From Rubens to Twiggy: Changing the Language of Bodies

I have to admit to two distinct experiences that shaped the way I have engaged with the discussions of cosmetic surgery and appearance altering in this class. Throughout most of my childhood and adolescence , I was considered obese. At the end of high school, though, I lost forty pounds, and more than my weight changed very suddenly. It was subtle, but noticeable; I found people I met reacted to me more positively, and were more likely to start conversations with me. I also found it much easier to find a retail job that summer than the summer before. Now, like millions of women, I always think it would somehow be “better” if I could lose another ten pounds.
Because of this, I think I have always known that society reads the bodies of individuals in it, though I would not have known to use those words. Even though weight loss is in some ways a separate issue from rhinoplasty, Bañales’ article “The Face Value of Dream: Gender, Race, Class and the Politics of Cosmetic Surgery” engages with many of the same concepts that involve any change in appearance. Bañales describes the choice of a Peruvian women to have her nose surgically altered so she would look more European and less mestizo. This decision allowed her more economic security, and to be read by the people in her culture in the way she wants to be. The American desire to be thin is also driven by a desire to be read in a certain way; men and women both want to be considered attractive, fit, and healthy.  There is a complex web of personal desires, societal desires, victimization and agency that goes into the decision to use technology alter one’s appearance; ultimately, I hope that we will be able to alter the ways in which society reads our bodies, rather than altering our own bodies.
Bañales is sure to emphasize the personal agency which contributes to the decisions of women in Peru to get cosmetic surgery. And she is right to do so; they are certainly not passive victims who accept their fate of poverty. The particular woman she describes was dissatisfied with her condition, and acted to change it; employers read her body in a way that barred her from employment, so she changed that body. In my case, I knew part of the reason I had social and work-related difficulties was my weight, so I changed my weight. Both of us took control of what we had to control: ourselves. In other words, we wanted to be read differently, so we changed the text that was being read. In this process, though, society was not just reading: it was writing. Though a personal choice was involved for the woman in Peru, it was society’s way of reading that motivated that change. It is in this way that society is constantly both reading and writing on the bodies of individual subjects, who identify societal pressures and then react to those pressures, often in ways which perpetuate the method of reading.
But is it possible to change the other half of the equation? The woman in Peru and I both knew we had control over the text of our bodies, and so that is what we changed. Theoretically, though, it could be society’s method of reading the text changes to have the same effect. Since the woman in the Bañales article is a member of Peruvian society, and I am a member of my own, if we do not have control over the method of reading, who does?
To answer these questions, we can look to times when the method of reading has changed. I do not have personal experience with the history of mestizo phenotypes in Peru, but I can speak to the ideal body image in the United States and the West. The shifts are obvious; we only have to look from classical paintings, including the traditional Rubens nude, and compare that to the images of the ideal female form in pop culture today to know that the reading of the female body has shifted.
Twiggy  is often cited as the beginning of the idealization of the waifish body type in Western media. Writing for the New York Times, Susan Cheever describes in ideal woman before Twiggy in 1967, “when big breasts were more important than thin thighs, the ideal woman was an hourglass with wavy hair, a pretty name and a nurturing soul, a woman as sexy as Marilyn and as demure as Jacqueline.” This ideal is not necessarily better than the current one, I only want to point out that it is different. Cheever cites a significant figure: “In the 1960’s, the average fashion model was 15 pounds lighter than the average woman; in the 1990’s, the average fashion model is 35 pounds lighter and four inches taller than the average woman.”
We are constantly shown images of models, who have become lighter and taller, and our ideal has changed to be lighter and taller. The image of this one woman altered modeling in a way that has laster more than forty years, and probably will last years more. Twiggy demonstrates the power of the image in the media, of technology’s effect on how we read our own bodies. Women now can look at themselves and say they are “too fat” when what they mean is they are fatter than the models they see everywhere.
I am still stuck with the question of what to do about the way we read bodies. No one individual decided that the modeling industry would change its way of doing business after Twiggy, as well as others like Audrey Hepburn. As consumers, we have the power to demand a more diverse image of beauty, in terms of weight, but also race, height, and many other characteristics. If we read a greater variety of body types more positively, we would all have the freedom to make decisions about technologically altering our appearance based more on personal desires and less of the threat of being negatively read.

WORKS CITED
Bañales, Victoria M. “‘The Fact Value of Dreams’: Gender, Class and the Politics of Cosmetic     Surgery.” Beyond the Frame: Women of color and Visual Representation. Ed. Neferti
X. M. Tadiar and Angela Y. Davis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 131-152.
Cheever, Susan. “Heroine Worship: Twiggy, A Strick Figure.” The New York Times Magazine.     1996. <http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine4/articles/twiggy.html>