"From our bodies, through our bodies"

Last week, I ended my presentation on female bodybuilders with Stevn Davis and Maglina Lubovich’s conclusions about the impetus for women, particularly hypermasculine bodybuilders like Bev Francis, to complicate gender stereotypes by participating in “physical feminism.” Stevn and Davis say in Hunks, Hotties, and Pretty Boys that women like Francis participate in an “embodied resistance that operates through fleshy transformation. Bev Francis, as a practitioner of this form of somatic emancipation, directs women towards the fact that they can only liberate themselves from their bodies through their bodies” (157). Some class members were hesitant to readily accept this premise. Half of the class responded that these women were in fact liberating themselves by complicating gender stereotypes and possessing control (in the most drastic and literal ways) of their bodies, thereby evading traditional hegemonic and cultural notions of femininity. The other half, however, argued that female bodybuilders were actually inhibiting themselves (through their bodies) by “trapping” themselves in typically male-like bodies, and subsequently, actually purporting the brawny, male physique as the most desirable. 

                                   

I maintain that though these women are aspiring to achieve a “manly” body and are thereby suggesting the man’s body is more desirable to possess as one’s own, they are still using their physical bodies to liberate themselves from their physical bodies. This type of meta-transformation, in which traditional ideals of gender rest in, and are then disrupted in, the “somatic” body, indicates control over “[what] nature has given but [what] fortune has taken away” (Gaspare Tagliacozzi quoted in “Proud Flesh” by Rebecca Mead).  Fortune, in this case, is less a matter of “luck” and more a matter of discipline. The quote could also be read as “what nature has given but what discipline has transformed.” In this case, those who labor hard enough on their bodies, fortunately, are liberated from them.

However, Ollivier Dyens says it’s not just fortune or hard work which allows human beings to be free from their bodies. Of bodybuilders specifically, Dyens says: 

[These] strange and sometimes obsessive behaviors stand for [this: They] all demonstrate a need on the part of those involved to be present and dominant in the cultural environment. A bodybuilder who bulks up with steroids is definitely not a healthy person, but his predominant position in the cultural environment turns him into a desirable individual…Good biological health and reproductive effectiveness are no longer the object of our quest. What we long for is cultural dominance. (Metal Flesh and the Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over 22, emphasis mine)

Bodybuilders (and all human beings) who labor to attain self-perfection (through affectations both innocuous and drastic—from makeup application to bodybuilding or cosmetic surgery) do so because the transformation is worth something more than healthy biological enhancement; it is worth desirability. And desirability is, as Dyens would argue, an intangible product of our culturally mediated bodies.  

But, then, isn't it one of our most basic human needs to feel desired? Certainly we have studied how closely desirability, sexuality, beauty, and the body are all dependent on one another, but Dyens says the new conceptions of our bodies as technobodies, "plasticized by power, technology, and culture," allow for a new manifestation of desire-to-be-desired (72). Now, we want to become "memes,...vehicles for cultural replication" (22). This is not to say that we do not want to be physically desirable, but that we no longer need to be only "healthy looking" to do so. Starving models are not healthy. But they are attractive to many, because what makes them relevant is cultural stamina. Claudia Benthien would call this "the sexual experience of the future-- autoerotic and narcissistic" (Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World 226). As long as we can perpetuate our image (the perpetuation itself indicating a relevance), we remain desirable.

And in the 21st century, to achieve any sort of cultural, autoerotic stamina, we must be plugged in. 

Our social presence is no longer limited to our physical presence. In this sense, we are disembodied cultural bodies. Marshall McLuhan says that simultaneously, through our "cultural bodies," "by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat controls...will be translated into information systems" (Understanding Media 57). Twitter and Facebook have become places where we not only create virtual identities, but also where we dictate thoughts and engage in dialogue without ever having to utter a single word aloud. Our physical appendages become conductors of thought and vectors of our cultural significance. Our fingers now do the labor which our entire bodies once did, and therefore, these machines upon which our fingers touch and click, perform the functions our physical bodies once did. They are extensions, but they are also attachments.

Benthien says: 

The goal is no longer to have the body excluded from the electronic web (integrated merely via the eyes through eyephones, the ear through earphones, the hands through keyboards, data gloves, joysticks, or touch screens) but to bring it into virtual reality as an entity with complete sensual perception. (222)

The irony here is that to be somatically emancipated (as Davis and Lubovich state above) by technocratic socialization, one must not detach but attach oneself to external aids, technology specifically, which allow us "freedom from our bodies" (in that we no longer have to walk to our friend's house to talk to her) but which literally adhere to our bodies, which then must adapt.

And we manage to adapt just fine.

This image shows us two things. First, it shows us what is clear to anyone who's read this post-- the cell phone acts as a cultural transmitter, transmitting our meme and connecting our cultural bodies to other cultural bodies, making us significant. But more than that, the gloves show how we have altered and adapted our essential articles of clothing (gloves originally intended as a survival tool to keep warm) to allow for this interaction (with the phone and with each other). 


Below is another example of technology mediating the world for us, via our own physical functions (in this case, seeing).

 

This smart-phone app, called "Type'N'Walk" allows users to do just that--type (text) and walk simultaneously. The phone itself takes on the function of our eyes, laboring for us, so that we do not have to look up and back down repeatedly while walking and texting (an act in and of itself which connotes social significance).

The question I leave you then is this: if we are inclined to adapt and let technology enhance our functionality, even at the cost of literally attaching technology to one's body, do we do so out of necessity? Benthien talks about the bodysuits which transmit touch to other people wearing other bodysuits halfway around the world; these suits are what McLuhan would call "extensions of one's body." My question is then are these "extensions" (via body suit, cell phone, Facebook, and on and on) going to ultimately inhibit our own ability to function without these enhancers? Do we submit to our technobodies because they are convenient?  Because they are more fun? Because we are curious? Because they really do make life easier? Or because in order to be socially significant, to be a meme, to posses cultural stamina, we must? 

Works Cited:

Benthien, Claudia. Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World.
Davis, Stevn and Lubovich, Maglina: Hunks, Hotties, and Pretty  Boys.
Dyens, Ollivier. Metal Flesh and the Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. 
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Mead, Rebecca.  Proud Flesh.  New Yorker.  Nov. 13, 2006. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/13/061113crbo_books?currentPage=all