Yağlardan Kurtarın! isimli sergimdeki altı farklı işi, tez süreci boyunca yaptığım
araştırmalar sonunda ürettim. Tezimin son bölümünde irdelediğim Beni Bu
Yağlardan Kurtarın! şişmanlığa dair endişeleri vurgularken, ikinci jenerasyon
feminist teorilerin eleştirel bakış açısından faydalanarak ideal vücutlara dair sosyal
normları yıkmak adına bir girişimdir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Şişmanlık, Algı, Vücutsal Varoluş, İdeal Vücut, Feminist Teori,

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...............................................................................................................IV
ÖZET...........................................................................................................................V
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..........................................................................................VI
TABLE OF CONTENTS..........................................................................................VII
LIST OF FIGURES....................................................................................................IX
INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1
CHAPTER 1: CORPOREAL EXISTENCE AND CORPULENCE
1.1 CORPOREAL EXISTENCE AND TRANSACTIONS....................10
1.2 THE FORMATION OF THE EGO AND THE MATTER OF
PERCEPTION............................................................................................................13
1.3 CORPULENCE.................................................................................16
1.4 EATING DISORDERS: COMPULSIVE EATING..........................19
1.5 CONCLUSION..................................................................................21
CHAPTER 2: REPRESENTATIONS OF BODY IN ALL SIZES
2.1 INTRODUCTION.............................................................................24
2.2 IDEAL BODIES THROUGHOUT THE WESTERN HISTORY OF
ARTS..........................................................................................................................27
2.3 CRITIQUE OF THE MALE GAZE IN ART HISTORY.................40
2.4 THE FEMALE SENSIBILITY.........................................................42
2.5 “UNFIXING” THE FEMININE........................................................45
2.6 CONTEMPORARY TURKISH FEMINIST ART:
CANAN ŞENOL'S PERFECT BEAUTY SERIES.....................................................47
2.7 FAT BEAUTY..................................................................................54
CHAPTER 3: BODY IN TRANSITION: CUT THIS FAT OFF OF ME!
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3.1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK......................................................57
3.2 ARTWORKS.....................................................................................59
3.3 VISUAL MODEL.................................................................................73
CONCLUSION...........................................................................................................75
REFERENCES...........................................................................................................79
APPENDIX
Appendix A
Cut this fat off of me! Studio Work Photo Gallery...................................86
Appendix B
Art-homes Project: Is this my Culture?....................................................93
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LIST OF FIGURES
1. Venus of Willendorf, ~10.000-15.000 BC.............................................................28
2. Ankhesenamun, Wife of Pharaoh Tut, ~1350 BC.................................................29
3. Leonardo Da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, ~1500..........................................................29
4. Venus de Milo, ~2nd C.BC.....................................................................................30
5. Warrior of Riace, ~445 BC ..................................................................................30
6. Aphrodite Kallipygos, ~ 100 BC...........................................................................31
7. Caroline Bookpaintry, Adam and Eve, 840..........................................................31
8. Limbourg Bros., Trés riches heures: Paradise, ~ 1440......................................32
9. Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1486................................................................32
10. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 1505..........................................................................33
11. Maso da San Friano, Diamond Mine ~ 1570........................................................33
12. Jacob Jordaens, The Wife of King Kandaules, 1646.............................................33
13. P.P. Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, 1618..............................34
14. F.A. Bustelli, Leda Commedia dell'arte, ~ 1760..................................................35
15. Jean Dominique Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis, ~ 1810............................................36
16. Francisco Goya, The Mayas, 1798-1800..............................................................37
17. Jean Dominique Ingres, Turkish Bath, 1862.........................................................37
18. Toulouse-Lautrec, Ball At the Moulin Rouge, ~ 1890..........................................38
19. Ferdinand Hodler, 19.The Day II, 1905................................................................38
20. Max Beckmann, Dancing in Baden-Baden, 1923...............................................38
21. Amadeo Modigliani Reclining Female Nude, 1917.............................................39
22. Canan Şenol, Perfect Beauty Series – Blackness, 2009........................................48
23. Canan Şenol, Perfect Beauty Series – Smallness, 2009........................................49
24. Canan Şenol, Perfect Beauty Series – Tightness, 2009........................................50
25. Canan Şenol, Perfect Beauty Series – Redness, 2009..........................................51
26. Canan Şenol, Perfect Beauty Series – Roundness, 2009......................................52
27. Canan Şenol, Perfect Beauty Series – Breadth, 2009...........................................53
28. Canan Şenol, Perfect Beauty Series – Length, 2009............................................54
29. Pelin Güre, “V”, 2008..........................................................................................59
30. Detail from Pelin Güre,“V”, 2008.......................................................................60
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31. Sketch of Pelin Güre, bulimic, 2010.....................................................................61
32. Pelin Güre, bulimic, 2010.....................................................................................61
33. Detail from Pelin Güre, bulimic, 2010................................................................62
34. Detail from Pelin Güre, bulimic, 2010................................................................62
35. Pelin Güre, Fighting Fat Cells, 2010...................................................................63
36. Pelin Güre, Fighting Fat Cells, 2010...................................................................64
37. Detail from Pelin Güre, Fighting Fat Cells, 2010................................................65
38. Pelin Güre, Fighting Fat Cells, 2010...................................................................66
39. Pelin Güre, Fighting Fat Cells, 2010...................................................................66
40. Pelin Güre, Lipo, 2010.........................................................................................67
41. Detail from Pelin Güre, Lipo, 2010......................................................................68
42. Pelin Güre, My Old Fat PC, 2009........................................................................69
43. Detail from Pelin Güre, My Old Fat PC, 2009.....................................................70
44. Detail from Pelin Güre, My Old Fat PC, 2009.....................................................71
45. Detail from Pelin Güre, My Old Fat PC, 2009.....................................................71
46. Pelin Güre, before/after, 2010..............................................................................72
47. Pelin Güre, before/after, 2010..............................................................................72
48. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype),
1991............................................................................................................................74
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INTRODUCTION
The body is a highly contested site, its flesh is both the recipient and source of
desire, lust and hatred. As a pawn of technology, the body is sacred and sacrificial,
bearing the politics of society and state. The body is our common bond, yet it
separates us in its public display of identity, race and gender. Fat is one of the most
visible outcomes of psychological or social restlessness. This is why the topic on the
concept of body and fat have been discussed and analyzed on various grounds
especially after the number of obese people in the United States started to increase
uncontrollably. The problems fat would bring into a person's life may well be caused
by medical reasons, but the problems that produce the corpulence I refer to in this
study focus on the uneasiness of the vast majority of fat people who are compulsive
eaters. Despite the diverse discourses on fat, I have come to realize, when they feel
free enough to express their discomfort, the individual experiences of fat people
seldom differ.
My interest in researching this area is rooted in my own relationship with fat. I
have been fat since I was a child. I became obese when I was eighteen. I spent ten
years eating compulsively, until my weight reached three digit numbers, and another
10 years to reverse that increase. Although it is easy for me to express my feelings
about my fat experience, as I no longer consider myself fat, still, I do not fit social
norms of the society. The process has been traumatic, both mentally and physically.
It is because of this personal experience that my research has autobiographical
characteristics. Excluding the first two chapters – the first grounded in
psychoanalytic, and the second in feminist theory in the visual arts – I communicate
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my arguments in a first-person voice, which is identified as the most significant
characteristic of autobiographical research papers. I prefer to use this style in my
paper – first, because my thesis aims to make clear the conceptual framework of the
artworks presented in the last chapter following the theoretical analysis. Secondly,
my artworks flourished from my own struggle with fat. As can be seen in several
autobiographical examples in feminist art, gaining consciousness of one's own body
is pivotal in retaining a critical position on matters of female body.
I would first like to approach the topic from a psychoanalytic perspective in
accordance with the progress of my own experience, which is not much different
from many other obese people. Fat people are seen simply as fat people. Like any
other type of discrimination, fat depersonalizes. It is necessary at this point for me to
briefly go through my personal history of dealing with fat, which serves as a case
study for the rest of the analysis as well as a basis for the artistic production
explained in the last chapter.
The first ten years of my fat history, when I was constantly putting on weight,
were passed looking for medical solutions to my problem. I visited many doctors,
had my hormone levels checked on a regular basis, and used all kinds of pills to
decrease the fat absorption of my body. I even went to the only fat camp in Turkey.
Finally, went through surgery: a silicon balloon was inserted into my stomach, filling
three quarters of it, so that I would be physically unable to eat more than was
physiologically necessary. Whatever I did, it turned out to be useless. My body was
perfectly healthy, the dietitians were either unable to help me lose weight or were
able to help only for very short periods, after which, I regained twice the amount I
had lost. Both my parents were doctors. None of the medical help offered could cure
my compulsive eating. As I accepted the problem I was supposed to have, the weight
problem grew bigger.
When I left home for college, I started losing weight at a very slow pace and
from then-on never really put on significant amounts of weight. Leaving home made
me realize how much emotional pressure I had been under – to be perfect for the
ones I love: the excess weight I carried was a sign of that pressure, increasing every
day I was exposed to the sadness my condition caused them.
I decided to see a psychiatrist. I no longer wanted to pretend that I was content
with my body and started searching for the books on the issue. It was to my surprise
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that there was a great amount of literature, especially about women. It was the first
time I felt relief, that I realized I was not the only one dealing with this problem,
even I had been to places where fat people were the only residents such as Dr.
Muzaffer Kuşhan's fat camp. I found in those places that fat was an even bigger
taboo: people were there in order to hand control of their bodies over to wiser
authorities, instead of trying to comprehend the reasons and find the solutions of this
readily apparent and visually present problem. As is the case with surgical operations
like liposuction, the image of a healthy life sold by these camps was yet another way
of avoiding the problem. That is why I was even more surprised when I read how
other women expressed their feelings – how similar they were to me in their
discomfort. Fat is a taboo in the urban society I come from, just as it is in any other.
For this reason, expressing his/her feelings for a fat person is beyond frightening.
After getting my reading of feminist theories of the body, I realized that I was
naively egoistic in thinking that the world was spinning around me—around my fat
— and in the beginning I was too scared to accept otherwise. My fat became an
excuse for the actions that I was afraid to take and I was able to blame my physical
appearance for any kind of failure I was experiencing whether or not related to my
condition. In other words, my problem with my body, my appearance, had a
magnetism that could pull all my other problems into its territory, turning everything
into one big complex problem that I was unable to take under control. That is one of
the reasons why I was never able to articulate what I truly felt about myself: my fat
became a cover for all my fears and anxieties. I would like to quote a list of what fat
means from Susie Orbach's book Fat is a Feminist Issue. This was my first encounter
with a hidden society of fat women, who shared the same feelings I was experiencing
and were bravely articulating them. There is not one line on this list that has not
crossed my mind while dealing with my fat.
To be fat means to compare yourself to every other woman, looking for
the ones whose own fat can make you relax.
To be fat means to be outgoing and jovial to make up for what you think
are your deficiencies.
To be fat means to refuse invitations to go to the beach or dancing.
To be fat means to be excluded from contemporary mass culture, from
fashion, sports and the outdoor life.
To be fat is to be a constant embarrassment to yourself and your friends.
To be fat is to worry every time a camera is in view.
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To be fat means to feel ashamed for existing.
To be fat means having to wait until you are thin to live.
To be fat means to have no needs.
To be fat means to be constantly trying to lose weight.
To be fat means to take care of other's needs.
To be fat means never saying “no”.
To be fat means to have an excuse for failure.
To be fat means to wait for the man who will love you despite the fat –
the man who will fight through the layers.1
As is clear in the list above, the worries I, and other women with the same
problem, have carried for so long are mostly related to how a woman perceives her
size through the eyes of the others. Being unable to meet the expectations of a
society intolerant to any kind of imperfection locks people into the prison of the
“self”, a consciousness aware of the imperfections it carries along with it. A US
study, carried out by George L. Maddox, Kurt W. Back, and Veronica R. Liederman
of Duke University, shows that fatness, as a characteristic of self or others, tends to
provoke negative affect and rejection. The study, explained in the article Overweight
as Social Deviance and Disability is, in short as follows: various samples, selected to
include individuals most likely to be indifferent to normative preferences for
leanness or tolerant to fatness, that is to say individuals with overweight issues as
well as ones who have normal weight ratios according to body mass index, are
shown to consider a fat child as less likable than children with recognized physical
disabilities in a picture-ranking task. Fatness in self is also shown to be related to an
elevated actual-ideal discrepancy among overweight individuals, and to a tendency
to perceive oneself as not fat. Fat individuals are imputed to be responsible for their
condition, a factor which intensifies the negative effect and affects interaction in both
social and medical contexts:
A major source of difficulty for the fat person is likely to be the
discomfort in his relationships with his fellows rather than bodily
discomfort or disease. The high probability of interpersonal pain and
suffering is associated with the fact that Western culture on the whole,
and contemporary American culture in particular, has ridiculed and
despised fatness. Fatness tends, therefore, to have high social relevance,
usually with negative connotations. Fat people are stigmatized. They are
imputed to be responsible for their deviance. Moreover, there are
1 Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-Diet Guide for Women, (New York: Galahad
Books, 1997), 38-39.
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indications that, whatever physicians think about the prognosis of obesity
theoretically, practically they perceive it to be incurable and only slightly
improvable.2
Reasons for the negative connotations of fatness in this contemporary Western
society is numerous. One is the persistent claim that obesity is a morbid condition
which a responsible person concerned about his health should avoid. While this may
be the case, hatred towards fatness is rooted in religious traditions and has a long
long history before the emerge of obesity as a common disease. Gluttony is one of
the seven deadly sins of Catholic tradition. On the other hand, greediness is also
condemned in Islam, one characteristics of which is a strong emphasis on impulse
control (the word “nefis” in Turkish, used to express both lower-self, meaning the
bodily appetites to be controlled, and something delicious). Fatness suggests a kind
of immorality inviting punishment. Correspondingly, the reduction of excess weight
and the avoidance of the contagion of gluttony imply self-denial to bring appropriate
rewards, including good health. The moral orientation is in turn reinforced by
aesthetic considerations.
From a feminist perspective, following the religious codes of a any society that
relegates women to the social norms of wife and mother has several significant
consequences that contribute to the problem of fat. First, in order to become a wife
and mother, a woman has to have a man. Snaring him is presented as an almost
unattainable – but essential – goal. To do that, a woman has to learn to regard herself
as an item, a commodity, a sex object. Much of her experience and identity depends
on how she perceives herself and how she is perceived by others. As John Berger
observes in Ways of Seeing:
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations
between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves.3
This emphasis on presentation as the central aspect of a woman's existence
makes her extremely self-conscious. It demands that she occupy herself with a selfimage
that others will find pleasing and attractive – an image that will immediately
convey what kind of woman she is. She must observe and evaluate herself,
scrutinizing every detail of herself as though she were an outside judge. She attempts
to make herself in the image of womanhood presented by billboards, newspapers,
2 George L. Maddox et al., “Overweight as Social Deviance and Disability,” Journal of Health and
Social Behavior 9 (1968): 289.
3 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, (United Kingdom: Penguin Books Ltd., 2008), 47.
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magazines and television. The media present women either in a sexual context or
within the family, reflecting a woman's two prescribed roles, first as a sex object, and
then as a mother. A girl is brought up to marry by “catching” a man with her good
looks and pleasing manner. To do this she must look appealing, sensual, sexual,
virginal, innocent, reliable, daring, mysterious. And thin. She sets out her self-image
in the marketplace of marriage. My mother, who was highly radical mother for her
own time, fighting the social norms of her community, would say these things again
and again. These are no longer the superimpositions of higher power structures such
as the media and big corporations, they are perfectly functioning even within the
smallest units of the society—families. Susan Bordo argues that compulsive eating
concerns mother and daughter relationships directly:
Traditional studies approach the issue of fat using pathological
discourses, which treat fatness as a disease, or psychosomatic discourses,
which treat fatness as a symptom of a psychological disorder. Whereas,
the feminist perspective reveals that compulsive eating is, in fact, an
expression of the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.
It is a complex and ironic process, for women are prepared for this life of
inequality by other women who themselves suffer its limitations – their
mothers.4
It's obvious that growing-up is different for girls and boys; what may be less
apparent is, that to prepare her daughter for a life of inequality, the mother tries to
hold back her child's desires to be a powerful, autonomous, self-directed, energetic
and productive human being. From an early age, the young girl is encouraged to
accept this rupture in her development. She is guided to cope with the loss by putting
her energy into taking care of others. Her needs for emotional support and growth
will be satisfied if she can convert them into giving to others. Judith Butler puts it as
“To be a woman is to live with the tension of giving and not getting.”5
As the daughter develops from child to woman, the act of feeding herself may
become a symbolic response, both to the physical and emotional deprivation she
suffered as a child – an expression of her fraught intimacy with her mother. As the
child gets more adept, she begins to feed herself and select her own foods, producing
a developing sense of independence of the mother. But this break causes conflict for
4 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 22.
5 Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault,” in Contemporary
Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer,
(New York: Longman, 1998), 619.
16
the daughter. On the one hand, the daughter wants to move away, learn to take care
of herself. On the other hand, this ability to nurture herself implies a rejection of the
mother. Elizabeth Grosz points out a deep significance that this rejection takes on
because of the social limitation of the woman's role in patriarchal society. If the
mother is not needed as a mother, who will she be? And so the daughter feels guilt
for destroying her mother's only role. As she seeks emotional sustenance through
other social relationships, the adult daughter may continue to suffer deprivation.
Very often her own partner has not learned to give. In search for love, comfort,
warmth and support, she turns to eating for that indefinable something that never
seems to be there. Compulsive eating becomes a way of expressing both sides of this
conflict: In overfeeding herself, the daughter may be trying to reject her mother's role
– reproaching her for her inadequacies in nurturing; or else she may be attempting to
retain a sense of identity with her mother.6
For the compulsive eater, fat has a symbolic meaning which makes sense
within a feminist context. Fat is a response to the many oppressive manifestations of
a sexist culture. Fat is a way of saying “no” to powerlessness and self-denial, to a
limited range of acceptable sexual expression, which demands that females look and
act in a certain way, and to an image of womanhood defining of a specifically
prescribed social role. “Fat offends western ideals of female beauty and, as such,
every overweight woman creates a crack in the popular culture's ability to make
women mere products.”7, says Barbara Winstead, but while fat serves as a symbolic
rejection of the way society distorts women and their relationships with others,
particularly in the critical relationship between mothers and daughters, becoming fat
remains an unhappy and unsatisfactory attempt to resolve these conflicts. And
whether a woman is trying to conform to social expectations or attempting to forge a
different identity, it is a painful price to pay.
In this context, the first chapter of this study constructs a theoretical framework
of fat as it is experienced by the fat person, together with how it is perceived by
others. The chapter opens with an analysis on the boundaries of bodily existence.
The discussion then traces psychoanalytic arguments about the importance of
perception in the formation of the ego. Definitions of corpulence and how a person
6 Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, (Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1989),
110-14.
7 Barbara A. Winstead, “Body Image, Physical Attractiveness, and Depression,” in Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology 53 (Feb 1985): 89.
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redefines himself/herself according to those definitions bring the analysis to the
closing section on theoretical background: the visible problems of self that occur as a
result of different understandings of corpulence – eating disorders.
The second chapter presents different ages of body ideals in the fine arts. The
human figure is one of the oldest and most significant motifs in the art of most
cultures. In the west, the vast majority of sculptures were figurative forms until
twentieth century modernism. Although the visual definitions of the body have
changed significantly through the centuries, the body still preserves its significant
hold over the representative arts. Every culture constructs images of attractiveness;
certain body types are presented as the ideal objects of desire and dominate all areas
of visual culture while, other body types are characterized as undesirable. Dale
Cusumano and Kevin Thompson argue that “Although contemporary western culture
today make a fetish of the slim female body, in sixteenth and seventeenth-century
Europe, an ample body was most admired as evidence of a person's wealth and
power, and voluptuous women were more commonly represented.”8 The first part of
the second chapter explores the ideals of beauty presented in the fine arts until the
twentieth century.
When photography became common, especially in advertising after the WWII,
body ideals changed drastically and manipulated women to fit into norms that are too
perfect to be natural. Art that focused directly on issues of the body as a theme
surfaced dramatically in the late 1960's and 1970's by women artists that were
inspired by the activism of political movement for women's rights.9 In the 1980's,
feminists continued to engage with politicized issues pertaining directly to the body.
Artists like Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman deconstructed the ideological
meanings of objectified and stereotyped representations of the body from the past
and present. “Your body is a battleground,” proclaims a text in a 1989 artwork by
Barbara Kruger, referring to the conventions regarding the most socially preferred
size, shape, color of bodies, and taboos against specific forms of sexual expression.
Feminist critiques on the body that were highly debated in 1970's and 80's West
follow the chronological analysis of body image. Male gaze became a crucial point
in order to understand the deficiencies of the body-politics. The chapter closes
8 Dale L. Cusumano and J. Kevin Thompson, “Body Image and Body Shape Ideals in Magazines:
Exposure, Awareness, and Internalization,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 37 (1997), 702.
9 Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” The Art
Bulletin 69, No. 3 (1987), 326.
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concluding that woman artists play a significant role in challenging the existing
definitions of beauty and creating awareness in society on body issues. Considering
fat bodies, a solution is offered in the realm of feminism that a shift in social norms
concerning bodies might reduce the invisible burden on women enabling them to
experience their bodies freely in their natural sizes.
The third and last chapter presents the artworks that I produced on the issues of
fat. As a person who experienced obesity, I offer a two-sided conceptual framework
of my artworks on fatness following the pattern of my thesis. In my graduation
exhibition Cut this fat off of me!, first, I aim to express the ambivalent feelings
women have towards their bodies in the context of fat related to the issues of
perception and the self. Second, I try to deconstruct the imposition of slimness in the
society by taking a second-generation feminist position that is explained in detail in
the second chapter.
19
CHAPTER 1
Corporeal Existence and Corpulence
1.1 Corporeal Existence and Transactions
Corporeal means involving or relating to the physical world rather than the
spiritual world. Corporeal existence, then, is the pure physical—bodily set of
perceptions and experiences of being. When human existence is in consideration, it
would not be wrong to say that the boundaries between physical and spiritual is not
that pure anymore. As it is the main discussion in this analysis, body is a highly
contested site. It is the subject of a continual change, therefore vulnerable to various
manipulations of the changing social interactions. Since how one perceives his/her
own corporeality does not solely depend on his/her physical encounters with nonchanging
body forms, his/her understanding of the physical self is open to
adjustments of an evolving mind set.
In her book Living Across and Through Skins, Shannon Sullivan develops a
pragmatist-feminist account of corporeal existence that hinges on her thorough
explication of the Deweyan notion of “transaction.” In her introduction, Sullivan
situates her own thinking in a rich context of pragmatism and feminism as well as
genealogical and phenomenological philosophy, emphasizing along the way the
importance of the “cross-fertilization”10 of these fields to her theoretical approach.
By unpacking Dewey's use of the term “transaction,” Sullivan is able to show how
“bodies” are continuously “undergoing reconstitution through their constitutive
10 Shannon Sullivan, Living across and through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and
Feminism, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 7.
20
relations with others.”11 Thus, bodies are not neatly enclosed in their skins, but rather
live across and through them. Identity becomes not a result of isolated existence but
a function of certain stable transactions between a dynamic body and its oftenprecarious
environment. Sullivan here employs a trio of culinary metaphors to
further clarify her point. Transaction is not like a “melting pot” in which distinct
ingredients sacrifice themselves in service of a “distinction-erasing” whole.12 Nor is
transaction accurately represented by a “tossed salad” in which different ingredients
are “merely juxtaposed”.13 Rather, transaction is like a “stew pot” in which various
ingredients actively “intermingle” and help constitute each other.14
That human bodies are continuously intermingling in this way suggests, for
Sullivan, that the verbal noun “bodying” might be the best term for the human body
in transaction.15 Moreover, bodying does not occur arbitrarily, but rather follows
certain patterns, or “habits.”16 These habits are not private constructions of individual
organisms, nor are they rigid products of a fixed social/environmental order, but
instead emerge out of the moving transactions of an organism with its environment.
And it is here in this transacting interplay of organism and environment that the
possibility of meaningful change in the world arises.
Sullivan then moves from this extended explication of transactional bodies to
discuss the implications of such an account for particular issues in contemporary
philosophy by taking up the work of Judith Butler and Susan Wendell, in order to
explore how a transactional understanding of bodies assists in explanations of the
body's “discursivity” and “materiality,” and how this view helps to create the
possibility of concrete resistance to cultural norms. Most importantly, she revises
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal existence, replacing his notion of
“projective intentionality” with “hypothetical construction”. The former, according
to Sullivan, relies too heavily on an “atomistic” and “solipsistic” framework, which
the latter avoids by taking seriously the “mutual constitution of meaning”17 that
occurs in “transactional bodily communication.”18
The basis of Sullivan's opposition to Merleau-Ponty's notion of “projective
11 Ibid., 13.
12 Ibid., 14-15.
13 Ibid., 15.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 30.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 79.
18 Ibid., 82.
21
intentionality” lies in the different definitions of them for the “anonymous body”.
Sullivan argues that according to Merleau-Ponty, the body is able to be the backdrop
that ensures communication because of anonymity. He claims that just “as the parts
of my body together (comprise) a system, so my body and the other's are one whole,
two sides of one and the same phenomenon , and the anonymous existence of which
my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.”19
She opposes him on the ground that anonymous existence is not the only level of
human existence that is prepersonal. There is a personal level of bodily existence in
which one can distinguish her body from the others, but beneath that personal level is
a level of existence in which there is a commonality between and a quasiindifferentiation
from other bodies.20 The wholeness that accompanies individuation,
particularity, and distinctiveness is the link that provides the possibility of
communication between one and other. She finally argues:
Whether impersonal or prepersonal, Merleau-Ponty's anonymous body
imposes a commonality upon different bodies and in doing so, impedes
the communication and common ground between corporeal subjects that
his account seeks to explain. The anonymity of the body reveals itself to
be an assumption of a connection among bodies rather than an
explanation of how community and connection might be achieved given
the particular ways various people live their bodies. Only by rejecting
Merleau-Pornty's concept of the anonymous body can feminists create a
genuine option of breaking out of the ethically solipsistic subjectivity
against which Merleau-Ponty tries to argue. Taking seriously the idea of
others as different from oneself not only does not make community
impossible, it is crucial to the possibility for communication with and
understanding of another. 21
In order to understand the underlying misconceptions that create reactions
towards corpulence, it is crucial to take both Merleau-ponty's and Sullivan's
arguments on corporeal existence into consideration. What this chapter tries to set
out is a philosophical and psychoanalytical map of the underlying conceptions that
lead to the obvious social reaction and fear towards fatness and present possible
solutions on the level of theory, which will then form a ground for the visual analysis
of the next chapter. To get more involved in perceiving bodies, next part presents an
analysis on the formation of the ego and the untrustworthy importance of perception
in the process, by going through Freud's and Lacan's theories on one's first
19 Merleau-Ponty quoted in (Sullivan 2001, 69.)
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 75.
22
understanding of his/her body and the self. Their theories point out the truth in
Merleau-Ponty's arguments that reside even in the first steps of a person to form an
understanding of the self, as well as shedding light on the problematics of the
process, which Sullivan reckons and offers solutions from a feminist perspective.
1.2 The Formation of the Ego and the Matter of Perception
Perception is the key element in the formation of the ego as Freud explains
how ego is constructed based on the interactions of conscious and unconscious.
According to him, what is conscious functions on the level of ego, which is the
surface that is covering and controlling the id. 'Being conscious'22 is in the first place
a purely descriptive term, resting on perception of the most immediate and certain
character. With the unconscious, he feels the need to make a distinction between
what is yet there to become conscious—preconscious—,and the repressed, which is
the true unconscious.23 The distinction between them is made according to one's
ability to put what he/she perceives into words. If an idea yet to be formed is on the
stage of visuality or perceived through any other senses within the id, it is
preconscious and when it is verbalized it will move to the level of conscious. On the
other hand, unconscious is something that cannot be verbalized because it has been
blocked or repressed somewhere throughout the process.
Foucault explains the importance of perception in physical life according to
Freud's two different notions of the ego; narcissistic ego and ego as the mediator. In
the former, the ego's origin is described in terms of the subject's ability to take itself
or part of its own body as a love object. The development of the ego is not solely
based on the subject's relationship to his/her body, but also the stimuli derived by the
social interactions.24 In that respect, perception becomes one of the key concepts that
already exists in the breach between the mind and the body, being the psychical
registration of the collision of external and internal stimuli on the body's sensory
receptors. It is a term that requires a transgression of the duality of the mind/body
22 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
and trans. J. Strachey, et al., (London: Hogarth, 1955-74), 13.
23 Ibid., 13-18.
24 Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, (New York: Pantheon Books,
1978), 51-54.
23
split. It shows the ineliminable dependence of the inside and the outside, mind and
matter, on each other. Based on The Ego and the Id, Grosz interprets the ego as a
mediator between two contradictory terms rather than the circulation of libidinal
cathexes, the instinctual and corporeal strivings of the id on one hand and the
demands and requirements of “reality” or “civilization”25 for the modification,
control, or postponement of instinctual satisfaction on the other. In other words, the
narcissistic genesis of the ego entails that the subject cannot remain neutral or
indifferent to its own body and body parts. The body is libidinally invested. The
subject always maintains a relation of love or hate toward its own body because it
must always maintain a certain level of psychical and libidinal investment. No
person lives his or her own body merely as a functional instrument or a means to an
end. Its value is never simply or solely functional, for it has a libidinal value in itself.
The subject is capable of suicide, of anorexia, because the body is meaningful, has
significance. Grosz quotes Foucault's explanation of anorexia:
Anorexia, for example, is arguably the most stark and striking
sexualization of biological instincts: the anorexic may risk her very life in
the attainment of a body image approximating her ideal. Neither a
“disorder” of the ego nor, as popular opinion has it, a “dieting disease”
gone out of control, anorexia can, like the phantom limb, be a kind of
mourning for a pre-Oedipal (i.e., precastrated) body and a corporeal
connection to the mother that women in patriarchy are required to
abandon. Anorexia is a form of protest at the social meaning of the
female body. Rather than seeing it simply as an out-of-control
compliance with the current patriarchal ideals of slenderness, it is
precisely a renunciation of these “ideals.”26
In other words, Freud would explain such an experience as a protest expressed
not in verbal terms but rather visual or by action—an idea(l) that could not develop
in the order of preconscious to conscious, but remained unconscious, that is to say,
repressed by the collision of the social norms and the self, and found its way out of
the id as a protest action rather than a verbal reaction. In her book Sciences of the
Flesh, Dianne Sadoff explains different treatments that were used in psychoanalysis
by Freud, one of them being rest-fattening-cure. The cure is simple; it requires rest in
bed, isolation, feeding up and massage. Freud uses that specific cure for one of his
patients named Emmy, a late nineteenth-century bourgeois wife. Emmy's domestic
and marital responsibilities, intensified by the death of her husband during her
25 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, (Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 28.
26 Foucault quoted in (Grosz 1994, 40).
24
second confinement, had strained her capacity to perform them. Freud observed that
Emmy managed a complex set of domestic economies and public interactions as well
as had helped her entrepreneurial husband. Having withdrawn when ill into total
isolation, Emmy nevertheless helped manage her husband's large business, supervise
her children's educations, and correspond with prominent people in the intellectual
world. Under Freud's care, Emmy lay quietly in bed, slept well but she relapsed after
months of relative health and so Freud prescribed her a “feeding up” regimen. The
rest-fattening-cure represented wasted women as demanding the authoritative
intervention of a medical man who, invoking nature, rebirthed and reeducated her.
His power infantilized the patient, who necessarily exhibited child-like acquiescence
to her doctor's commands as her body ballooned.27 This case study sets an example to
how perception and acceptance through the other's eye can influence one's
relationship to his/her body. Sadoff explains:
A profoundly responsible and demanding position—by which I mean
both job and social location—late-nineteenth-century bourgeois
wifehood and maternity was situated at a point of historically specified
stress that, in the new discourse of health and pathology, identified as ill
the woman who failed to perform its functions perfectly. For the middleor
upper-middle-class female found herself constrained by contradictions
and necessarily responding to conflicting cultural demands on both body
and psyche. A less industrially developed society might merely have
demanded that women be fat and fertile; a more aristocratic society
might have removed mothering responsibilities from upper-class women,
delegating the rearing of their children to nurses and tutors; and a less
industrialized and business-centered society might have needed
managers, but late-nineteenth-century culture overinscribed the demands
on and overrefined the definition of wife- and motherhood. 28
Since there is not enough literature on Turkish society and fatness, it is crucial
here to note Sadoff's words importance in an emphasis shifting society on women's
roles. Since the 1980's, the role of women especially in urban settings in Turkey is
changing dramatically, but the family structure is changing slower than the economic
structure of the cities. For the women who are lost in different representations of “the
other” woman figure from their mothers to their colleagues, perceiving their own
bodies through the other becomes even more complicated.
Lacan also explains in his idea of the “mirror stage” that the ego is not an
outline or projection of the real anatomical and physiological body but is an
27 Dianne F. Sadoff, Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis,
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 124-32.
28 Ibid., 133.
25
imaginary outline or projection of the body, the body insofar as it is imagined and
represented for the subject by the image of others (including its own reflection in a
mirror). The ego is both a map of the body's surface and a reflection of the image of
the other's body. The other's body provides the frame for the representation of one's
own. In this sense, the ego is an image of the body's significance or meaning for the
subject and for the other. It is thus as much a function of fantasy and desire as it is of
sensation and perception; it is a taking over of sensation and perception by a
phantasmal dimension. This significatory, cultural dimension implies that bodies,
egos, subjectivities are not simply reflections of their cultural context and associated
values but are constituted as such by them, marking bodies in their very “biological”
configurations with socio-sexual inscriptions.29
Next part analyzes how these socio-sexual inscriptions appear physically in the
biological configurations as excess weight. Corpulence is most commonly believed
to result from eating too much. Medical theories that form the basis for this belief are
presented in order to understand whether eating as a purely instinctual physical act is
affected by exogenous factors or palatability can simply be the answer to
accumulation of excess weight.
1.3 Corpulence
For many decades obesity has been a subject of major interest especially in
countries with a high standard of living and readily available food supplies, and there
is a voluminous literature on this condition that has accumulated in both the lay and
medical press. Much work has been carried out on metabolism in the obese; there has
been even more speculation, but the problem still remains a vexed one. Especially
during the last few decades populations of modern affluent societies are warned by
scientist, politicians, media and interest groups that there is an obesity epidemic.
Being overweight is now not only culturally condemned, but also medically and
politically defined as a major public health threat.
29 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, (New York: Routledge,
1996), 94-115.
26
It is important at the outset to define what health professionals mean when they
speak of overweight and obesity. Overweight is defined as body weight in excess of
an ideal weight, based on height- and sex-specific standards. Overweight can result
from excesses of bone, muscle, fat, or, more rarely, fluid. Almost everyone who is
more than 20 percent overweight is also overfat, or obese. However, not all people
who are heavy are excessively fat. The relative contributions to overweight of bone,
muscle, and fat vary from person to person, and it is often hard to recognize these
differences. The component that actually causes weight in excess of normal is less
than clear when overweight is in the more moderate range, less than 20 percent over
ideal weight. This brings diagnostic difficulties for overfatness and the term obesity
emerges. Obesity is defined as body fatness in excess of an age and sex specific
standard. Body weights grossly in excess of standards are indicative of obesity.
More than 100 years ago, von Noorden suggested a classification of obesity
into (a) an exogenous or simple type caused by manifest overeating, and (b) an
endogenous type produced by, or associated with, various metabolic abnormalities.30
In the 1950's, the work of Newburgh and his collaborators appeared to refute the
existence of this latter type, and as a result attention has largely been focused on the
factors regulating appetite and food intake; the usual treatment has been to reduce
total calorie intake, by devious means, below the theoretical calorie requirement of
the individual.31
In the late 1960s, Schachter and colleagues initiated a series of studies which
led to the so-called ‘externality theory’ of obesity. Compared with their lean
counterparts, both obese rats and human subjects were argued to be more reactive to
external cues (time, presence of food, situational effects, etc.) and less sensitive to
internal hunger and satiety signals than their lean counterparts. According to this
view, high external responsiveness would, given an environment of an easily
accessible, abundant and highly palatable food supply, encourage overeating and,
hence, the development of obesity.32
These ideas became widely accepted and generated a large volume of related
research in the 1970's. Many of the subsequent studies confirmed the original notion
30 C. von Noorden, Metabolism and Practical Medicine, (Chicago: W. T. Keener, 1907), 37.
31 L. H. Newburgh, in Clinical Nutrition, ed. N. Jolliffe, F. F. Tisdall and P. R. Cannon, (New York:
Paul B. Hoeber Inc, 1950), 689.
32 S. Schachter, “Some extraordinary facts about obese humans and rats,” American Psychologist 26
(1971): 133-34.
27
of externality; however, many did not, and this view lost favor as it became clear that
the relationship between externality and overweight is much more complex than
originally proposed.33 Nevertheless, this spawned a number of ideas which have
continued to be the focus of research through to the present. In particular, in their
comprehensive review of studies on human eating behavior, Spitzer and Rodin
concluded that “palatability is the most consistent variable influencing amount eaten
and producing overweight-normal differences in amount eaten.”34 Specifically, in
experimental studies, better-liked foods are not only consumed in higher quantities
than lesser-liked foods, but the magnitude of this palatability effect is reliably found
to be exaggerated in obese subjects. However, the relationships amongst sensory
acceptance, actual food choices and intake, and the development and maintenance of
obesity have never been fully explored. Thus, the possibility that certain traits of
externality contribute to a predisposition to obesity remains a plausible hypothesis.
Present knowledge is consistent with the view that preferences for, and
consumption of, dietary fat are linked to weight status. Consumption of diets
moderate or high in fat or energy density (with low physical activity levels) appear to
be critically implicated in the development of obesity amongst susceptible
individuals. There may be additional confounding effects; for example, physical
activity may be associated with lower fat intakes as Simoes et al. argue,35 and
possibly also to changes in sensory or food preferences. Regardless of specific diet
and lifestyle, a positive fat balance appears to be the outcome of a causal chain which
might start at several points, with a range of physiological and behavioral factors
potentially contributing.
If phenotypic expression of a genetic predisposition toward obesity has
consumption of a high fat intake as an important precursor, then the origins of this
voluntary behavior are often explained by palatability. In fact, the fundamental cause
of high fat preferences and intakes in obesity remains obscure. The basis for fat
preferences in general has recently been reviewed by Mela, and that analysis
suggests that “post-ingestive, psycho-biological effects of fats may contribute to an
associative conditioning process, through which a liking for fat-associated sensory
33 G. R. Leon, and L. Roth, “Obesity: Causes, correlations, and speculations,” Psychological Bulletin
84, (1977): 126.
34 L. Spitzer, and J. Rodin, “Human eating behavior: A critical review of studies in normal weight
and overweight individuals,” Appetite 2 (1981): 308.
35 E. J. Simoes, et al., “The association between leisure-time physical activity and dietary fat in
American adults,” American Journal of Public Health 85 (1995): 241.
28
qualities is acquired by experience.”36
Fat-containing foods might conceivably have greater reinforcing psychobiological
effects for certain individuals or under certain conditions, therefore
becoming more potent stimuli for the acquisition and maintenance of conditioned
preferences, and increased liking. Physiologically, this might be mediated through
variations in the stimulation or function of neural mechanisms involved in the
acquisition or expression of hedonic responses in general. By any mechanism,
however, the physiological effects of energy-dense, high-fat foods, when combined
with a heightened responsiveness to such foods specifically or to palatability
generally, creates ideal nutritional and psychological conditions for excessive intakes
and poor weight control. Understanding of these behavioral characteristics and their
links to overeating and obesity can potentially contribute to predicting responses to a
natural treatment and social acceptance of obesity and fatness.
In the last fifty years, researchers explained how eating habits were related to
external factors. On the other hand, some other researchers refuted the externality
theory with proof on simplistic relationship between overeating and palatability.
Later on, palatability was redefined also as being related to external factors affecting
the body perceptions. The next part argues what external factors affect the
relationship of body perceptions and eating habits, and how palatability and the
amount of the food consumed can also be manipulated by different understandings of
one's body in a social context.
1.4 Eating Disorders: Compulsive Eating
Nisbett in his article Hunger, obesity, and the ventromedial hypothalamus
suggested that the obese-normal differences in eating behavior identified by
Schachter37 could be due to greater hunger experienced by obese individuals. This
might be due to actual dieting or, as Nisbett originally proposed, many overweight
individuals may be engaged in a chronic struggle to restrain their eating against a
biological drive toward further weight gain. Dieting and restrained eating are
prevalent amongst individuals whose weight is normal or below normal, and these
36 D. J. Mela, “Implications of fat replacement for nutrition and food intake,” European Journal of
Medical Research 1 (1995): 81.
37 (Schachter 1971, 129-44)
29
ideas therefore prompted examination of the eating behavior of subjects classified
according to their degree of dietary restraint and dieting, rather than body weight
alone.38
Subsequent studies showed that restrained subjects tended to eat more after a
preload identified as high in energy, compared with the same preload identified as
low in energy. Polivy claims that this counter-regulatory behavior apparently occurs
when the perceived intake of energy is sufficient to cause normally restrained eaters
to suspend their self-imposed restraint, thereby releasing an underlying desire to
eat.39 The pattern of thinking identified with such behavior has been characterized by
Wardle as such; ‘I’ve blown it already, so I might as well eat’.40 Many factors other
than food preloads have been shown by Baucom and Aiken to precipitate overeating
in restrained eaters, such as emotional events (including anxiety), the presence of
other people overeating, the sight and smell of well-liked foods, and even the
anticipation of a forthcoming high food intake.41 These findings confirm a major
influence of cognition on short-term food intake, and suggest potential causal links
between restraint and compulsive eating, and perhaps longer term failure of weight
control.
Diet Nation by Basham, Gori and Luik offers a broad critique and is based on
an extensive review of the relevant literature. One of their points is that research
about the negative outcome of dieting is almost never mentioned in the dominant
literature. However, Basham, Gori and Luik cite several studies that conclude that
‘the stress of dieting weakens the organs, decimates lean tissue, and makes people
much more vulnerable to diseases far more insidious than fat’ and point to data ‘that
showed that those who wanted to lose weight and succeeded were significantly more
likely to die young than those who stayed overweight.’42
As explained above, restraints create a reverse reaction towards weight control.
Compulsive eating occurs mostly after one feels the need to restrain himself/herself
38 R. E. Nisbett, “Hunger, obesity, and the ventromedial hypothalamus,” Psychology Reviews 79
(1972): 437-41.
39 J. Polivy, “Perception of calories and regulation of intake in restrained and unrestrained subjects.”
Addictive Behaviors 1 (1976): 237.
40 J. Wardle, “Compulsive eating and dietary restraint.” British Journal of Clinical Psychology 26
(1987): 53.
41 D. H. Baucom, and P. A. Aiken, “Effect of depressed mood on eating among obese and nonobese
dieting and nondieting persons,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 41 (1981): 584-86.
42 Patrick Basham et al., Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, (London: The Social Affairs
Unit, 2006), 251.
30
from the possible dangers of delicious food. That is one of the reasons why
overweight people cannot break away from the vicious cycle of losing weight after a
period of strict dieting and gaining higher amounts after the removal of those
restraints. But these concepts of disinhibited eating are subject to refinements and
investigations since the implications of maintaining dietary restraint in a culture and
environment where energy-dense foods and opportunities to eat are omnipresent,
while slimness is promoted as the ideal of beauty, self-control and success. In other
words, palatable and energy-dense foods may not be of concern solely because of
their inherent nutritional composition, but that for many individuals consumption (or
even the presence) of such foods may present a particularly potent stimulus for the
breakdown of restraint, loss of dietary control, and overeating of these or other foods.
This loss of control over one's own body might be the basis of the fear of corpulence
among the society.
From a sociological point of view, Basham, Gori and Luik's most important
contribution is offered in the first chapter of Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity
Crusade on ‘Cooking up a Scare: How Fat Became the Health Catastrophe’.43 Their
main point here is that ‘the century-long Western preoccupation with thinness and
the rejection of fat is very much a social construct in which obesity is increasingly
associated with the morally unacceptable’.44 They call people who advertise obesity
epidemic by publicly opposing big food industries, in order to fight against obesity,
as “obesity crusaders”, and criticize those people in order to draw a broader picture
of overweight issues including the economic drives of other markets that benefit
from an obesity epidemic;
...their blatant misrepresentations are neither accidental nor
disinterested. Rather, they are driven by enormous amounts of self
interest. This is because the existence of an obesity epidemic offers
enormous commercial, financial and power-maximizing opportunities for
at least seven groups: the medical profession, academic researchers, the
public health community, the government health bureaucracy, the
pharmaceutical industry, the fitness industry and the weight-loss
industry.45
43 Ibid., 31–86.
44 Ibid., p. 33.
45 Ibid., p. 43-44.
31
1.5 Conclusion
This first chapter aimed at presenting different approaches on how one forms
the first understandings of his/her body. The importance of perception is emphasized
in relation to how self image is accumulated through the image of the other. The role
of the ego in maintaining a healthy relationship between the physical and ideal
experiences of oneself is examined. Corporeality, as the pure physical experiences of
one, is analyzed in a way that those experiences are in constant transformation via
every single encounter with other changing forms. In such a frenzy of stimuli and
change, corpulence serves as a gap that one falls when he/she is incapable of
processing the overflowing emotional, physical and social data. As a result the
person develops habitual acts in order to cope with the overflow of mentioned data.
Whereas once fat was seen in a positive light as a token of social, economic and
sexual well-being, now the reverse is true. Present cultural preferences make thinness
the ideal of beauty and discriminate against fat. Alongside this cultural change, one
finds a growing body of medical writing that offers the very same picture: being lean
is good for one's health and being fat is not only bad for one's health but also socially
and economically irresponsible. Thus, public policies are devised to ‘protect’ fat
people from their own bad habits, thereby protecting society from their irresponsible
behavior as well. Just like other risk discourses, the one on obesity revolves around
power and control relationships between different social interests. Risk and blame,
power and morality are intimately linked.
It is not surprising that the critical literature reviewed above is produced mostly
by scientific professionals who do not belong to the obesity establishment. Within
that establishment the present core of the paradigm is the conviction that obesity is a
disease, which is taking on pandemic proportions. To be an obesity expert means to
accept this core conviction. To doubt this conviction implies the danger of being
rejected from obesity science. This is a picture that fits most disciplines, especially
when their knowledge is politically significant.
Three important conclusions can be drawn from the critique above. First, the
science does not support the dominant convictions about the facts and the causes of
an obesity pandemic. Second, because there is no effective therapy, the solutions that
are offered make the problem worse. Dieting makes more people fat and it has
unhealthy side effects. Finally, as the medical science and the public policies
32
coincide with the dominant cultural prejudice against overweight people, they
produce and legitimize discriminatory practices. Stigma and social exclusion are the
result and there are several markets that benefit from such an exclusion.
The process how one becomes fat and the ways in which he/she deals with it is
a highly visual process. The process is both affected by the visuality surrounding one
and it proceeds with such a strong visual change in itself that in the end affects
society. The next chapter focuses on the visual representations of body image by
looking at examples of different body ideals throughout the history. The analysis
then follows to investigate critical approaches to beauty ideals, especially concerning
the female body. Finally, fat beauty is defended not as a beauty ideal but in order to
create consciousness on the limits of the present social construction of bodies and the
possible discriminative policies that come along with a social mania on the
perception of bodies.
33
CHAPTER 2
Representations of Body in All Sizes
2.1 Introduction
The present ideal of beauty is historically almost unique in the sense that
thinness is obsessively praised. In other times and cultures, people tend to admire fat
as a representation of health and wealth. The timing of the Western cultural change
seems to coincide with a change in the availability of food especially in the
beginning of the twentieth-century. One hypothesis is that as soon as even the poor
have enough to eat, the conspicuous consumption of food looses its appeal for the
rich. Then people with economic and social power start to think of obesity in
negative terms and associate fat people with classic sins such as gluttony, sloth, lust
and greed.
Recent feminist analysis of Western cultural preferences focus strongly on fat
politics. This kind of analysis holds that ‘the greater the female position of power (in
public and economic life), the greater the enforcement of an impossible weight and
beauty norm’. This leads to the conclusion that ‘thinness is yet another tool men use
to keep women down’.46 In this feminist tradition, LeBesco’s Revolting Bodies is
about ‘the struggle to redefine fat identity’. She reminds us that ‘fat people are
widely represented in the popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as
revolting – they are agents of abhorrence and disgust’. However, if ‘we think of
revolting in terms of overthrowing authority, rebelling, protesting, and rejecting, then
corpulence carries a whole new weight as a subversive cultural practice that calls into
46 J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 85-86.
34
question received notions about health, beauty, and nature’.47 Similar theories focus
more on fat politics as a tool of the upper class to rule the lower classes and the facts
agree with such analysis in so far as it is true that women face much stricter weight
limits that men, well-educated and richer people are thinner than less educated poor
people.
Between 1880 and 1920, the Western cultural symbolism of fatness and
thinness reversed. Though heaviness had signified prosperity in the nineteenthcentury,
as food prices fell, and as the discovery of the calorie as a unit of food
energy revolutionized especially Americans' understanding of nutrition and weight,
in the early twentieth century slimness became a marker of prosperity and privilege.
A thin body represented not only superior knowledge of the new food science, but
one's ability to purchase such costly foods as vegetables and lean meats, rather than
the cheap, starchy staples associated with the immigrant poor. Peter Stern states that,
in middle-class women in the 1920's in the West, a lean body signified a rejection of
an older, Victorian maternal ideal and the embrace of a modern sexualized identity
centered on youthfulness and physical display. As the century progressed, fatness in
both sexes acquired connotations of laziness, gluttony, and even psychopathology;
by the 1960's, fat bodies were regularly described by medical and psychiatric
discourses as deviant, asocial, and diseased. In popular culture, fat bodies were
rendered grotesque, marginal, and in many cases, invisible.48
Richard Klein’s book Eat Fat offers a similar analysis in that he focuses almost
entirely on culture. He does not plead for a mere acceptance of fat, he urges the
public to re-evaluate the reverence of fat that previously existed in Western culture,
and still exists in other cultures. In his last chapter, he tells that it ‘is not this book’s
intention to be political, to persuade or exhort or encourage. It aims to be prophetic’.
And his prophecy is that there ‘will come a day when fat will be beautiful and skinny
will be hated and feared, as it always has been’.49
Instead of focusing on the images that drive a slimness-obsessive society in the
last century, this chapter will focus on the beauty ideals of the past in order to follow
a similar path that Klein suggests. The first section provides images of ideal human
47 Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 1-2.
48 Peter Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York: New York
University Press, 1997), 167-89.
49 Richard Klein, Eat Fat (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 210-11.
35
bodies in fine arts starting from the prehistoric times until the beginning of twentiethcentury.
All the dominating art movements of the past centuries are presented briefly
in order to follow the focuses of different economic, cultural, and artistic movements
that were affecting the perception of human body forms and how those perceptions
were reflected in sculptures and paintings of their times.
The second section presents a specific historical analysis of 1970's and 80's on
the emergence of feminist artists and their criticism and discourses on the
representations of the female body. With a change of women's position in the work
place, especially after the WWII, the body ideals changed drastically manipulating
women to fit into norms that are too perfect to be natural. Art that focused directly on
issues of the body as a theme surfaced dramatically in the late 1960's and 1970's by
women artists that was inspired by the activism of political movement for women's
rights. In the 1980's, feminists continued to engage with politicized issues pertaining
directly to the body. Feminist movement in visual arts was highly concerning the
position of women in the social structure and that was the main focus of their artistic
production. Instead of analyzing how their reactions were visually presented, most of
the time very direct and simple, the aim of this section is to explain the issues that
were discussed by woman artists to create a ground for their artistic production in the
field of visual arts which has always been based on the male gaze.
The following section provides the analysis of a contemporary Turkish feminist
artist Canan Şenol's series of seven works called Perfect Beauty. In that series, Şenol
makes visible the Ottoman understanding of female beauty with the miniatures she
uses. The texts in the artworks, based on the words of the 'sagacious' men of the
empire, give definitions of beauty of the Ottoman times. While Şenol criticizes the
dominance of the male gaze on female beauty with her series, she also points out the
differences between the beauty ideals of the past and the present.
The chapter closes arguing that beauty ideals concerning the female body has
changed many times within the history and plump women were represented most of
the time as the ideals. Based on the changing role of women since the modern times,
unnatural and extreme slimness became the new ideal. If the present social
constructions on the body change, the ideals of beauty will change again. Women
artists play a significant role in the process of creating that change and they should
oppose the dominant power exercised on the female bodies by being conscious about
their bodies and push others for such an awareness.
36
2.2 Ideal Bodies Throughout the Western History of Arts
Human figure is the most analyzed and represented form in the history of
visual arts. Artists of each different era in the history tried to capture the ideal
human body based on the cultural; economic, religious and artistic constructions of
their times. The definition of beauty is not an immanent and objective quality of
things, since every age, place and social class formed its own ideal of it, ideal beauty
is corresponding with the aesthetic feeling of people of a respecting period. Although
it is difficult to explain beauty with a general definition, it often appeared in the
artworks of the past centuries based on some combination of inner beauty, which
includes psychological factors such as personality, intelligence, grace, politeness,
charisma, integrity, and elegance, and outer beauty, which includes physical factors,
such as health, youthfulness, facial symmetry, and body proportions. Mimesis was
the driving force of the Formalist Art that is why artists until the modern era tried to
capture all the properties of human beauty according to the norms of their times.
Contemporary era brought ground-breaking changes to artistic traditions, and it
became harder to follow the norms of beauty as art was freed from forms. On the
other hand, the use of imagery also exceeded the realm of visual arts and became a
commonly used medium in all different areas of social life. While visual arts was
freed from mimetic forms, 'the image' in printed and visual media created its own
ideals of the human body. Since 'Aesthetics' is not the main concern of the mass
media, the common ground for beauty that was including both inner and outer
beauty, as explained above, lost its strength and harmony in the consumable image.
This part of the analysis focuses on the representations of the ideal body
images in the history of visual arts excluding the contemporary era. Most of the
artworks presented below are taken from Lilith Gallery's50 on-line art history archive
on European images and show how female beauty was perceived and reflected for
the sake of the analysis that will follow in the next section on the emergence of
feminist artists and dominance of male gaze throughout the history of Western arts.
50 The Lilith Gallery of Toronto, http://lilithgallery.com/.
37
Prehistoric Times
The most famous early image of a
woman is Venus of Villendorf that was found
in Austria from prehistoric times, about 22.000
years ago.51 The sculpture is small in size, only
11 cm of limestone, but great in design, as it is
very elaborately composed and carried out. It
is believed, that it had ritual functions
concerning fertility. Her great age and
pronounced female forms established the
Venus of Willendorf as an icon of prehistoric
art. As the earliest known representation, she
became the first woman, on the fascinating
reality of the female body. The sculpture
shows a woman with a large stomach that
overhangs but does not hide her pubic area. A
roll of fat extends around her middle, joining
with large but rather flat buttocks.
A characteristic of all the Paleolithic "Venus" figurines exhibited by the
Willendorf statuette is the lack of a face, which for Withcombe, arguing that the face
is a key feature in human identity, means that she is to be regarded as an anonymous
sexual object rather than a person; it is her physical body and what it represents that
is important. Another characteristic of Paleolithic "Venus" figurines is the lack of
feet. In the archaeological report of her finding, the Willendorf statuette is described
as perfectly preserved in all its parts, so it appears she never had feet. It has been
suggested that possibly the intention was to curtail the figurine's power to leave
wherever she had been placed. A more common explanation is that because the
statuette served as a fertility idol, the sculptor included only those parts of the female
body needed for the conception and nurture of children.52 In any case, compared with
the other Paleolithic figurines in this group, the Venus of Willendorf is a remarkably
realistic representation of a fat woman.
51 Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, “Women in Prehistory: The Venus of Willendorf,” Images of
Women in Ancient Art, (2003), http://witcombe.sbc.edu/willendorf/willendorfdiscovery.html .
52 Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, “Women in Prehistory: Woman from Willendorf,” Images of
Women in Ancient Art, (2003), http://witcombe.sbc.edu/willendorf/willendorfwoman.html .
38
Figure 1: Venus of
Willendorf, 10.000-15.000 BC,
Austria Limestone, 11,5 cm;
Vienna
Ancient Egypt
The woman figure on the ivory plaque
on the right is Ankhesenamun, the wife of the
Paharaoh Tutankhamun, is almost thirty-five
hundred years old, from ancient Egypt. This
part of the ivory coffer lid depicts the wife, but
the original was decorated with a carved relief
of a garden promenade of Tutankhamun and
his wife Ankhesenamun together.
As a common female beauty form of
ancient Egypt, Ankhesenamun has a delicate
and refined fashion, and a slim female body. It
is stated that the ladies were shaved entirely,
and to emphasize this, their pleated skirts were
worn wide open in front.53
Antiquity: Ancient Greece
This well known drawing by Leonardo
Da Vinci, about 1500, relates to the
architectural treatise, to survive from
Antiquity, by Vitruvus Pollio. Although it is
unillustrated, it profoundly influenced art
throughout history, especially in the period
Renaissance. Vitruv, in the first century BC,
reports the classical ideal of beauty as derived
from symmetry and a modular relationship, of
the parts to the whole on a mathematical basis.
The smaller part compares to the larger as this
to the whole, that is called the Golden Ratio.54
53 Squid Who is Ankhesenamun, “Ankhesenamun-Tutankhamun's Wife,” Squid Who.,
http://www.squidoo.com/ankhesenamun
54 Helen South, excerpt from the Ten Books of Architecture by Vitruvius Polio ,
http://drawsketch.about.com/od/leonardodavincidrawings/a/vitruviusman.htm
39
Figure 2: Ankhesenamun,
Wife of Pharaoh Tut, 1350
BC, Ivory chest (part 30x20
cm), Cairo
Figure 3: Leonardo Da
Vinci, Vitruvian Man, ~1500,
Drawing, after Vitruvius 1st C.
BC; Venice, Acad.
Architecture was seen as an imitation of
nature with human proportions. Vitruv
distinguished the three column types as Doric,
Ionic and Corinthian, the proportions deriving
respectively from a man, a matron and a young
girl. Art and science (and also nature) were
considered as completely homogenous, as a
unit.55
Socrates postulated, that the main task of
the artist was to give a standard idealized contour
of the human body in exact proportions to gain
balance and harmony. According to him, the
artist was already two removes away from the
ideal because the craftsman was the first one to
imitate “the idea” for useful purposes and the
artist was imitating the products of the craftsman.
Human beauty, in that sense, was already
mimicking the idea of beauty so the artist had to
use the same proportions in order not to delude
the viewer into imperfection.56 One can still
admire this approximity of ideal proportions in
the statue of the Venus de Milo, one of the most
famous works of art history.
In the same way as this beautiful ideal
image of a man's body, the so-called Warrior of
Riace, found in the Mediterranean Sea in August
1972, now in Naples.57 These personified ideals
of classical beauty have influenced art throughout
the centuries until today.
55 Ibid.
56 Plato, The Republic, (United Kingdom: Penguin Books Ltd., 2007), 421-39.
57 J. Alsop, "Warriors From A Watery Grave," National Geographic 163 (1983): 821.
40
Figure 4: Venus de Milo,
2nd C. BC, Marble, 203 cm
high
Figure 5:Warrior of Riace,
Bronze, Over 2 m high; South
Italy, Reggio di Calabria
Antiquity: Hellenism/Ancient Rome
The Hellenistic conception of art derived from natural life, as the Romans were
more pragmatic than the Greeks. It was realistic and therefore allowed the first
individual portraits in history. The image below shows the sculpture of Aphrodite
Kallipygos, goddess with perfectly shaped buttocks, made about 100 BC.
The rear becomes the focus of attention, the
main view.
Early Middle Ages
In the genesis scenes of the Grandval Bible
from the early Middle Ages, about 840, it is
possible to see, how the consideration of physical
characteristics, the proportions and harmony of
the design, had become unimportant. The human
beings live religiously, beyond earthly reality,
and the emphasis on human beauty fades away in
God's garden.
Late Middle Ages
Below, there is a paradise scene on a
miniature from the book Les trés riches heures
du Duc de Berry, a prayer book of the French
king's brother, originating from about 1400.58 It
is not difficult to realize that a significant
change in art had taken place from the rough
drawings of the Early Middle Ages to the soft style of the Late Middle Ages. A
luxurious, refined fashion emerges again, with slim silhouettes. The ideal of a
beautiful female body appears as having a belly and looking pregnant.
58 University of Chicago Humanities, “Les trés riches heures du Duc de Berry,” University of
Chicago, http://humanities.uchicago.e du/images/heures/heures.html .
41
Figure 6: Aphrodite
Kallipygos, Marble, 150 cm,
Copy of ~ 100 BC; Naples
Figure 7: Caroline Bookpaintry,
Adam and Eve, Grandval Bible ~
840; London, Brit. M.
Early Renaissance
The Renaissance intended to
revive the classical antique style of
symmetry and proportions as their
ideal of beauty. The treatise of Vitruv
inspired the world. At the same time
the artisan changed from a craftsman
to a scientist and intellectual. Now
attention is drawn from religious to
profane, worldly themes, for the first
time in history after the Hellenistic
era of Ancient Rome. Boticelli's Birth
of Venus is one of the most famous
paintings of the Early Renaissance.
The ideals of female body that are
personified below in the painting of Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, had an immense
affect until modern times, as well as this special invention of a reclining nude.
Figure 9: Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1486, Oil on Canvas, 175 x 278 cm;
Uffiz
42
Figure 8: Limbourg Bros., Trés riches
heures: Paradise, Praying book of the
Duke of Berry, ~ 1440; Paris
Figure 10: Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 1505, Oil on Canvas, 82 x 73 cm;
Dresden
Late Renaissance
A painting in the style of late
Renaissance, that is Mannerism. Mannerism is
notable for its intellectual sophistication as
well as its artificial, as opposed to naturalistic,
qualities. San Friano painted human figures at
a diamond mine in an exaggerated manner,
such as excessive limbs that are far away from
classical proportions.
Baroque
Baroque style is characterized by dynamic
movement, clear and visible emotion, and selfconfident
rhetoric. The intensity and immediacy
of baroque art, observed in such things as the
convincing rendering of cloth and skin textures, is
compelling. On the left, there is the Wife of King
Kandaules by Jacob Jordaens, contemporary of
Rubens. The ladies in Flemish Baroque Paintings
43
Figure11: Maso da San
Friano, Diamond Mine ~ 1570,
Oil Painting; Florence, Pal.
Vecchio
Figure 12: Jacob Jordaens,
The Wife of King Kandaules,
1646, Oil Painting; Stockholm
are in fuller-bodies, luxuriant and voluptuous. Below, there is a painting from
Rubens. Rubens is famous of his history paintings of mythological and allegorical
subjects.59 The female figures in this painting are beyond being plump, especially the
lower figure almost have the muscle structures of a man at her back. Also the
women's arms and legs are far away from being feminine in the present sense.
Figure 13: P.P. Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, 1618, Oil On
Canvas, 224 x 210.5 cm; Munich.
59 Julius S. Held, "On the Date and Function of Some Allegorical Sketches by Rubens," in Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 219.
44
Rococo
The later Baroque style gradually gave
way to a more decorative style, the Rococo.
The word Rococo is seen as a combination
of the French rocaille, meaning stone, and
coquilles, meaning shell, due to reliance on
these objects as motifs of decoration.60 In
Rococo, ladies became graceful and petite,
the ideal was a very slim waist line. On the
right, there is Leda Commedia dell'arte by
Franz Anton Bustelli.
In general, the style was best expressed
through delicate porcelain sculpture rather
than imposing marble statues. The colors
became refracted with white or even dark.
Classicism
The painting below, Jupiter and Thetis is steeped in the traditions of both
classical and neoclassical art, most notably in its grand scale. It was painted to meet
the artist's obligations to the French Academy, and although its overhand tone
correctly reflected the patriarchal bias of Napoleon's regime in its contrast between
male power and female subservience, it is generally regarded as a rejection of such
values. Ingres highly regarded the painting, and in a manner it sets out the great
motifs of his career: the voluptuousness of the female character and the authoritative
austerity on the male deity.61
60 Monique Wagner, From Gaul to De Gaulle: An Outline of French Civilization, (New York: Peter
Lang, 2005):139.
61 Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815. (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1993), 206-7.
45
Figure 14: F.A. Bustelli, Leda
Commedia dell'arte, ~ 1760,
Porcelain, 20 cm high
46
Figure 15: Jean Dominique Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis, ~ 1810, Oil on Canvas, 330
x 260 cm; Aix-en-Provence
Romanticism
Two of Goya's best known paintings are
The Nude Maya and The Clothed Maya. They
depict the same woman in the same pose, naked
and clothed, respectively. Without a pretense to
allegorical or mythological meaning, the painting
was "the first totally profane life-size female nude
in Western art". In 1813, the Inquisition
confiscated both works as 'obscene'.62
In Romanticism, another classicistic era, the
ideal again approaches Antiquity with a flowing
silhouette.
Orientalism
Half a century later in a new epoch, Ingres
turns to the Orientalist current with a different
sense of beauty of soft curves and magical
fairyland. Ingres copies a passage entitled
"Description of the women's bath at
Adrionaple" by Lady Mary Montegau in his
notebook in 1825:
“I believe there were two hundred women there in all. Beautiful naked
women in various poses... some conversing, others at their work, others
drinking coffee or tasting a sorbet, and many stretched out nonchalantly,
whilst their slaves (generally ravishing girls of 17 or 18 years) plaited
their hair in fantastical shapes.”63
62 Fred Licht, Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art, (New York: Universe Books, 1979),
83.
63 Louvre Museum, “The Turkish Bath,” http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/detail_notice.jsp?
CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673226335&CURRENT_LLV_NOTICE%3C
%3Ecnt_id=10134198673226335&FOLDER%3C
%3Efolder_id=9852723696500815&bmLocale=en .
47
Figure 17: Ingres, Turkish Bath,
1862, Oil on Canvas, 108 cm; Paris
Figure 16: Francisco
Goya, The Mayas, 1798-1800,
Oil on Canvas, 97 × 190 cm;
Madrid, Prado
Impressionism
Toulouse-Lautrec's painting Ball at Moulin
Rouge shows one generation later in the epoch of
Impressionism with the new fashion of slim waist
again, and the buttocks are emphasized again
after almost exactly 2000 years. Toulouse-
Lautrec's depiction of people relied on his
painterly style which is linear and with great
emphasis on contour.
Art Nouveau/Jugendstil
Jugendstil or Art Nouveau liberates
the female body contours from corset
once again, and the natural curves
appear again as a hundred years ago, but
this time on a flat, patterned surfaces. On
the right, there is Hodler's huge painting
The Day II of 1905.
Expressionism
After the horror of the First World War only
practicability was important. It was not important
to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression
of the artistic subject matter; the Expressionists
focused on capturing vivid emotional reactions
through powerful colors and dynamic
compositions instead.64 In the era of Bauhaus the
difference between the sexes vanishes for the first
time in art history. Curves are no longer an ideal,
as on the left in the Dancing in Baden-Baden by
Max Beckmann, 1923.
64 Artmovements, Expressionism, www.artmovements.co.uk/expressionism.htm.
48
Figure 18: Toulouse-
Lautrec, Ball At the Moulin
Rouge, ~ 1890, Oil on
Canvas,122x 140 cm;
Philadelphia Coll.
Figure 19: Ferdinand Hodler,
19.The Day II, 1905, 160x360 cm;
Zurich
Figure 20: Max
Beckmann, Dancing in
Baden-Baden, 1923, Oil on
Canvas, 100x65cm; Munich
Modern Era
Primarily a figurative artist, Modigliani known
for his paintings and sculptures in a modern style
characterized by mask-like faces and elongation
of form. The Reclining Female Nude, also known
as the Red Nude by Modigliani65, presents a
beautiful and ideal body that is closer to the
beauty ideal of the present.
Nevertheless, in contemporary art the variety is vast and there seems to be no
more universal ideal. Although the images presented above offer a limited analysis of
the human body ideals of the whole Western art history, the artworks chosen are of
the most important ones of their times and they roughly offer a chronological
understanding on the changes of the human body ideals. One important issue to note
here is that all the ideal body forms are presented through the male gaze. It is only
very recent that women speak of the ways they perceive beauty just for a few
decades. When compared to the history of male dominance in visual arts as well as
other fields of social life, women's involvement in art production is of great value to
comprehend the changing social norms on the body.
Next section presents the important theories and women's critical standpoint in
art production especially concerning the female body. Transformation of women's
involvement in visual arts from 'the object' to 'the subject' was only possible first by
questioning what that object—the body—meant to the subject.
65 Artchive, Amedeo Modigliani, www.artchive.com/artchive/M/modigliani.html.
49
Figure 21: Amadeo
Modigliani Reclining Female
Nude, 1917, Oil on Canvas,
60.6 x 92.7 cm; Milan
2.3 Critique of the Male Gaze in Art History
The nature of female imagery in art has been an important issue for feminist art
history. As art historians began to think of art as “a purposeful, active, and vital
shaper of culture,”66 in Larry Silver's words, images of women in art were seen to
embody different and more complex meanings. The issue of woman's presence in art
as an embodiment of male fears and desires was incisively discussed by John Berger.
He used the personification of Vanitas as an example of men's moralizing through
the female nude: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her,
you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally
condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.”
The real function of the mirror, the symbol of woman's vanity, is to make her
“connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.”67
Berger raised three significant issues in this passage: first, the use of the female
nude for the purpose of hypocritical moralizing in an androcentric society; second,
the moral condemnation of the woman whose nakedness the male artist liked to paint
and the male patron liked to own; and, third, the use of the mirror to make woman an
accomplice in her own objectification as “sight.” Central to these and most other
treatments of the female nude is the notion that “Men act and women appear. Men
look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”68
Linda Nochlin, in “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,”
demonstrated that the meaning of the term “erotic” is confined to “erotic for men.”
She observed that “the imagery of sexual delight or provocation has always been
created about women for men's enjoyment, by men,” and added that the equivalent
sexual imagery created by women has been blocked by “woman's lack of her own
erotic territory on the map of nineteenth-century reality.” This, she believes,
happened because “women have no imagery available with which to express their
particular view-point.”69
A different approach to an analysis of images of women was taken by Carol
66 Larry Silver, "The State of Research in Northern European Art of the Renaissance Era," Art
Bulletin 118, (1986): 527.
67 (Berger 2008, 47)
68 Ibid.
69 Linda Nochlin, Woman as Sex Object. Studies in Erotic Art 1730-1970, ed. Thomas B. Hess and
Linda Nochlin, (New York: Newsweek Inc., 1972), 379.
50
Duncan, who discussed the effect of images of women on the viewer, and their role
as shapers of culture and ideology. In “Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in
Eighteenth-Century French Art,” Duncan situated the increasing popularity of such
secular themes as happy motherhood and marital bliss in French art and literature
within the complex social, cultural, and economic parameters of the growing
campaign in eighteenth-century France to convince women that motherhood was
their natural and joyful role. She concluded that both art and literature were part of a
campaign, at a time of social and political transition, to convince women of their
proper roles within the emerging modern bourgeois state.70
In “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,”
Duncan discussed the power of art to position and control those it represents, in this
case the female nude as used by the Fauves, Cubists, German Expressionists, and
other vanguard artists before World War I. She asserted that their images of
powerless, often faceless nudes, and “passive available flesh,” are witnesses to the
artist's sexual virility. These women are represented as “the other,” a race apart, “in
total opposition to all that is civilized and human.”71 According to Duncan, such
images reflect the male need to demonstrate cultural supremacy at a time when the
struggle for women's rights was at its height.
In a third article, Duncan, similarly but more specifically than Nochlin,
redefined the basic meaning of the term “erotic,” not as “a self-evident universal
category, but as a culturally defined concept that is ideological in nature.”72 She
demonstrated that female nudes by artists as stylistically diverse as Delacroix, Ingres,
Munch, Miro, Picasso, and Willem de Kooning are conditioned by the same personal
psychology. They also have the same effect, to teach women to see themselves
“in terms of dominating male interests.” The obsession with the confrontation
between the submissive female nude and the sexual-artistic will of the male artist in
these paintings, in which the male “I” prevails on the fundamental instinctual level of
experience, can be seen as an expression of cultural symptoms.73 Her article was
important in recognizing and articulating the ideological construct of the female in
art and the asymmetry of meanings carried by male and female images.
70 Carol Duncan, "Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth- Century French Art," in
Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, New
York, 1982 200-19.
71 Ibid., 381-83.
72 Carol Duncan, "The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art," Heresies 1 (1977): 47.
73 Ibid.
51
2.4 The Female Sensibility
One of the most heated debates during the first decade of feminism in the
1970's, which seemed to demand a position from most writers and artists, was the
possibility of a female sensibility and aesthetic expressed in contemporary art. Gloria
Orenstein considered it a “central theoretical question.” Non-commital concerning
the nature of its existence, but indicating that the concept of the female sensibility
produced a “new liberating tendency in art for many women,” Orenstein pointed to
the self-conscious investigation of female body imagery, and of female experience
generally, as well as the new audience of females that it addressed.74 Womanhouse
project, a women-only art installation and performance, that grew out of Judy
Chicago's and Miriam Schapiro's Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of
the Arts in 1972 , was one of the first manifestations of the female aesthetic. In
reference to the project, Schapiro speaks of West Coast women bringing a “new
subject matter into their art - the subject matter was the content of their own life
experiences, and the aesthetic form was to be dictated by this new content. What
formerly was considered trivial was heightened to the level of serious art- making.”75
Most feminist artists not only seemed to accept the existence of such an aesthetic on
some level, but also the need to explore it, as Vivian Gornick pointed out in 1973:
To achieve wholeness women must break through to the center of their
experience, and hold that experience up to the light of consciousness if
their lives are to be transformed. They must struggle to "see" more
clearly, to remember more accurately, to describe more fully who and
what they have always been. For centuries the cultural record of our
experience has been a record of male experience. It is the male sensibility
that has apprehended and described our life. It is the maleness of
experience that has been a metaphor for human existence.76
A whole body of research in psychology, literature, art, and sociology,
indicates that women perceive reality differently than men, and therefore have
different expectations of and responses to human experience. Carol Gilligan's
psychological study presents the view of many of these revisionist texts with the
74 Gloria Orenstein, "Review Essay: Art History," Signs 1 (Winter 1975): 511-12.
75 Miriam Schapiro, "The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse," Art Journal 31
(1972): 268.
76 Vivian Gornick, "Toward a Definition of Female Sensibility", Essays in Feminism, (New York:
Harper and Row, 1978), 112.
52
following thesis: “Given the differences in women's conceptions of self and morality,
women bring to the life cycle a different point of view and order human experience
in terms of different priorities.”77
The question was first formulated with respect to the sources and the nature of
the female sensibility. Was it biologically determined? Or was it purely a social
construct? Lucy Lippard claimed to be able to recognize female sexual or body
imagery in art by women as such; “Vaginal iconology was as much a political as an
essentialist or erotic statement, an attempt to challenge the notion of female
inferiority and 'penis envy,'78 as well as to establish and reclaim a sense of female
power.” Miriam Schapiro, too, said that “our discovery of the 'central core image'
was a way of making ideological statements for ourselves, a kind of subject matter
that was surfacing in the art of other women and finally an explication of how that
subject matter can be disguised.”79
Elaine Showalter's study of what she calls feminist bio-criticism concludes that
“it is useful and important to study biological imagery, but there can be no
expression of the body which is unmediated by linguistic, social, and literary
structures.”80 Her ideal model centers on a theory of women's culture that
incorporates ideas about women's body, language, and psyche but interprets them in
relation to the social contexts in which they occur. French feminist Julia Kristeva
also writes with regard to the way woman's different viewpoint conditions her place
in the world:
Sexual difference - which is at once biological, physiological, and
relative to reproduction is translated by and translates a difference in the
relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social
contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and
meaning.81
Many contemporary feminists focus on the question of representation and
gender difference. Postmodernist artists and writers believe that representation is at
77 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 22.
78 Lucy Lippard, "Sexual Politics: Art Style," in From the Center Feminist Essays in Women's Art,
(New York: Hacker Art Books, 1976), 29.
79 (Schapiro 1972, 270)
80 Elaine Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics," in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine
Showalter, (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 133.
81 Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. et al.,
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), 39.
53
the very root of the difference between male and female in the society. Both
feminists and postmodern cultural philosophers understand representation not as a
mimesis of some ultimate reality, but rather as a way of reflecting the culture's vision
of itself. Representation thus legitimizes culture's dominant ideology, and is
therefore inevitably politically motivated. It constructs difference through a
representation of preconditioned concepts about gender that inform all the
institutions and that are at the very foundation of the society's ideology and system of
beliefs. The artist Mary Kelly claims that “there is no preexisting sexuality, no
essential femininity. To look at the processes of their construction is also to see the
possibility of deconstructing the dominant forms of representing difference and
justifying subordination in the social order.”82
Another related concern in feminist art and theory is the exploration of female
sexuality. Since the feminist art movement began in 1970, feminist artists have been
getting in touch with and reclaiming their bodies, their sexual feelings and
expressing those in art. In the mid-1970's, feminist artists such as Joan Semmel and
Hannah Wilke attempted to generate new expressions of female sexuality that denied
what they saw as the passivity and idealization of past images of women represented
through the male gaze. Harmony Hammond states that in such “women-centered”
art, women present themselves as “strong, healthy, active, comfortable with their
bodies, in contrast to the misogynist attitudes toward women's bodies and bodily
functions that we observe throughout the history of western art.”83
Lisa Tickner indicates the problem with such an attempt to express female
sexuality in art when she questions the basic assumption that women “will find a
cultural voice to express their own sexuality.” She expresses reservations about any
static definition of sexuality:
The fallacy here exists in the implication that there is a definitely defined
male sexuality that can simply find expression and an already existent
female sexuality that simply lacks it. Women's social and cultural
relations have been located within patriarchal culture, and their identities
have been moulded in accordance with the roles and images which that
ideology has sanctioned.84
Women had no language before with which to express their sexuality except
82 Mary Kelly, "No Essential Femininity: A Conversation between Mary Kelly and Paul Smith,"
Parachute 26, (Spring 1982): 35.
83 Harmony Hammond, "A Sense of Touch," New Art Examiner (Summer 1979): 78.
84 Lisa Tickner, "The Body Politics: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970," Art History 1
(1978): 238.
54
the male one, and it is difficult to determine even what that sexuality is in womencentered
terms. The first question then was how, against this inherited framework,
women are to construct new meanings which can also be understood. Tickner thus
maintains that “the most significant area of women and erotic art today is that of the
de-eroticizing, the de-colonizing of the female body; the challenging of its taboos;
and the celebration of its rhythms and pains, of fertility and childbirth.”85
2.5 “Unfixing” the Feminine
A second generation of feminists has abandoned the issue of female sexuality,
and of female sensibility, in favor of an investigation of the workings and
interactions of gender differences rather than the nature of the specifically female.
Instead of restructuring the “colonized and alienated female body” as Tickner saw
many first-generation feminist artists doing,86 from Sylvia Sleigh to Hannah Wilke,
artists such as Barbara Kruger and Mary Kelly are deconstructing it. Those artists
analyze “how meaning is produced and organized” and therefore undermine “the
structures of domination.”87 As Jane Weinstock records, this attitude expresses the
shift that has occurred in feminist art and criticism in the 1980's.
Early states of feminist thought emphasized the condition and experience of
being female, and attempted to diminish and minimize the importance of differences
because difference from men meant inequality and continued oppression. Women
thus set out to document the worlds of women and their experience, previously
excluded from analysis. The shift in emphasis for second-generation feminists has
been not to minimize difference but to assert its importance as a crucial focus of
study.
In other words, the first position, sometimes termed essentialist, conceives of
woman as a fixed category determined through societal and cultural institutions, and
less often through the concept of an inherent and biological female nature. Its
advocates often attempt to characterize or celebrate specifically female attributes,
within a separatist mode, or to reveal the history and the nature of the repressions of
woman within those categories. The second sees woman as an unfixed category,
85 Ibid., 239.
86 Ibid., 247.
87 Jane Weinstock, "A Lass, A Laugh and a Lad," Art in America (Summer 1983): 8.
55
constantly in process, examined through her representations and ideological
constructions within a male system. Rather than a definition of gender per se, of
woman, the issue becomes, as Tickner puts it, “the problematic of culture itself, in
which definitions of femininity are produced and contested and in which cultural
practices cannot be derived from or mapped directly onto a biological gender.”88
Second-generation artists and critics are concerned rather with an interrogation of an
unfixed femininity produced in specific systems of signification:
The most important contribution of the feminism under consideration
here is the recognition of the relations between representation and sexed
subjectivity in process, and of the need to intervene productively within
them. The artists considered here hold the common aim of "unfixing" the
feminine, unmasking the relations of specularity that determine its
appearance in representation, and undoing its position as a "marked term"
which ensures the category of the masculine as something central and
secure. 89
Tickner links the development of the later position to the understanding of the
“psycho-social construction of sexual difference”:
The result was a shift in emphasis from equal rights struggles in the
sexual division of labor and a cultural feminism founded on the
revaluation of an existing biological or social femininity to a recognition
of the processes of sexual differentiation, the instability of gender
positions, and the hopelessness of excavating a free or original femininity
beneath the layers of patriarchal oppression.90
The contribution of the first generation of American feminists has been
important as groundwork, despite its limitations. Feminist art historians were first
interested in recovering the lost history of women artists and in reinterpreting images
from a female viewpoint in order to reveal and critically analyze the roles women
have been assigned in history. They also have criticized the canon of art history seen
as a linear progression of male geniuses, based on a hierarchy of art still embodied in
art history textbooks. As it became clear that these judgments were arbitrary, and not
universal absolutes, women artists and critics began to question the nature of the
discipline that nurtured them.
88 Lisa Tickner, "Sexuality and/ in Representation: Five British Artists," Difference. On
Representation and Sexuality, exh. cat., (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984),
23.
89 Ibid., 28.
90 Ibid., 19.
56
2.6 Contemporary Turkish Feminist Art: Canan Şenol's Perfect Beauty
Series
Canan Şenol is a contemporary feminist artist that occupies a position similar
to the second-generation feminist artists of the 1980's America with her discourse
and artistic approach. She criticizes the domination and possession of the power
sources on individuals with a feminist standpoint, focusing on the basis of
patriarchal, religious and political factors shaping the daily life. In her own words:
I describe my work with the feminist slogan that is still pertinent
today: “Personal is political.” I start from the point of view that the
ideological system is following the path to “body restriction” by
spying on and normalizing us by means of controlling our personal
lives. I am questioning the governing power of such institutions as
religion, government, society and family on our private lives.
I focus my work on the concepts that are glorified, that are
transformed into taboos, that are not talked about, and that have a
continuum without being questioned. Daily life has been the biggest
influence on my work. From this point of view the artwork becomes
provocative, aggressive, erotic, risky and violent. Artwork, then, has
the act of meeting the private with public space.91
Born in Istanbul in 1970, Şenol graduated from the Department of Business
Administration in the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Marmara
University. She continued her study in the Painting Department in the Faculty of
Fine Arts at Marmara University and graduated in 1998. In 2006, she studied at the
School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 92
Her series of seven works called ‘Perfect Beauty’, exhibited in Scope Basel
2009 before, and in her solo exhibition ‘Even a Cat Has a Mustache’ opened in 21st
of January 2010 at Gallery X-ist, interrogates the mutuality of body politics, and
signalizes the masculine point of view behind the opposing present and past beauty
definitions.
91 Brooklyn Museum, “Canan Şenol,”
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/gallery/canan_senol.php.
92 Turkish Culture Foundation, “Canan Şenol,”
http://www.turkishculture.org/whoiswho/visual-arts/canan-senol-1178.htm.
57
In all the seven works, the miniatures she re-worked are almost the same as the
originals from the Ottoman archives with a slight manipulation of the women's faces.
Şenol replaced the original faces with her own face. On the left side, she uses
traditional calligraphy around the images she created that are resembling the
miniature style. In an interview she gave to İlke Kamar from BirGün Newspaper, she
explains the strong correlation of the past and the present in her works as such:
While the past is refreshing memory, it aims to question and make the
present clear. Art history comprises a visual memory. Although the
written history is in a way reliable, it might be re-written. That is why I
believe that the visual and verbal memory is very important for memory
continuum. Art history that involves the past visual memory results in a
comprehension of the reasonings of today's policies. In that sense, the
use of miniature language in my works helps to refresh the visual
memory of the past and memory continuum.93
93 BirGün Gazetesi, “Kedilerin de bıyıkları vardır,” trans. Pelin Güre,
http://www.birgun.net/culture_index.php?
news_code=1264597572&year=2010&month=01&day=27.
58
Figure 22: Perfect Beauty Series – Blackness, mixed media on special paper, 35*50 cm, 2009
Darkness (English translation of the text; “Perfect Beauty – Canan Şenol” X-ist ex. cat., 2010)
Sagacious men have stated that, regarding darkness, or the elements that ornament and add
grace to the face of a woman, there are four that beautify her appearance. The first is black hair, the
second is black eyelashes, the third, black brows and the fourth, black eyes.
Instead of creating a new female sensibility, Şenol attacks the prevalent norms
on the female body with a great sense of humor. Although the language she prefers
to use is not common anymore, the same discourse still applies to the contemporary
woman on how she should look and act like. Her miniature-like images on the left
side of the artworks offer a direct criticism to the defined rules of the past on the
female appearance and a subtle one to the present definitions of women's bodies that
are just not written as boldly as the past rules but still dominate the society by using
other mediums.
59
Figure 23: Perfect Beauty Series – Smallness, mixed media on special paper, 30*50 cm, 2009
Smallness (English translation of the text; “Perfect Beauty – Canan Şenol” X-ist ex. cat., 2010)
There are four elements which lend beauty from the aspect of small size. First, a small mouth
will always add perfection to the beloved's beauty. The second is small hands. The third is small
breasts, and the fourth is small feet.
60
Figure 24: Perfect Beauty Series – Tightness, mixed media on special paper, 35*50 cm, 2009
Tightness (English translation of the text; “Perfect Beauty – Canan Şenol” X-ist ex. cat., 2010)
It is from the standpoint of the tightness that the female organ perfects the beauty of the beloved.
Persons of discernment have come to understand that the tightness of the cleft is indicated by the
small mouth the beloved. If the end of her tongue is flat, that is an indication that her cranny is
extremely wet. If her nose is pointed, she will have but little desire for intercourse. If her chin is long,
her fissure will also be high, that is protuberant, its hairs sparse, and will resemble the breast of a
goose. If her chin is small, so will her aperture be deep. If the beloved's face is white and her neck
thick, her hips will be small and her cleft long and narrow. If the tops of her hand and feet are wellpadded,
her cranny will also be big and her pleasure in intercourse will be excessive. If their calves
are thick and tight, their lust will be great and they will be desirous of intercourse. If the body is
always warm, the lips red, the breasts firm and widely separated, this is a sign of exaggerated
licentiousness and an excessive pleasure in intercourse. A thickness of the lips signifies that the area
surrounding the aperture is thick as well, whereas thinness of the lips indicates a paucity of sensuality.
The possession from birth of large and heavily outlined eyes is proof of excessive licentiousness and
a small and narrow cleft. If the eyes are close to the head, or low-browed, it is an indication of a wide
cleft. Lovers can be separated into a few different classes according to the differences in their bodies.
This classification mandates that, if the female organ does not find a male tool that is appropriate to it
in terms of size and length, passion will not develop. What we speak of is that together with these
qualities, the shape of the head and face should also be well-proportioned and harmonic. That is, if
the head is large, the face should not be small; the body should be proportionate in every way, and
should be neither thin nor fat. She should be taut of skin and her complexion should be of a reddish
white or a reddish black, that is, the warm color of wheat; her hands should be well-proportioned and
soft, her conversation sweet, her blood hot, her laughter gentle, her smile courteous, and she should
be attractive and arousing.
İlke Kamar asks Canan Şenol her understanding of beauty and what the
deficiencies of “perfected beauty” by the exercised power are. Şenol replies:
I produce my artworks mostly on the bio-political concepts. If
we evaluate the past and the present from a bio-political perspective—
that body is influenced and shaped by the political power—we see that
female body is materialized as the object of desire and exposed to
strict physical limitations both in the past and the present. One of the
most important reasons why I made the series “Perfect Beauty” is that
I wanted to show how different are the past definitions of beauty from
the present ones.
While slimness is the beauty norm today and thousands of diet
products are being produced to promote losing weight, voluptuous
women are the ideals of the past. For sure, different dieting options
were promoted in the past in order to become plump. If we analyze the
past now, the present definitions of beauty lose their effect. Woman's
eyebrows and eyes should be black, cheeks red, hands and feet small
and body round... Although the two eras have different opposing
definitions of beauty when compared, one can see that beauty is
defined through the male gaze based on the control over female bodies
in both eras. Definitions of beauty are not important only for the social
gender policies but also effective on the control that the west applies
on the east. I don't think body politics are much different from any
other political areas, in fact they feed each other. 94
94 Ibid.
61
Figure 25: Perfect Beauty Series – Redness, mixed media on special paper, 30*50 cm, 2009
Redness (English translation of the text; “Perfect Beauty – Canan Şenol” X-ist ex. cat., 2010)
The elements of reddishness that beautify are four as well. The first is a red tongue, the second
is red lips, the third is red cheeks and the fourth, a red bottom, that is, reddish buttocks.
62
Figure 26: Perfect Beauty Series – Roundness, mixed media on special paper, 35*50 cm, 2009
Roundness (English translation of the text; “Perfect Beauty – Canan Şenol” X-ist ex. cat., 2010)
There are also four elements of rotundity that produce beauty. The first is the round form of
the face, the second roundness of the head, the third is roundness of the heels, and the fourth is the
roundness of the buttocks.
It should be well understood that females can be divided into three categories from the
standpoint of achieving satisfaction; these are: fast, medium, and slow. For example, females who are
tall and narrow-waisted are quickly satisfied, those who are short and thick-waisted are slow to be
satisfied, and the satisfaction of those with intermediate bodies is medium. The indication of orgasm
is as follows: she relaxes her hands and feet, her eyes become smaller and she is embarrassed to come
face to face with the male and covers her face with her arm, her brow perspires and joints loosen, and
she begins to tremble and embraces her partner. These are the signs of having achieved satisfaction.
If the male and his beloved achieve orgasm at the same moment, he will not find greater pleasure and
delectation than the woman, and this will increase the interest and love between them. However, if
their satisfaction is not achieved at the same time, but close to one another, the degree of love will be
increased proportionately to the degree of closeness. What is worthy and laudable in a male is not to
withdraw his tool until he senses that the woman has also been satisfied, even if he has already
achieved orgasm, so that she too can savor the pleasure of intercourse.
intermediate (medium), and one is young (small). In fact, we have already spoken of the three
types of male organ. For example, if the male organ is long and wide, it is called (with respect to the
size of an elephant) fila, or “elephantine”. A medium organ, because the horse is of medium size, is
referred to as küheylan, or “thoroughbred”. And in reference to the small size of a ram, the smaller
organ is referred to as kebşa.
Canan Şenol explains her position in feminism as being critical to social
gender policies. Her production is not based on sexism, on the opposite she defines it
as being against to gender discrimination. “My artworks can in no way be interpreted
as women movement.” she says and argues that feminism initially has a critical
structure and it has to be based on a political ground and aim to challenge and
transform the already settled ideologies and practices. She adds “There is no women
movement that can be defined in the realm of feminism unless it stands against
sexism as well as it stands all kinds of discrimination; racism, militarism.”95
With Perfect Beauty series Canal Şenol offers a conceptually perfect, multi-layered
criticism of changing Turkish definitions of the female body.
95 Ibid.
63
Figure 27: Perfect Beauty Series – Length, mixed media on special paper, 35*50 cm, 2009
Length (English translation of the text; “Perfect Beauty – Canan Şenol” X-ist ex. cat., 2010)
There are also four elements of length that beautify. The first is a long neck, the second is tall
height, the third is long eyebrows, and the fourth is long hair.
2.7 Fat Beauty
Fat has been considered to be beautiful throughout the history. The examples in
the first section show that voluptuous women were in fashion since the beginning of
the visual history. The oldest woman figure Venus of Willendorf, if projected to a
life-size scale, might become one of the fattest women one can imagine. Although
she is assumed to be a fertility fettish, there is no sign that proves she is not simply a
beauty figure to be looked at. Research has proved that fat is more fertile and
extreme slimness might result in vanishing fertility, but Venus of Willendorf does not
just have big breasts and a prominent belly, as opposed to the women of Early
Renaissance who appear as if they are pregnant in the paintings, she is obviously and
64
Figure 28: Perfect Beauty Series – Breadth, mixed media on special paper, 35*50 cm, 2009
Breadth (English translation of the text; “Perfect Beauty – Canan Şenol” X-ist ex. cat., 2010)
The elements of breadth that beautify are also four. The first is a broad forehead; the second is
wide eyes, that is, not eyes that squint, but rather the eyes of a gazelle; the third is a broad breast, and
fourth is a wide and rounded countenance.
simply fat. Additional to reproductive reasons, one can argue that fat was something
to enjoy looking at in pre-historic times.
In Egyptian art, women become more sophisticated with their looks. They are
elegant but in no way bony skinny. They pay more attention to their looks with all
the accessories and make-up they wear, but their bodies are still proportionately
round. For the Greeks, a fat body lacked the asymmetry of lithe, moving lines that
belong to the restless energy of thin. But thin, lacks the noble thickness that lends
dignity and a commanding air to the perfect bodies, to the Gods. Aphrodite by
today's standards is not thin. Venus de Milo's girth is impressive, although she is
proportionate she is not tiny at all.
After paganism, nudes disappear for a long time until the Renaissance. In the
late Renaissance—Mannerism—they appear again but in weird proportions of limbs.
Kenneth Clark argues the beauty that the mannerist female figures embody “is
antinatural; they bear no relation to real women, but only to impossible ideas of
women, whose illusion they created. The goddess of mannerism is the eternal
feminine of the fashion plate.”96 Top models of today, with their emaciated forms
resemble mannerist women in that sense.
In Baroque art, women gain weight again. In The rape of the daughters of
Leukipp, one can see those luscious fat girls of Ruben's standing for the love of
beauty desire to possess, to surround and carry off the whole weight and wealth of
human nature. Between Roccoco through Orientalism until modern era it is possible
to follow back and forth shifts of fat and thin ideals of female body according to the
changing power positions in the society. By the end of nineteenth-century, men
settled their corporations and women experienced the exuberance of fat until the first
decade of the twentieth-century, when all of a sudden thin became the model of the
modern. A model that is persistent for a century now, in which the prejudice against
fat seems universal.
Those shifts throughout the history might lead to an assumption that the norms
about the body will change again and fat will become the ideal in the future. It is
possible to agree with Clark's viewpoint in the sense that body ideals resemble
fashion. Because bodies are not just clothes we wear, it is important to break that
cycle. Since the late 1960's feminist artists struggling to evoke an awareness about
96 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956),
89.
65
the female bodies and their more than material meaning by standing against the
limitations on the body. Whether fat bodies will become favorable again or not, the
condemnation towards fatness should be precluded so that women could live their
bodies freely in any size. One can foresee that if the pressure to fit in social norms on
beauty is removed from women's shoulders, their bodies will convergence their
natural sizes.
In that respect, next chapter presents the artworks that I produced on the issues
of fat. As a person who experienced obesity, I offer a two-sided conceptual
framework of my artworks on fatness. With Cut this fat off of me! exhibition, first, I
aim to express the ambivalent feelings women have towards their bodies in the
context of fat. Second, I try to deconstruct the imposition of slimness in the society.
66
CHAPTER 3
Body in Transition: Cut this fat off of me!
3.1 Conceptual Framework
Cut this fat off of me! is a series of artworks that I produced along my thesis
research process. The series is composed of six different artworks on how women
perceive their bodies through the eyes of the others and struggle with fatness in
different stages of their lives. The series tell the story of a life-time with bodies
through the stages; adolescence, adulthood, and senectitude. As I imagine my body
in transition through those stages, my subconscious worries about my body turn into
critical consciousness on the way. Each stage is presented with two artworks. First
artworks in each part are representations of women's troubled experiences with their
bodies. Second artworks take a critical approach to the limitations on the body under
which women desperately find themselves struggling with imposed ways of weight
loss.
Findings of researches that were done on the prevalence of concern about
weight and dieting behavior in America in the late 1960's, coinciding with the time
of the rise of feminist movement, have shown that age and sex are the most
influential differences on the level of concern about weight among the society.
Dwyer and Mayer's analysis of several public opinion polls revealed that concerns
about weight and dieting behavior were much more common among women than
among men. Polls taken in 1956 found that 45 per cent of the women and 22 per cent
of the men wanted to lose weight, and that 14 per cent of the women and 7 per cent
of the men were currently on diets to do so. Polls in 1966 showed that 42 percent of
67
the women and 35 per cent of the men interviewed felt that they were over their best
weights, and 14 percent of the women and 6 per cent of the men claimed that they
were doing something to lose weight. While concern with weight appeared to be
rising among the men over time, dieting behavior was not.97
Excessive weight deviations tend to be more common among adults than
adolescents, yet adults appear to be less concerned about their weights and less apt to
take remedial measures that requires patience and determination than teenagers. The
studies of Heuenemann et al. indicate that almost all obese and many non-obese
adolescents are concerned about weight and they engage in remedial efforts more
than adults.98
The differences in gender-related concerns about weight relates to the troubles
women have in order to fit in some certain norms on the body. The sensitivity of the
self-images of females to weight problems encourage them to constantly undertake
corrective efforts. It is little wonder that, since women know the importance of their
physical appearance particularly in determining how men will regard them as well as
in influencing other females' opinions of them, appearance becomes so tightly bound
up with self-image. Extra kilos pose a powerful threat to a woman's appearance, and
hence generate greater concern and ego involvement in women than men.
Concerning the age difference, due to their recent experience with the dramatic
physical changes, brought about by the accelerated growth of puberty, adolescents
are more self-conscious about their bodies than are adults. The desire to conform to
others and to ideals in weight and appearance is particularly strong during
adolescence, probably stronger than it is in adult life. Although the adult women are
concerned about their weight, the remedies they prefer are not as strictly applied as
the adolescents' level of determination.
Based on the age differences in understanding and handling the fat problem the
first artworks “V” and bulimic under 'Adolescence', conceptualize the process how
young girls sensationally become acquainted with their sexuality and their bodies,
and with what measures they react to fat. Artworks under 'Adulthood', focuses on the
period in which women become more settled with their bodies. Fighting Fat Cells
and Lipo tell the story of stubborn fat cells with a black humor; once they are created
97 J. T. Dwyer and J. Mayer, “Potential dieters: who are they?,” Journal of the American Dietetic
Association 56 (June 1970): 510-14.
98 R. L. Huenemann et al., “Adolescent food practices associated with obesity,” Federation
Proceedings 25 (January-February 1966): 8.
68
and settled in the body, only a professional can suck them out permanently.
My Old Fat PC dramatically represents the psychology of aging, by
recognizing slimness as an even more aggressive fashion within technological
products' design than it is for the female body. Looking back in time considering all
the changes her body went through, My Old Fat PC recalls that she was the beauty
ideal of her time, she was in fashion. She was a big girl, but she was fit. Now she is
ten years old and she has a big belly. Her time has passed, surprisingly fast. The last
work under 'Senectitude', Before/After, speaks out very directly. The final 'after' is
death. Bodies are confined to perish. The whole fuss about them turns out to be
meaningless and useless in the end.
2.2 Artworks
Below are the photographs of each artwork that were exhibited in my
graduation exhibition Cut this fat off of me! opened on the 4th of August 2010. The
exhibition took place at Sabancı University Social Sciences Faculty stairwell. The
artworks below follow the order; “V”, bulimic, Fighting Fat Cells, Lipo, My Old Fat
PC, and finally before/after. All the works are presented with images on their final
stages, as well as with details.
-Adolescence-
69
Figure 29: “V”, Pelin Güre, 2008, 3*60 cm equilateral aluminum
triangle frames filled with tow
70
Figure 30: Detail, “V”, Pelin Güre, 2008
71
Figure 31: bulimic, Pelin Güre, installation, 2010
2 mirrors 60*90 cm placed across each other in the toilet with one of them
partly covered with puke and a sound installation of vomiting sounds
Figure 32: bulimic, Pelin Güre, installation, 2010
72
Figure 33: Detail, bulimic, Pelin Güre, 2010
Figure 34: Detail, bulimic, Pelin Güre, 2010
-Adulthood-
73
Figure 35: Fighting Fat Cells, Pelin Güre, 2010
2 cylinders of cacao and coconut marshmallow cakes placed on an
abstract female body shaped wooden platform, and nails
74
Figure 36: Fighting Fat Cells, Pelin Güre, 2010
75
Figure 37: Detail, Fighting Fat Cells, Pelin Güre, 2010
76
Figure 38: Fighting Fat Cells, Pelin Güre, 2010
Figure 39: Fighting Fat Cells, Pelin Güre, 2010
77
Figure 40: Lipo, Pelin Güre, mixed media on photograph, 2010
78
Figure 41: Detail, Lipo, Pelin Güre, 2010
-Senectitude-
79
Figure 42: My Old Fat PC, Pelin Güre, installation, 2009, PC with a belly shaped
glass screen in front of a wooden toilette mirror, and cosmetic accessories
80
Figure 43: Detail, My Old Fat PC, Pelin Güre, 2009
81
Figure 44: Detail, My Old Fat PC, Pelin Güre, 2009
Figure 45: Detail, My Old Fat PC, Pelin Güre, 2009
82
Figure 46: Before/After, Pelin Güre, mixed media on photography, 2010
Figure 47: Before/After, Pelin Güre, mixed media on photography, 2010
2.3 Visual Model
The theories of the subject as decentered in contemporary arts, which
proliferate in the 1970's, seek to provide an alternative to the idea of the viewer
implicit in Renaissance perspective that is a centered, coherent, and humanist
subject. Post-structuralist theories argue that each person is intrinsically dislocated
with him or herself. In other words, post-structural theory states that the correct way
in which to view our condition as human subjects is first as fragmented, by
unconscious desires and anxieties, second as multiple, by an independent and
differential relationship to the world, and third as decentered, by pre-existing social
structures. This discourse of decentering has had particular influence on feminist
artists, who argue that fantasies of 'centering' perpetuated by dominant ideology are
masculinist, and conservative.
Starting from 1965 until the beginning of the 1980's, ideas of heightened
immediacy, of the decentered subject, and of 'activated spectatorship' as political in
implication came into focus in installation art. 'Activated Spectatorship' in
installation art is a term that loosely refers to the type of art into which the viewer
physically enters, and which is often described as 'theatrical', 'immersive' or
'experiential'.99 Dan Graham in 1978 noted that 1960's art was 'a new form of Kantian
idealism' in which the isolated spectator's subjective consciousness-in-itself replaces
the art object to be perceived-for-itself; his/her perception is the product of the art.100
In Cut this fat off of me!, I attempt to engender a kind of activated
spectatorship, by exhibiting my works in an alternative space—stairwell—which
extends the conventions of museum practice and offering the viewer a more isolated
and immersive space. Although different in form, Barbara Kruger's installation All
violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype sets a famous example for such an
immersive space used in order not only to create a physical interaction of the viewer
and the artworks, but also to engage them in a conversation.
99 Claire Bishop, Installation Art, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 102.
100 Dan Graham, “Public Space/Two Audiences,” in Two Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by
Dan Graham, ed. Alexander Alberro, (Cambrige: The MIT Press, 1999), 157.
83
In a similar sense, Cut this fat off of me! conceives of its viewing subject not as
an individual who experience art in transcendent or existential isolation, but as part
of a collective community and memory.
One last significant visual influence to note appears in the work Lipo in the
exhibition as a homage to Kruger, using the trademark of her overlaid photographs
with declarative captions in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. I admire Kruger's
works not only because of her use of the space, but also the language she speaks with
through her artworks. Much of Kruger's work engages the merging of found
photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the
viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. Reminding
the viewer the collective community he/she belongs to, her works speak to the
viewer using pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they".
84
Figure 29: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (All violence is the illustration of a pathetic
stereotype), installation, 1991
CONCLUSION
This thesis aimed at drawing the conceptual and visual framework of my
exhibition Cut this fat off of me! The exhibition is composed of six artworks that
address the issues of female bodies concerning fat. As a person who experienced fat
to the extremes for more than ten years, my artworks question the issue on a social
level by focusing on the personal. Our bodies signify the limits of our existence, and
these limits are most of the time socially constructed.
This first chapter presented different approaches on how one forms the first
understandings of his/her body. The importance of perception is emphasized in the
process of how self image is created through the image of the other. The role of the
ego in maintaining a healthy relationship between the physical and ideal experiences
of oneself is examined. Followed by a brief medical history of the theories on the
causes of corpulence, the physical and psychological effects of remedies, such as
dieting, are investigated.
Three important conclusions were drawn in the first chapter. First, the science
does not support the dominant convictions about the facts and the causes of an
obesity pandemic. Causes of palatability remains as a question in between the
interactions with the environment and pure instinct. Second, psychoanalytic theory
proves that the body is libidinally invested, so one always has a love and hate
relationship with his/her body. Unless the repressed feelings that a person has about
his/her body are relieved in order to gain consciousness and reduce the extremities of
the libidinal relationship with the body, the solutions that are offered in the market
will keep making the problem worse. It is a fact that dieting makes more people fat
and it has unhealthy side effects. A purely physical understanding of corporeal
existence is the underlying reason why applied remedies such as dieting do not turn
85
out to be helpful in the long run. Instead of defining corporeality as purely physical,
theories that support the idea of a 'common body' are presented. Those theories
redefine corporeal existence as a personal level of bodily existence in which one can
distinguish her body from the others, but beneath that personal level is another level
of existence in which there is a commonality between and a quasi-indifferentiation
from other bodies. For the fat person cannot meet that commonality on one level,
stigma occurs and social exclusion is the result. Public policies are devised to
‘protect’ fat people from their own bad habits, thereby protecting society from their
irresponsible behavior as well. Just like other risk discourses, the one on obesity
revolves around power and control relationships between different social interests.
Finally, it is argued that as the medical science and the public policies produce and
legitimize discriminatory practices and coincide with the dominant cultural prejudice
against overweight people, claiming that being lean is good for one's health and
being fat is not only bad for one's health but also socially and economically
irresponsible.
The process how one becomes fat and the ways in which he/she deals with it is
a highly visual process. The process is both affected by the visuality surrounding one
and it proceeds with such a strong visual change in itself that in the end affects
society. Whereas once fat had positive connotations of social, economic and sexual
well-being, now the reverse is true. Present cultural preferences make thinness the
ideal of beauty and discriminate against fat. In the line of the argument, the second
chapter's focus was on the visual representations of body image by looking at
examples of different body ideals throughout the history. All the dominating art
movements of the past centuries are presented briefly in the first section in order to
follow the changes that different economic, cultural, and artistic movements brought
to the perception of human body forms, and how those perceptions were reflected in
sculptures and paintings of their times.
The following sections presented a specific theoretical analysis of the 1970's
and 80's on the important theories and women's critical standpoint in art production
especially concerning the female body. Art that focused directly on issues of the
body as a theme surfaced dramatically in the late 1960's and 1970's in art by women
artists that was inspired by the activism of political movement for women's rights.
Women artists opposing the dominant male gaze in the female body representations
engaged in creating a female image independent of the male gaze. 'Women only'
86
exhibitions were held in which a number of women artists' works were presented.
Female bodies in those artworks appeared as independent and strong to oppose the
position of women in the social structure that was regarded as passive. Later, in the
beginning of 1980's, a second-generation of women artists argued that the efforts to
create a new female sensibility were supporting the gender-discriminative policies.
Total exclusion of the male gaze from the female body representations were
considered to be rather utopic than outlining the real. Those artists suggested a
deconstructive approach to challenge the limitations on the female body instead of
constructing 'women only' ones.
Following the feminist perspectives on the female body, contemporary Turkish
feminist artist Canan Şenol's series of seven works, Perfect Beauty, analysis provided
a conceptually and visually strong example for feminist art production. Şenol, in her
series, makes visible the Ottoman understanding of female beauty with the
miniatures she uses. The texts in the artworks based on the words of the 'sagacious'
men of the empire give definitions of beauty of the Ottoman times. While she
criticizes the dominance of the male gaze on female beauty with her series, she also
points out the differences between Turkish beauty ideals of the past and the present.
The main conclusion to be drawn from the second chapter is explained in the
last part 'fat beauty'. The beauty ideals concerning the female body has changed
many times within the history and plump women were represented most of the time
as the ideals. Based on the changing role of women since the modern times,
unnatural and extreme slimness became the new ideal. If the present social
constructions on the body change, the ideals of beauty will change again. Instead of
introducing fat beauty as the next fashion to replace slimness, it is argued that the
driving forces that direct societies to such obsessions on the body should be
addressed in order to create a female awareness on the body politics. Women artists
of the 1970's and 80's played a significant role in the process of starting the change
on perceptions of the female body by becoming actively involved in theoretical and
artistic production processes.
Based on the interaction of the two different theories, psychoanalytic and
feminist, explained in the first two chapters, Cut this fat off of me! acknowledges
women's troubles with their self image from a psychoanalytic approach and attempts
to deconstruct the ways with which the mediated ideal body image operates. In order
to do so, I benefited from the visual structure of 'Activated Spectatorship' in
87
installation art in my curatorial approach. 'Activated Spectatoship' in installation art
is a term that loosely refers to the type of art into which the viewer physically enters,
and which is often described as 'theatrical', 'immersive' or 'experiential'. By
exhibiting my works in a dorm room at Sabancı University, a space which extends
the conventions of museum practice, I offer the viewer a more isolated and
immersive space in which s/he can engage in a conversation with the artworks.
88
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Appendix A
Cut this fat off of me! Studio Work Photo Gallery
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97
98
99
100
101
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Appendix B
art.homes Project: Is this my Culture?
art.homes is an art project which aims at promoting young artists from Munich
and Istanbul. Ten artists from Munich and ten from Istanbul will meet and be paired
up to share and make use of 10 apartments in Istanbul (November 2010) and in
Munich (August 2011). The artists are supposed to respond to the specific spatial
situation of each apartment and work there experimentally, so that everyday homes
will be transformed into art laboratories. Their art-in-progress will also be accessible
to the public for the duration of 10 days.
art.homes pursues an experimental concept of exhibition: the limits of art and
the artists themselves are to be tested and exhausted. The artists, coming from
different cultural and linguistic backgrounds must, first virtually, let their ideas of
space-specific work react to one another and then, in reality, channel them into a
common use of the apartment. This implies necessary compromises that go beyond
traditional artistic collaboration.
http://www.art-homes.de/english/
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Below, you can see my project proposal that was selected. Is this my Culture?
is a culinary performance piece with which I take my thesis topic one step forward
and experiment on the visual codes of food in a cultural dialog.
Title: IS THIS MY CULTURE?: A Culinary Experiment
Description: My mother was working intensely, that is why I don't remember her
cooking for us very often. I spent my childhood eating fast-food outside home. I
turned out to be obese when I was 18. To resolve my fat problem I tried every
possible way including a surgical operation and visits to a fat camp. None of those
attempts could help me lose weight. After I left home for college I started losing
weight on a slow pace, but constantly. Then I realized, it was the outcome of the fact
that I was responsible for my own cooking from that time on.
Cooking and eating habits are among the most important signifiers of a culture. I
have been working on my master's thesis on eating disorders, fat and their visual
representation for a while now. Since food, and all that is associated with it, is
already larger than life, I am focusing on what disgusts people about food and fat.
As a result of my personal interest in the area, I have been cooking experimentally
whenever I had the chance to feed a crowd. Since cooking is a performative act in
itself, Is This My Culture? is a performance piece in which I will be cooking the
meals of a specific menu everyday throughout the exhibition. What is on the menu is
rather visually disgusting for most of the people as I have come to realize while I was
searching the recipes on-line, but quite tasty contrary to their reputation: smoked
sheep heads, giblets, offal, viscera, brain and intestines. For example, tripe soup is
one of the most famous soups of Turkish culinary culture but I have not seen or
heard anyone cooking it at home. These kind of meals are restaurant-specific meals
and by cooking them at home I would also like to meet and experience that part of
my culture not only by the taste but also visually. I will be documenting all the
process starting from the shopping at the butcher to the serving and enjoying the
meal part everyday. The photographs, comments and all the documents I collect will
be presented on a board next to the dining table throughout the exhibition.
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