Title: The Effect of Media Analysis on Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Body Image Among College Students
Author: Rabak-Wagener, Judith; Eickhoff-Shemek, JoAnn; Kelly-Vance, Lisa
Source: Journal of American College Health, 47(1):29, July 1998. ISSN: 0744-8481
Publisher: Heldref Publications

          Abstract. Particular strategies of media advocacy can help people contest the dominant body images of fashion advertisements and reframe them to include a broader array of "normal" images. A study with an intervention group (n = 60) and a comparison group (n = 45) of undergraduate college students was conducted to investigate whether analyzing and reframing fashion advertisements changed the students' attitudes and behaviors regarding their own body images. Results from the posttest showed a significant change in beliefs among those in the intervention group but no significant change in behaviors. The comparison group showed no significant change in beliefs or behaviors. Posttest results from the women in the intervention group (n = 44) indicated a significant change in the study participants' beliefs that adult models in advertisements have an ideal body size and shape and that the participants' decisions about dieting or exercising should be based more on looks rather than on health status.
          Key Words: advertising, body image, fashion, media advocacy, reframing issues
          The proliferation of research studies on eating disorders in the 1970s and 1980s has been followed by a broad examination of a health issue that affects a larger segment of the population--body image dysphoria, defined as dissatisfaction and anxiety, ranging from mild to severe, about one's body.[1-6] Eating disorders are estimated to occur in from 1 to 100 women (or 20 in 100 when anorexia and bulimia are combined).[7] Eating disorders occur approximately 10 times more often in women than in men,[8] and the prevalence of body image dissatisfaction among young women and men is much higher than statistics for eating disorders indicate.[3] It has been estimated that up to two thirds of young women and one third of young men experience significant dissatisfaction with their body size, shape, condition, or appearance.[3,9]
          The mass marketing of body images through print media and television advertising has been well documented as a powerful force in creating the 1990s perception of the tall, thin, and toned ideal for women[4,8,10-13] and the medium-sized, muscular ideal for men. [14] Additional studies have demonstrated a disturbing trend in dieting in very young women[1,3,5]; a correlation between smoking and weight control behavior, particularly in young women[15]; and a proliferation of body-image reconstructive surgery among women. [16,17]
          Fashion advertisements have also been found to have a negative effect on body image attitudes and behaviors among young women, Levine and associates[10] reported that 70% of the teenage women who regularly read fashion magazines in their study considered the magazines an important source of beauty and fitness information. Nearly one fourth of those girls reported a strong interest in emulating fashion models.
          Although the prevalence and effects of media images on young adults' perceptions of body image have been the subject of a host of evaluations, few researchers have investigated the effect of participation in a fashion critique on young women's and men's attitudes and behaviors regarding their own body image. In a secondary-school-based program on eating disorders, Neumark-Sztainer et al[18] incorporated the critical analysis of weight loss advertisements as a component; they did not report direct measures of students' perceptions of media credibility or indicate whether attitudes and behaviors (or both) changed as a result of the program.
          Studies that use media analysis and counter programming techniques have focused most notably on the influences of the tobacco industry. Some researchers have demonstrated a positive correlation between student approval of cigarette advertisements and student smoking.[19-21] Armstrong et al[21] found that students who perceived cigarette advertising as influential were more likely to be smokers.
          Techniques in media advocacy can provide valuable theoretical tools for reframing public understandings of health issues from a problem of the individual to that of the social and industrial environment by changing the normative behavior of the media.[22-24] When this approach is used, we suggest that media advocacy dealing with body image can call upon several methods to shift the focus of body image dysphoria from a personal failing to media exploitation. These techniques include research, creative epidemiology, and reframing (or contesting) the issues.[22,24] Health interventions that deal with body image dissatisfaction can be designed so that students (a) investigate key assumptions about the fashion industry; (b) design counter advertisements that present epidemiological data regarding eating disorders, body image obsession, and cosmetic surgery in a less than flattering but truthful light; (c) expose the industry's exploitation of models and use of computer imagery; and (d) reframe the issues by creating new images in fashion advertising that include models of various ages, body shapes and sizes, social and cultural backgrounds, and physical abilities. Health educators can involve their students in challenging the media's emphases on slimness and muscularity and all that such emphases imply.[8]
          In this study, we investigated how an education intervention that focused on critiquing popular fashion advertisements and creating more inclusive fashion advertisements would affect college-age students' beliefs and behaviors about their own body images. We designed an intervention to challenge fashion advertising credibility among traditional aged, undergraduate college students.
          [....]
          COMMENT
          Pretest means on beliefs and behaviors for the intervention and control groups indicated that both groups demonstrated a fairly high agreement with the notion that the main impact of advertisements is that they influence people to buy their product (Item 6). Although we applied two-tailed independent t tests only to the group of beliefs and not to individual items, the intervention group's pretest to posttest mean on this question dropped from 5.03 to 4.58, whereas the comparison group's mean increased slightly, from 4.95 to 5.15. A strong component of the intervention was to challenge the students to analyze the many meanings that were created from the images and text in advertisements. This may have led the intervention group to be more skeptical of the simple notion that the only impact of ads is to influence purchases of fashion products.
          Results from our study suggest two key findings: (a) this particular intervention was more effective with women than with men, and (b) beliefs were changed more readily than behaviors. When we compared the entire intervention group with the entire comparison group, we noted that beliefs, overall, changed significantly among the intervention group. However, neither of the groups demonstrated any significant changes in behaviors. This pattern supports past research in health education, indicating that it is much more difficult to change behaviors than to change beliefs.
          [....]
          Implications
          Our study results have implications for all health professionals and educators. Although the population studied was primarily aged 18 to 23 years, this type of intervention may be applicable to people older and younger than this cohort. The link between using media advocacy techniques, specifically those that reframe the issues to create new norms and change health attitudes and behaviors, is particularly important. Further research is warranted to (a) investigate the potential for theory-based interventions that shift the focus from personal failings to exploitation by the industrial environment, (b) modify students' attitudes regarding media credibility, and (c) weaken the hold of cultural and social norms that often dictate personal behavior.
          Judith Rabak-Wagener is an assistant professor of health education at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb; JoAnn Eickhoff-Shemek is an assistant professor of health education at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, where Lisa Kelly-Vance is an assistant professor of psychology.
          Copyright ©  1998, Heldref Publications

Title: Integrating Disability Studies into the Existing Curriculum: The Example of 'Women and Literature' at Howard University
Author: Thomson, Rosemarie Garland
Source: Radical Teacher(47):15-21, Fall 1995.
Publisher: Boston Women's Teachers' Group, Inc.

          As a white woman with a quite visible physical disability who is a professor at a historically black university, I envision my role to be introducing complexities into my students' tendency to see race as the primary, if not exclusive, focus of individual and group identity. The centrality of racial history, issues, identify, and community to many of the humanities and social science courses at Howard, as well as the predominant black presence, foster a strong sense of black solidarity among our students. Yet, at the same time, Howard's almost exclusively black student and majority black faculty population also afford the kind of safe atmosphere where distinctions among the black community can be examined without the kind of recourse to minimizing differences in order to establish black solidarity that sometimes prevails at predominantly white institutions. My job at Howard is to invite students to consider how gender, class, and disability bisect racial groupings and to interrogate the very process of social categorization according to physiological or psychological characteristics. While many of my colleagues balance race with gender and class analyses, introducing disability as a category of social analysis is rare. Disability studies is simply not a part of the general education currency at Howard or at most other institutions. The salience of race as an analytical category at my university seems to me to both obscure and invite an examination of disability as a parallel yet distinct social identity based in corporeal or mental differences. The hyper-awareness of racial considerations often overshadows or minimizes other forms of what I call socially constructed "corporeal otherness" even while it serves as a model for examining those same forms of cultural marginalization. What I intend to discuss here is how I attempt to introduce disability studies -- disability consciousness, if you will -- in the context of a sustained focus on racial difference and to a lesser extent on gender distinctions.
          In the broadest sense, my aim in teaching disability studies is to complicate the received "we" and "they" conception that implies both a victim/perpetrator and a normal/abnormal relationship between the disabled and the nondisabled. To do so, I probe the categories of "disabled" and "nondisabled," questioning their interpretations as mutually exclusive groups who are sorted according to bodily or mental traits. I emphasize the social aspect of disability, its relativity to a standard that is culturally determined, rather than its physical aspect, precisely because our traditional account of disability casts it as a problem located in bodies rather than a problem located in the interaction between bodies and the environment in which they are situated. In short, this pedagogical goal requires removing disability from its traditional medical model interpretation and placing it into a minority model understanding. It means not describing disability in the language of inherent physical inferiority or medical rehabilitation but instead adopting the politicized language of minority discourse, civil rights, and equal opportunity so as to invoke such historical precedents as the Black Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Movement. In other words, by focusing on the social construction of disability, by framing disability as a cultural reading of the body that has political and social consequences, and by invoking a politics of positive identity, I hope to facilitate understanding and identification across identity groups rather than guilt and resentment. Such an approach is intended to relativize and politicize both the categories of "disabled" and "able-bodied" while casting a critical eye on the cultural processes that produce such distinctions.
          [....]
           I will discuss here how I infuse disability studies into a particular undergraduate humanities course called "Women in Literature" that I teach regularly at Howard. I intend to show here, first, examples of material from various disciplines that are not explicitly labeled "disability studies" but which can nevertheless be marshaled to elucidate the way that disability, along with other stigmatized identifies, operates in Western culture. Second, I will suggest how literary and cultural analysis might be enlisted to reveal the ways that social relations produce the cultural distinctions of disability, race, gender, as well as class. Third, I will reflect on student responses to the material and the approach.
          In all my teaching, rather than focusing exclusively on disability as the sole form of social otherness under consideration, we simultaneously investigate the bodily based social identifies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation as parallel but distinctive social categories whose function is, among other things, both to differentiate and in some cases to stigmatize individuals on the basis of corporeal differences. By intertwining analyses of a range of identities culturally constructed from bodily traits and behaviors, I encourage students to draw comparisons among them as well as mobilize their own varied experiences of differing types of social marginalization or oppression. Thus, my aim is not to privilege disability identity, but rather to probe the sociopolitical and psychological aspects involved in a matrix of often overlapping forms of social identity which rest on a premise of irreducible corporeal difference.
          Even though the course I am assigned to teach at Howard is entitled "Women in Literature," I subtitle it "Human Variation and the Politics of Appearance" with the intention of thinking political subordination to the cultural valuing and devaluing of bodies on the basis of their appearance. Centering our inquiry on appearance enables us to discuss not only the system of standards upon which social discrimination draws, but to consider how appearance norms contribute not only racism but to other forms of social oppression as well. In order to scrutinize simultaneously race, gender, class, and disability, the course undertakes as its primary subject a critical examination of feminine beauty. Since the politics of appearance along with its value system, "beauty," encompass multiple forms of social marginalization, all students can identify with the issues in one way or another. In this way, ableism becomes one variation of a general form of social discrimination rather than an issue that the nondisabled students might think has nothing to do with them.
          [....]
          At the beginning of the course almost all students rather uncritically assume that beauty is a somewhat fixed property of the femalebody. Although many students recognize the historical and cultural relativity of appearance standards, they tend to see beauty as an absolute physical quality free from political implications or relations of power. Many students are willing to challenge impossible beauty norms, but few have taken their critiques beyond the arena or personal adequacy or inadequacy. Beauty, they often feel, is something corporeal that one has or does not have -- just like a disability. But whereas having a disability seems a disadvantage, having beauty seems an advantage. Few students have considered the disadvantages of beauty. Thus, we further probe the operation of beauty and disability to see the parallels and to uncover the social relations that govern enforcement of bodily norms. What I try to develop is a global critique of appearance norms which at once transcends and draws from students' individual relationships with their bodies and their personal negotiations with beauty demands.
          One successful way to do this, I have found, is to shift our attention to beauty's mutually constituting opposite, "ugly," which under scrutiny yields up the recognition that while beauty may not initially seem oppressive, the attribution of its flip side, ugliness, is indeed disempowering -- a point I will return to later. Introducing ugliness makes it easier to denaturalize beauty, to show that it is a series of practices and positions that one takes in order to avoid the stigmatization of ugliness. I accomplish this by introducing and juxtaposing two historical figures to the class: one woman who epitomized beauty, Marilyn Monroe, and another woman who epitomized beauty's opposite -- not just ugliness, but freakdom. She is Saartje Bartmann, the nineteenth-century African woman known as "The Hottentot Venus," whose body, which was normal in her own culture, differed so much from the European standard that she was recruited into English and French freak shows. By recognizing how constructed Marilyn's beauty was -- the hair dye and makeup, the photo techniques, the cosmetic surgery, the name change -- and how vulnerable it made her to its transience as well as its exploitation, the students see that beauty is not only a set of practices but that its empowerment is quite limited if not actually detrimental, as Marilyn's biography illustrates so well. What Marilyn and Saartje have in common is that their bodies were displayed for profit before audiences in ways that were not necessarily beneficial to them but that were dictated by the culture's need to articulate formally its standards for the female form.
          While the students' response to Saartje Bartmann's display as an exoticized, sexualized freak is uniform disgust and outrage, their responses to Marilyn Monroe are usually more varied and complex. Juxtaposing the exploitative display of a white woman and a black woman invites, of course, a consideration of race and its accompanying power dynamics. The students who reveal great hostility toward Marilyn as the figure of perfect white beauty that has been held up to them as forever unattainable are generally softened and their judgment is legitimated by Gloria Steinem's analysis of the star's miserable life. Other students clearly admiringly identify with Marilyn, expressing sympathy that her life was not the fairy tale that they imagined beauty would confer. Regardless of whether they adore or despise her, students generally find shocking the pathology and liability of Marilyn's beauty. For the most part, they are unaware of the ways that beauty is mediated by cultural presentation: they assume that what they see is the natural, unreconstructed woman and that beauty delivers fulfillment. Most students are also astonished that white women try to reconfigure their bodies because they depart from beauty norms. They are very aware of the disparity between femalebodies of African heritage and the stylized contemporary white beauty standard, but many do not realize that European femalebodies usually cannot conform to the impossible ideal either. For example, students frequently express interest and surprise when I reveal my own conviction about the inadequacies of my hair, which is straight and limp. This sometimes creates a complex dynamic in which students identify across race with white women on the basis of shared gender experience even as they recognize white women's relative privilege within beauty culture's hierarchy of bodies. What they witness is an affirmation of what they already know but which cultural pressures mute: that a satisfying life is not so simply linked to looking right. This, of course,lays the groundwork for examining the body's social context and suggesting that the disabled body does not necessarily produce misery.
          In order to denaturalize and politicize beauty culture, at the outset of the course we critically view a number of advertisements to catalogue the qualities of beauty which are so hyperbolically and relentlessly choreographed in the pages of women's magazines. With a little guidance, students adeptly and zealously read the images, compiling a stunningly uniform and narrow profile of acceptable body traits for women which include -- among others -- hairlessness, odorlessness, a prepubescent slimness and youth, softness, whiteness, thick wavy hair, as well as psychological characteristics such as passivity and self-consciousness. While the students are keenly aware of the racist implications in the ads' celebration of European physical features and of thinness, they have not usually thought through the role of women's bodies as spectacles in a consumer society that accords males the role of spectator and actor -- a relationship that is writ large, if subtly, in advertising. Analyzing the images and reading theoretical critiques -- such as John Berger's Ways of Seeing, an exploration of the social relation between the male spectator and the female spectacle in European oil painting -- reveals for students a dynamic, in this case gendered and racialized, in which one role is to look, judge, and act while the other role is to be gazed upon, measured, and passive. They begin to understand here that the usually disembodied, usually male figure who has the power to define and to evaluate is seldom pictured in these ads, but that the woman presenting herself before the gaze is displayed for his approval and explication. Such critiques provide the students with explanatory vocabularies which they tend to wield in their journals and essays as they discuss their lives. Often they write authoritatively of spectators and spectacles, of gender and racial systems, and of social constructions.
          While the class is certainly a feminist analysis of how beauty operates as sexism, it at the same time illustrates the more general process of how the body is the arena where asymmetrical power relations are acted out. This sets us up for discussing how the categories of normal and abnormal so fundamental to disability oppression are products of a social relationship in which one kind of person has the power to judge and to assume normativeness, while another must submit to judgment. The overwhelmingly female class is thus able to make a leap of identification between themselves as women, particularly black women, and people who have disabilities: they come to understand that the process of objectification that is a part of the ideology of feminine beauty is related to the process of objectification that is part of being considered disabled. Just such a dynamic between the defining subject and the defined object produces the traditional interpretation of physical disability as abnormality or inferiority. Examining this relationship allows us to uncover the power relations involved in the gaze not only in terms of gender and race, but also to relate that concept to "the stare" that is a specific form of social oppression for people with disabilities. The evaluating gaze of the male upon the female can be seen as parallel to the evaluating gaze of the "ablebodied" upon the disabled. One of the students' favorite readings, Alice Walker's autobiographical essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self," especially links disability to the politics of appearance as well as to the matrix of race, class, and gender. This essay interrelates Walker's becoming blind with her loss of femininity and worth and then chronicles how she regained a valued self image. Like the Marilyn Monroe story, this particularized narrative is popular with students because it manifests in an individual life the points that the cultural analyses explicate.
          The course also highlights several cultural sites where ambiguity exists between beauty and disability to suggest that the coercive valuing of certain body types over others is what lies at the heart of both disability and beauty oppression. The first of these intersections is the nexus where prescriptions for beauty result in bodily transformations that amount to "disabilities." Discussing such historically and culturally varied practices as corseting, foot binding, clitorectomies, anorexia, and cosmetic surgery reveals to use the cultural relativity of the concept of disability, for such practices are understood in one context as the achievement of beauty or social acceptability and in another context as precisely the kind of bodily transformation that is taken to be a "disability." We particularly focus on cosmetic surgery because it is the practice for normalizing the (usually female) body that seems the least exotic, distanced, or pathological to modern American sensibilities. Indeed, many of the students accept the confessional mode I invite with the reading response journals to reveal anoretic or bulemic tendencies or admit to having considered cosmetic surgery to "improve" their looks or to "correct" what beauty has told them are their deficiencies. Because studies indicate that black women are generally more comfortable with their bodies than white women and generally suffer less frequently from eating disorders, I am surprised that many of my students disclose how inadequate they -- often secretly -- imagine their bodies to be, how tormented they are by these convictions, and ho willing they would be to alter painfully their bodies to fit the standards. My suspicion is that the studies are measuring class differences more than race differences and that my students are responding to middle-class pressures to conform to beauty norms that underclass women, who are perhaps more alienated from mainstream requisites, might be spared.
          Through framing cosmetic surgery as part of the beauty industry and ideology, students can recognize that the surgical normalization of the female body to meet cultural standards of beauty is parallel to the coercive "corrective" procedures that disabled people are often subjected to in order to reform their bodies to meet norms that they defy. Some of the images and discourse we examine are articles and ads on cosmetic surgery that are featured in women's magazines. Critically studying this marketing language enables students to understand how uniform the appearance standard is and how constructed it is even as it masquerades as natural and effortless. Perhaps most interesting is that with both disability and beauty the naturally occurring body is mutilated in order to conform to a standard that is presented to us as "regular" or "normal. Just as rhinoplasty and liposuction sculpt the "ugly" nose or the "fat" hips to the standard contours beauty dictates, surgeons "reconstruct" the disabled body and fit it with myriad prosthetics -- often only to police life's physical variations, ones that are apparently so intolerable within contemporary American culture. It is this tyrannical concept of "normal," serving as it does capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, that I want the students to come to question.
          Mounting such a comprehensive cultural critique creates some pedagogical dilemmas I am not sure I successfully negotiate. By attacking beauty standards, even if I let the material speak for me, I risk implying that the students are complicit in their own oppression. What floats palpably in the classroom -- coming from many sources -- is the accusation of false consciousness, the suggestion that the students themselves are being castigated for their participation in beauty practices. More problematic yet is the logic inherent in the critique that caring about men is consorting with enemy. I try to address this problem directly by discussing the concept that there is no place outside acculturation for anyone to be, that we all want to be attentive to our appearance even as we try to avoid being in thrall to it. We talk much about placing ourselves in relation to beauty norms in ways that we can live with. Nevertheless, indictments erupt in class discussions that I try at once to defuse and to play out. The intense hair debate, provoked predictably by Alice Walker's witty and highly politicized essay about "oppressed hair," always provides a forum which at least exposes this dynamic even if we never resolve it. The discussion about what it means and whether or not a black woman should straighten her hair is highly charged with defensiveness, accusations, and humor, serving as a conduit to examining identity politics, the racism inherent in beauty standards, and the politicization of personal practices. The even inconclusive hair question perhaps best illustrates the complexity of these issues.
          Another dynamic that requires scrutiny is what I call coercive agreement. Most students' response to the concept of disability as a site of oppression is that they have never thought about it before. Many quickly and profoundly make the connections I hope to establish with race and gender, while some seem to unreflectively adopt an overly sympathetic attitude that I suspect may be in deference to me because I have disability and am the teacher. This coercive agreement is one of the hazards of advocating in the classroom for a group to which you belong. Such a situation is one reason I prefer invoking as many manifestations of corporeally justified oppressive social relations as I can to analyze the larger processes at work.
          One of the liveliest and most polarized of these instances always occurs around the issue of "fat," which lies in a zone somewhere between ugliness and disability, and is often the conduit through which female students come to personally identify with the social stigmatization that accompanies disabilities. While being overweight can constitute a functional disability, the students are quick to see that the social condemnation attached to being obese is usually far more detrimental than the impairment involved. Furthermore, the students' own struggle with our cultural tyranny of slimness enables them to recognize that bodily aberration is relative to a cultural and historically specific standard that serves particular interests, such as the cosmetic or fashion industries, for example. Again, autobiographical essays -- Roberta Galler's about being disabled and Carol Munter's about being obese -- are read together so that students can compare the subjective experiences of both women. As I mentioned before, my students seem to respond with greater understanding and interest to the identifitory and personalizing mode of the individual life story presented in the subjective voice than they do to theorizing or historical surveys. While each writer concludes that society rather than their bodies needs to change, Munter's movingly account of the denigration of her body because it is fat presents an idea new to most students, who, of course, have internalized the script of blaming the overweight person rather than the impossible standards the culture of beauty demands. Yet, frequently arguments erupt in class when some students frame fat as unhealthy, undisciplined, and inexcusable excess while others fiercely defend themselves or friends and family as victims. Fat -- which I point out legally constitutes a disability -- is the subject most often mentioned in the reading response journals. It is remarkable how freely some students assail obese people in ways they would never openly denigrate people with disabilities, on the assumption that obesity can be altered by an act of will. The class never reaches consensus on this point or on the lively argument of whether it is appropriate for black women to straighten their hair. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of disability and fat oppression emphasizes that often the cultural context surrounding and defining our bodies, not our bodies themselves, creates problems for us -- and that this context rather than our bodies requires alteration.
          To complement the autobiographical accounts and to move the issue of appearance from the individual body into the larger context of social relations and value systems that support power dynamics, we read as well excerpts from historical critiques of those systems such as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Elizabeth Spelman's Inessential Woman, and bell hooks's Black Looks: Race and Representation. Some students find the accounts of the systematic nature of sexist oppression to be a revelation that frees them from a sense of individual failure for their own insecurities as women, while others resist accounts of patriarchy as having so much historical force and precedence. One of the most persistent sentiments among many students -- both male and female -- is the myopic and rather defensive conviction that women of this generation are fully liberated from the residue of sexism, that the problems are simply gone. It is interesting that students tend to recognize the enduring presence of racism, while insisting that society no longer limits women. Perhaps this is an important enabling progress narrative that should not be questioned; on the other hand, it risks denial and naivety. One of my most difficult challenges is to facilitate a comprehensive critique of systematic racism, sexism, and ableism while still encouraging empowerment and exploring modes of resistance.
          So in order to expose the systematic nature of oppression without suggesting that it inevitably overwhelms individual agency, the first part of the course delineates the complex workings of oppression while the second part explores potential strategies of opposition. Because the course "Women in Literature" is offered as an English as well as a humanities course, literary analysis occupies a central place. To this end, we read two novels which place at the center of their social critiques the institution of feminine beauty as it is inflected with racial, class, and gender considerations. First is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a powerful novel which presents how the inextricable, institutionalized forces of racism, sexism, and classism combine to enact the tragic destruction of a young, black girl, abetted by the often unwitting complicity of the very community that might have saved her. The second is Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, which provides a prescription for combatting the complex matrix of forces which attribute "ugly" to certain femalebodies. While Morrison's is a descriptive account of the tragic political and personal consequences precipitated by what I am calling "the ideology of beauty," Walker's account offers students an optimistic paradigm for resistance and transformation. Morrison's novel is a tragedy which demonstrates the complexity and relentlessness of oppression and Walker's novel is a comedy (not a funny story but a painful tale with a happy ending) which details the triumph of a woman over those same crushing forces. Taken together, the two novels constitute the dual aspect of cultural critique: a complex articulation of the problem in its multiple material manifestations and a speculative strategy for resistance.
          As preparation for reading the assigned novels and autobiographical writings, we thoroughly discuss the issue of representation, stressing the ways that representation shapes the reality that it supposedly reflects. We examine the political and ethical consequences of literary representation by reading Susan Sontag's study Illness as Metaphor, which elaborates the metaphorical uses of tuberculosis in the nineteenth-century and cancer in the twentieth century in order to suggest the negative consequences that these modes of cultural representation hold for people who have the diseases. Sontag's classic analysis thus allows us to use the representation of disability as a vehicle to understand the representation of race in Morrison's novel.
          The juxtaposition of The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple form the center of the course. Around each novel are clustered the analytical or historical essays and the shorter biographical readings (all of which are listed at the end of this essay) so that Morrison's and Walker's narratives act as individualized testimonies to the concepts the course is designed to examine. The particularization of the issues that the novels accomplish gives the students a sense of reality and immediacy about the ways that the politics of appearance function in the complexity of lived experience. Moreover, their journals, discussions, and essays suggest that the students are able to identify often in profound ways with the two central characters, Pecola and Celie, on the basis of their being judged as "ugly." What Morrison's novel allows the students to understand is that "ugliness" is not located in any objective physical criteria but instead in the ideological systems of denigration that produce "ugliness" as a condition of racism, sexism, and classism, not as a property of a particular body. Yet the students seem to find most compelling the emotional involvement they establish with the characters, the personalization of social and political issues that narrative and identification make available to them. My intention is to devastate them with Morrison and uplift them with Walker, for Celie transforms the sentence of ugliness not through Prince Charming nor cosmetic surgery nor weight loss nor any of the traditional prescriptions for female self-creation. Instead, Walker's Celie transfigures from ugliness not into beauty, but into personal empowerment catalyzed by female community, meaningful work, economic independence, sexual sovereignty, and loving recognition of others. Women in the class respond particularly favorably to The Color Purple because, I think, it enables them to imagine themselves escaping social judgments of their bodies.
          When the class seems adept at articulating this transformation, I use it as an opportunity to move among racism, sexism, and disability by differentiating between what I call the traditional "narrative of overcoming" and another story I term the "narrative of resistance," both of which are common disability narratives. Although both narratives are affirmative and perhaps related, an essential distinction needs to be made. The conventional "narrative of overcoming" suggests that one's body is the recalcitrant object that must be surmounted often either by some physical or psychological feat of rehabilitation or by a spiritual transcendence of the anomalous body. In contrast, the "narrative of resistance" claims rather than transcends the body, rejecting the traditional pronouncement of its inferiority and asserting the right of that body to be as it is. The notion of "resistance" thus locates the disabled or otherwise disapproved body within a cultural environment in which norms create deviance while the concept of "overcoming" places the deviance within the body deemed aberrant.
          If on the one hand the novels act as touchstones for an identifying understanding, on the other hand they also arouse the most profound resistance among students. In both Morrison's and Walkers' novels a simplistic reading suggests that the women are victims and the men are perpetrators. Although I offer ample textual evidence that no easy polarity between innocent women and guilty men is supported by the texts, the subjects of incest and rape that the novels explore always spark discussions in which some students usually take entrenched positions which pit men against women. The conflict that is sometimes fueled is exacerbated by the issue of racial solidarity and is how through with suggestions of betrayal on both sides. Sometimes in class discussions, a great deal of hostility between men and women emerges that I must try to process sensitively and equitably. There are also always resistances to the critique of beauty that follow the logic that to reject beauty standards is to reject men. In every class, I feel that some students leave with the conviction that the course is essentially anti-male, no matter how much I attempt to present complexity and draw parallels among racism, sexism and ableism. The journals indicate that a few students chose to see beauty as innocent and me as a curmudgeon. Most often, some of the men hold this view, perhaps because they are emotionally identified with the male characters in the novels rather than with the women or perhaps because beauty is less anxiety provoking for them.
          In conclusion, I need perhaps to offer a caveat concerning the position I have advocated so unequivocally here. It is important to recognize the limitations of the methodology that underlies the course that I am describing. By relating a variety of forms of social stigmatization, one risks failing to make clear the specificity, the distinct character, of each form. In comparing the disability category with race or gender systems, one must be vigilant not to conflate them so as to suggest that racial categorization, for example, is the same thing as disability, but simply in another form. The distinguishing aspects of disability such as physical pain, impairment, onset and origin, social milieu, specific economic concerns, and the like must not be erased by the move toward embracing a minority model. Nor should we fall into the simplistic equation I often hear either that "everybody has a disability of some sort" or that "being a woman (or black) is a disability." Comparing various forms of marginalized identities also risks invoking unproductive attempts to determine a hierarchy of oppression. I try with varying degrees of success to shift discussions of who suffers more than whom into examinations of complexity, interrelatedness, and uniqueness. While it is useful and illuminating to make comparisons and seek out underlying similarities among stigmatizing processes, it is equally important to particularize each identity so as to address precisely how it works in the world and how its attribution affects the persons involved.
          Copyright © 1995, Boston Women's Teachers' Group, Inc.

          Girls and their problems are big news these days.
          For years, research on adolescent development failed to distinguish between girls and boys. Now, however, we are bombarded with reports about how deeply unhappy girls are with their bodies; how they are prone to depression and to their own set of pathologies, which include eating disorders and compulsively cutting themselves; how their class participation and academic achievement suddenly decline in middle school.
          As the newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman recently put it, "Teenage girls are drowning in words like 'I hate my body. I hate my looks. I hate myself.'"
          What's wrong?
          Many writers, including the psychologist Carol Gilligan and the therapist Mary Pipher, have investigated girls' psyches for an answer. But in a book published this fall by Random House, the Cornell University historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg takes a different approach. As she told an anxious young girl on a recent telecast of Oprah: "I'm not a psychologist. But I'm a historian -- and a grandmother."
          Those two identities permeate Ms. Brumberg's The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, an examination of female adolescence over the past 100 years. Looking at how both physical and cultural changes have put girls at risk, it covers menstruation and virginity, tampons, acne medicines, and training bras. It is the Špassionate call of a former middle-school teacher and a grandmother of two young girls -- ages 7 and 4 -- to do something about what's wrong.
          Ms. Brumberg teaches in Cornell's department of human development, the only historian among psychologists and sociologists. She has spent her career straddling disciplinary borders, having directed the women's-studies program at Cornell and held a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn. Both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have given her research grants.
          Her 1988 book, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, published by Harvard University Press and brought out later in Japan and Germany, won prizes from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the American Studies Association, the History of Science Society, and the Society for Medical Anthropology.
          Unlike its predecessor, however, The Body Project is very much a trade book. Fasting Girls was praised by scholars but was little read outside academe, Ms. Brumberg says. "I was sick and tired of feminists talking to each other in women's studies programs. I wanted to address the people who parent girls today."
          So even though her new book draws on a wide range of research, it relegates those references largely to footnotes. Quotations from girls' diaries -- which Ms. Brumberg found in archives and received in answer to an advertisement she placed in The New York Times -- provide an intimate narrative. A photo essay demonstrates social attitudes toward girls' bodies.
          The book has been widely reviewed, and the reactions widely varied. Many readers are clearly impressed: "Fascinating and important," the reviewer for Newsweek declared. But does the author sacrifice too much scholarly rigor to the demands of trade publishing? some critics ask. Is she too nostalgic for a bygone era that many feminists would just as soon not revisit? Š
          Two diary selections sum up Ms. Brumberg's argument:
          "Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously." That was from 1892.
          "I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories." That was from 1982.
          "Girls have moved from basing their identities on good works to good looks," Ms. Brumberg says.
          She attributes the shift partly to consumer culture. In the late 1890s, the bathroom mirrors that arrived in many middle-class homes, along with running water, called attention to people's looks. As the 20th century progressed, advertisements for sanitary napkins and tampons moved the discussion of menstruation away from dealing with a girl's emotions and toward protecting her appearance. In the 1920s, girls began to think seriously about dieting, as fashion dictated the relentless baring of more and more flesh. By now, the thong bikini leaves no room to hide as much as an ounce.
          What Ms. Brumberg calls "the jeaning of America" emphasizes the lower body, making shopping for pants an agony for girls who don't fit into standard sizes, and adding the term "thunder thighs" to pop vocabulary. Training bras now are de rigueur for even flat-chested adolescents, playing up their sexuality at an ever younger age. The 1990s have brought liposuction and body piercing -- painful and sometimes dangerous procedures.
          Yes, Scarlett O'Hara almost fainted while nipping in her waist. "But today's body project requires more internal control than being laced into a corset," Ms. Brumberg argues. "The body has become an all-consuming psychological project."
          What's more, she says, society no longer offers girls the same protections that it once did. The Victorian Age may have Šrepressed girls' behavior as well as their aspirations, but it also gave them breathing space in which to grow up. Today, physicians and school counselors have taken over many of the discussions of sexuality that once gave mothers the opportunity for intimate talks with their daughters. Girls learn about sex -- and become sexually active -- at younger ages than they once did.
          Still, culture is not the only culprit, Ms. Brumberg says. "If culture alone could make you anorexic, we'd all have it. Unlike a lot of scholars in the humanities, I don't think the body is just a cultural construction. Biology and culture interact."
          Thus The Body Project cites evidence suggesting that girls mature earlier today. The average age of first menstruation has shifted from 15 or 16 in the 19th century to 12 today, Ms. Brumberg notes. "That creates a mismatch between biology and culture, sexualizing girls before they're emotionally ready to handle the pressures," she says.
          The depth of her concern leads her to do something that most historians avoid: telling us how to change our behavior. The Body Project calls for reviving an "intergenerational conversation" about the body between girls and women. In part, it says, that means formulating a new "code of sexual ethics."
          "We need a coherent philosophy about what is fair and equitable in the realm of the intimate," Ms. Brumberg writes.
          The girls and young women to whom she addresses that message have responded enthusiastically. At a talk she gave at Macalester College last month, for example, she packed the largest public room on the campus, drawing more than a third of the school's 1,700 students, both men and women.
          "We all got it. We were galvanized by the way she tapped into something that we had all experienced," says Sarah Feldstein, a senior majoring in psychology. "Macalester is pretty liberal, but I know feminists here who won't eat a candy bar for fear of putting on a pound." Š
          The scholarly response to The Body Project is more mixed. Scholars who praise Ms. Brumberg's work emphasize its interdisciplinary quality. "Joan's approach is almost unique. It gives historians a model for thinking about what has been typically seen as an individual psychological experience, and those of us in the social sciences and medicine a way to think about culture," says Allan M. Brandt, a historian of science at Harvard University.
          "The psychologists I know find the way she puts our work together with history very persuasive," says Jaine Strauss, a professor of psychology at Macalester. "I invited Joan to our campus because my experience as a clinical psychologist left no doubt in my mind that the social and cultural messages that she describes have damaged a lot of girls."
          The naysayers, in contrast, focus on two issues. Some reviewers have challenged Ms. Brumberg's use of evidence. Ellen K. Silbergeld, a professor of epidemiology, toxicology, and pathology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, argued in The Washington Post that much of the scientific evidence in The Body Project is "opinion presented as fact." Researchers actually know far less about girls' sexual and reproductive experience than Ms. Brumberg suggests, Ms. Silbergeld said. She also took the book to task for focusing on middle-class girls and ignoring class, race, or even geographic differences.
          The use Ms. Brumberg makes of historical sources has come in for criticism as well. Susie Linfield, acting director of the cultural-reporting and criticism program at New York University, raises questions about the way the author reads the silence about sex and menstruation in 19th-century diaries as a sign that girls in that era weren't concerned about their bodies.
          "It's hard to prove a negative, especially for a period when many issues were thought about but not discussed," Ms. Linfield says. "No one's going to write, 'Dear diary, today ŠI didn't think about beauty.'"
          Susan Ware, a visiting scholar at Radcliffe College's Schlesinger Library, sees it differently. "Joan's complex and sophisticated use of diaries is a model for historical research," she says. "A historian shouldn't be damned for writing a short book that people can read in one lifetime."
          The second point of contention centers on feminism. Ms. Silbergeld suggested that Ms. Brumberg is a "new Victorian," nostalgic for an era when, in the name of protecting girls, society kept them from education, careers, and even sexual fulfillment.
          Others agree. "In a period like today's, when the Right is trying to curb many freedoms for women, that nostalgia is dangerous," says one feminist scholar, who asked not to be named.
          But Nancy Tomes, a professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, thinks that the critics "ignore the age that Joan is talking about. She's warning that 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds are being sexualized. As the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, I can tell you that resonates."
          Ms. Brumberg acknowledges that her book is primarily about white, middle-class girls. "That's a problem of source material -- the girls who tend to keep diaries are the girls who have the time and privacy to write in them," she says.
          The last chapter of her book raises the possibility that girls living in poverty -- sometimes with little family support and often prey to sexual victimization at a young age -- are doubly at risk of succumbing to today's cultural risks. "But that's all speculative," she says.
          She's also a bit uncomfortable with the demands of promoting a trade book. One television talk-show host asked her whether she had posed for the close-up photo of a pierced navel on the book jacket. "I told her I'm a historian, not a model. Even if I had that flat a midriff, I wouldn't go Šaround showing it off," Ms. Brumberg says.
          Her voice rises in anger when she turns to the charge of nostalgia. "Ridiculous," she says. "I'm not saying we should teach girls to just say No. I've angered conservatives by arguing that we must help girls think through a range of options -- from lesbianism to telling a boy that you want sex, but not on a dirty mattress in a fraternity."
          Her voice rises again: "Protection does not have to be punitive."
          Even louder: "Feminist ideologues who claim to be pro-sex ignore the fact that it's pediatricians -- pediatricians! -- who are increasingly called on to tell whether a girl has been raped."
          Ms. Brumberg's voice drops. Quietly, she says, "I'm scared for our girls."