"Femininity and Domination, chapters 3+5" Sandra Lee Bartky - 1990

Bordo and Bartky (feminist philosophers) are more nuanced as not everything is painful, there can be pleasure and agency. They situate their critiques within a history of ideas, Foucault etc.

Bartky has very Utopian idea of what women should be but can’t really locate it. She comes up with a revolutionary aesthetic of the body, a radical body - 6 years later she flushes out nuances of conflicting aspects of feminism, but the radical body becomes more like the natural 70s body, which many of us don’t feel more powerful in. (For example, Tara feels more comfortable in her constructed, performative body that her natural one.) Bartky and Doane both deal with female narcissism.

Chapter 3: Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation
"One of the tasks that socialist feminists have yet to accomplish is the alteration and elaboration of Marx's theory of alienation." (p.33) "For Marx, labor is the most distinctively human activity; following Hegel, he regards the product of labor as an exteriorization of the worker's being, an objectification of human powers and abilities. But under capitalism, workers are alienated form the products of their labor as well as from their own productive activity." (p.34) Summing up Marx as arguing that separating workers from the product of their labor causes fragmentation and prohibition of the exercise of typically human functions which causes workers to be like condemned prisoners. (Men are still responding to this in escapist movies like Wanted, and superhero movies in general as looking for the means to escape the new incarnation of Marx's capitalist society in which everyone works in tiny, divided cubicals at a computer all day creating virtual "products.")

Bartky extends Marx's definition of alienation to women. Women are alienated in cultural production (men have control) and sexual objectification of women (as passive subjects meant to be looked at) fragments women. The difference between Marx's alienation of labor and femininity as alienation is that "many women seem to embrace with enthusiasm what seem to be the most alienated aspects of feminine existence." (p.36) if objectifier and objectified become the same woman we get feminine narcissism. "How is feminine narcissism possible, i.e., how is it possible for sexual objectification, which is profoundly alienating, to produce narcissistic states of consciousness, which are profoundly satisfying? We can understand the interest women have in conforming to the requirements of sexual objectification, given our powerlessness and dependency; less easy to explain is the pleasure we take in doing so." (p.37) She uses narcissism by its original definition in psychoanalysis (infatuation with one's bodily being). She wants to argue that "feminine narcissism is not the rock on which the idea of femininity as alienation must founder. On the contrary, a fuller disclosure of this phenomenon can help reveal the nature of self-estrangement which lies close to the heart of the feminine condition itself." (p.37)

"Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in the feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised." (p.38) The "Other" can take on many forms (mother, self, lover) but becomes "an interiorized representative of what I shall call the "fashion-beauty complex"...a major articulation of capitalist patriarchy." (p.39) This is the same idea that all the articles articulate: keep the standards of beauty so high that women are constantly found lacking and need to make up for their lack by purchasing goods to better themselves. "All the projections of the fashion-beauty complex have this in common: They are images of what I am not...We can now grasp the nature of feminine narcissism with more precision: it is infatuation with an inferiorized body." (p.40) Like the church, that creates anxieties about bodily appetites and then presents itself as the only way "to take away the very guilt and shame it has itself produced" the fashion-beauty complex creates anxiety and lack that only it can fulfill through body care rituals and products. These are "false needs" that are "produced through indoctrination, psychological manipulation, and the denial of autonomy; they are needs whose possession and satisfaction benefit not the subject who has them, but the social order whose interest lies in domination." (p.42) They are repressive satisfactions. Her solution is that women must work together to expand the notion of what is beautiful. The problem seems to present itself as a catch 22, how can we have pride in our body and have self-esteem while denying the dominant idea of beauty that usually lends itself to self-esteem and positive self-image?

Foucault, Femininty, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power
Panopticon - the perfect prison where, under constant surveillance, each inmate becomes his own jailer, internalizes self-surveillance which is the genesis of "the celebrated 'individualism' and heightened self-consciousness which are hallmarks of modern times." (p.65) Femininity is an artifice and Bartky examines 3 things that are recognizably feminine: (1) sculpting the physical body, (2) movement and gestures and (3) display of the body as an ornamented surface. All these three things are based on women being deficient, passive and highly constructed. "Femininity as spectacle is something which virtually every woman is required to participate. Second, the precise nature of the criteria by which women are judged, not only the inescapability of the judgment itself, reflects gross imbalances in the social power of the sexes that do not mark the relationship of artist and their audiences. An aesthetic of femininity, for example, that mandates fragility and a lack of muscular strength produces female bodies that can offer little resistance to physical abuse..." (p.73) "The absence of formal institutional structure and of the authorities invested with power the power to carry out institutional directives creates the impression that the production of femininity is either entirely voluntary or natural." (p.75) This is different from Foucault's ideas about discipline of the body being tied to social institutions like the school, the factory or the prison. Now the media and visual representations are taking over these roles to create internalized self-critique; isolated and self-policing subjects. Images in the media create a normative image of femininity. She doesn't really present a solution to the problem. She suggests a better understanding of cultural messages.