Contemporary beauty norms reproduce a Platonic dualism of body as lack to be mastered

Evidence

Bluestone’s own account often seems out of touch with contemporary feminist scholarship and concerns. She contends, for example, that contemporary college-age women are held up by an ‘excessive emphasis’ on their bodies; it would be beneficial for such women to escape this ‘obsession’ with their bodies and learn a lesson from Platonic indifference to the body (1987:151). But this is to misrepresent both the problem for contemporary women and Plato’s account, which is not ‘indifferent’ or neutral regarding the body, or aimed merely at correcting an ‘excessive emphasis’ on it, but is mostly negative and contemptuous. Indeed the preoccupation with the weight and appearance of the female body which Bluestone takes to be ‘excessive emphasis on or adulation of’ the body, ‘obsession with the body’, is not the expression of an overly affirmative view of the body, but rather conceives the female body in terms of a series of lacks. As many feminists have argued, this stems not from adulation but from a created insecurity and anxiety about falling short of absurd and disempowering ideals of ‘beauty’ … The non-benign influence of the Platonic model in the contemporary context can be seen in the approach to female beauty as conformity to a remote form or Ideal (or rather the six or seven Ideals licensed for this fashion season) rather than in the celebration of the diversity of actual bodies. It can also be seen in the thoroughly Platonic identification of the body and its appetites as alien and inferior and the object of obsessive attempts at control by a real self identified with a disciplining, mastering logos (Bordo 1988; 1990). — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 306

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The beauty-ideals-as-conformity angle echoes the complaints-about-immodesty piece’s theme of dress as group-and-identity policing.
• XREF: Centers the body-as-lack and mastering-logos mechanism that the ecofeminist dualism critique applies to both women and nature. — connects to: A single reason-over-nature dualism structures every domain of Plato’s philosophy — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 312; Western metaphysical dualism drives the erasure of the body in academic teaching — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 381; Modernity recodifies Plato’s form-change hierarchy as a hard-soft gendered division — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 446 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Western metaphysical dualism drives the erasure of the body in academic teaching #expands (0.86) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 381
• Modernity recodifies Plato’s form-change hierarchy as a hard-soft gendered division #expands (0.84) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 446
• Descartes relocated the Platonic devaluation of nature from virtue into consciousness #expands (0.83) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 423
• Femininity is an artificial, inculcated product rather than a natural instinct #exemplifies (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1037
• Colonial knowledge treats Orientals as a fixed Platonic essence #exemplifies (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 122
• Plato located the potential for enmity within the body itself #complicates (0.79) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1015
• Self-hatred of the imperfect body drives the quest for bodily perfection #complicates (0.74) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 579