Consuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification 9781350225299, 9781350225329, 9781350225305

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Consuming the Body

Also available from Bloomsbury Visual Arts Revisiting the Gaze: Feminism, Fashion and the Female Body, edited by Morna Laing and Jacki Willson

Consuming the Body Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification Dawn Woolley

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Dawn Woolley, 2023 Dawn Woolley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © ‘Lure (11)’ by Dawn Woolley. C-type photograph, UK (2014). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-2529-9 ePDF: 978-1-3502-2530-5 eBook: 978-1-3502-2531-2 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

I would like to dedicate this book to my family, and particularly Gary Woolley, who died before it was finished but would have been very proud of the achievement.

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Contents List of illustrations  Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Sadistic commands 2 The fetishistic gaze 3 Hystericized insistent presence 4 Self(ie) discipline 5 The hysteria economy 6 The clinical fetishistic gaze 7 Anti-consumers and the fetishistic gaze 8 The bulimic economy 9 Empowering presence Conclusion Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

viii ix 1 11 23 33 47 61 71 85 97 109 123 130 150 177 193

Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

‘Planche XX. Attitudes Passionnelles. Supplication Amoureuse’ ‘Hystéro-epilepsie. Contracture, Planche XXX’ ‘#WeJustNeedToPee selfie’  ‘Masc#2 Spoof Instructional Selfie’ ‘Fem#1 Spoof Instructional Selfie’ ‘Fem#2 Spoof Instructional Selfie’ ‘Laura and Jake’ ‘Laura and Jake’ ‘Rob and Hayley’ ‘Louise and Josh’ Two photographs of a woman suffering from anorexia Four photographs of a woman showing anorexia nervosa ‘“Antipon”: permanently cures obesity’ Doctor Jukes pumping the stomach of Sir W. Curtis; several other aldermen wait to be operated on, representing the gross appetites of some civic dignitaries 15 ‘#fat #fatshion#fashion #fatfashion #podcasts #femmes #femmesover40 #whatfatgirlsactuallywear #eldergoth’ 16 ‘Glitch Selfie’

37 38 49 53 54 55 74 74 75 76 92 94 99

110 120 128

Acknowledgements This book contains research that took place during my PhD at the Royal College of Art and while working at four institutions. I am very grateful to my PhD supervisors Dr Francette Pacteau and Dr Sharon Kivland, for their insight, encouragement and guidance, in refining many of the ideas in this book. Discussions with colleagues and students at Bridgend College and Anglia Ruskin University have also been invaluable in helping me to shape my ideas. My analysis of adverts has been enriched by writing ‘Looking at Adverts’ blog posts for the Open College of the Arts and the thoughtful comments posted by staff and students in response. Leeds Arts University has provided the space, time and support I have needed to complete my research and synthesize the ideas in this book. Thank you Professor Naomi Segal for your suggestions, advice and sharp editorial eye. Thanks also to Dr Caitlin O’Hara and Dr Savani Bartholdy at King’s College Eating Disorders Research Group for their insight into neuro-psychology and eating disorder treatment, and Dr Suzi Doyle for sharing her research regarding visual symbolism in eating disorder psychotherapy. I have shared aspects of this research at numerous conferences, gaining invaluable feedback from editors of journal articles and book chapters that have resulted from these events. The Dolce and Gabbana adverts discussed in Chapter 5 are examined in ‘The Dissecting Gaze: Fashioned Bodies on Social Networking Sites’, published in Revisiting the Gaze: Feminism, Fashion and the Female Body (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). The chapter considers how Laura Mulvey’s conception of the gaze has been transformed by social media. These ideas continue to inform my research and were caringly teased out and edited by Dr Jacki Willson and Dr Morna Laing. Chapter 8 contains research into the Quantified Self Movement and eating disorders that was developed in writing about self-tracking apps in relation to The Productive Body by Didier Deleule and François Guéry. ‘The Quantified Self, The Ideology of Health and Fat’, will be published in The Body Productive: Rethinking Work, Capitalism & the Body, by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022. This chapter was developed with insightful feedback from Dr Steffan Blayney, Savanah Whaley and Joey Hornsby. Ongoing creative collaborations with Zara Worth have enriched my thinking about social media and brought to my attention aspects of online cultures that would otherwise remain a mystery to me. In 2020, during the stress and confusion of the first pandemic lockdown, Dr A.C. Davidson invited me to collaborate on Bois of Isolation, an Instagram research project that aimed to explore how women and non-binary people queer their selfies during lockdown. This project helped me to move beyond binary thinking about gender and selfies. Without this, and the experiences and creativity of the workshop participants, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to write a positive

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forward-thinking conclusion, proposing ways to produce selfies that challenge the dominant and discriminatory norms of selfie practice. I am also indebted to James Moore for the countless ways he has assisted my research when I lived in Cardiff, including discussing ideas, proof reading texts and generally being supportive. Many thanks.

Introduction

Consuming the Body examines contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of ideal gendered bodies, paying particular attention to the new mechanisms of interaction produced by social networking sites. Modes of discipline, forms of pleasure and opportunities for subversion are identified in an examination of how individuals are addressed and the ways in which they are expected to respond. Consumption is not a simple matter of buying things to fulfil a need. For people in neoliberal societies, including ‘the world’s poorest citizens’, social worth is largely measured by an individual’s ability to consume.1 Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, influenced the development of neoliberal policies. Friedman applied economic models to public policy issues and argued that free markets are beneficial for the state and its citizens. Two characteristics of a free-market economy are deregulation and privatization, both of which reduce the influence of government and welfare state provisions. Deregulation, privatization and reduction of government  intervention are the cornerstones of the neoliberal economic policies implemented in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Michel Foucault described neoliberal capitalism as a political economic system that aims to transform social life and influence the way that people behave.2 According to Foucault, ‘the economic model of supply and demand and of investment-costs-profit’ becomes ‘a model of social relations and of existence itself, a form of relationship of the individual to himself, time, those around him, the group, and the family’.3 It is the process through which many aspects of life come to be viewed as part of the economy and are commoditized. According to John Gledhill, neoliberalism seeks to ‘commoditize the most intimate of human relations and the production of identity and personhood’ while also measuring social worth purely ‘in terms of consumption and marketed “lifestyle” symbols’.4 In neoliberal societies, individual workers are expected to view themselves as flexible entrepreneurs who are willing (and able) to take advantage of the opportunities the free-market economy provides. It seems to offer everyone equal opportunities for success. However, the social structures that make it difficult for marginalized people to benefit, such as those with caring responsibilities, who have disabilities and who are discriminated against due to their race, class, gender and sexuality, are concealed in neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalization produces precarious employment conditions,

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such as zero-hour, hourly paid and fixed-term contracts. Alongside casualization, neoliberalism is characterized by an ‘audit culture’ in which ‘continuous assessment and demands for evidence that goals are being realized has powerful disciplinary effects’.5 Being continuously audited increases the worker’s feeling of job insecurity by implying that they are in competition with colleagues to maximize productivity, which impels them to work longer hours under deteriorating working conditions.6 Because neoliberalization changes the way people behave, it implies that there is an ideal type of behaviour and an ideal person who always behaves that way. The ideal neoliberal subject is ‘rational’ and ‘self-interested’,7 a mobile, flexible, enterprising and innovative individual who invests in the self in order to increase their human capital.8 The ideal neoliberal subject described in this book is a conceptual characterization rather than a description of a real person. Jim McGuigan writes that conceptual characterizations ‘classify different kinds of situated response to various societal pressures’ in order to emphasize the key character traits that would be produced by these responses.9 By defining the ideal neoliberal individual, it is possible to trace the ways in which individuals are coerced into behaving in this way, and potentially find ways to resist and disrupt these expected forms of behaviour. This is the aim of Consuming the Body. It identifies key modes of address used in commodity culture to compel the consumer to consume: sadistic commands communicated in adverts, TV programmes and magazine articles; a fetishistic gaze that dissects the body into parts to be improved through commodification; and a hystericized insistent presence that compels the consumer to present the body for critique and appreciation by others that is exemplified in the selfie. These dominant modes of address are structured like pathological relations. However, it is not my intention to pathologize individual consumers. Instead, I aim to demonstrate how consumers are disciplined to become more like the neoliberal ideal using hypothetical scenarios that ideally suit capitalism. I interpret the visual characteristics of different types of selfies, including selfies posted using the hashtags #fitspiration, #thinspiration, #fatspiration and #bodypositivity, to understand how they relate to current body ideals. In my analysis of thinspiration images (thinspiration is a term used to describe photographs of emaciated bodies shared on pro-eating-disorder blogs and websites)  I  argue the anorexic body represents the logical (and fatal) end point for the idealized body in consumer culture. Looking at fat acceptance and fat activism selfies revealed a fourth mode of address, empowering presence, with the potential to liberate consumers from the ‘trap of visibleness’ produced by the other three modes of address. In the mass media and academic writing, the meaning and value of selfies are fiercely debated. Numerous articles criticize selfie-taking as a form of vacuous narcissism practiced predominantly by girls, young women and gay men.10 In Seeing Ourselves through Technology, Jill Walker Rettberg views the mockery and pathologizing of selfietaking as ‘disciplinary strategies to put young women in particular back in their place. This is about power and about who has the right to speak in public or to share images in public’.11 Selfies enable public self-expression by women and marginalized people that was previously restricted to powerful men and individuals working in media industries. Furthermore, taking selfies and liking or commenting on other people’s selfies enable individuals to reinforce social bonds and gain peer approval. Therefore,

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it is not my intention to suggest that we should stop taking selfies. Instead, I examine the disciplinary forces that are at play during the process of taking and sharing selfies to identify aspects that have the potential to be empowering. As a slender, white, bisexual woman who has moved from working- to middleclass through education, I write this book from a position of privilege. The latter four chapters of the book examine notions of health in neoliberal capitalism in relation to eating disorder and fat discrimination. Although I am slim, many of my actions and decisions are informed by an internalized fear of fat, produced by living in a society that discriminates against fat and openly expresses fat hatred. As fat studies scholars have noted, we are all affected by anti-fat discourses.12 In line with fat acceptance discourse,  I  use the term ‘fat’ throughout this book as a descriptive term that does not carry the moral stigma or medicalization of ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’.13 These latter terms are contained in quotation marks because  I  view them as problematic and contested terms.

The discourse of the capitalist I use the structure of power relations alluded to in Jacques Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist to understand the impact that consumer culture has on consumers, and to reveal ways that consumers may resist commodification. Using psychoanalytic concepts in relation to gender and sexuality can be problematic if they are applied in a way that reinforces and validates patriarchal oppression. However, psychoanalysis also provides tools to understand how these oppressions continue to exist.14 In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey describes psychoanalysis as a ‘political weapon’ that shows how Hollywood films are structured to reinforce patriarchy.15 Mulvey writes, ‘There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one.’16 When examining the dominant modes of address on social networking sites, the structure of the discourse of the capitalist enabled me to explore modes of discipline through a prism of desire as well as domination and control, and explore potential forms of self-presentation that may offer resistances within consumer society. Lacan’s four discourses, the discourse of the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst, offer a method to identify social positions ‘determined by power, seduction, demand and desire’ and see where potential resistances lie.17 Lacan developed the theory of the four discourses and introduced the supplementary discourse of the capitalist in the aftermath of the student protests and wildcat strikes that took place across France in 1968. The anti-capitalist protests resulted in university restructuring and increased wages; however, capitalism also changed as it absorbed and recuperated the criticisms of the protesters: capitalism usurped the left’s rhetoric of worker self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan to a capitalist one. It was Socialism that was conservative,

4

Consuming the Body hierarchic and administrative …. The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical rhetoric of ’68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organisations of corporate capitalism and ‘really existing’ socialism.18

The radical political demands of the 1968 protests were neutralized and reconfigured by capitalism. Sexual freedom and social equality were turned into the neoliberal ideals of individualism and a flexible, entrepreneurial workforce who are in competition with each other.

Commodified empowerment and sign-value exchange This form of capitalism is difficult to critique because it incorporates and neutralizes anti-capitalist criticism. For example, in response to criticism of sexism by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, advertisers appropriated ‘a kind of faux feminist legitimacy’ by using slogans and ideas from feminist campaigns.19 In this process, female empowerment became linked to consumption and body maintenance. By the 1990s the idea of empowerment through consumption took the form of what Rosalind Gill calls the ‘midriff ’.20 The ‘midriff ’ is exemplified by Trevor Beattie’s 1994 Wonderbra campaign and the slogan ‘hello boys’. The advert caused controversy in the UK when first displayed, with some viewers claiming it was derogatory and others suggesting it had caused traffic accidents because it was distracting drivers.21 The woman in the advert addresses the viewer; she knows she is desired and flaunts her attractive body as a source of power. Gill writes that ‘today women are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their (implicitly “liberated”) interests to do so’.22 Liberation becomes a ‘new form of tyranny, an obligation to be sexual in a highly specific kind of way’.23 She continues: Not only are women objectified (as they were before), but through sexual subjectification in midriff advertising they must also now understand their own objectification as pleasurable and self-chosen … women are endowed with the status of active subjecthood so that they can ‘choose’ to become sex objects.24

Gill notes that the figure of the midriff is ‘resolutely heteronormative’, young, ablebodied and white, and excludes ‘any woman who is unable to live up to increasingly narrow standards of female beauty and sex appeal that are normatively required’.25 Commercial culture continues to reinforce polarizing stereotypical feminine and masculine ideals, despite also including more gay, queer and non-binary people in adverts. Since the mid-2000s gay culture has featured more frequently in adverts because it provides ‘an easy way of adding desirable “edginess” to a product’s image’.26 This includes the ‘hot lesbian’ figure, described by Gill as ‘extraordinarily attractive’, ‘conventionally feminine’ and highly sexualized.27 This advertising archetype recodes

Introduction

5

lesbianism so that it conforms to a dominant heterosexual feminine ideal. She is almost always engaged in sexualized, physical contact with another woman who is equally attractive. The embrace between the two women beckons to the male gaze, ‘offering a heady mix of the coolness of queer, alongside the sexual objectification of women’s bodies, and the soft-porn-sexiness of seeing two attractive women engaging in intimate sexual conduct’, while escaping criticism by claiming that female desire is the focus of the advert.28 These adverts do not challenge heterosexuality or dominant feminine ideals. The types of women that are excluded from hot lesbian adverts are: fat, older, disabled, non-binary and queer women. Occasionally beautiful Black women feature in the adverts as the contrasting counterpart to a fair-haired white woman.29 The number of adverts featuring Black models has also increased in recent years, but the predominant types of bodies that are represented tend to conform to white, Western beauty ideals. bell hooks writes that, rather than challenging racist stereotypes that do not view black as beautiful, the increased representation of Black women in fashion magazines and catalogues ‘reinscribe[s] prevailing stereotypes’ in which ‘[d]arker-skinned models are most likely to appear in photographs where their features are distorted’ and ‘[b]iracial women tend to appear in sexualised images’.30 She notes that Black models ‘must resemble as closely as possible their white counterparts’.31 The preference for Black women with light skin has historical roots in the slave trade; slaves with light skin were deemed to be more intelligent than slaves with darker skin, and as a result, light-skinned slaves were often selected to work in the house rather than in the field, and were sometimes taught to read and write. This prejudicial hierarchy of skin tone – colourism – continues to have a detrimental effect on Black women today. Aisha Phoenix writes, ‘women with dark skin are at a disadvantage because skin shade is central to assessments of beauty, with light skin operating as a form of symbolic capital that is converted into economic capital and advantage’ that leads to higher levels of education, better paid jobs, living in a wealthier neighbourhood and greater likelihood of being married.32 Colourism is perpetuated by white and Black people, adding to the racist and sexist discrimination dark-skinned Black women experience within and beyond their communities. Adverts that feature Black women with light skin, long straight hair and slim bodies enable commodity producers to benefit from the positive associations of Black culture and capitalize on the public interest in protest movements such as Black Lives Matter without alienating white audiences. For example, in their research, Robert L. Harrison, Kevin D. Thomas and Samantha N. N. Cross found that advertisers may see the inclusion of particular mixed-race bodies (specifically those of majority/minority origin) as a target marketing panacea, providing the ability to appropriate the cultural meaning embedded in the ‘other’ while maintaining a visual and cultural connection to the perceived normalcy of whiteness.33

Representation is an important source of social legitimation; however, the preference for light-skinned models means that dark-skinned Black models remain invisible. Furthermore, this preference may represent a form of ‘strategic ambiguity’, employed by marketers to reinforce racist and sexist ideals about beauty by ‘appealing to the

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powerful while placating the marginal just enough to keep them from openly rebelling against the discourse and the system it supports’.34 Racial justice, LGBTQI+ and feminist ideas are incorporated into advertising rhetoric, and the notion of empowerment is reduced to a type of sexual power over men that is achieved by having a young, slim, beautiful body and white, Western features. At the same time, activist demands are incorporated, de-politicized and repackaged as individual consumer choices in which ‘women’s choice and freedom are linked to the marketplace’.35 There is no space for collectivist action. Neoliberal capitalism incorporates criticism by marginally expanding the types of people and bodies that are represented and idealized, without challenging and changing those ideals. In doing so, it creates the impression of living in a post-racial and post-feminist society without changing any of the structural inequalities that enable racism and sexism to proliferate. In Consuming the Body,  I  argue that the conflation of empowerment with sexualization and commodification produces gendered subjectivities that are ideally suited for neoliberal capitalism. Ideas of health along with culture-bound illnesses, such as hysteria and eating disorders, are examined to demonstrate the relationship between body ideals and the impact of commodification on consumer’s bodies. Throughout this book I will use Jean Baudrillard’s term ‘sign-value’ to describe the dominant mode of consumption in contemporary consumer societies, in which the main aim of consumption is not the satisfaction of objective needs but the social act of purchasing lifestyle symbols and values. In the system of sign-value exchange, the actual function or use-value of the commodity is of secondary importance, because the purchasable object is also a symbol that expresses something about the consumer’s social worth, importance, desirableness and success. For example, owning a particular brand of car may tell others that the individual earns a lot of money or supports environmental activist concerns about the use of fossil fuels. Baudrillard argues that it is often the expression of this message that is the primary intention of a purchase. He writes that if we desired objects for their use-value, the increasing material wealth experienced by consumers in affluent nations would result in a reduction in consumption. However, because we desire what the objects symbolize, we can never get enough.36 The more we consume and display these sign-values, the greater their importance becomes, and the more strongly we feel compelled to purchase objects to show that we identify with and share the values. In their research into the impact of social class on consumer behaviour, Shavitt, Jiang and Cho found that working-class consumers purchase middle- and upper-class commodity status symbols (sign-values) to ‘restore lost feelings of power’.37 White working-class consumers can elevate their social status by undertaking upper-class consumer practices; however, ethnic minority consumers do not experience the same benefits. Elizabeth Edgecomb writes that when poor, ethnic minority tweens wear branded clothes and jewellery, it is assumed ‘they have done something criminal to get them’ and so their consumer practices signify ‘immorality and criminality’.38 The tweens use sign-values to avoid this stigmatized consumer identity. They are aware of the racist stereotypes relating to dress and appearance that are prevalent in society and are careful not to repeat them. The boys do not wear oversized trousers that reveal their

Introduction

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boxer shorts, and the girls avoid clothing that is tight or revealing.39 However, they use ‘code switching’, blending sign-values, to enable them to assimilate some social norms and reduce stigmatizing identity markers without disavowing their identity: Through code switching linguistically, ideologically, and through fashion… the tweens redeploy, revolutionalize, and subvert the social, economic, and political constraints in ways that allow them to live in their delinquent identities, gain some sense of control, and have fun.40

Code switching enables marginalized consumers to perform hybrid identities that are marked by class, race, gender and sexuality, and partially assimilate to dominant consumer culture ideals. In the process they change the meaning of commodities, destabilizing the dominant sign-values that are circulated and reproduced by the objects. However, appropriation and destabilization of sign-value is a cyclical process. For example, the fashion industry appropriates the street style of Black urban youth, transforming the trends into high-end commodities that are beyond the financial reach of the individuals who originate the style. Innovative fashions produced by code switching are emptied of the important signifiers that enable marginalized consumers to negotiate their stigmatized consumer identities, and are turned into sign-values of prestige for white, middle-class consumers. In addition, capitalism ‘is always invading new territories’ such as different parts and functions of the body, in order to subordinate them to the system of signvalue.41 This is achieved by commoditizing ‘the most intimate of human relations’, ‘identity and personhood’ and ‘social life itself ’.42 Social interactions and friendships are commoditized by social networking sites (discussed in Chapter 5), and even our political and ethical values are incorporated into the sign-value exchange system through their commoditization in reusable sanitary products and political slogan T-shirts. This book will examine how the body has become entangled in the sign-value exchange system as a denigrated object and an object of prestige.

Chapter overview The first three chapters examine the economic and social context produced by neoliberal capitalism and describe the modes of address that are used to support it: sadistic commands, a fetishistic gaze and hystericized insistent presence. Chapter 1, Sadistic Commands, considers consumer culture to be a ‘libido economy’ due to the economies of desire that emerged from psychoanalysis and neoclassical economic theory in the nineteenth century. Contemporary consumer culture is explored using the characteristics of kleptomania and fetishism. Cycles of fashion, cosmetic surgery and anti-ageing products are examined as consumer practices that pathologize the relation between the consumer and their body. Sadistic commands, one of the dominant modes of address in consumer society, is explained in relation to psychoanalytic and literary accounts of sadism. The chapter also applies Foucault’s

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concept of bio-power and Han’s definition of the achievement-subject to selfies, selfbranding and ‘context collapse’ on social networking sites. Chapter 2, The Fetishistic Gaze, introduces the second mode of address: a magnifying, dissecting way of looking at the body that is frequently used in adverts, and is internalized by consumers, who view their bodies as imperfect objects. Discussion of a L’Oréal make-up advert shows how the dual forces of the panopticon and the spectacle encourage individuals to consume commodities in order to improve their appearance. The fetishistic reduction and erasure of imperfection is discussed using psychoanalytic case studies and Ann Cahill’s descriptions of derivatizing objectification. The chapter argues that fetishized bodies mould the viewer’s aesthetic and sexual tastes around their shape, transforming desire itself, so that all bodies must resemble erotic commodities in order to excite desire. In this process the consumer’s desire is commoditized and derivatized. Chapter 3, Hystericized Insistent Presence, examines the characteristics of hysteria in relation to consumer culture to argue that capitalism idealizes the personality traits of the hysteric. Historical case studies produced by Charcot and Freud are discussed, and the relationship between hysteria and popular culture is examined to describe how traits common to hysteria may be popularized and transmitted in contemporary consumer culture. The chapter concludes by arguing that contemporary consumers are hystericized in a way that transforms them into ideal neoliberal subjects, and that the affordances of social media, and particularly selfies, allow the hysteric’s compelling and contagious display to reach a wide audience. Chapters 4 and 5 examine selfies and social networking sites in more detail. Chapter 4, Self(ie) Discipline, reviews existing selfie research from a number of disciplines, including sociology, communication theory and social psychology, to determine the positive and negative effects of selfie-taking practices. Selfies are used by different marginalized groups to challenge stereotypes, create supportive communities and raise awareness. However, in selfies there is also a tendency to assimilate to dominant social ideals that sometimes reinforce stereotypes. This chapter also examines the relationship between selfie-taking practices and cosmetic surgery, concluding that rather than offering the possibility of multiple forms of expression, selfies compel individuals to change their bodies in order to conform to social ideals. Chapter 5, The Hysteria Economy, examines celebrity culture, social media influencers and the use of selfies in and as adverts. The chapter begins with a Marxist overview of alienation and exploitation on social networking sites, and goes on to explore selfies in relation to notions of authenticity, the attention economy and Freud’s psychoanalytic discussion of group formation. Fashion adverts by Dolce and Gabbana featuring models taking selfies are discussed. The chapter concludes that economies driven by attention and self-branding produce hystericized interactions with others that are characterized by mimetic identification, rivalry and fear of the loss of uniqueness. The remaining chapters consider how the sign-values of ideal bodies have come to be sign-values of health, legitimizing the fetishistic gaze as a clinical mode of looking. Chapter 6, The Clinical Fetishistic Gaze, describes healthism in neoliberal societies, arguing that ‘health’ is used to disguise comments that may otherwise be perceived to be sexist or narcissistic. The television programme Supersize vs Superskinny is examined using Foucault’s description of the clinical gaze. Psychology studies into

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the correlation between exercise participation, self-esteem and body satisfaction are discussed, and the chapter ends with an examination of content analytical and psychology studies of #fispiration posts on social media. Chapter 7, Anti-Consumers and the Fetishistic Gaze, examines anorexia through case studies and writing by historians, anthropologists, psychoanalysts and psychologists. The clinical gaze is discussed in relation to the techniques of surveillance used in the treatment of eating disorders and the methods developed by patients to disrupt it. Discussing thinspiration blogs and selfies, the chapter compares anorexia with hysteria and fetishism, arguing that anorexia is the logical result of the relentless pursuit of perfection commanded by capitalism. Discussion of content analysis studies comparing thinspiration, fitspiration and bonespiration supports this argument, and demonstrates a cyclical relationship between fitness, slenderness and disordered eating in contemporary consumer culture. Chapter 8, The Bulimic Economy, examines healthism and the dual imperatives to consume indulgently and maintain a slender body that are dominant in consumer society. Julie Guthman’s analysis of bodily spatial fixes and the bulimic economy enables a comparison between the compensatory methods used in bulimia nervosa and those available to consumers in bulimic economies. The Quantified Self movement is examined as an exemplary compensatory method, concluding that the Quantified Self combines the fetishistic dissecting gaze with hystericized insistent presence in a manner that produces health and an ideal neoliberal citizen. In Chapter 9, Empowering Presence, historical and contemporary discourses about fat are examined, including popular culture and media representations. Body positivity and fat acceptance selfies are discussed, concluding that the bodies in fat acceptance photographs destabilize the neoliberal body-labour ideology of self-denial. It identifies empowering presence as a form of insistent presence that holds the potential to disrupt the dominant modes of address described in Chapters 1, 2 and 3. The conclusion reflects on the pathological structures in capitalism, concluding that empowering presence could initiate a more active, empowering way of looking at bodies, which may also interrupt capitalist commodification of bodies. The book ends with a series of creative methods for producing selfies that may enable bodies to be visible online without being commoditized or subject to discipline.

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1

Sadistic commands

In the late nineteenth century, psychoanalysts and economists were interested in the desire of the individual. Sigmund Freud sought to understand how the individual is driven by unconscious desires that cannot be satisfied by any object, human or otherwise. Concurrently, commodity producers adopted a neoclassical economic theory that aimed to predict how much consumers would desire their products in order to determine a market value based on demand and not solely on production costs.1 The centrality of consumer desire produced a ‘Freudian’ marketing model in which adverts express either the threat of loss or potential increase in pleasure for the consumer.2 Freud’s psychoanalytic technique is based on the ‘principles of value, cost and saving, of exchange, investments, compensation, promises of satisfaction, incentive bonuses and so on’.3 Freud viewed the libido as ‘a form of liquid capital that might be saved or spent, productively invested in labour, expended without return in orgasm, or locked up unprofitably, like a sleeping asset, in the unconscious by neurosis’.4 The aim of psychoanalytic treatment was to ‘release the libido dammed up in neurosis back into productive circulation in his patients’ professional or business lives, thereby increasing their earning-power’.5 Psychoanalytic treatment was an investment that was expected to return a profit. In the nineteenth century, the neoclassical economy and the increasing influence of Freud’s psychoanalytic technique contributed to a ‘more hedonistic society oriented toward personal satisfaction … offered by a consumeroriented society’.6 Psychoanalysts told people that they were dissatisfied and advertisers presented them with purchasable sources of satisfaction. Today, commodities are marketed as pleasure-producing objects that provoke the consumer’s desire and create the illusion that satisfaction will be instantly derived with the purchase of the product. Louise Kaplan writes that commodity culture produces perverse relations in which ‘material goods are a substitute for security, self-esteem, and love and that sex is merely another of the commodities that can be purchased in the marketplace’.7 She argues that the dual process of eroticization of commodities and the commodification of desire influences the form that perversions take. Buying things to make oneself feel better is not, in itself, perverse. However, perversions push the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour. For example, kleptomaniacs and fetishists seem to adhere to social conventions by preoccupying themselves with objects but consumption is taken to a perverse level through theft and sexual excitation.

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In ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, Freud defines perversions as deviations from heterosexual aims and objects.8 He writes that perversions are extensions or exaggerations of ‘normal’ sexuality, and that characteristics of perversion, such as a pleasure in looking (voyeurism) or an overvaluation of attributes of a loved one (fetishism), are common in sexual relationships. He clarifies this distinction further, stating that a perversion is not deemed to be pathological because of its content but because it is characterized by ‘exclusiveness and fixation’.9 Kleptomania is said to be the prototype female perversion, and fetishism is its male counterpart, although neither perversion is exclusive to a single sex. The stolen item and sexual fetish compensate symbolically for the absence of ‘love, of a sense of wholeness, belonging and well-being’.10 In Freudian psychoanalysis, fetishism is a perverse sexuality, in which the fetishist requires a particular object, such as a type of shoe or a person with a hooked nose, in order to achieve sexual satisfaction. Fetishism becomes a perversion when sexual satisfaction cannot be achieved without it. In Freud’s analysis, perverse fetishism is initiated in childhood when a boy sees that his mother does not have a penis and thinks she has been castrated. In ‘normal’ development this realization leads the child to split from the mother and identify with the father, who possesses a penis and, he suspects, may also have castrated the mother. The fetishist is unable to accept the perception because it implies that he might also be castrated. He disavows the memory and protects himself from castration threat by erecting a fetish. Freud developed the idea of disavowal to describe a split in an individual’s psyche that takes place as a form of defence. The person unconsciously denies something, such as the knowledge that women do not have penises, but creates a memorial to the knowledge in the form of the fetish. The fetishist must simultaneously hold two contradictory ideas about the fetish object – knowledge of its real character (i.e. it is just a shoe or a nose) and belief in its powers as a fetish (it is a substitute penis for the mother and that it will protect him against castration). Mannoni described disavowal as ‘I know very well, but nevertheless’.11 Fetishism may produce sexual pleasure but its main function is to prevent the fetishist from being overcome by anxiety and desperation. The fetishist is able to achieve this by following a rigid script that symbolically re-enacts the traumatizing event that caused the need for a fetish. However, the re-enactment places the fetishist in the position of power, enabling them to undo their powerlessness in the original scene. The fetish also protects the body of the sexual partner from violence. A fetishist may insist on cutting some of their lover’s hair because it allows the fetishist to symbolically mutilate them without inflicting real injury.12 Freud says that women cannot become fetishists because they cannot fear castration.13 However, in On the Genesis of Fetishism he proposed that all women are fetishists because they are exhibitionists. Women want to be looked at and desired, but this is at odds with the modesty they are expected to perform, so they repress the desire. They conceal their bodies in elaborate and beautiful dresses designed and worn to attract attention. By courting the gaze and covering the real object of attraction, the dresses function as fetishes.14 According to this account of fetishism, all women who spend time on their appearance are fetishizing their own bodies. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the fetish is a substitute for the individual’s lack of phallus, and not a

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substitute object for a missing penis, as in Freudian psychoanalysis. The phallus is a phantasy object that symbolizes power, but in reality, no one possesses it. However, patriarchal societies misrecognize the penis as the phallus, creating the impression that men possess phallic power. Similar to the self-fetishizing women described by Freud, Lacan said that women wish to possess the phallus and become phallic by decorating and displaying their bodies. According to Lacan, when a woman is desired by someone who appears to possess the phallus (i.e. anyone with a penis), she gains access (by proxy) to the thing that she lacks.15 Both of these theories of fetishism are problematic because they position heterosexual men as the ideal against which all other bodies and sexualities are judged. To avoid reproducing the misrecognition between phallus and penis that reinforces patriarchal imbalances of power, it is more productive to describe what the phallus represents: the power and full subjecthood that is denied to and long for by women and other marginalized people when they are perceived to be lacking in relation to the heterosexual, white, able-bodied, middle-class, male ideal. When power relations are viewed in this way, fetishism and kleptomania are not specifically male or female perversions. Instead, the fetish and kleptomania object are substitutes for a variety of losses, humiliations and traumatic events that can be experienced by anyone. The objects are memorials to absences and losses; they enable the denial of loss, and protect the individual from anxiety and potential violence. There are numerous psychoanalytic case studies of female fetishism to support this view.16

Perverse consumers In kleptomania, absences, losses, restrictions and humiliations are symbolized by the stolen object and act of stealing. In an early-twentieth-century account of kleptomania, Wilhelm Stekel writes that experiences of repression and frustration produce ‘emotional energy’ that is transferred to the impulse to steal, transforming theft into a sexually exciting act. Stealing ‘absorbs the whole emotional volume, all the impulsive energy of sexuality’ and becomes ‘irresistible like sexual instinct’.17 For example, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, a psychiatrist practising in the early twentieth century, recounts four cases of female silk fetishists who are also kleptomaniacs. ‘Case F’ presents a 49-year-old woman who, arrested twenty-two times in twenty years, said she is unable to wear silk because the sexual excitation it causes is too great.18 Clérambault does not diagnose fetishism in these cases because, unlike male fetishism, which he describes as an ‘homage to the opposite sex’ putting ‘into play an entire fantasy of love, of union with the opposite sex, the perverse female passion for cloth is rooted in the very refusal of this fantasy’.19 Clérambault describes the female silk fetishists enjoying the cloth ‘with no more reverie than a solitary gourmet savoring a delicate wine’.20 Her pleasure does not derive from the imagined sexual union with another; it is an immediate tactile pleasure that excludes men. Clérambault had a professional interest in cloth. He was injured while serving in the First World War and was sent to Morocco to convalesce. During this time, he began to study and photograph traditional Arabic dress. He became an authority on

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Consuming the Body

the subject, teaching drapery courses at the École des Beaux-Arts, and developed his own classification system of twistings, fastenings and folds. According to Joan Copjec, Clérambault did not share his silk fetishist patients’ pleasure in the soft sensual feel of the fabric, preferring stiffness and solidity. His photographs (he produced over 40,000) express this admiration because they do not show ‘cloth that flows from or hugs the outline of the body, not a cloth elaborately embellished, symbolically erotic, but a material whose plainest, best photographed feature is its stiff construction’.21 Some of Clérambault’s photographs are edited to erase the person wearing the cloth, suggesting that he was not enthralled by the fantasy of sexual union with another. Whether soft or stiff, the fabric was prized because of its tactile character. In the mid-nineteenth century the invention of the department store accelerated and intensified this desire for tactile objects, as for the first time, the objects for sale were displayed in full view and within reach of the customers, who could touch them. Handling the silk made the women sexually aroused and the excitation produced a form of ‘deviant sexualized consumerism’ and the impulse to steal.22 Émile Zola writes of the tempting sensuality of lace in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise, a fictional account of the development and growth of the first department store in Paris: It seemed as if all the seductions of the shop had been leading up to this supreme temptation, that it was there that the hidden alcove of downfall was situated, the place of perdition where even the strongest succumbed. Hands were being plunged into the overflowing pieces of lace, quivering with intoxication from touching them.23

In the book, Zola comments on the rise of shoplifting due to the new way of shopping in the department store. He identifies three types of female thieves: professional thieves, pregnant women who steal only one type of commodity, such as ‘two hundred and forty-eight pairs of pink gloves stolen from every counter in Paris’, and ‘women with a mania for stealing, with a perverted desire, a new kind of neurosis which had been scientifically classified by a mental specialist who had observed the acute temptation exercised on them by big shops’.24 By changing the way that people shopped, the department stores produced a new form of perversion, silk fetishism, that was ‘a licentious mirror to virtuous consumerism, played out in the relatively new world of amassed displays of seduction and often frivolous commodities’.25 The department store brought desirable commodities into close proximity, allowing the consumer to touch them and encouraging them to ‘become passionate about items for sale’.26 Along with their mode of display, the commodities themselves are designed to be seductive. In Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Wolfgang Fritz Haug says that commodities are enhanced using attractive packaging to cast ‘flirtatious glances at the buyers’, enticing them to make purchases.27 Zola also notes this seduction by the commodity in his description of a window display of garments: the very pieces of cloth, thick and square, were breathing, exuding a whiff of temptation, while the overcoats were drawing themselves up even more on the

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lay figures, who themselves were acquiring souls, and the huge velvet coat was billowing out, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh and blood, with heaving breast and quivering hips.28

The consumers – described by Zola as ‘a regular mob, made brutal by covetousness’ – bring the objects to life with their desire.29 In contemporary consumer culture, adverts endow commodities with the significance of a fetish or kleptomania object by implying that they will reduce anxiety by providing something the consumer lacks. Judith Williamson writes that ‘all consumer products offer magic, and all advertisements are spells’ because the adverts endow commodities with the ability to create ‘beauty, love, [and] safety’ for the consumer:30 Ideals, feelings, time past … and time future … worlds and people can all be miraculously contained in objects. This makes objects seem very important: society over-emphasizes and clings to them as the material representations of otherwise ungraspable things. Life and meaning are attached to objects that might seem worthless in themselves.31

Adverts use the ‘emotional volume’ and ‘impulsive energy’ of anxiety and desire to make the urge to buy the commodity ‘irresistible like sexual instinct’.32 Bernard Stiegler describes the use of sexuality and desire in marketing is a form of ‘psychopower’ that aims to harness and exploit ‘libidinal energy in the service of constant behavioural control’.33 Desire is unpredictable and it can be liberating. If consumers follow their own desire, they may be difficult to control, but if their desire can be standardized and made predictable, people will become more docile. In Brave New World this system is perfected: satisfaction can be purchased and the opportunities for pleasure are so plentiful that individuals do not have the time, or the energy, to think about what might be missing from their lives. As the controller states, ‘[i]mpulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness …. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers’.34 Consumers are distracted by the choices they are presented with, but their desire is short-circuited in the process and fails to reach a fully satisfying conclusion. The desire for commodities is not unpredictable like the desire for another person, who may or may not reciprocate. But the predictable satisfaction achieved by commodity consumption is short-lived, in order to compel consumers to buy more. As Stiegler writes, consumer culture directs the consumers’ libido away from potentially satisfying objects and towards a string of dissatisfying, adulterous encounters with multiple commodities.35 To be productive for capitalism the commodity must fail: The object of consumption, as soon as it is invested, must be dis-invested: consumerism is an economy of disposability, that is, of infidelity. Consumers must not become attached to their objects: they must consume, precisely, by detaching themselves from them, by destroying them and by disposing of them in order to follow the diversion of the energy of their drives toward the ever-newer objects.36

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Anxiety is provoked by advertising, producing a compulsion to consume based on the belief that commodities will ease the anxiety. However, the commodity fails to satisfy, which causes the anxiety to return, thus maintaining the momentum of repeated consumption, a continuous loop of demand, acquisition and dissatisfaction. Fetishism is problematic for capitalism because it breaks this cycle. Freud says that fetishists rarely seek a cure for their fetishism because they do not view it as a ‘symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering. Usually, they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life’.37 He continues: ‘other men have to woo and make exertions for what can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all’.38 In this respect, the fetishist believes she or he has the secret of enjoyment. They are satisfied with their object because sexual fetishism is a form of compromise that is achieved when expectations are severely reduced: Where desire endlessly explores reality for a satisfaction that is never forthcoming, the fetish steps in to close the circuit of desire by providing a partially satisfying solution, and does so in the attempt to protect the subject from the world’s nonconformity to desire’s high expectations.39

A fetish object is only partially satisfying but it is predictable and easily attainable. The silk fetishist has found a solitary object that satisfies her desire. She doesn’t even need to make a purchase; she can simply linger in the department store enjoying the tactile qualities of the goods. The partial satisfaction provided by a fetish object might be preferable to an endless cycle of consumption in which desire is incited but not satisfied. Because commodities are signs of power, desirableness, protection and status, they appear to possess the qualities of a fetish that can restore lost power. The commodity and the sexual fetish share a common structure of overvaluation and disavowal, making consumption feel ‘irresistible like sexual instinct’.40 But unlike the sexual fetish, the commodity reneges when it comes to the climax. The psychoanalyst Arlene Kramer Richards identifies a variety of meanings attributed to the overvaluation of shopping for clothes, including the denial of any experience of loss, particularly the death of a parent. In ‘Ladies of Fashion: Pleasure, Perversion or Paraphilia’, she describes how a patient called Elinor spent most of her weekends buying clothes and jewellery but usually returned them the following week. She had acquired this habit during childhood shopping trips with her mother. Richards says that the mother’s cycle of buying and returning clothing is a symptom of her desire to undo the early death of her own father, and that Elinor was terrified that her mother would also die, so she bought and returned clothing to prove that ‘anything could be undone, nothing was final, nothing was irreversible, not even death’.41 In the act of buying and returning clothes, Elinor and her mother unconsciously acknowledged their fear of death and denied it. Because items of clothes could be bought, exchanged, worn and returned, all acts could be undone, all damage repaired and nothing truly lost. Another patient, Mary, a successful career woman, devoted a great deal of time to organizing her wardrobe, removing the previous season’s clothes, making adjustments to the garments, cleaning the drawers and planning what to buy for the coming season.

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She followed fashion closely and felt compelled to buy clothes featured in fashion magazines. According to Richards, Mary’s preoccupation with the ever-changing seasons of fashion enabled her to deny the real passage of time. She was able to repudiate her own ageing body and the advancing years of her parents by constantly updating her wardrobe. When Mary’s doctor informed her that she had menopausal symptoms, she felt a strong impulse to spend thousands of dollars on clothes. When her denial of ageing was jeopardized, the fantasized shopping spree was not only a distraction from reality, it was also a compensatory act to cover up all the losses that could no longer be denied. Mary buys new clothes to disavow any change occurring in the body underneath. The clothes act as a veil, covering over the transformation she wishes to deny. It is a compromise solution that alleviates anxiety about ageing and death. Mary and Elinor use shopping to reduce distress caused by ‘real’ experiences, and their symptoms reiterate the dominant messages in adverts, magazines and television programmes, which state that signs of ageing can and should be prevented. Products called Time Delay (Boots), Stop Time (Facialderm), Time Corrector (Facialderm), Age Defy (Green People) and Age Resist (Simple) produce anxiety in relation to appearance and offer themselves as magical objects that will stop, delay or turn back time, implying they can overcome death itself. Psychoanalysts interpret anti-ageing practices as ‘attacks’ on or ‘rebellious acts against the transience of life’ and ‘secular strategies to protract mortality’.42 The expectation that cosmetic and surgical technologies can prevent ageing is problematic because ‘promises of youthfulness and immortality are in opposition to lifelong efforts of integration that are based on the recognition of limitation and transience’.43 Throughout life, the individual comes to accept themselves and their perceived flaws, but when buying into anti-ageing products, this process of integration is interrupted. Consumers who are unable to accept their imperfections view their body ‘as an external, rather alien object’ that has ‘split from the subordinate, integrating self ’.44 This ‘othering’ of the body is reinforced by the words and phrases used to describe body parts that show the effects of ageing, such as ‘crow’s feet’ and ‘turkey necks’. Ada Borkenhagen notes that these animal analogies make the body parts highly undesirable ‘as if the person’s facial features have somehow maliciously turned against them’.45 Consumer practices pathologize the relation between the consumer and their body, and consumers develop pathological symptoms that involve consumer practices to relieve their anxieties.

Sadistic capitalists In ‘Advertising, Perversions, Neurosis’, Maria Rita Kehl says that consumers are following perverse scripts that are expressed in advertising. She interprets an advert for a car (she does not remember which) in order to psychoanalyse the relation between the consumer and the advertisers. The advert presents a woman and a man in a restaurant. The man is trying to propose to the woman but she is not listening because she is distracted by a red car that is parked outside. The object of her desire is not the man, or the heteronormative ideal of marriage, but the car. The woman knows what

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she wants because the car advertiser told her. Kehl describes adverts as ‘a repetitive series of pronouncements from the perverse master who calls his subjects … to identify themselves with the objects of enjoyment that he offers to them’.46 She argues that market research is used to identify the unconscious motivations of consumers in order to more effectively sell products to them, enabling advertisers to act like a perverse master who knows the secrets of enjoyment and offers commodities as objects of desire that guarantee satisfaction. Kehl writes that contemporary consumer culture is a caricature of the Marquis de Sade’s fictional libertine society because it celebrates individualism and seems to advocate the consumer’s right to enjoyment by any means and at any cost. In Sade’s novels, acts of torture are carried out and then described to an audience using multiple points of view in a logic of accumulation and proliferation. Gilles Deleuze writes: Sade chooses to rely on the quantitative techniques of accumulation and acceleration, mechanically grounded in a materialistic theory: reiteration and internal multiplication of the scenes, precipitation, over-determination. (The subject is at once parricide, incestuous, murderer, prostitute and sodomite.)47

Like neoliberal capitalism, ‘number, quantity and quantitative precipitation were the specific obsessions of sadism’.48 As will be discussed below in relation to bio-power and the achievement-subject, advertising and popular culture provide ideals for bodies and lifestyles that are very difficult to achieve in real life. The expectation and impossibility of achieving the ideals, and the inherently dissatisfying nature of commodities described earlier, places the consumer in a cycle of consumption characterized by reiteration and over-determination. In psychoanalysis, an individual becomes a sadist when they are ‘monstrously reduced to a pure superego’.49 The superego is the part of identity that functions to limit the individual’s hedonistic pursuit of pleasure; it encourages them to strive for self-improvement and to think of the greater good. It is like a role model, conscience and disciplining guardian or teacher. An individual with an overly dominant superego is often prone to perfectionism and may develop neurotic tendencies.50 Deleuze writes that the sadist is all superego and has no ego to soften its harsh criticism. To alleviate the anxiety and distress this causes, the sadist must find an external ego to criticize. Sadistic acts towards another person are the expression of the sadist’s tyrannical superego. Like Kehl, Levi Bryant says the relation between capitalists and consumers is perverse. Following from Lacan’s four discourses (briefly outlined in the introduction of this book and expanded in the glossary), Bryant writes that the discourse of the capitalist is an expression of a ‘ferocious super-ego’ who does not prohibit enjoyment but repeatedly and insistently commands it.51 When sadistic capitalism insists on enjoyment via consumption, it is ‘far more insidious [than punishment] in that it is no longer clear how resistance is possible … Everywhere we look, commodity consumer society seems to command enjoyment, such that if we are not enjoying we are somehow falling short or failing’.52 The sadistic commands of the capitalist follow Sade’s logic of

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‘reiteration and internal multiplication’ because desire is insatiable and commodities always fail to satisfy.53 The sadistic command to ‘enjoy’ does not produce pleasure but reproduces the dissatisfaction that compels consumers to buy more commodities. Similarly, Byung-Chul Han writes that neoliberal capitalism disciplines consumers by ‘pleasing and fulfilling’ them rather than ‘forbidding and depriving’ them: it is a highly effective form of coercion because people are willing to conform to it.54 He says: ‘Neoliberal psychopolitics seduces the soul; it pre-empts it in lieu of opposing it. It carefully protocols desires, needs and wishes instead of “depatterning” them.’55 Desires are standardized and commodified. Consumers feel that they are responsible for their own pleasure and blame themselves when they are dissatisfied. Rather than questioning the inequalities of capitalist society, they feel shame and become depressed.56 The sadistic commands of capitalism also incorporate the consumer’s body into the sign-value exchange system by viewing it as a potential object of prestige – a sign of selfcontrol, success and power. Han writes: ‘Cosmetic surgery and fitness studios are taking the place of disciplinary orthopaedics … sexiness and fitness represent new economic resources to be increased, marketed and exploited.’57 A well-maintained body signifies a person with the financial resources to undertake self-improvement practices and the ability to succeed within the competitive marketplace, whereas a poorly maintained body signifies a lack of discipline and weakness of character.58 Sexiness and fitness are economic resources and the body is a marketable commodity. For example, Ann Cahill writes that men are increasingly undergoing cosmetic procedures in order to achieve professional advancement. She suggests that these forms of self-improvement are undertaken not to make the male body more desirable to a female audience but to signify self-control and youthful vitality to other men.59 For women, being slender and toned ‘has tradable value in a job market’ and gaining weight or showing signs of ageing risks ‘social disapprobation’, loss of ‘status and self-respect’.60 Consumers are further integrated into the neoliberal system because the appearance and abilities of their bodies are aligned to the logic of the marketplace. Bodies are objects of prestige that have a direct impact on an individual’s social and economic status, particularly if they are marginalized due to gender, race and body size. Research also shows that Black women with lighter skin, slim bodies and straight hair – who more closely resemble the white Western ideal – have better paid jobs.61 In a study of skin lightener adverts, Evelyn Nakano Glenn found that dark skin is presented as ‘a disease for which skin lighteners offer a cure’, a ‘veil that hides one’s natural luminescence’ and a source of ‘pain, rejection, and limited options’, as opposed to light skin which is ‘necessary to being youthful, attractive, modern, and affluent – in short, to being “all that you can be”’.62 Aisha Phoenix notes that cosmetic surgery and procedures that reinforce white hierarchies of beauty, such as the skin-lightening industry, are growing because women (and increasingly men …) seek to access privileges afforded to those with light skin. ‘Ethnic cosmetic surgery’ is also proliferating. It includes rhinoplasty, or ‘nose jobs’; cheiloplasty, or lip reduction surgery; and ‘East Asian blepharoplasty’, or ‘double eyelid surgery’ to create ‘western eyes’.63

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People of colour can gain economic and social benefits by undertaking these types of surgery. Cosmetic surgeons and commodity producers ‘derive considerable financial benefit from the cosmetic industry and multi-billion dollar skin lightening industry that feeds on constructing people of colour as ugly, but remediable’.64 Commodities such as hair relaxers and skin lighteners aim to erase features that are stigmatized and are often the focus for racist behaviour. The products validate racism by viewing some types of hair texture or skin tone as undesirable. By suggesting that the stigmatized feature should be erased, the commodity producers also imply that people of colour are responsible for the reduction of the racism they experience. By compelling people to undertake beauty and fitness practices, the sadistic commands of capitalism are a form of bio-power. Foucault coined the term ‘biopower’ to describe how individuals are conditioned to function effectively in capitalist societies. Bio-power enables ‘the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production’ in a manner that optimizes them ‘without at the same time making them more difficult to govern’.65 If the worker needs to be strong to perform their work, they are encouraged to increase their body’s power through exercise, but only in a manner that improves their efficiency at work, and not in a way that might enable them to physically challenge their boss or damage the machinery. Bio-power turns a worker into ‘a completely regulated body that could function as a gear in the machine of production without friction, waste, or remainder’.66 According to Han, the worker who is disciplined by bio-power is an ‘obedience subject’ who follows orders under the threat of punishment. In contrast, contemporary consumers in neoliberal capitalist societies are ‘achievement-subjects’ who voluntarily discipline themselves because they view all aspects of the self as a self-improvement ‘project’.67 Like the disciplinesubject of bio-power, achievement-subjects are optimized for labour and in the process become easier to govern. Competition in the employment market demands endless self-improvement and bodily labour that is expensive and a constraint on the individual’s leisure time and energy.

Self(ie) advertising The production of the body as sign-values and the neoliberalization of the self are accelerated on social networking sites and intensified by the imperative to produce selfies. On social networking sites selfies are viewed as ‘advertisements for the self ’ and an important tool in the careful construction of a professional persona: a self-brand.68 To produce a self-brand, an individual must view ‘the self as a commodity for sale in the labour market, which must generate its own rhetorically persuasive packaging, its own promotional skin, within the confines of the dominant corporate imaginary’.69 As adverts and rhetorically persuasive packaging, selfies reproduce the visual language of advertisers. Aslaug Veum and Linda V. M. Undrum analysed the text accompanying selfie posts on Instagram and found that ‘consumers are themselves applying the advertising style to their own texts’.70 They compared the content and framing of selfies to the findings of existing research examining visual tropes in commercial stock images in international image banks. In stock photographs people tend to be depicted

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in a ‘generalized, decontextualized and stylized way’ so they appear to be symbols of a lifestyle rather than individuals, and this is replicated in the visual norms of selfies.71 Users present themselves as decontextualized, generalized symbols: brands. Veum and Undrum conclude: Individuals who publish self-portraits on social media networks such as Instagram (usually) do not have to fulfil commercial targets. Still… they seem to adapt the homogenized multimodal language, thereby contributing to spreading values and interests of global corporations. As a consequence, SNS users get a rather narrow impression of how people, especially young girls, should behave and could look.72

The adoption of global corporate discourse by selfie-takers results in the standardization of selfies and further imbeds the dominant values of neoliberalism into the individual’s life. Ori Schwarz writes that Shox, a social networking site popular with young Israelis, is predominantly visual and almost exclusively made up of selfies. This is partly because the users do not like writing, but also because written accounts would provide contextualizing information that could destabilize an otherwise controlled and marketizable image of self: you can’t show who you really are: they didn’t want people to learn too much about them from their photos and didn’t believe they could learn a lot from the photos of others. Photos and blog-posts should only make you look good and cool.73

Schwarz describes the photographs as ‘contextless’, usually showing the individual in isolation, often ‘scantily dressed’ and ‘posed in ways strongly influenced by advertisements and fashion photography’.74 He notes that the images are also labelled in a manner that references advertising: ‘when person X is photographed holding a consumer item or any other object Y (usually during a social gathering), the caption will often be “X modelling Y”’.75 The marketization of the self on Shox is reinforced by the visual structure of the platform. ‘Friends lists’ on users’ personal profile pages and search engine queries present other users as ‘multiple choices, like products of different brands seen synchronically one besides the other on the shelf, a visual economy of abundance’, evoking the ‘logic of the catalogue’.76 Alice E. Marwick describes self-branding as a ‘neoliberal technology of subjectivity’: to  be business-like and authentic, the individual cannot act ‘unbusinesslike, illegal, or controversial in any way’.77 In her study of the Twitter practices of workers in the technology industry in Silicon Valley, she finds that self-branding practices lead to ‘tension and stress for practitioners, who must engage in emotional labor and selfsurveillance to ensure an appropriate branded persona’.78 She continues: ‘If the Web 2.0 self is one that must be both entirely transparent and entirely business-oriented, the self cannot logically exist.’79 Personal traits that do not correspond to those idealized by capitalism are eliminated and the full subjectivity of the individual is erased. Furthermore, in Silicon Valley the demand for authenticity disciplines individuals to perform like business men. Marwick writes: ‘“authenticity” encourages people to filter their thoughts and feelings through a capitalist logic that frames only

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certain  types of self-expression as acceptable. In the tech industry, these topics are often those deemed acceptable to men’.80 ‘Context collapse’ occurs when a user’s network includes a combination of family members, work colleagues and friends, so the user has to adapt their behaviour, language and conversation topics to those that are ‘safe for all possible readers’.81 The division between work and social life is eradicated in this process, and neoliberal ideologies creep further into private life. Han calls this aspect of social networking sites a ‘dispositive of transparency’ that ‘seeks to suppress deviation …. Its effect is conformity: it is as if everyone were watching over everyone else’.82 Social media users are compelled to optimize themselves in relation to neoliberal ideals and market logic, while simultaneously being constrained in their communications and social interactions via self-branding and context collapse. Social networking sites produce optimized workers who are always at work and always working on the self.

2

The fetishistic gaze

In Chapter 1, I used the mechanisms of bio-power and achievement-subjects to explain how consumers are impelled to undertake an array of self-measuring and regulating techniques to produce ‘a kind of neoliberal spreadsheet, a constant benchmarking of the self, a highly standardised mode of self-assessment, a calculation of one’s assets, a fear of possible losses’.1 This mode of looking and thinking about the body segments it into parts and functions that can be measured and optimized. This chapter examines how a particular way of looking at bodies along with contemporary apparatuses for showing and looking, such as selfies and social networking sites, support the sadistic commands described in Chapter 1. This fetishistic mode of looking works with the messages expressed in advertising by increasing the consumer’s self-criticism and compelling them to commodify their bodies.

Panopticon 2.0 A demonstration of the fetishistic gaze can be found in an advert for L’Oréal Paris ‘Infallible Sculpt’ make-up. The short film featuring Barbara Palvin begins with Palvin saying, ‘I may not be infallible but  I  am always selfie ready’.2 To demonstrate her fallibility, she stands in a goal wearing impractical high-heeled footwear and attempts to deflect numerous footballs that are kicked towards her. On the football pitch she is the focus of attention of a crowd: a spectacle. Guy Debord, the author of The Society of the Spectacle, defines the spectacle as a social structure in which power is exercised over individuals via entertainment and enjoyment because their social relations are mediated by images. Debord writes: the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.3

The spectacle is a mode of production for the consumer sphere because it encourages consumers to buy more things. Consumers wish to be like the glamorous people

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they see in adverts, magazines, films and TV, so they try to replicate the lifestyles and attitudes, predominantly through the consumption of commodities. Firat and Venkatesh describe this process as ‘ordinary gestures and the activities of daily life are prepackaged as glamorous and seductive; commodities come complete with preordained roles and lifestyles; even dissent and critique are commodified and sold to those who experience and produce them’.4 The spectacle is disciplinary because it produces the expectation that the consumers should be glamorous and seductive and that buying the correct commodities will enable this. The spectacle is also a process of neoliberalization in which different aspects of the body and lifestyle of the individual are incorporated into the sign-value exchange system as sign-values of glamour and prestige. Because glamorousness and sexiness are marketable attributes for the branded self (Chapter 1), they are subjected to the logic of market forces. The L’Oréal advert cuts to a studio scene in which the model is wearing a belt of selfie-sticks with camera phones and a male voice-over tells the viewer that they can be selfie-ready from any angle for up to twenty-four hours.5 The camera phone belt that encircles the model visually demonstrates the need for continuous readiness under the multiple gazes of the devices. The phone screens represent a sadistic capitalist scrutinizing the consumer from every angle. Palvin appears to be trapped by her visibility, a prisoner in a panopticon. The panopticon is a type of prison designed in the late eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher and social theorist. The architecture of the prison produces a hierarchical power structure of looking and visibleness: it has a central viewing position from which the prison guard can see all of the prisoners in their cells but the prisoners cannot see the prison guard. The prisoners do not know if they are being watched so they are forced to modify their behaviour. They internalize the gaze of the warden and always act like they are being watched. Michel Foucault describes the disciplinary gaze of the panopticon as ‘the normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges them’.6 The prisoner is forced into a state of perpetual exhibitionism. They are examined and categorized as normal, pathological or criminal, and subsequently disciplined or punished if they are deemed to belong in one of the latter two categories. Although Foucault uses the panopticon as a model for the structures of power that are at work in disciplinary societies, he says that many institutions, including schools, factories and hospitals, enable the supervision and regulation of individuals. These institutions are effective because they segment ‘time, space, and social relations through an instrumental use of small details that paradoxically also result in making larger numbers of plebeian and proletarian subjects more docile and useful in the modern pursuit of profit’.7 Through surveillance and examination the population is segmented into smaller, more specific social categories in order to control them more effectively. As I describe in the next section, segmentation and the scrutiny of minute details are techniques used by advertisers to encourage consumers to buy more products.

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Foucault argues that the structure of the panopticon replaced the structure of the spectacle: The spectacle turned into surveillance, the circle that citizens formed around the spectacle–all that is reverse. We have here a completely different structure where men who are placed next to each other on a flat surface will be surveilled from above by someone who will become a kind of universal eye.8

For Foucault, surveillance society transforms ‘the economy of visibility into the exercise of power’.9 This process is intensified on social networking sites and in selfies. As demonstrated in the L’Oréal advert, mobile devices with cameras and social networking sites produce a panopticon in which users can be photographed and viewed in a photograph at any time, hence the need to be selfie-ready from any angle, twenty-four hours a day. On social networking sites users display themselves for an omnipresent examining gaze, and do so willingly as a source of pleasure. Social networking sites are vast panopticons in which each user is an overseer and also internalizes the disciplining gaze of all of their followers. However, as the L’Oréal advert implies, contemporary consumer culture is organized by power structures characteristic of both the spectacle and the panopticon. Without the coercive force of the spectacle, users may not be so willing to present themselves for the inspecting gaze of others.

The dissecting gaze In the L’Oréal advert, the photographs taken by each of the mobile phones that surround Palvin are shown to the viewer. Her face is presented in a series of closeup photographs taken from different angles and arranged in a grid. Moments later her face is shown as a collage of six images: left eye, right eye, nose, mouth, cheek, shoulder. This fragmented view demonstrates the way that the consumer’s body is viewed by commodity producers. As markets become overcrowded, commodities are produced that target progressively smaller areas of the body: Face products specify which part of the face they are supposed to improve, and moisturizers are now made for the face, hands, feet and body. Adverts represent the consumer’s body using magnified images of hair follicles and close-up cross sections of the surface of the skin. Mike Featherstone describes the contemporary view of the body as a ‘cool surgical gaze measuring the body for cutting’ produced by ‘the “cutting scalpel eye” of the consumer culture body maintenance and transformation professionals, whose gaze assesses and marks the re-fashionable potential of our bodies’.10 As commodity producers scrutinize the body for areas to problematize, the consumer internalizes and intensifies their gaze. It becomes a self-regarding gaze in which the consumer perceives their body as fragments corresponding to areas of imperfection. The dissecting gaze increases sensitivity to what constitutes an imperfection. Susan Bordo quotes a cosmetic surgeon, who describes the process of intensification: ‘Plastic surgery sharpens your eyesight. You get something done,

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Consuming the Body

suddenly you’re looking in the mirror every five minutes – at imperfections nobody else can see.’11 The dissecting gaze is a magnifying gaze that turns small flaws into glaring aberrations. When the consumer focuses on a small area of imperfection, the appearance as well as experience of the whole body is obscured. It is a fetishistic mode of looking, similar to ‘hyperfocalization’, described by Emily Apter as a form of refusing to look at something (e.g. at the female body), ‘but in refusing to look, he stares. It is a “not looking” sustained paradoxically through visual fixation on the substitute’.12 The fetishist obsesses over a particular shape of nose in a manner that enables them to block out all other parts of the person’s body. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the fetish is a distraction and a decoy: it conceals that something is missing (power, love, security) by presenting an object to replace it; that also confirms that something is missing. Louise Kaplan describes the visual character of the fetish as ‘a glaring lie and fetishistic tropes as blunt metaphors, vividly bright, iconic images that blind us’.13 She continues: ‘The hyperpigmented image is a sham, the false gold that distracts the viewer by glittering up the perceptual field.’14 The glittering fetish is a dazzling lure. Janine ChasseguetSmirgel says that fetish objects often have incongruous characteristics such as an attractive shiny surface and an unpleasant smell. For example, a highly polished shoe and a pair of satin knickers are simultaneously ‘grotesque and excremental, ideal and pristine’ because they are visually alluring and, once worn, emit body odour.15 These seemingly incompatible features demonstrate the dual character of the fetish object: one aspect of it is idealized and revered and another aspect is detested and debased. The fetish object is loved and hated, and the fetishist’s script may contain actions that temporarily disfigure the fetish in an act of symbolic violence, such as cutting hair or soiling shoes. When viewing their own body with a fetishistic gaze, the consumer may only see a defective object and not an aspect that they revere, because the dissecting mode of looking internalized from advertising only draws attention to the flaws. For example, a ‘pore refining’ face cream shows a close-up of a woman’s luminous and flawless skin. The consumer is led to believe that their own skin is flawed because they do not use the cream that produced this image of perfection. The consumer disavows the knowledge that the commodity probably will not reproduce the texture of the skin in the advert. They also disavow the knowledge that the model already had excellent skin, which is why they are employed to promote cosmetic products, and that the image is constructed with studio lighting, make-up and post-production editing techniques that improve the appearance of the skin. The image of the model is a glittering distraction that produces the belief that the commodity has the power to magically erase imperfection and provide satisfaction for the consumer. The bodies of others, particularly the ones in adverts that are presented as flawless, function as ‘bright, iconic images that blind us’. The revered and hated fetish is split in two: the ideal body of the other in the advert and the denigrated body of the consumer. Rather than ‘glittering up the perceptual field’ with an object that is reassuring and pleasant to view, this self-regarding fetishistic gaze presents the self as a despised object that is a source of anxiety and guilt.16

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Contemporary body and beauty work are presented as empowering and beneficial to mental well-being because they enable individuals to match their appearance more closely to how they feel (i.e. young). However, self-improvement procedures that enhance the body can ‘undermine the psychic integration of experiences of absence, loss and transience’ while also causing the consumer to view the body as a debased and alien object (see Chapter 1).17 Paradoxically, forms of body modification, such as cosmetic surgery and anti-ageing practices, also appear to be the preferred option by which individual experiences of alienation or even pathological depersonalisation caused by social excessive demands and heteronomy can be opposed …. Following this approach one can assume that body-modifications facilitated by technological and medical advancements motivate fantasies of omnipotence.18

Body modifications impede the production of an integrated sense of self, but also produce a feeling of mastery and power. Like fetish objects, they offer partial satisfaction and protect against anxiety and distress. As I described in Chapter 1 in relation to Mary and Elinor, fetishism is characterized by repetition, and doing and undoing. This repetitive process is also found in contemporary methods for surgically altering and enhancing the body. In ‘Cosmetic Surgery and Fashionable Faces’, Meredith Jones discusses the trend for temporary surgical procedures, now available on the high street: [Cosmetic surgery] has always been sold by popular media and advertising as a way to look younger and more beautiful, but it is only in the last few years that it has begun to be represented as something that may date (like a handbag): as something that has a current, fashionable incarnation at any given moment.19

Temporary cosmetic surgery procedures plump the flesh or smooth the skin, creating effects that usually last for a matter of months. Some of the procedures will go out of fashion, creating the need for consumers to keep up with trends by purchasing repeated but subtly different procedures. The fashion of the face is characterized by newness and novelty, and is in constant flux. However, as the surface of the face changes, it is frozen. The face is described as a ‘historical repository, each wrinkle or mark representing an experience while the visage as a whole declares a life narrative’.20 The inscription of time on the face is erased by surgery, and the capacity of the face to add to the repository is lost. It is deanimated and fixed by an appearance of youthfulness but also constantly changing to the rhythm of fashion. Subjected to the ever-changing demands of fashion, the body becomes alienated from its own transformations and ageing is treated as a problem that can be overcome with commodities. A recent cosmetic surgery trend emanating from the United States is the ‘simply to look done’ ‘year-zero face’, which aims to produce an ageless face, a face that looks cosmetically enhanced. Because the aim is not to look younger, young women are potentially in the market for the

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Consuming the Body

procedure; indeed the trend is said to have been initiated by the actress, Lindsay Lohan, who at the age of twenty-four made waves at the Paris Fashion Week in 2009 with her timelessly sculpted face. It neither shows any expression nor individual idiosyncrasies. Lohan had the ideal prototype face of a woman around the age of 30, one that seemingly transcends age and death.21

Reminiscent of Mary described in the previous chapter, the ‘simply done’ face offers a fetishistic form of protection against death, by enabling the consumer to disavow that time is passing and their body is ageing. Furthermore, Lohan’s face illustrates Jones’ conception of surgically enhanced faces: ‘the quintessential faces of our time, marked by our dominant paradigm – consumer culture  –  in ways that no others are’.22 The faces may not express emotion or lived experience but they do express quantities of money that have been spent on their creation. Recalling Marx’s ventriloquist speech by a commodity, the commodified fashionable faces communicate to each other as exchange-values: ‘Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects …. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.’23 Fashionable faces express body-labour and exchange-value. Jones writes: ‘worked-on faces tell stories about celebrity, class, fashion, neoliberal values, and about the display of endless work on the self … tied in with purchasable “lifestyle” items’.24 They also communicate a narrative of the body becoming commodified and spectacular. Baudrillard writes that the mirror image in which individuals are reflected back to themselves as individuals has been replaced by the shop window, where people appear to themselves and others as a collection of signifiers of status. The individual is absorbed into the capitalist system of sign-value exchange and their individuality is erased.25 Popular and commercial culture idealize and normalize bodies that have been commodified; they become the glamorous ideals of the spectacle, and other consumers are ‘protocolled’ to want to resemble them and to find them desirable in others.

Commodity fetishes/commodified desire Ann Cahill, a philosopher, says that objectification – viewing an individual as an object and particularly as a sexual object – is not automatically demeaning or harmful. It can be affirming and enjoyable to be objectified by a lover, and it can also be alienating and harmful to be overlooked by the sexually desiring gaze of another. However, when an individual is viewed only as a projection of someone else’s desire, they are derivatized: The [derivatized] other shows up as a more or less successful fulfilment of those desires, and the sexualizing gaze is no more than a yardstick that measures that success …. Such a situation negates the human presence of the other by failing to recognize their sexual ontological distinctiveness, which, by definition, will not and cannot match up perfectly to a pre-existing list of demands.26

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Elements of the derivatized individual that do not correspond to the derivatizer’s desire are ignored or devalued. If the derivatized person does display these unwanted aspects of themselves, they are viewed as ‘arrogant, treasonous, and dangerously rebellious’.27 Cahill says that derivitization constitutes an act of violence that suppresses female subjectivities and sexualities. In relation to Ariel Levy’s description of the impact that pornified popular culture has on young women, Cahill writes: What girls lose in this bargain, then, is access to their own bodies and bodily experience. They have little to no sense of their own sexual topography, of their bodies’ ability to hum with sexual excitement and sensation. In a crucial and harmful way, they have been disembodied, separated precisely from the potentiality of their own lived materiality.28

When derivatization is internalized, an individual can only value those aspects of the self that are desired by the other and cannot experience their own body as sexually pleasurable. They are desexualized in order to signify the other’s preferred form of sexuality more fully. Alarmingly, commercial and popular culture are saturated with images of women that have been derivatized to appeal to a particular type of heteronormative desire. Furthermore, this form of desire is presented as if it is universal, suggesting that all men and women seek the same type of bodies, faces, personalities and sexualities in their partners. This is not to assert that all consumers are forced into a derivatized or derivatizing position, and a heterosexual, genderbinary relation to others. However, popular and commercial culture continue to reinforce polarized, stereotypical gender ideals that derivatize women, and increasingly derivatize men.29 This is fetishistic reduction: an individual is dehumanized and reduced to a sexual characteristic because the fullness of their being is experienced as threatening. A fetishized individual is predictable and easy to control; they hold no surprises. They must not deviate from the fetishist’s script or express their own wants and desires. Divergence from the script would ruin the fetishist’s pleasure, and may also result in violence towards the fetish. Robert Stoller, a psychoanalyst, argues that removing a person’s flaws is a form of fetishistic dehumanization. He writes: Even the pornographer’s seemingly trivial airbrush removes the truth, the little blemishes that are unbearable, unaesthetic. This is dehumanization. With it, because we cannot stand the revelations of intimacy, we deprive others of their fullness. We see them only as members of classes or as possessors of selected parts or qualities only. We anatomize them.30

By removing imperfections, the body is both idealized and dehumanized. This duality is described by Freud in his account of the Chinese custom of ‘lotus feet’, in which women’s feet were mutilated by tight binding and then revered. He suggested that ‘the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated’.31 Through the sacrifice of mobility and comfort, the Chinese woman gained an elevated

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Consuming the Body

social position; she was an extraordinary object of desire. The fetishized individual experiences some benefits for submitting to fetishistic reduction. For example, Olympia is a stripper and pornography centrefold, who has turned her body into an object of pleasure for others. She displays a fetishistic dissociation of her own body. Robert Stoller writes that Olympia dehumanizes her body to the point that she experiences it as a separate entity. It is not her but simply a tool used to sexually excite men and a commodity used to earn money. Through this form of self-fetishization she achieves a limited form of power. She says: ‘so now, I have much more credibility with people. I say things and people listen now, even though I’m the exact same person I was five years ago. The main centrefold is saying that. So it must be important’.32 Her chosen name places her in the canon of art history and the history of bodies for sale. Olympia, the prostitute in Edouard Manet’s painting, is constructed using symbols of desire. She is adorned with pearls, an oriental shawl and a solitary orchid in her hair, all of which symbolize wealth and sexuality. In the painting, a cat symbolizing promiscuity stands by her feet, instead of the faithful dog that often appears in paintings alongside classical nude figures.33 However, Olympia the stripper also brings to mind Olimpia, the beautiful automaton seemingly brought to life in Hoffmann’s tale The Sandman. Olimpia is a perfect commodity; her beautiful surface distracts attention from the mechanics within. In The Sandman, Nathanael catches a glimpse of Olimpia but is kept at a distance. He is only able to look at her closely when he buys a magnifying lens. He is dazzled by her beauty but perceives ‘a singular look of fixity and lifelessness’ in her eyes. This only concentrates his determination to look more closely, and eventually ‘he fancied a light like humid moonbeams came into them. It seemed as if their power of vision was now being enkindled; their glances shone with ever-increasing vivacity’.34 In the distance between them, seemingly reduced by the magnifying lens, he was deceived into thinking that the automaton was returning his desiring look. Like the fetish object, ‘the false gold that distracts the viewer by glittering up the perceptual field’, the beauty of Olimpia is also an attractive diversion.35 Nathanael’s gaze is fetishistically intensified because the lens ‘hyperfocalizes’ on a fragment of her body. Staring into her eyes, he is led to believe that his desire will be fulfilled. Olimpia is a fetish that ‘allows its believer to maintain a fantasy of presence even when all signs point to absence. The fetish magically procures illusions that nothing is amiss even when no power remains for belief ’.36 The viewer of pornography might also be misled into reading reciprocated sexual pleasure in the pose of the body of Olympia the centrefold. Looking at the deceptive closeness of her body in the image and the illusion that she returns the viewer’s desire, the viewer might forget that a transaction has taken place. Olympia describes herself as ‘a female impersonator’ because she wears her female body like a disguise.37 To conceal the dissociation from her body she covers herself in erotic sign-values and the viewer of pornographic photographs mistakes the erotic signs for real desire. Jean Baudrillard outlines the difference between desire and the erotic, stating that the erotic is a collection of signs of desire – symbols of it that lack any of the intensity or pleasure of the feeling. Erotic symbols are used to sell commodities because, when included in adverts they imply that the commodities are capable of

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producing and satisfying desire even though they are empty signs that contain none of those positive properties.38 Using commodified tropes of desire, Olympia crafts her body through pose, props and gesture, constructing her surface to maximize its appeal. Olympia creates herself in the image of generic desire; she becomes ‘a person that appeals to the sexuality in everyone’.39 Similarly, Cahill writes that the derivatized woman can produce no wonder in the male viewer, since she is, by definition, constituted of known elements. There is nothing here to discover, nothing to question, nothing to explore  –  only known qualities and quantities within which the male viewer’s sexual fantasies reign supreme.40

For Olympia, this is a desired outcome and successful marketing strategy: ‘You don’t decide what an audience wants: rather, you fill a void that’s there. I try to keep myself receptive to what they want to see.’41 She turns herself into a sign of sexual satisfaction, an indistinct message that hints at the fulfilment of an equally vague desire in the consumer: a void that needs to be filled. Her ambition is to create an archetypal sexual female body, a perfect derivative of male desire. Olympia produces her body as an erotic commodity. In fact, like the automaton who shares her name, she appears to be a commodity that has come to life. Her body exists only as a value in exchange: she offers sexual excitation and receives money in return. The constant variation of her live strip show performances and centrefold photographs relates to the logic of accumulation: add novelty in order to keep the customer buying tickets and magazines. The lure of Olympia’s body may evoke the hyperpigmentation of a fetish, but it is as a commodity with which she seduces her audience. As described in Chapter 1, sexual fetishism offers the fetishist partial satisfaction, and a fetishistic relationship to objects would impede the adulterous, dissatisfying relationship between consumers and commodities that is required by capitalism. Olympia seems to offer her audiences a shortcut to the satisfaction of their desire. She says that ‘though I plan to play a part, the reader doesn’t know that. They think that’s me and that’s my name’ and continues ‘the real me doesn’t have a name, doesn’t have a face. It doesn’t have that spark of life or whatever… No, because they haven’t named me. They’ve named my body, my [public] personality’.42 She turns herself into an archetypal fantasy woman in order to lure the viewers into accepting an erotic sign, a commodity. Her subjecthood is fundamentally diminished but the consumer is also reduced in this process: to paraphrase Byung-Chul Han, the consumer’s desires are ‘protocolled’ or shaped around a series of erotic sign-values and so they are more susceptible to the use of those sign-values in adverts.43 The body as a commodity moulds the consumer’s aesthetic and sexual tastes around its shape. The viewer is lured into becoming a passive, pre-determined form of desiring consumer. As this commodified aesthetic for desirable bodies becomes the norm, all other bodies must turn themselves into similar erotic commodities in order to excite desire. Capitalism invades the territory of desire and reconfigures it to conform to a set of commoditized erotic sign-values, and so the derivatizer is also derivatized. The indistinct lure of the

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commodified body covered in erotic sign-values conceals the fact that the desired object is a commodity, and the viewer is lured into a fetishistic form of sexuality in which they desire an object and not a person. In turn, the partial satisfaction afforded by sexual fetishism creates the illusion of a satisfying commodity, a thing that produces pleasure, in and of itself. The image is seamless: a desirable commodity produces a fetishistic sexual relation with the consumer that in turn commodifies the consumer’s desire.

3

Hystericized insistent presence

In ‘Advertising, Perversions, Neurosis’, Maria Rita Kehl concludes that capitalism puts the consumer in the position of a hysteric, responding to the commands of perverse advertisers who tell them what they need to buy to become an ideal object of desire.1 In Chapter 1,  I  argued that capitalism produces a relationship between capitalists and consumers that resembles a sadistic relationship.  In psychoanalysis, neurosis and perversion are viewed as ‘mental organisations that have a reciprocal function to one another’.2 People with perversions, such as fetishism, desire a partner who is predictable and easy to control. Hysterics need a perverse partner to tell them what they desire; they are unable to articulate their own needs, so they devote their time and energy to trying to fulfil the desires of their partner in the hope that it will help them to understand their own. Joël Dor writes: ‘The inability to formulate a demand leads, paradoxically, to the duty to accept and endure everything …. This passive attitude is an invitation to sadistic mistreatment at the hands of the other.’3 Hysterics are exploited because of their willingness to please. In Kehl’s description, the sadistic master is a male advertiser and the hysteric consumer is female. In this chapter  I  will examine the characteristics of hysteria in relation to consumer culture to argue that capitalism idealizes the personality traits of the hysteric, and that female and male consumers are hystericized in order to turn them into ideal neoliberal subjects.

Hysterical subjects Hysteria is an illness with a long history. It is commonly accepted that Hippocrates, the Greek physician (b. c.460 bc), was the first to diagnose symptoms of hysteria as emanating from movement of the uterus and so hysteria was viewed as a female illness.4 By the eighteenth century it was diagnosed as a neurological illness, an idea developed by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in the nineteenth century. Despite the advances in knowledge produced by Charcot, and his case studies of male hysteria (sixty-one published case studies and notes for over thirty more), the theory of the ‘wandering womb’ was still used as a diagnosis in the late nineteenth century.5 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer further advanced medical understanding of the illness in Studies on Hysteria in 1895, linking hysterical symptoms to childhood fantasies and repressed wishes. The symptoms of hysteria assisted in Freud’s development of the

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psychoanalytic technique. Charcot and Freud’s approaches to the treatment of hysteria will be discussed later in this chapter. Monique David-Menard writes that the hysteric’s symptoms are metaphors: the hysteric has repressed an experience that is traumatic to them, but it resurfaces in a disguised form as a symptom.6 Through their symptoms, hysterics repeatedly re-enact a memory that is intolerable to them.7 The variety of symptoms that are described in hysteria case studies include: ‘predilection for drama and deception, excessive emotionality, paralyses of the limbs, temporary deafness and muteness, heightened sensitivity of the skin, wilful starving, spontaneous bleeding, feeling of strangulation, hallucinations and somnambulism, and fits of contortions and seizures’.8 It is a spectacular, performative and mimetic illness, and the symptoms sometimes resemble other illnesses. For example, in the Salpêtrière hospital some of the symptoms of hysteria looked like epileptic fits when the hysterics were housed in the same wing of the hospital as epileptics.9 Despite the ‘plasticity’ and ‘diversity’ of symptoms, hysteria has consistent features.10 In psychoanalytic literature, hysteria is characterized by a refusal to see or accept a situation. This form of ‘not seeing’ is not the same as fetishistic hyperfocalization (Chapter 2). The fetishist disavows one element of reality  –  an idea that is traumatizing – and some aspects of ‘normal’ sexuality are maintained but exaggerated or diverted towards other objects. Hysteria results in an absolute denial of desire. Dispossession is an essential characteristic of the hysteric’s desire: it is a desire that is never satisfied. In Structures and Perversions, Joël Dor says the hysteric unconsciously tries to place ‘herself at a distance from herself and thus from her desire, so that she may remain in ignorance of this desire’.11 The hysteric may try to seduce another person, but only with the aim of bringing the other person’s desire into existence. Dor calls this ‘hysterical pretence’, and gives the example of a woman who spends time in an area populated by prostitutes. When a potential customer approaches her, she replies: ‘You’re making a mistake, I’m not that kind of woman’.12 The hysteric may seem to want to act upon desire but what they really want is to be desired by another so that they can understand what it means to be an object of desire. Confusion relating to the nature of their desire causes a conflict that captivates the hysteric, and they cannot accept themselves as an object, and particularly an object of desire for another person. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the mirror phase marks an infant’s apprehension of itself as a separate being and an object. At first the infant lacks the motor skills needed to fend for itself and experiences its body as fragments that are indistinguishable from its parent and its environment. During the first years of life, the infant comes to view its own body in a mirror. At first the infant perceives the mirror image as another real infant, and experiences confusion between self and other. By apprehending itself in an image of a complete and separate body, the infant comes to be able to define the boundaries of its own body, whose movements it begins to master. Joël Dor writes, ‘in re-cognising himself through the image, he [sic] is able to reassemble the scattered, fragmented body into a unified totality’.13 However, because the infant still lacks motor coordination the unified body is anticipated rather than experienced, resulting in a split between the infant’s real experience of physical immaturity and the ideal image of the body it sees in the mirror. The infant is therefore captivated and alienated by the

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ideal image of their body. This also causes a split between the self as a subject that is perceived as lacking and the self as an object (the mirror image). Lacan writes that the split produced by the mirror image initiates the formation of the ego: the individual’s sense of who they are.14 They are able to differentiate the self from the rest of the world, and begin to reject some elements of the external world while others are internalized as ego ideals (see Glossary). Hysteria results when an individual cannot identify with the mirror image and is unable to construct an image of the self. Because they cannot imagine being an object for another, the split between subject and object that takes place in the mirror phase is intolerable. Through their symptoms the hysteric repeatedly poses the questions: ‘who am I?’, ‘what do I desire?’. The answer they receive is never adequate because it confirms they are both subject and object. Gérard Wajcman, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, writes: By answering the subject’s question: ‘Who am I?’ the Other lets the subject come into being; but any given answer, necessarily specific, reduces the subject’s quest to a finite object: ‘Who you are? A saint, a fool, a hospital case … ’ Calling the subject into being, the hysteric’s ‘Who?’ in response receives a what that objectifies her.15

The hysteric’s demand always receives an objectifying response; the questioning subject is also the object of the answer, so the split within the self becomes unavoidable. Ego ideals are formed by identifying with positive attributes in other people and internalizing them (see Glossary). This process is also disrupted in hysteria because the hysteric cannot construct a self-image. Unable to imagine or understand who they are, the hysteric’s identifications are mimetic and driven by jealous rivalry. Rather than integrate positive attributes into their identity, the hysteric tries to exactly replicate the other person, and their identity is not enriched by the attributes. In Freudian Passions Jan Campbell compares hysterical identification to dressing up in other people’s clothes: Unable to choose, the hysteric is always trying everyone’s clothes, selves, and desires on for size … the ability to impersonate another person’s ego and their desires defines hysteria. And yet this mobility of identification, this mobility to select what, or who she can become is another refusal on the part of the hysteric, to acknowledge the benefits of reality over fantasy.16

The hysteric tries on other people’s egos and identities without coming any closer to an understanding of who they are and what they want. For example, a female hysteric will identify with a ‘woman who, she assumes, has brought her feminine identity to the state of perfection’.17 Mark Micale writes that hysteria in men reveals the normative masculine ideals of the society in which they reside.18 Similarly, Elaine Showalter says that Charcot’s case studies of male hysterics ‘are as crucial to understanding the construction of masculinity as his studies of women are to the construction of femininity’.19 The hysteric searches for an individual who is desired by others in order to learn about their own desire. Their obsession with the perfect feminine or masculine person causes gender ideals to be exaggerated because it is modelled on social ideals that are fetishized and derivatized (Chapter 2). It is a despotic desire for perfection

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because the hysteric must exactly correspond to society’s beauty ideal.20 To become the most desirable woman or man, the hysteric puts on a spectacular performance and attempts to ‘appear as a brilliant object that will fascinate the other’.21 The hysteric dreams ‘of a perfect erotic body that could display itself as a whole’,22 searching for a form of body modification that ‘would adjust their image to their ideal’.23 Because they can never be beautiful enough or perfect enough, they must find ways to hide their imperfections. Dor writes that the hysteric ‘attempts to mask the imperfections that she experiences as psychically overpowering’ using a variety of methods, including ‘clothing, jewelry, role playing, ostentatious identifications’.24 The hysteric’s perfectionism and hypercritical self-perception make them susceptible to exploitation by cosmetic surgeons, and fitness and beauty commodity producers.

Prototype for passion In the Salpêtrière hospital in the late nineteenth century, hysteria was a spectacular illness, expressed through a series of dramatic symptoms. During attacks of hysteria, gestures and poses ranging from sexually provocative to religious devotion were enacted by the hysterics. In order to determine what caused them, Charcot isolated the hysteric’s symptoms in drawings, plaster casts and photographs, and categorized them. He identified four phases of an hysterical attack: an epileptoid phase that mimics epileptic seizures; clownism, contorted and acrobatic movements and gestures; attitudes passionelles (passional poses), in which the hysterics enacted a series of emotions and religious poses, for example, praying and crucifixion; and finally, delirium.25 The gestures were drawn and photographed, enabling Charcot to produce an iconography of physical symptoms. Georges Didi-Huberman writes that photography had a number of different functions in the Salpêtrière: it was ‘an experimental procedure (a laboratory tool), a museological procedure (scientific archive), and a teaching procedure (a tool of transmission)’.26 Many of the photographs produced at the Salpêtrière were published in the journal Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. In 1875, the year that a photographic studio was installed, one of Charcot’s most famous and most photographed patients, Louise Augustine Gleizes (known by the pseudonym Augustine), was also admitted to the Salpêtrière hospital. Augustine became ‘the “supermodel” of the clinic’.27 She is described in the Iconographie as ‘active, intelligent, affectionate and impressionable, but also capricious, and quite enjoys attracting attention. She is a coquette’.28 She is beautiful and seductive: a model hysteric. Didi-Huberman writes that Augustine ‘remains the captive of a situation, the spectacle (of her body)’.29 Unconsciously, through her symptoms, Augustine was attempting to become ‘the feminine idol about which all men dream’.30 Didi-Huberman describes this form of self-display as ‘an almost scientific experience with the given-to-be-seen … the science of objectifying herself for another’.31 Through her symptoms, Augustine attempted to comprehend her own desire by inciting the desire of her spectators, and the photographers at the Salpêtrière seemed to respond. For example, in reference to a photograph of Augustine’s contracted limb (Figure 2), Didi-Huberman writes that

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Figure 1  ‘Planche XX. Attitudes Passionnelles. Supplication Amoureuse’ by Paul Regnard. Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière: service de M. Charcot/par Bourneville et P.  Regnard, vol. 2: Epilepsie partielle. Hystéro-epilepsie, Paris, 1878, Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

the image disguises the ailment it is supposed to document because Augustine’s body is framed and posed in a way that foregrounds her beauty rather than her illness: ‘The drape hides the body (rare, for the “medical style” of the time) but the frame grips “the subject” all the more tightly, arousing curiosity, the desire to “complete”.’32 The symptoms of male hysteria were the same as female hysteria; however, ‘the athletic contortions of the fit came more naturally to boys and men than to women’ and therefore the male hysteric’s performances were ‘more athletic, acrobatic, and violent’.33 Emile Batault, an intern in the Salpêtrière, described a 27-year-old male hysteric called Gui—, whose ‘acrobatic performance [was] as beautiful as it was varied’.34 Showalter notes that, unlike the photographs of the female hysterics, in Gui—’s photographs ‘he is seen at a distance, and his body is impressive in its muscularity and flexibility. It is also quite anonymous: the camera avoids his face, and he might be in a gym rather than a hospital’.35 The male hysterics were photographed in a manner that reinforces masculine ideals of strength and athleticism, while the photographs of female hysterics

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Figure 2  ‘Hystéro-epilepsie. Contracture, Planche XXX’ by Paul Regnard. Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière: service de M. Charcot/par Bourneville et P. Regnard, vol. 2: Epilepsie partielle. Hystéro-epilepsie, Paris (1878). Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

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reproduce the feminine ideals of the time: saint and seductress. The Salpêtrière photographic studio reproduces gender norms along with the hysteric’s symptoms. Late-twentieth-century feminist art historians and film theorists, such as Laura Mulvey, write that, in paintings, films and photographs, female and male bodies are presented in ways that reinforce a patriarchal imbalance of power. The female model tends to look directly at the camera in an inviting manner and is passively laid out for the desiring gaze of a male viewer. When a male body is captured, it is posed in a manner that discourages the desiring gaze of the viewer. The male model is often engaged in physical activity or preoccupied with something outside the frame of the image.36 He is presented as an active subject and not a passive object of desire for the viewer. Photographs produced in the Salpêtrière conform to this gender stereotypical visual language. Since the invention of photography, its relationship to truth has been challenged. Roland Barthes writes that a photograph appears to provide evidence and ‘a certificate of presence’.37 Unlike other forms of representation, such as drawing and sculpture, the photograph does not approximate a scene: it cannot portray a type of object, such as a female body, because it always portrays a specific person. Barthes describes this as ‘the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph’.38 However, this relation to truth is not straightforward. Susan Sontag writes that ‘photographs furnish evidence’ and pass for ‘incontrovertible proof that a given thing has happened’.39 However, she goes on to say that, like paintings and drawings, photographs are interpretations of the world. Photographers interpret the scene before them, making decisions about angle of view, depth of focus and what to include and exclude from the frame. Sontag writes: Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy. Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks … Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.40

To a degree, photographs can show something to the viewer, but they cannot explain what it is, or the varied meanings that it may express to different groups of people. Photographs express a particular point of view and present it as objective reality. Didi-Huberman describes the photographs of hysteria produced at the Salpêtrière as ‘a paradox of spectacular evidence’ and ‘a practice of facticity … that which is in fact (irrefutable, even if contingent) and that which is factitious’.41 The photographs in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière offer irrefutable evidence of the visual symptoms of hysteria but they are an expression of the photographer’s point of view, which is shaped by socially constructed aesthetic standards and gender expectations of their time. The hysteric’s poses depicted in the photographs are also a product of the culture within the Salpêtrière. The hysterics are factitious because their symptoms are characterized by theatricality and mimicry. The gestures and attitudes of the hysteric’s bodies were reproduced in drawings, engravings and photographs, and restaged using

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hypnosis in Charcot’s lecture theatre. The process of reproduction ‘demarcates and intensifies the symptom: it constrains the symptom to the perfection of a drawing’.42 The symptoms were perfected and intensified in the hospital because they were recorded and reproduced. Between Charcot’s desire to categorize the symptoms in order to understand them and the hysteric’s desire to attract the attention of the physicians, the symptoms of hysteria were ‘aggravated, always becoming more demonstrative’.43 Representations of hysterics also filled the pages of newspapers and novels, and performances on stage and screen. For example, Charles Richet, Charcot’s assistant, described Emma in Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert as ‘the most vivid, the truest, the most passionate of hysterics’.44 Charcot’s lectures were attended by celebrities and members of high society, including visiting royalty, high-ranking officials and politicians. Actresses, performers and dancers, such as the Moulin Rouge dancer Jane Avril, attended the lectures and then ‘worked the Salpêtrière style into their own performances’.45 Even the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt spent time in a cell in the Salpêtrière ‘to perfect a performance of an attack of hysterical insanity in the play Adrienne Lecouvreur’.46 In fact, the theatrical performances by Marie Wittman (known in the Salpêtrière as Blanche ‘the Queen of Hysterics’) were compared to Bernhardt’s: Never has a ‘Rachel or a Sarah Bernhardt, Rubens or Raphaël, arrived at such a powerful expression. This young girl enacted a series of tableaux that surpassed in its brilliance and power the most sublime efforts by art’.47 The symptoms and suffering of the hysterics were applauded for their creative intensity. The hysteric’s knowledge of this popularity is described anecdotally in instances of prima donna-like behaviour among the patients. In a memoir, Alphonse Daudet describes a scenario in which ‘Balmann’, the pseudonym he used for Blanche, refused to take to the ‘stage’ during one of Charcot’s lectures because a less beautiful and less talented hysteric had been displayed before her.48 Asti Hustvedt writes that ‘the best performers attracted large audiences and their shows even went on the road, travelling to other hospitals and amphitheaters’.49 Hysteria also featured in a popular type of carnival stage show that copied Charcot’s Salpêtrière lectures and was performed by mesmerists and female hysterics. Hustvedt writes that there was a direct route between the hospital and the stage because mesmerists employed hysterics to perform in their acts, offering them ‘a cut of the night’s profits, as well as food and lodging’, and the hysterics would return to the Salptêrière when they ‘needed a break … or their hysterical attacks became too disruptive’.50 Gilles de la Tourette, a doctor at the Salpêtrière, was concerned by the contagious nature of hysteria and described the audiences at the performances as a ‘crowd of imbeciles who have brought to this repugnant spectacle their wives and daughters, as though hysteria does not spread quickly enough with ordinary day to day provocations’.51 Tourette did not disapprove of the shows because they were fraudulent but because the mesmerists were able to produce attacks of hysteria in their hypnotized assistants and he feared that audience members with latent hysteria would be triggered by the performances. The influence between pathology and popular culture was cyclical: performers and entertainers drew on the passionate gestures of the hysterics, and the theatrical nature of hysteria was a ‘displacement of the gestures which were part of the Republic’s love affair with boulevard spectacle. Hysteria would be enacted differently elsewhere’.52

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Despite its confounding array of symptoms, hysteria was romanticized in nineteenthcentury Paris because the symptoms communicated in a language that was familiar to the audience. Through reciprocal influence between the hospital and the stage and screen, socially acceptable feminine behaviours took on an aspect of hysteria: Posed for and captured by the new technology of the camera, their passionate attitudes, simultaneously erotic and saintly, played a part in initiating a local fashion in hysteria. These expressions and gestures also affected the actors of the silent screen, where they were in a sense normalized into histrionics and disseminated once more. Hysteria became every woman’s expression of intense passion.53

The symptoms of hysteria were incorporated into everyday expressions. Mark Micale says that ‘the role of the physician is that of semiotician: to decode the hysterical symptom, to find out what it “stands for”’ because hysteria is ‘an alternative physical, verbal, and gestural language, an iconic social communication’.54 Hysteria is a culturebound syndrome (see Glossary) because the symptoms are specific to the culture in which the hysteric resides, and therefore the symptoms can be interpreted to reveal the anxieties and fantasies of the society that produces them.55

Hysterical politics The hysterics in the Salpêtrière hospital were predominantly working-class women and men being treated in hospital by physicians. At the end of the nineteenth century, psychoanalysts were attempting to cure middle- and upper-class hysterics, such as Freud’s most famous case study of hysteria: Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’).56 The late nineteenth century was a time of social change that women may have experienced as contradictory: gender roles were beginning to modernize and upperclass women were less confined to their homes.57 However, the remaining social and intellectual restrictions placed on wealthy women is thought to have contributed to the onset of hysteria. Appignanesi writes that the hysteric’s symptoms represent conformity to and resistance against the gender expectations of the society: She is  –  in her hypnotized, sleeping, paralyzed or mute state  –  a parody, an excessive, caricatural version of that Victorian vision of the feminine which would have woman passive, angelic, malleable, and utterly desirable while undesiring, her skin anaesthetic.58

Viewing hysteria as a form of protest and refusal to conform to social expectations undermines the image of the ideal Victorian woman, who was docile and sexually ignorant. During the 1870s, when hysteria was being treated as a nervous disorder by psychoanalysts, the suffragette movement was demanding social and political rights

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for middle- and upper-class women. Elaine Showalter argues that hysteria exists on a continuum with feminism because it is a ‘body language of women’s rebellion against patriarchal oppression’ and ‘a desperate, and ultimately self-destructive, form of protest’.59 Some doctors thought that hysterical women were ‘closet feminists who had to be reprogrammed into traditional roles’, and politicians who opposed giving votes to women ‘attacked feminist activists as closet hysterics who needed treatment rather than rights’.60 Furthermore, politicians suggested that enabling women to take a more active role in public life would ‘incorporate that hysterical activity permanently into the life of the nation’.61 In feminist critiques of psychoanalysis, Freud is celebrated for drawing attention to the social causes of hysteria and destigmatizing the illness. But he is also accused of ‘turning protest into illness’ because he tried to cure women of their hysteria rather than encouraging them to demand greater social and political agency.62 In relation to Dora, Elaine Showalter writes: Unlike the impoverished working-class women at the Salpêtriêre, who had to give Charcot what he wanted, Dora had the financial and social resources to resist her therapist. Yet Dora failed as well. She was not a willing participant and did not collude with Freud, but she couldn’t manage to tell her own story.63

At eighteen years of age, Ida Bauer, identified by Freud using the pseudonym Dora, entered treatment with him after her parents found a letter written by her that appeared to be a suicide note. Dora also suffered from attacks of nervous coughing and loss of voice. Freud interpreted the strangulating pressure she felt on her throat to be a displacement of a sensation relating to a repressed memory. When she was fourteen years old, Herr K, a family friend, had contrived to be alone with Dora and had kissed her. Freud writes that she felt the pressure of Herr K’s erect penis against her groin and, with a strong feeling of disgust, repressed the memory, displacing the sensation from the groin to her throat as a cough and loss of voice. Freud interpreted the upward movement of the symptom to be a denial of the sexual nature of the experience. Freud deduced that Dora was in love with Herr K because her episodes of loss of voice coincided with the periods of time when Herr K was away.64 At the time of her treatment with Freud, Dora was tormented by her father’s affair with Frau K, although she had facilitated their clandestine meetings earlier in the affair. Freud writes that her illness is caused by two simultaneous identifications: with Frau K, in the position of her father’s lover, and with her mother, the displaced former lover. Her desire to be the object of her father’s desire is a displacement of her desire to be the object of Herr K’s desire. Unconsciously she wants to be his lover and regrets that she had rejected his advances. In his re-reading of Freud’s case study, Lacan argues that Dora’s hysteria resulted from her inability to determine if she related to Frau K as an ideal ego (see Glossary) or an object of desire. Freud writes that ‘when Dora talked about Frau K, she used to praise her “adorable white body” in accents more appropriate to a lover than to a defeated rival’.65 He continues: ‘she had been given a present of some jewellery [by her father] which was exactly like some that she had seen in Frau K’s possession and had wished for aloud at that time’.66 To make his generosity towards Frau K less conspicuous, her

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father gave her the same jewellery. She desired Frau K, but her father’s gifts and Herr K’s desire for her also made her Frau K’s equivalent. Lacan writes that Dora bounces between primary identification with an ideal ego and secondary identification with an object of desire, unable to escape the question of what, and who, she desires. There have been many subsequent discussions about Dora, including numerous feminist readings of Freud’s case study. For example, Toril Moi writes that Dora ‘is not only a pawn in the game between Herr K and her father; her doctor joins the male team and untiringly tries to ascribe to her desires she does not have and to ignore the ones she does have’.67 Freud insists that Dora is in love with Herr K, forcing her to conform to his heterosexual, patriarchal expectations. Maria Ramas argues that Dora’s hysteria is an unconscious compromise that enables her to simultaneously conform with the demands of patriarchal culture and revolt against it. Her choice of Herr K as a love object is ‘truly ingenious’ because it allowed her to ‘comply with her father’s wishes and wear the cloak of femininity … while knowing full well that this was a doomed affair, … given the strictures of respectable fin de siècle Vienna’.68 Similarly, in a published conversation with Catherine Clément, Hélène Cixous writes that through her hysteria, Dora resists the family and society that are founded on the body of women, on bodies despised, rejected, bodies that are humiliating once they have been used. And this girl – like all hysterics, deprived of the possibility of saying directly what she perceived, … still had the strength to make it known. It is the nuclear example of women’s power to protest.69

Clément responds, saying that hysterics are similar to the ‘clowns, charlatans, [and] crazies’ who do not fit into society: ‘They all occupy challenging positions foreseen by the social bodies, challenging functions within the scope of all cultures. That doesn’t change the structures, however. On the contrary, it makes them comfortable.’70 The hysteric’s ‘feminine revolt’ did not change society or improve women’s position within it. Frustrations about inequality, exploitation and lack of intellectual stimulation are dismissed as hysteric ravings.

The neoliberal hysteric Juliet Mitchell proposes that hysteria is not initiated by unrequited love in an intergenerational relationship, as Freud and Lacan suggest, but is caused by a lateral relationship characterized by unconscious rivalry between siblings and peers. A  sibling rival threatens the hysteric’s position as a unique child. In this relation, a child is ‘displaced’ by a real or fantasized younger sibling. Mitchell says that ‘an actual sibling is the concrete embodiment of a general condition in which no human being is unique – he can always be replaced or repeated by another’.71 She continues: ‘it is the catastrophic awareness that one is not unique which triggers the onset of hysteria’.72 Without the identity of unique child, the hysteric is unable to conceptualize the self.

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Mitchell argues that Dora is displaced from her father’s affections by Frau K, who is a lateral rival for her father’s love and attention. Dora is ‘in both her own and in Freud’s account, beside herself with fury. When is one “beside oneself ” except when one has been displaced, one’s place occupied by another’?73 With her provocative symptoms Dora unconsciously forced others, including her father and Frau K, to pay attention to her. Attention-seeking behaviour is characteristic of hysteria: Having been replaced by a rival, the hysteric ‘neither remembers nor expects to be remembered if he [sic] is not always present – so he always over insistently presents himself ’.74 When threatened by displacement by a rival, the hysteric is overwhelmed by the threat of absence and annihilation. They unconsciously retaliate by splintering their identity: ‘Breaking in bits, fragmenting as a body or as a multiple personality’, an action that Mitchell describes as a ‘desperately insistent presence’.75 The fractured personality or fragmented body protects the hysteric from the threat of non-existence by seeming to multiply the self into parts or variations and presenting the self in a manner that is impossible for others to ignore. The hysteric’s anxiety is also temporarily relieved by powerful identification with their rival. The hysteric ‘tries to achieve what he wants by imitating whoever seems best at it. But beneath this – and far more persistent – is the fact that he mimes whoever he is most jealous of ’.76 There is an aspect of one-upmanship in the identification process because the hysteric is desperate to gain recognition for superiority over a rival who is deemed to be better and better loved. This leads to an escalation of provocative, attention-seeking behaviour. Hysteria is contagious and it compels participation because the intensity of the hysteric’s symptoms ‘draws in those around the hysteric, whose own potential hysterical vortex (which we all have) responds’.77 According to Mitchell, hysteria calls out to the latent hysteria in others, causing mass outbreaks, such as an outbreak of anorexia in a girls’ school and the rise of neo-Nazism. Although hysteria has disappeared from medical discourse, writers and psychoanalysts argue that it still exists. Hustvedt writes that if the hysterics in the Salpêtrière presented their symptoms to doctors today, they would be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, conversion disorder, eating disorder and bi-polar disorder. She notes that individuals with histrionic personality disorder display excessive emotionality and attention seeking; they behave in an inappropriately sexual, seductive or provocative manner, are easily suggestible, and prone to self-dramatization and theatricality.78 Histrionic personality disorder is very similar to hysteria. Because hysteria is a culturally contingent syndrome, the symptoms are ‘culturally permissible expressions of distress’ that can be interpreted to reveal the anxieties and fantasies of contemporary society.79 Naomi Segal writes that in contemporary consumer society, hysteria is caused by ‘the particular terror that is exposure’.80 The pressures of idealized femininity ‘haunt’ and ‘prey on’ the surface of the female body: ‘The inadequacy of our “outside” stalks us. Carried by us yet not belonging to us, it makes us all to some degree hysterics, speaking through the text that is our skin.’81 Women are alienated from their bodies by unattainable social body ideals. Although Segal writes that the social construction of femininity contributes to the onset of hysteria, masculinity comes with its own burden of visibility and is not immune to the anxiety of exposure. For example, the contemporary ideal male body is muscular with

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little body fat, which causes men to pursue a ‘drive for muscularity’.82 Dor describes how male hysterics frequently exhibit their bodies in a theatrical manner, such as bodybuilding, so that their rival ‘will be totally flabbergasted by the embodiment of such perfection’.83 The messages expressed in consumer culture produce and exacerbate hysteria. Paragons of femininity and masculinity are presented to consumers on billboards, the pages of magazines, social networking sites and in television programmes. They are ideals against whom the consumers judge themselves to be inferior and imperfect. The body comes to be viewed as an unruly object that requires constant surveillance and discipline to prevent it from revealing the individual’s imperfection. For example, an Estee Lauder advert calls upon the consumer to ‘imagine they have nothing to hide’, evoking the terror of exposure that makes it necessary for flaws to be concealed. The pursuit of perfection and despotic desire to exactly correspond to society’s beauty ideals are defining characteristics of hysteria. The sadistic commands and hyperfocalizing fetishistic gaze in adverts and popular culture increase dissatisfaction and hystericize consumers. When the commodity fails to transform the hystericized consumer’s body into the idealized edited body in the advert, they are driven to search for another commodity that promises to produce conformity to the ideal. The unattainable standards of beauty in advertising and the threat of exposure of flaws further inflame the hystericized consumer’s anxiety and jealousy, resulting in increasing levels of consumption. The personality structure of hysteria, characterized by perfectionism, rivalry and insistent presence, is the ideal neoliberal subject. Juliet Mitchell writes that symptoms of contemporary hysteria will be ‘mass experiences in an era of mass communication’.84 Social networking sites are mass hystericization sites: the spectacle compels users to repeatedly and insistently present the self, and the panopticon intensifies the terror of exposure. Insistent presence is normalized by selfies that function as rhetorically persuasive packaging for the selfbrand. Gym and bikini selfies seem to be posted with the intention of inciting jealousy in the viewer, posing the question, ‘Am I the perfect object of desire?’ The following chapters will examine the affordances of social media, and particularly selfies, in relation to peer rivalry, perfectionism and insistent presence.

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Self(ie) discipline

Mehita Iqani and Jonathan E. Schroeder define selfies as self-portrait photographs that are ‘taken at arm’s length or in a mirror, as such they are typically relatively close up pictures, they present the subject/self in a way that is considered attractive, good-looking or sexy by that subject, and they are entirely under the control of the photographer/ subject’.1 Two ‘technologies of the self ’ intersect in the selfie: photography and ‘a contemporary space of individual expression: the computer screen’.2 In academia and popular culture the selfie is described as a symptom of narcissism and an empowering form of agency. Katrin Tiidenberg writes: ‘the assumption behind calling selfies narcissistic is that if you take a picture of yourself, you must think you are worthy of being seen’.3 She notes that it is socially acceptable for powerful men to have portraits and statues made to demonstrate their importance, but the selfie practices of young people, particularly women and gay men, are vilified if they decide that they are also worthy of attention. Tiidenberg says: ‘the social order is shaken’ when young women and other marginalized individuals bypass the (often white, upper- or middle-class male) ‘gatekeepers of visibility’ such as professional photographers, modelling agencies and magazine editors.4 Similarly, in her study of personal fashion blogs, Agnès Rocamora says that, prior to the availability of smart phones with cameras, forms of representation were ‘restrained by men’s ownership of the tools of artistic production such as the brush or the camera as well as of the spaces of display such as galleries and museums’.5 In his article interpreting the self-portraits produced by young female photographers, some of which resemble selfies, Derek Conrad Murray describes the empowering potential of selfies with even greater enthusiasm: viewed individually, they appear rather banal, commonplace, and benign. Taken en masse, it feels like a revolutionary political movement – like a radical colonization of the visual realm and an aggressive reclaiming of the female body. Even if there is no overt political intent, they are indeed contending with the manner in which capitalism is enacted upon their lives.6

Murray positions these artists within the history of feminist art practices of selfrepresentation. He argues that selfies and self-portraiture enable young women to challenge the ‘gender-specific slights and ideological trivializing of young women’s efforts to define themselves; to make themselves visible, in a cultural climate that

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continues to negate, ridicule, malign and sexualize them’.7 He views the prevalence of ‘pin-up’ style selfies online as a reaction against the unattainable beauty ideals perpetuated in popular culture. He writes that the sexualized selfie is ‘not meant as titillation for the male gaze, rather it is designed to embrace femininity and sexuality; celebrate the history of women; reject unhealthy beauty standards promoted by the media; and advance a body-positive attitude’.8 However, he goes on to say the pin-up style selfies explore ‘formulaic female sexualities’ that reiterate patriarchal ideals, and do so as a form of empowerment.9 Tiidenberg writes that if selfies are empowering, they will produce positive change. She asks if selfies produce a feeling of empowerment because the individual has received praise for reproducing, without challenging, the norms of society? To avoid producing a binary view of selfies as either empowering or disempowering, she defines empowerment as ‘a personal sense of power and control, which carries the potential for social impact through exerting influence on existing discourses and ways of looking’.10 She examined the positive experiences of the selfie-takers who post ‘sexy’ and nude selfies on Tumblr and found that selfies enable individuals to examine, develop and perform their identities in a manner of their own choosing. They also receive encouraging feedback that enables them to think positively about themselves and feel that they are valued members of a community. In this sense, selfies are an empowering form of exhibitionism.11 Furthermore, selfie-taking practices can potentially enable individuals to ‘reject those conventional norms that systematically hold us down’ by presenting diverse representations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, body size and disability.12 For example, members of marginalized communities use selfies to perform their identities in a positive way that challenges stereotypes. Researchers examined the #ILookLikeAnEngineer hashtag campaign and the impact it had on participants from a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds.13 They found that individuals who used the hashtag when posting selfies felt empowered, experienced a greater sense of community and increased visibility by gaining followers. Participants also engaged in campaign actions offline, as a direct result of the hashtag. These actions included talking to friends and colleagues about issues of diversity within the profession, writing blog posts about the hashtag, participating in media interviews and donating money to further the cause. The researchers conclude that participation in identity hashtag campaigns could improve the participants’ professional self-image and ‘reduce bias for participants and movement observers’.14 They write that selfie campaigns ‘give a face to the social issues experienced by marginalized groups’, challenge stereotypes and ‘shape and reclaim the broader public image of a marginalized group’.15 Other selfie studies have found similar positive results and uncovered a variety of motivations for taking and sharing selfies, all of which challenge the notion that selfie-taking is narcissistic and vain. David Nemer and Guo Freeman conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the favelas of Vitória, Brazil, to understand the social networking site use and selfie-taking practices of the inhabitants. The researchers found that selfies enabled individuals who were illiterate to participate in social networking sites, which improved their literacy skills.16 Furthermore, selfies enabled participants to ‘realistically depict their everyday lives, history, and social situation’; ‘escape from the eyes of powerful drug lords to

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Figure 3  ‘#WeJustNeedToPee selfie’ by Michael Hughes. Twitter Post (https://twitter.com/ michaelhughes_1/status/575659231841378304?lang=en), Minnesota (2015). Credit: The author. Reproduced with permission from the author.

implicitly express their dissatisfaction and objections’; and ‘consciously reflect on their true selves and maintain their spiritual purity’.17 For marginalized groups living in difficult circumstances, selfies are multifaceted and positively affect people’s lives. Similarly, in LGBTQI+ communities, selfie-takers are empowered to present themselves in a manner that challenges stereotypes, affirms the complexity of genderfluidity and provides visibility for people who are under-represented in mainstream media.18 Echoing the positive experiences of individuals who post sexy selfies on Tumblr, Son Vivienne undertook research with trans and gender-fluid Tumbler users, who report that positive comments from other users are self-affirming and enable body acceptance. The participants benefit from seeing diverse bodies online, and view trans and gender-fluid selfies as empowering expressions of defiance against beauty industries that promote binary beauty ideals and capitalize on consumer’s insecurities.19 In this respect, selfies that unashamedly present diverse bodies, genders

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and sexualities, such as trans and gender-fluid selfies and the ‘sexy’ selfies discussed by Tiidenberg, disrupt the disciplinary, panopticon aspect of social networking sites. Trans and gender-fluid selfies frequently appear as pairs or collections in order to document performances of gender over time. While an individual shot cannot represent a linear journey (permanent transition across gender) or an oscillating one (fluidity), second and third shots and accompanying text can provide a more complex narrative context.20

The sequential format of these selfies replicates but also subverts a visual trope common to diet and beauty industry advertising: the before and after image. Because gender-fluid selfies do not focus on a desired end-point for the body’s transformation, they disrupt the idea of progress usually expressed by ‘before and after’ adverts. Additionally, sequential selfies by trans participants enable individuals to closely examine their bodily changes. LB, one of the participants in Vivienne’s research, took a selfie each month to ‘analyse the soft-tissue changes around her face that are hard to see in daily observation’, and she shares the photographs on Facebook so her network of friends and family are able to follow her transition.21 Like the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil, selfie-taking and sharing practices among LGBTQI+ communities perform a variety of functions, including: increasing self-awareness and self-acceptance, building communities and challenging stereotypes. However, sharing selfies can also lead to negative feedback. LB also posts her selfies on the ‘trans-passing’ discussion forum on Reddit. The Reddit discussion thread is for non-trans individuals to ‘slag off (in a constructive manner)’ trans selfies.22 LB says: ‘I invite brutal honesty … I’d rather some dick there said “you look like a dude in a dress” than someone in person.’23 Although the Reddit forum facilitates the expression of anti-trans sentiments, it also ensures distance from the person commenting, shielding LB from negative face-toface experiences. Discussion forums like this one may be used by trans people to test their self-image, but they also instil an expectation that individuals should conform to binary gender norms, and enable discriminatory behaviours against individuals who cannot or do not wish to conform to these ideals. In her examination of the #WeJustNeedToPee selfie campaign, Stephanie Duguay acknowledges that selfies are used to raise awareness of inequality, protest against restrictive legislation and influence the opinions of social media audiences in their understanding of gender and sexuality.24 However, visibility on social media does not automatically ‘challenge dominant discourses … Media representations are often assimilative, maintaining an “equal rights” discourse of sameness with heterosexual and cisgender people’ and ‘reinforce stereotypes that silence and obscure difference instead of increasing acceptance of diversity’.25 Selfies taken by individuals with disabilities can also encourage assimilation when they minimize the appearance of the disability in order to present a ‘socially idealized self rather than a self that is grounded in offline characteristics and cues’.26 Aya Yadlin-Segal interviewed participants of #FSHDselfies, a campaign that aimed to raise awareness and money for a facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD)

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charity. Because FSDH affects the muscles around the eyes and mouth, selfie-taking is a pertinent, but potentially distressing way for individuals with FSHD to participate in the campaign: sharing a selfie became a way to explain the physical condition but also to negate the stigma associated with disability… participants were able to generate an accepting and even subversive space, where many of [the participants] shared the experience of overcoming their need to ‘pass’ as able-bodied and to step outside of the shame over their appearance rather than hiding it.27

Participants were empowered by the experience of visually foregrounding their disability, and the campaign prompted discussions about the experiences of living with the disability. However, other participants criticized the use of selfies in the campaign, noting that images showing individuals overcoming obstacles by engaging in activities such as sports may challenge some stereotypes but they do not express the diversity or the complexity of FSHD, and exclude individuals who do not or cannot engage in those positive experiences. In the #FSHDselfies campaign, these opposing positions converge in the smile of the selfie-taker, ‘subverting normative messages about “passing” and beauty to foster empowerment on the one hand, and on the other hand facilitating a fixation on the happy and positive realities of individuals with disabilities who are overcoming grand obstacles in their lives’.28 Selfies are double-edged swords. They enable individuals and minority groups to challenge stereotypes and assert their right to be seen. Responding to selfies with positive comments produces a supportive community and empowers individuals by improving their self-image. When there is greater body and identity diversity in selfies, they also contribute to the production of a more inclusive visual culture online. However, the preference for positive images in which marginalized individuals assimilate to dominant social ideals tends to result in slightly greater diversity, without challenging the power structures that hold the dominant norms in place. Selfies that show the ‘hardship and day-to-day realities of minorities’ are excluded from or sidelined by social media platforms, just as they are excluded from mainstream media platforms.29 Marginalized individuals are permitted to be visible if they conform to expectations determined by the platforms’ creators and users.

Standardizing selfies For marginalized communities, assimilating to dominant social ideals can be a pathway to inclusion and increased visibility on social networking sites. However, assimilation is not a simple matter of copying dominant codes. The standards for socially acceptable selfies are informed by multiple codes and norms relating to gender, race, sexuality, class and numerous other identity markers. For example, Apryl A. Williams and Beatriz Aldana Marquez found that selfie-taking by white men is heavily stigmatized as narcissistic by white women who view male bathroom selfies as an extreme violation of acceptable masculine behaviour. Williams and Marquez interpret

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this reaction: ‘Effortful projections of masculinity can be abrasive to White women and incite strong opinions. Masculinity tends to be perceived as an effortless performance that is simple to read.’30 Male bathroom selfies challenge the notion that masculinity is effortless because it takes effort to produce a good bathroom selfie. By adding negative comments to the posts, white women stigmatize male bathroom selfies and inadvertently reinforce the stereotype that selfie-taking is a narcissistic female practice. In contrast, Black and Latino men are not stigmatized for taking selfies, provided their selfies reinforce their community’s masculine ideal and they do not take too many. The notion of the selfie king coincides with regulations of masculinity and gender presentation that are often crucial in Black and Latino social structures. Macho men are required to be confident and selfie taking allows them to blatantly construct that confidence. When users like posted selfies, they reaffirm and reprosume ideas about masculinity.31

Williams and Marquez suggest that these positive feelings derive from a need for approval and the affirmation by other male members of their community, which may shield the selfie-takers from experiences of racism and discrimination.32 Marijke Naezer carried out ethnographic research with young people in the Netherlands to examine their performances of sexiness in their selfies, and found that discourses of sexiness are gendered, heteronormative, racialized and classed.33 White girls are perceived to be victims of sexualization, whereas girls of colour are viewed contradictorily as too oppressed for sexual self-expression to occur, and as passive, exotic or hyper-sexualized objects. Working-class girls are associated with ‘bad taste, lack of reflexivity and responsibility, and hypersexuality/sluttishness’.34 In negotiating these contradictory interpretations of sexy selfies, some of the girls in Naezer’s study rejected displays of sexiness, while others viewed them to be empowering. Antillean participants embraced sexiness as a demonstration of bodily pride and self-confidence, and also a ‘marker of racial and ethnic difference between them and other girls’ that contribute to ‘the performance of Antillean (and sexy) femininity’.35 In addition to marking a racial boundary, the girl’s relation to sexiness can also demarcate class boundaries. One of the Antillean participants mimicked the ‘posh’ accent of middleclass Dutch girls when she describes a selfie as ‘trashy’. By mocking and distancing herself from this classed attitude, she ‘categorises her own positive attitude towards sexy pictures as “lower” class, and reclaims this as a positive identification’.36 To a degree, the girls categorized as lower class are able to assimilate higher-class associations by distancing themselves from the sexualized behaviours of their peers. Kyra said that she ‘knew better’, ‘performing a smart, knowing self that carries higher educated/higher class connotations’.37 However, the potential to use some of the higher-class codes may be predicated on Kyra’s whiteness. Naezer writes: ‘while the interferences between constructions of multiple differences can be dynamic and unpredictable, they do not exist in a social and material vacuum, and they may also work to reproduce dominant categorisations, social norms, stereotypes and power relations’.38 Individuals can use selfies to challenge dominant ideals; however, social hierarchies and gender norms continue to be reproduced in selfies.

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In his research into the selfie-taking practices of Moroccan-Dutch youths in Amsterdam, Koen Leurs found that gender stereotypes are ‘powerful ideological models, to which users aspire in order to achieve social acceptance, make new friends, find romance and gain popularity’.39 Leurs concludes that the participants may feel empowered by the attention and popularity that stereotypical gender performances produce, but there are also negative consequences. In relation to female participants, he writes: Bodies are disciplined to meet these expectations, but versions of femininity are increasingly becoming unattainable, leading to frustration and a loss of (peergenerated) self-worth. Additionally, exposing oneself implies susceptibility to victimization practices … that may put an end to the sense of agency users may have affectively felt.40

Selfie-takers are rewarded for conforming to gendered social ideals but the ideals are increasingly difficult to attain and maintain.

Figure 4  ‘Masc#2 Spoof Instructional Selfie’ by A.C. Davidson and Dawn Woolley. Bois of Isolation Instagram Project (https://www.instagram.com/boisofisolation/), UK (2020). Credit: The authors. CC BY-NC-ND.41

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Figure 5  ‘Fem#1 Spoof Instructional Selfie’ by A.C. Davidson and Dawn Woolley. Bois of Isolation Instagram Project (https://www.instagram.com/boisofisolation/), UK (2020). Credit: The authors. CC BY-NC-ND.

The exaggeration of gendered ideals in selfies was demonstrated in 2015 by Nicola Döring, Anne Reif and Sandra Poeschl, who conducted content analysis of 500 selfies on Instagram to determine if they conform to the gender stereotypes identified by Erving Goffman.42 In 1976 Goffman analysed the pose, position of the body and facial expression of female and male models in over 500 adverts in magazines. He identified several trends and patterns in how gender ideals are represented and reinforced: women are more likely to be photographed caressing an object or touching their own body, which has the effect of presenting the female body as a touchable object. Female models are more likely to be featured lying down or adopting an imbalanced posture, with their head or body canting to one side, for example, by tilting the head, crossing the legs or leaning on another person, all of which infer an inferior social position and lack of (emotional) balance. Subordinate social status is also signified by a withdrawal of gaze from the direction of the camera, closed eyes and a loss of control over emotions that is implied by intense laughter or concealing the face.43 In addition

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to Goffman’s five categories, Döring, Reif and Poeschl added Kang’s category of bodily display, which classifies how much of the body is revealed by the individual’s clothing, and three categories deriving from selfies: muscle display, kissing or pouting face, and faceless portrayal.44 The study revealed that the gender stereotypical behaviours found in adverts are repeated in selfies. The researchers say that ‘gender differences with small to medium effect sizes were found in selfies for all of Goffman’s and Kang’s categories with the sitting posture being the only exception …. The biggest gender effects were found for the categories feminine touch and imbalance’.45 In the selfie categories ‘more selfies produced by females were found to fit the categories the kissing pout and faceless portrayal, whilst males’ selfies more often displayed muscle presentation’.46 The study also found that feminine touch, imbalance, withdrawing the gaze and loss of control are featured in selfies more frequently than in the magazine adverts. These findings suggest that an intensification of gender stereotypes has taken place on social networking sites.

Figure 6  ‘Fem#2 Spoof Instructional Selfie’ by A.C. Davidson and Dawn Woolley. Bois of Isolation Instagram Project (https://www.instagram.com/boisofisolation/), UK (2020). Credit: The authors. CC BY-NC-ND.

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Self(ie) harm Although selfies allow an individual to produce an image of their choosing, they also increase self-surveillance and foreground the value of appearance. Sarah Grogan, Leonie Rothery, Jennifer Cole and Matthew Hall ran an exploratory psychology study to investigate the link between body image and selfie posting in young British women. They found that ‘if women feel as though they are in control of their own images, they are able to draw on neo-liberal discourses of free choice and self-determination to justify objectification of themselves and other women’.47 Platforms such as Instagram encourage ‘unhelpful body critique’, because some women take and view selfies to identify flaws in their bodies and faces.48 Additionally, women are constrained by pressure to conform to social expectations about appropriate female self-presentation. As a consequence of ‘choosing’ to deviate from acceptable gender norms, the selfietakers ‘risk being judged by other women as unfeminine or pathological’.49 Despite saying that they are motivated to post selfies for their own enjoyment, most of the participants described feeling pressure to take and post selfies, fearing that they would be viewed as ‘abnormal’ if they did not.50 Similarly, Ori Schwarz writes that young Israelis on the social networking site Shox who did not post selfies were ‘often publicly accused of taking on a false identity or of ugliness’ and as a consequence they fail to make friends and usually leave the platform.51 The platform also reinforces the importance of selfies because only profiles that contain selfies will be selected by Shox to be featured on the homepage, an opportunity that significantly raises the profile and social capital of the users that are featured. In selfies, the disciplinary forces of the spectacle and panopticon work together. Individuals, and young women in particular, are expected to take and share selfies, and they risk a loss of status among their peers if they do not. They are compelled to engage in hystericized insistent presence (Chapter 3). The panoptical aspect of social media, in which users judge their peers, functions to regulate where selfies are taken, by whom and what they contain. As described in relation to male bathroom selfies, users are constrained to take selfies in certain circumstances and to post an appropriate quantity. In their research into the selfie practices of Singaporean teenage girls, Trudy Hui Hui Chua and Leanne Chang found that the desire to express affiliation to a particular peer group influences the type of selfies that the participants take and how they edit them.52 The participants present an idealized self in their selfies, but they cannot excessively edit their images because their online peers are also often their offline peers and individuals who post inauthentic and deceptive selfies are severely, publicly admonished.53 All of Chua and Chang’s participants conformed to the peer standards of beauty and followed peer norms to guide their self-presentation. Participants admitted that as much as they may say that ‘true beauty is in the heart of everyone,’ it was difficult to accept it in reality because of the pressure they received from peers who adopted the media-dictated standards of beauty, which then became peer norms.54

The participants honed their understanding of beauty ideals and learnt the ‘rewards of conforming with and the hazards of deviating from the peer standards of beauty’

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using the positive and negative comments posted in response to other individual’s selfies.55 Despite the information provided in user comments, the number of Likes a selfie receives and the quantity of followers a user has are the principal markers of success. Participants use numerical measures to determine how popular they are and position themselves in relation to their peers. Chua and Chang write that achieving a high number of likes was viewed as an accomplishment and indication that they ‘were “better” and “cooler” than their peers. Conversely, a lower number of likes and followers could evoke anger, jealousy, inadequacy, and doubts about self-worth’.56 In addition, the participants engage in upward and downward comparisons to evaluate their own selfies. Downward comparisons with users who are deemed to be less successful or less attractive enable an individual to maintain a positive self-image and an upward comparison with more successful individuals can provide information on how to improve social status. However, upward comparison also produces ‘pressure for continual advancement’.57 In this respect, social comparison produces rivalry and one-upmanship among peer groups and compels individuals to take up the neverending task of self-improvement. Although it can result in social advancement, upward comparison has been found to cause body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem. On social networking sites comparisons with peers are likely to be upward comparisons because users present an edited, idealized version of themselves and the drive for continual advancement intensifies the beauty standards that are portrayed. Negative comparisons with peers are driven by feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem, which they exacerbate. Some participants described how they or their peers had engaged in disordered eating practices and self-harm as a result of these negative feelings. Additionally, jealousy and competition caused by disparities in numbers of likes made friendships difficult to maintain.58 Other research has found that individuals with low-esteem who engage in high levels of self-monitoring are more likely to view the number of likes they receive as important and indicative of their self-worth.59 Naomi Coulthard and Jane Ogden found that posting selfies and receiving positive feedback produced a temporary improvement in participants’ face satisfaction, but after seven days their satisfaction deteriorated to a level lower than recorded prior to the experiment. They summarize: ‘whilst posting selfies with feedback may result in a temporary improvement in face satisfaction this does not seem to persist. Further, it may be that the temporary improvement is itself damaging if it leads to a rebound effect afterwards’.60 Social networking sites offer a unique and potentially harmful form of peer comparison: ‘the prolonged and intense interactions taking place on social media could amplify the impact of peer influence, as the judgment that each girl receives is collective, enduring, and public’.61 Users with low self-esteem are driven to take and share selfies because they need the positive affirmation produced by likes and new followers. However, peer comparison can have a detrimental impact on self-esteem, producing a ‘self-perpetuating cycle’ of selfietaking and low self-esteem.62 Research carried out by Facebook and leaked by The Wall Street Journal confirms these findings. The Wall Street Journal reviewed slide presentations by researchers working for Instagram and posted on Facebook’s internal message board. The slides state that ‘Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse’.63 Research into the effects of photo-sharing

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conducted by Facebook over the course of three years found that ‘We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls’, and ‘Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression’, a reaction that was ‘unprompted and consistent across all groups’.64 The researchers found that some of the problems teens experienced were specific to Instagram, such as those caused by social comparison, because the platform focuses on body and lifestyle more heavily than other platforms. The article concludes that ‘features that Instagram identifies as most harmful to teens appear to be at the platform’s core’.65

Selfie display and insistent presence The pressure to recreate the flawlessness of edited selfies in the real world seems to be indicated by the variety of cosmetics that are currently available on the market, claiming to produce effects equivalent to Photoshop techniques. Revlon says its ‘Photoready’ make-up will ‘airbrush’ skin to make it appear flawless, while products such as ‘All in One InstaBlur’ by the Body Shop and Garnier’s ‘5 second Blur Skin smoother’ claim to reduce the appearance of pores using ‘blurring’ or ‘liquifying’ technology.66 The face is treated like a screen, enabling airbrushing and blending to take place on the dermal rather than digital surface. When these products fail to recreate the perfection of the image, cosmetic surgery is the only remaining real-world equivalent of the digital manipulator’s toolbox. For example, Issue 932 of Heat magazine features an interview titled ‘Love Island’s Malin “I had £7K of Surgery to Look Good on Social Media”: She had it all done for Instagram and Snapchat’. Malin Andersson, a British reality TV star, says that self-consciousness about her body led her to have cosmetic surgery. The relation between selfies, visibility and imperfection is clear: If you look at my Instagram, there are no pictures with my boobs out or bikini shots. I absolutely hated them – even selfies in the mirror. I used to wear baggy jumpers, but now I can wear everything tight. I’ll be like, ‘Damn!’ and now I’m taking selfies left, right, and centre.67

Before she undertook cosmetic surgery, Andersson did not share selfies because she viewed her body as imperfect and expected to receive negative comments about it. However, she may be viewed as ‘unfeminine or pathological’ if she did not produce and share selfies, so she felt compelled to alter her body to remove its flaws. An article that immediately follows Andersson’s interview announces that ‘Snapchat Surgery Hits the UK’. A cosmetic surgeon referred to as ‘Dr Miami’ the ‘Snapchat surgeon’ describes how images of perfect faces and bodies achieved using digital filters and disseminated on snapchat, are driving people to surgery. He says ‘since Snapchat took off, my surgery schedule is booked out solid for two years’.68 Dr Miami publishes Snapchat posts of cosmetic surgery operations that are viewed ‘a million and a half ’ times by his 576,000 followers. Selfies create anxiety that causes a desire for surgery, and they appear in social media newsfeeds alongside posts by cosmetic surgeons advertising procedures that claim to erase the imperfections.

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Qingqing Sun examined the correlation between selfie-editing practices and cosmetic surgery among Chinese women, noting that ‘some patients bring their own edited and filtered photos and ask surgeons to turn them into reality’.69 The research shows that women who edit their selfies are more likely to consider undergoing cosmetic surgery, implying that editing practices enable more time and opportunity for self-appraisal and comparison to social ideals, prompting them to choose surgery as ‘the most effective and quickest way to bring their bodies closer to a beauty ideal’.70 Filtered and edited selfies function like the ‘after’ images in before and after photographs used to promote cosmetic surgery procedures, and reinforce the idea that the face and body need to be changed. Further evidence of the pressure to conform to beauty standards can be found in ôljjang, a phenomenon that became popular in South Korea in the early 2000s. Initially ôljjang, meaning ‘best face’, denoted those who had achieved celebrity status on the internet due to their good looks. Later it became synonymous with teenage internet users who digitally manipulated their images to achieve ôljjang. These individuals used photographic editing apps to change their selfies; in the manipulated photographs their faces resemble Western beauty standards exaggerated to their extremes: large eyes, narrow jawlines and flawless white skin.71 Ôljjangs appear to have been frustrated by the limitation of the virtual ‘best face’, because members of the subculture sought cosmetic surgery to permanently transform their faces into ôljjangs. Cosmetic surgery is normalized in South Korea and it has the highest rate of plastic surgery per capita in the world. However, online communities began to deride women and men with these surgical enhancements, calling them sunggui, that combines the terms ‘plastic surgery’ and ‘monster’.72 Sung-gui is ‘a very strong insult’, deriving from an internet comic strip about the women of Gangnam (a wealthy district of Seoul) with the same surgically enhanced faces. It is unclear what constitutes too much surgery, but the derogatory term ‘surgery monster’ suggests there are strict rules surrounding cosmetic surgery.73 While the sung-gui phenomenon may bring to light the artificial nature of beauty ideals by exaggerating them to extremes, the codes are quite conventional. They can be found in the ultra-feminine and -masculine features of cartoon characters in Disney and anime films. Meredith Jones says that cosmetic surgery offers ‘a tangible “solution” to the stress of living in two worlds – one “real” and one made up of images’.74 Cosmetic surgery and social media filters do not join two irreconcilable realities but force the consumer to make their body conform to the world of images. Ôljjangs and sung-gui demonstrate that the unbridgeable gap between an individual and the social ideal is foregrounded in selfie-taking and editing practices and can only be reduced with the aid of a surgical knife. Rather than offering the possibility of multiple forms of expression, social media’s dual imperatives of the panopticon and the spectacle force individuals to change their bodies in order to conform to the ideal image. Despite her positive attitude towards selfies on fashion blogs, Rocamora writes that selfies are another instrument of ‘panoptic control’ that are particularly destructive because they are ‘inscribed in a playful, banalized, and voluntary logic’.75 The selfie is a forceful disciplinary practice because it is deemed to be self-chosen and enjoyable. McRobbie compares social networking sites to the beauty pageants of the 1970s, saying that, online, women ‘are pulled into line as they are brought into the confines of a regime which requests of

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its subjects that they surrender themselves to visibly and thus to modes of public inspection’.76 Social media users must be selfie ready, twenty-four hours a day. Peer relationships have been hystericized by selfie-taking and sharing practices: they are structured by mimetic identification, perfectionism and rivalry. Numeric markers such as the quantity of followers a user has and the number of likes a post receives compel rivalry and one-upmanship.  Selfie-takers fear being usurped by another who is better and better loved. The terror of exposure is intense but they must insistently present the self to gain attention and receive confirmation that they are desirable. They pose the question ‘Do  I  have a perfect, captivating body?’ Peer comparison, self-idealization and insecurity instigate a cycle of perfectionism and spectacular exhibitionism that ensures that selfie-takers internalize the fetishistic gaze and are receptive to the sadistic commands expressed in adverts, including cosmetic surgery adverts on social networking sites. Beauty ideals that are ableist, sizeist, white, middle-class and heteronormative become exaggerated and increasingly difficult to achieve without the consumption of an array of commodities and procedures.

5

The hysteria economy

Social networking sites, structured like a spectacle and panopticon, turn each user into a performer, an overseer and an inmate. It is difficult to resist or reject these forms of discipline because social networking sites are integrated into life in neoliberal societies. Bernard Harcourt writes: ‘it is practically impossible to have a social life, to have friends, to meet up, to go on dates, unless we are negotiating the various forms of social media and mobile technology … It’s not so much a question of choice as a feeling of necessity’.1 The ubiquity of social media is supported by an ideology that positions social networking sites as ‘the golden route to de-alienation’ because they counter social isolation and loneliness.2 However, the notion of de-alienation is paradoxical in relation to social media, because users are shaped into ideal neoliberal subjects by the types of information they are asked to provide on the platforms and the forms of self-reflexivity required to produce it. Users describe themselves using pre-determined criteria, such as place of work, schools attended, film preferences and favourite foods. José van Dijck writes that platforms such as Facebook use the Timeline structure to encourage users to narrativize the self into ‘events’, impelling users to post valuable information about the places they visit, the activities they enjoy, special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries and who participates in these activities with them. van Dijck writes that ‘social media are not neutral stages of selfperformance – they are the very tools for shaping identities’.3 Social networking sites are specialist production lines that produce specialized information: ‘this information does not precede [the platforms], [social networking sites] provide the media ecology and rationale where the production of such information takes place’.4 Marx writes that industrialized factories pre-determine the factory workers’ actions because they are giant automata that comprise ‘a number of mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves can be no more than the conscious limbs of the automaton’.5 Like the limb of the machine, the actions of social networking site users are predetermined, limiting the range and number of permissible modes of self-expression. They are data factory workers. Social networking site users are commodified in this process: the information generated with each interaction, such as liking a particular celebrity or product, produces data commodities that are sold to data brokers. The data also places the user in a specific marketing demographic based on what they like and whom they

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are connected to. It reveals the likelihood that the user will pay attention to an advert, turning them into attention commodities that can also be sold to companies and advertisers. For example, an advertiser will pay the social networking site to identify users who like a brand of clothing and a football team because they are likely to pay attention to and respond favourably to an advert that features a footballer player from their team wearing the brand. Advertisers buy data about individuals who are in the product’s desired market demographic (data commodities), and purchase advertising space on those users’ newsfeeds (attention commodities). In essence, in producing data, users self-select the types of adverts that will be posted on their newsfeed.6 Data collection is not restricted to information that is given voluntarily; most of the user’s clicks and comments provide information that is packaged and sold to advertising companies. According to Marx, commodity fetishism is the concealment of the social aspect of the commodity; the worker’s labour is hidden from the consumer and it appears that commodities magically appear in the marketplace without human effort.7 On social networking sites, the social nature of the sites conceals the commoditization of the consumer.8 Users are encouraged to communicate with their friends on the sites because their interactions produce data. In online social interactions, the fetishism of commodities is fully articulated; what appear to be interactions between people are actually interactions between commodities. Christian Fuchs writes that social networking sites reproduce the ‘imperialistic tendency of capitalism’ that tries to convert all time, including leisure time, into surplus-labour.9 Surplus-labour is produced when a capitalist pays the worker less than the monetary value of the goods or services they produce, creating surplus-value: profit.10 Social networking site users are not paid for the time they spend online or for the content they produce, and so all the value that is generated by their data derives from surplus-labour. Fuchs notes that the ‘rate of exploitation converges toward infinity if workers are unpaid. They are infinitely exploited’.11 However, surplus-value diminishes over time because competition for resources and expertise increase and new innovations are copied by rival companies.12 In 2016 Facebook and Instagram introduced the ‘Stories’ function, followed later in the year by the ‘Instagram Live’ video function. In 2020 Twitter introduced ‘fleets’, a version of Stories. These ephemeral posts were introduced to rival the popular platform Snapchat, unique among social media because the user’s posts disappear once their intended recipient has viewed them. As social networking sites proliferate in number, the amount of time each user spends on each platform tends to decrease and the surplus-value they produce for each platform also decreases. In order to hold or increase market share, social networking sites copy their rival’s innovations or unique characteristics, which drives the need for innovation because the platforms become increasingly similar. Capitalists also increase surplus-value using two forms of exploitation: extensive exploitation, in which more of the worker’s time is dedicated to work, for example, by reducing the time spent taking breaks or by extending working hours; and intensive exploitation, in which more commodities are produced in the same amount of time, by increasing the speed of production processes and reducing the quality of the commodity.13 On social networking sites extensive exploitation is produced when

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users spend more time on the sites, connect to more people and post more content. Positivity is extensive because ‘people’s emotions are contagious’.14 Facebook tested the impact of exposure to positive and negative emotions in 2012; they manipulated the newsfeeds of 689,003 users to increase or decrease the quantity of positive and negative content they were exposed to. The researchers found that ‘emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’.15 Because negative emotion may lead users to switch off, social networking sites are structured by positive actions, likes, follows and friending, which cause users to spend more time on the sites and interact more, producing both extensive and intensive exploitation. However, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, found that ‘toxic and divisive content is prevalent in posts boosted by Facebook and shared widely by users’.16 She set up fake Facebook accounts for Carol, a conservative, and Karen, a liberal, both forty-one and residing in North Carolina. Subjected to Facebook’s algorithm, within five days of the accounts being set up Carol’s newsfeed contained ‘extreme, conspiratorial and graphic content’, and Karen received recommendations that all contained anti-Trump sentiments and some promoted ‘illegal activity’.17 Jessica Gunn and Kevin McCoy note that ‘the focus on posts with high numbers of comments and likes rewarded outrage and resulted in the spread of more misinformation and divisive content … The more negative or incendiary the post, the further and faster it spread’.18 Along with positivity, outrage and extremism are also extensive and intensive. In addition, mechanisms designed to increase communication on social networking sites extend and intensify the value of each click and interaction. Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond write that Facebook’s like button has produced a ‘Like economy’.19 When users click on like buttons on Facebook or external websites, their positive responses are intensified because they lead to a chain of interactions which increase the number of views the post receives. On Facebook the cost of an advert is determined by the number of users it reaches and interactions it receives, so a chain of interactions increases advertising revenue for Facebook. When a user clicks on a like button, a post is placed in their Timeline that also appears in their friend’s newsfeeds. If friends also like the post, it is placed on their Timelines and appears in more newsfeeds and so on. Each interaction is intensified and increases surplus-value for the company. Users are extensively and intensively exploited to produce surplus-labour as data commodities and attention commodities. Gerlitz and Helmond conclude: social interaction is instantly metrified and multiplied …. It enables only particular forms of social engagement and creates specific relations between the social, the traceable and the marketable, filtering them for positive and scalable affects.20

The scalable effect of likes is also intensified by the value placed on them by users. As discussed in the previous chapter, users equate quantities of likes with social acceptance and popularity. Likes impact on the user’s self-esteem, causing them to try to increase the number of likes they receive. By producing content in order to generate multiple likes, users further intensify their interactions online.

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Authenticity, celebrity sign-value and the attention economy In 2007 James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II published Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, in which they argue that consumers prioritize perceived authenticity over price when choosing a brand. Postmodernist ideas render all experiences constructed and inauthentic, and consumers have become cynical towards marketing rhetoric. They crave authentic experiences that differ from the celebrity obsessed artificiality of contemporary consumer culture.21 Like the self-branded user on social networking sites (Chapter 1), the expectation that businesses act in an authentic way is paradoxical. Quoting Robert Doniger in Michael Crichton’s Timeline, Gilmore and Pine define authenticity as everything that is not ‘devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations’.22 In contrast to individuals who develop selfbrands in order to appear more business-like, corporations must act more like a person, because the brand is perceived to be authentic if it corresponds to the consumer’s actual or aspirational self-image. Gilmore and Pine advise businesses to ‘Let customers provide input to a collective process not only for their own pleasure but for the enjoyments of others. Not just any others, moreover, but specifically those others who have similar selfimages’.23 Social networking sites are popular with brand managers because they enable users to co-create content and create a community of consumers for the brand. Celebrities also have to work to appear authentic. They post seemingly candid photos and comments online that conceal their profit motive, appearing to show ‘themselves living as “themselves” with brands in order to promote them’.24 According to Juliet Flower MacCannell, contemporary celebrity culture is characterized by a denial of difference, an insistence that each individual is equal regardless of wealth, talent or vast differences in numbers of followers on social networking sites.25 Celebrities are no longer unreachable and godlike because fans are able to access intimate details of their lives online. This exposure produces a feeling of sameness because the activities and environments captured in the celebrity’s selfies share some similarities with the daily activities and domestic environments of their fans. By levelling social differences into a single group of ‘selfie-producers’, celebrity selfies encourage fans to identify with the celebrities in a manner that resembles Freud’s description of the formation of artificial groups. He says the groups are ‘created solely by mirroring a singular ego as a multiple: a community of like egos, modelled on a single image, projected by a leader who in turn reflects them’.26 Members of the group feel that they already resemble the ego ideal – the leader of the group that they aspire towards and model themselves on. Usually, the ego ideal is aspirational and ‘ideal’ because it prohibits the ego’s more selfish wishes. It resembles a conscience that enables the individual to think critically about what they want and it helps them to make decisions. If the ego is already similar to the ego ideal, as in the group formation described by Freud, the individual feels powerful and unrestrained, and experiences a ‘mood of triumph and self-satisfaction, disturbed by no self-criticism’, that causes them to lose their empathy towards others.27 When a group is formed from individuals who are unrestrained by their ego ideals, the group thinks in images, which call one another up by association… and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable agency. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated.28

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The group is ‘impulsive’, ‘extraordinarily credulous and open to influence’ and ‘cannot tolerate any delay between its desire and the fulfilment of what it desires’.29 Furthermore, when the group leader takes the place of the ego ideal, they also take over the role of criticism and truth-checking, and are themselves beyond criticism. Examples of this group mentality can be found in the cult-like following of politicians, such as the Trump supporters who invaded Congress in January 2021. Freud’s description of the formation of a group is strikingly similar to Gilmour and Pine’s suggestion that companies should build a community of consumers with similar self-images who feel that the brand also reflects that image. The similarity between consumers, celebrities and brands produces a potent form of identification that makes consumers ‘credulous’, ‘impulsive’ and unable to tolerate delays in satisfaction. On social networking sites, a celebrity in a selfie is presented as the ‘same’, someone who the individual aspires to be like and who they feel that they already partially resemble, making the aim for further resemblance seem attainable. This closes the gap between the consumer’s ego and their ego ideal, and they become uninhibited, willing and compliant. The commercial power of this form of identification is implied when media outlets such as the Mail Online feature celebrity selfies alongside a ‘fashion finder’ section that directs viewers to online shops where they can purchase the outfits worn by celebrities.30 The message is clear: through commodification you can turn yourself into the ideal. The use of celebrity selfies to promote products also contributes to the production of attention commodities on social networking sites. Davenport and Beck foresaw the economic value of attention in The Attention Economy, published in 2001. They write that scientific and social advancements produce increasing amounts of knowledge, and new technology disseminates a vast amount of information quickly and widely, so we become increasingly overloaded with information. They cite the economist Herbert Simon, who said that ‘what information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’.31 Davenport and Beck write that our attention choices are still fundamentally controlled by innate needs relating to self-preservation, reproduction and the need for social interaction. Because our environments contain a vast quantity of information, we instinctively prioritize information in relation to a hierarchy of needs, responding first to signals of danger, then information relating to the perpetuation of the species and social needs. This is why adverts frequently include aversive-attention signals relating to danger, illness or ostracism, and attractive-attention signals about sex, popularity and intimacy. Davenport and Beck draw on research suggesting that people are particularly proficient at averting their eyes from adverts because of a ‘built-in attention-protecting feature’ that preserves attention for more important or interesting things.32 The authors identify a number of techniques that advertisers can use to circumvent this mechanism. The content should be expressed as a lifelike, realistic story that the consumer can identify with. The method of delivery should be interactive rather than passive because consumers invest more attention if they contribute to or co-create the content in some way. Advertisers should also use cross promotion, promoting commodities using things or people that already get a lot of attention because, once held, consumer attention can easily be carried from one product to another.

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Social networking sites are prime sites for attention economy advertising. They foreground user popularity through the prominent display of numbers of followers and interactions, making it clear which users are ‘attention-rich’ and would make effective cross-promoters. The sites also capitalize on the need for inclusion and desire for prestige that can be gained from association with prominent social members such as celebrities. Product-endorsing celebrity selfies narrate the personal life of the celebrity in a way that is realistic and can be identified with because the activities depicted are familiar. Because followers can like, share and comment on the selfies, they might feel they are co-creating content and invest their attention to a greater degree. The more that adverts resemble selfies, the more authentic they appear and the greater their currency is. In ‘Friend-zone with Benefits: The Parasocial Advertising of Kim Kardashian’, Jennifer Anette Lueck writes that ‘endorsed messages on Facebook and Twitter are 50 per cent more effective in cost-per-action than Facebook and Twitter ads that did not feature celebrities’, and Facebook posts that are endorsed receive twenty-one times more ‘click-throughs’ than posts without celebrity endorsements.33 A community of loyal fans is transformed into a community of potential consumers when a celebrity speaks positively about a product. The social becomes commercial. Lueck analysed the content of Kardashian’s Facebook posts in April and May 2011 to determine if interactions, such as comments, shares and likes, make Kardashian’s product endorsements more effective. Lueck found that Kardashian frequently embedded product endorsements into personal stories and gained the most audience responses when her posts were posed as questions directed towards the audience. Both of these strategies heighten the illusion of intimacy because the celebrity appears to be sharing personal information directly with their followers and asking them to respond.34 When the posts resemble spontaneous glimpses of the celebrity’s private life, the audience believe the interactions are social and personal rather than commercial. By responding to Kardashian’s questions, the fans feel that they are participating in a reciprocal conversation, even though Kardashian does not respond to the comments made by fans. In posts that endorse a specific commodity, audiences share positive experiences of the product and make suggestions for improvements: the illusion of intimacy … motivates the consumer to share information about the use of a product, which can be highly valuable for the marketing of a product. Additionally, the sharing of positive product experiences on the Facebook wall creates not only a focus group, but also a product community that will motivate other consumers to purchase the product.35

These promotional posts correspond to the methods for increasing the perceived authenticity of the brand, and effective attention economy advertising. The posts are life-like and relatable and they allow interaction, enabling the fans to feel that they are co-creating content. They also extract surplus-value from the free labour that users supply when they make suggestions about product improvements (focus groups) and share their positive experiences of the products (product endorsers). Furthermore,

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fans willingly give their attention to product endorsements, enabling advertisers to overcome their ‘attention-protecting feature’: The celebrity becomes an imaginary friend, who doesn’t talk about brands to conduct advertising, but to comment on a luxurious lifestyle and to give advice on how to create this lifestyle with the use of brands …. The brands are a gateway to the celebrity lifestyle and are therefore not perceived as nuisance, but instead, as welcomed tools provided by a trusted source.36

Interactions with celebrities online present the celebrity lifestyle as potentially attainable, and in copying the lifestyle through the consumption of commodities, fans assimilate to the image of celebrity. As a sign of high status and success, this form of consumption becomes a dominant sign-value on social networking sites (see Semiotic privilege). Furthermore, users perform ‘microcelebrity’ when they attempt to cultivate an image that imitates the marketizable, branded identities of celebrity.37 Rather than denoting a person, microcelebrity is a set of practices that can be performed by anyone on social networking sites. Like celebrities, microcelebrities carefully craft a self-brand and view their followers as fans. Some users perform microcelebrity with the aim of achieving ‘Instafame’ and becoming a social media influencer. Social networking sites are free to use, so they appear to be democratic platforms for communication offering a celebrity lifestyle to all users. However, as Alice Marwick writes, ‘while microcelebrity is widely practiced, those successful at gaining attention often reproduce conventional status hierarchies of luxury, celebrity, and popularity that depend on the ability to emulate the visual iconography of mainstream celebrity culture’.38 Successful microcelebrities are able to construct their online identities through the consumption of luxury goods and holidays, reinforcing ‘an existing hierarchy of fame, in which the iconography of glamour, luxury, wealth, good looks, and connections is reinscribed in a visual digital medium’.39 To become an influencer, users cultivate large audiences and craft an ‘authentic “personal brand” … which can subsequently be used by companies and advertisers for consumer outreach’.40 The value and level of influence are determined by social scoring companies that gather data from a number of social media platforms to produce an ‘influence’ score based on how many followers a user has and the number of interactions their posts receive. Marketers look for individuals with high social scores whose image or self-brand resonates with the products they are promoting. The use of metrics to determine social value creates a social networking site class system based on a version of success that is constructed and validated by the algorithms of the social scoring companies and social networking site infrastructures. The influence score is unregulated and the algorithms used to generate the score are secret, so protected identity characteristics, such as race, gender, age and sexuality, may be used in a discriminatory way. Marketable individuals with high influence scores are deemed to be more valuable than other users, reinforcing the dominant values of consumer culture that also reproduce and intensify the social privilege already enjoyed by people who are white, wealthy and attractive.

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Hearn and Schoenhoff say that companies increasingly rely on influencers to promote brands because ‘consumers are more likely to believe in the authenticity of a claim made by a personal acquaintance than one made by a rich celebrity’.41 Influencers are deemed to be more authentic than celebrities because it is assumed that they do not have teams of publicists, stylists and agents working for them. This makes posts by influencers more lucrative for advertisers but also has a greater impact on other users. As discussed in Chapter 4, upward comparison with other users causes low selfesteem and body satisfaction. The perceived authenticity of the influencer’s polished and controlled self-brand image, despite the likelihood of input from stylists and other media professionals, further exacerbate the low self-esteem and negative body image experienced by other users. The perceived authenticity of influencers is also reinforced because they are rarely paid money and are instead given free goods and access to ‘celebrity’ events in exchange for positive product endorsements. Presumably, this is also why marketers are keen to engage influencers to perform ‘consumer outreach’: zero payment produces maximum profit and infinite exploitation.42

Selfies and the spectacle Social networking site users are willing to provide product development and promotional work without pay, and ‘voluntarily give over their information or “like” a brand on Facebook, because they feel it expresses who they are’.43 When users like and buy products advertised on social networking sites, they incorporate the commodity’s values into their online and real world identities. They become part of a community of users with the same self-image, who also reflect and reproduce the brand image. Ideas of authenticity aid this process because they are used by corporations to conceal their profit motives and impel consumers to perform free labour in the form of product endorsements. Celebrities take and share ‘authentic’ selfies to increase engagement with their fan-base and promote their products, and microcelebrities develop an authentic marketable identity-brand in the hope of gaining access to luxury products and events. Users, brands and celebrities become a self-mirroring group of ego ideals, sharing an identity that is expressed through the consumption of luxury goods. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord describes a similar mechanism of incorporation and construction: the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this – that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien.44

The real world and the spectacle are the same thing; the spectacle produces reality as it represents it on social media and in popular culture. It dictates how we should behave and look by presenting idealized images, such as selfies, that supposedly show us how we already look and behave. For example, suggestion and recommendation mechanisms built into social networking sites produce dominant ideals by implying

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that some images are already dominant while suppressing the reach of others. Stefanie Duguay writes that users are guided to ‘create selfies congruent with the dominant discourses employed by Instagram’s model users (celebrity glorification, consumerism, normative beauty) since they see this content the most’.45 She notes that selfies that express counter-discourses, such as trans, non-binary and fat acceptance selfies, are unlikely to be selected by the app’s recommendation algorithm and so their potential audience reach is reduced. In addition, Facebook’s Edgerank and Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithms elevate particular topics and individuals while devaluing and suppressing others, measuring popularity ‘at the same time and by the same means as it tries to influence or manipulate these rankings’.46 The platforms dictate what is popular (and therefore important) when they claim to show what is popular. The integrated spectacle is both a creation and a reconstruction, therefore it is familiar; a reflection of the consumer and the originator of the image which the consumer identifies with and models their self on. In the selfie, the consumer’s body is integrated into the spectacle. Dolce and Gabbana adverts featuring models taking selfies seem to demonstrate the consumer identities produced by the integrated spectacle. In the Spring/Summer (2016) collection advertising campaign the models are engaged in an exaggerated, comical form of selfie-taking.47 They are not posing for the photographer who has been commissioned to produce the campaign; instead, they are absorbed in their interactions as groups of friends taking selfies, or locked in the selfregarding gaze of the lone selfie-taker. The photographs imply that the commodities advertise themselves when people take selfies while wearing fashion brands. In each advert in the Autumn/Winter 2015 collection the unsmiling model is posing for a selfie, transfixed by her image.48 She appears to be captivated by the spectacle of her own beauty as it is enhanced by dazzling Dolce and Gabbana accessories. She stands with a handbag held close to her face; they are objects of equal value and appeal. The viewer cannot see the selfie that the model sees. This arouses a desire to view the model and her commodities from the position of the mobile phone screen. Identification with the model is increased by this imagined position and produces a fantasy of possession: of the dress, the handbag, the body, the face. The adverts flatten social differences to a single group of ‘selfie-producer’, further increasing identification with the model. Agnès Rocamora describes the dual viewing position produced when looking at selfies on fashion blogs as the viewer is simultaneously placed in the position of the one doing the looking, and, through identification, the one being looked at …. The screen/mirror shows an idealized self the viewer can identify with and therefore appropriate to work on her own identity construction, whilst also indulging in the pleasure of voyeurism her status as a spectator grants her.49

If the consumer wears the dress and owns the handbag, they will be the image the model views in the mobile phone. When they project their own image into the unseen screens of the mobile phones, complete with Dolce and Gabbana accessories, the difference between the consumer’s ego and ego ideal is eradicated. The consumer identifies with the models in the adverts and sees them as a reflection of their self-image.

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The Dolce and Gabbana adverts seem to allude to the paradoxical nature of the authentic selfie. Selfies exist in the blurred boundary between self-expression and marketing because selfie-takers borrow from visual language of adverts to create a marketizable self-brand, and selfies feature in adverts to make the commodity brand seem more authentic. Selfies facilitate the commoditization of humans and the humanization of commodities. Iqani and Schroeder write that through selfies, selfrepresentation and self-expression are colonized by capitalism: Instead of genuine self-expression, of ideas, debates, arguments (presented in visual form), selfies arguably show how individual agency has been shaped by the power of consumerist mediation …. From this perspective, selfies serve as evidence of a willing buy-in, indeed celebration of, consumer culture and consumption.50

However, as the previous chapters have shown, individuals may not be all that willing. As discussed in Chapter 4, portraying the self as a desirable brand in selfies is presented as empowering and a sign of professionalism, and individuals may be deemed to be abnormal, deceitful and unattractive if they do not post selfies. The imperative to gain attention through self-branding reinforces the hystericized mode of communication produced by social networking sites: users are compelled to present the self (insistent presence), and mimetic identification between consumers, influencers, celebrities and brands heightens peer rivalry. We all reflect each other. This exacerbates the feeling of a loss of uniqueness and further hystericizes our interactions online.

6

The clinical fetishistic gaze

Previous chapters have examined ways in which the body has become an object of prestige that displays sign-values of success, desirability and self-control. The remaining chapters examine sign-values of health. Robert Crawford argues that the ideology of health, or ‘healthism’, supports a neoliberal agenda by treating health as a personal issue.1 In the 1970s healthism developed out of a new health consciousness produced by environmental groups that campaigned to raise awareness about toxins in the environment, and the women’s health movement that sought greater autonomy for female patients in a healthcare system largely dominated by male doctors and consultants. However, demands for greater agency for patients and scepticism towards government control of health care were also taken up by those on the political right, who advocated neoliberal policies that require individuals to take personal responsibility for their health so that state funding could be reduced.2 Concurrently, illness and the need for state healthcare support came to be viewed as a failure of ‘self-care’ and a sign of poor citizenship. The association of good health with good citizenship conceals the social inequalities relating to gender, class, disability, sexuality and race that contribute to health inequalities. In an examination of the relationship between health, weight and class, Paul Ernsberger writes that the connection between low socioeconomic status and illness is well documented. Multiple factors produced by social inequality contribute to health inequality, including: lack of access to quality health care, lack of continuity of care, greater exposure to pollution and toxins in the home and workplace, sedentary work, lack of access to exercise facilities, the low nutritional value of low-cost food, and high levels of stress and low self-esteem caused by internalized discrimination.3 Like structural inequality, health inequality is intersectional and cumulative. For example, Bianca D. M. Wilson found that ‘major systemic factors experienced by many Black lesbians and bisexual women, such as racism, anti-fat discrimination, sexism, poverty, violence, and heterosexism, are powerful detractors from health (physical, emotional, and mental) and should be considered in a meaningful way as targets for public health intervention’.4 Stress caused by poverty, discrimination and oppression can lead to anxiety, depression, insecurity and low self-esteem, which can lead to chronic health conditions.5 Emma Rich, Lee F. Monaghan and Lucy Aphramor write: ‘the surest way to promote healthier societies is to reduce income inequality’, but neoliberal societies continue to position ‘the individual as an isolated physical unit making rational choices in a good-enough environment’.6 Individuals who experience the health-diminishing

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effects of poverty, discrimination and oppression do not live in a good-enough environment. By viewing people with health issues as irresponsible citizens who do not deserve state support, this process is accelerated and intensified. In neoliberal societies health is viewed as a moral choice and the ‘healthy body’ acts as a sign-value for success, a strong work ethic and self-control; it is viewed as a productive resource and medium for creating ‘bodily capital’.7 In contrast to this, the unhealthy body, traditionally female, working class, poor, from ethnic minorities, and chronically ill, is a signifier for a lack of self-control and is deemed to be an obstacle to productive labour. Marginalized people ‘are subjected to the “bio-power” of experts who impose upon these bodies judgments that explain their pathologies and failures’.8 Unhealthy bodies are viewed and manipulated by others, while people with healthy bodies are self-regarding and able to take care of themselves.

The clinical gaze Michel Foucault examined the development of clinical medicine from ‘a body of techniques for curing ills’ to a ‘study of non-sick man and a definition of the model man’.9 Shifting from focusing on illness to focusing on health, medicine assumed a ‘normative posture’ that authorized practitioners to ‘dictate the standards for physical and moral relations of the individual and of the society in which he lives’.10 By the nineteenth century ‘health’ became a form of bio-power: a way to discipline and regulate the population. In order to differentiate ‘pathological’ bodies from ‘normal’ bodies, medical experts use a ‘clinical gaze’ that recognizes deviations and anomalies, and is able to calculate risks. The clinical gaze scans the whole body and also employs a glance, a decisive look that focuses on the area of concern, ‘silent, like a finger pointing, denouncing …. The glance is of the non-verbal order of contact’.11 Kirsten Ostherr writes that ‘we know we have become a patient when we are subjected to a doctor’s clinical gaze’, a gaze that is unique because it is authorized to ‘look at our private, hidden parts, to examine our vulnerable qualities and quantities, and declare them “normal” or “pathological.” The look of the doctor at the patient carries enormous power’.12 The patient is exposed to the clinical gaze. It is a mode of looking that is assumed to be detached, objective and unprejudiced. However, the healthy norm is a white, wealthy model man. Mebbie Bell writes that ‘medical discourse implicitly positions “woman” as the unhealthy, abject foil to its model man’, and because female body differs from the male body it is treated as irrational, unruly and in need of medical intervention.13 Foucault notes that class inequality underpins the imbalance of power between doctor and patient. Clinics were usually built and maintained with money provided by wealthy members of society. The poor contributed to the advancement of medicine with their bodies and their suffering. They presented their illness so that medical experts could examine them and devise cures also beneficial to upper-class members of society. Foucault asks, ‘to look in order to know, to show in order to teach, is not this a tacit form of violence, all the more abusive for its silence, upon a sick body that demands to be comforted, not

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displayed? Can pain be a spectacle?’14 He concludes that it is and must be a spectacle because medical care is a transaction: the cure is given in return for either money or the spectacle of suffering that allows medical knowledge to be advanced. The treatment of the hysterics in the Salpêtrière hospital is an example of this. Wealthy and powerful society members attended the lectures for entertainment as well as education. In contemporary neoliberal societies, this transaction still takes place. However, the  class structure of the transaction is less obvious because illness is viewed as a sign of poor consumer choices and failed citizenship rather than an outcome of social inequality. Disadvantaged and marginalized individuals continue to present their suffering to the clinical gaze in return for a cure. For example, populations in developing countries continue to be used as test subjects for clinical trials. Most recently, two French doctors were criticized when they suggested that a vaccine for Covid-19, a highly contagious virus that caused a global pandemic in 2020, should be tested in African countries. Less access to health care and protective equipment would enable Covid-19 to spread quickly through the population and so the efficacy of the vaccine would be more easily tested. In neoliberal societies, poor and marginalized individuals continue to present a spectacle of their suffering. In newspapers, magazine articles and television programmes, people share their ill health, exposing themselves to the clinical gaze of experts and the viewing public in exchange for a cure. Health makeover programmes are educational because they share information on the prevention of illness, such as exercising, healthy eating and giving up smoking. Makeover programmes also reinforce neoliberal values of personal responsibility because they present ‘the makeover (rather than state assistance) as the key to social mobility, stability, and civic empowerment’.15 Anna McCarthy says that American programmes such as Random 1 demonstrate ‘forms of individual self-management by putting the behaviors and life histories of others on display for our horrified pleasure, and then showing them corrected by the expertise of a variety of nonstate disciplinary figures’.16 Makeover programmes demonstrate that an individual’s choices, such as choosing to smoke or eat unhealthy food, result in particular health problems that can (and should) be corrected by the individual. McCarthy notes that makeover programmes are also ‘a neoliberal theater of suffering’ because the pain they depict is often excessive.17 The programmes are a form of entertainment that allow healthy viewers to enjoy the spectacle of ill health. They are also disciplinary because they present the spectre of potential illness: the consequences of unhealthy activities. In the UK television programme Supersize vs Superskinny, Dr Christian Jessen examines and attempts to correct the unhealthy diets of the participants ‘making over’ their relationship to food during the course of the programme. The audience is present during one-to-one consultations between the doctor and participant, giving the programme a fly-on-the-wall documentary feel. When the doctor speaks directly to the camera, the viewer colludes in the diagnosis and identifies with the doctor as someone who knows how to maintain a healthy body weight. Supersize vs Superskinny instructs audiences to view the body using a clinical gaze that scans the whole body and employs a glance that pinpoints pathological or unhealthy aspects. This way of looking dissects the body and magnifies areas that are ‘abnormal’. It is reinforced in cutaway

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Figure 7  ‘Laura and Jake’, dir. unknown, Supersize vs Superskinny, Season 7, Episode 6, 13 February 2014. London, 2012 [television broadcast]. Credit: Channel 4 Production.

Figure 8  ‘Laura and Jake’, dir. unknown, Supersize vs Superskinny, Season 7, Episode 6, 13 February 2014. London, 2012 [television broadcast]. Credit: Channel 4 Production.

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Figure 9  ‘Rob and Hayley’, dir. unknown, Supersize vs Superskinny, Season 5, Episode 2, 6 March 2012. London, 2012 [television broadcast]. Credit: Channel 4 Production.

clips that show the participants’ bodies as fragments of stomachs, buttocks, arms and legs, overlaid by statistical information such as circumference measurements, weight, height, calorie intake and BMI. The dissected body parts look like scientific specimens because the fat and thin bodies are placed side by side to enable comparison and they are filmed against a clinical white background. Sometimes the bodies appear to be rotating as if on a pedestal, allowing the camera to show them from different angles. At the beginning of each episode of Supersize vs Superskinny, the participants in the series line up in their underwear  –  the supersized on the one side and the superskinny on the other. Dr Jessen stands between the two groups of people with an old-fashioned set of weighing scales. Viewers are encouraged to identify with the doctor and the weighing scale, putting themselves in the privileged position of the one whose body is a socially acceptable size. The excesses of overindulgence and self-denial fan out to either side, clearly presenting the parameters of the acceptable body. In each episode a fat participant is paired with a thin participant and they swap diets. The pairing of a tiny body with a cornucopia of food and a large body with a meagre portion creates a hyperbolic scene. Indeed, the explanatory voice-over in the first episode of series one informs the viewer that ‘Dr Christian Jessen will be stuffing the superskinny … and starving the supersized’.18 The voice-over uses alliteration and hyperbole to draw attention to the disparity between body size and meal size.

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Neither participant adheres to a socially acceptable manner of eating, so Dr Jessen employs medically dubious methods to turn their ‘starving’ or ‘stuffed’ flesh into appropriately consuming bodies. The disjuncture between civilized and uncivilized eating is signified by the choice of the term ‘feeding clinic’ for the setting of Supersize vs Superskinny. In episode 11 of season 5, the voice-over announces that ‘it’s dinner time in the feeding clinic’, which immediately brings to mind the image of throwing food to animals on a farm or in a zoo.19 To use the word ‘feeding’ rather than ‘eating’ or ‘dining’ is incredibly dehumanizing. Niall Richardson writes that food is culturally determined: ‘Like all mammals, humans need to eat …. However, it is the way we have disciplined or regimented these activities which distinguishes us from our household pets.’20 The way we eat is not simply fulfilling a basic need; it is shaped by cultural rules and regulations. Richardson says a person eating excessively, at the wrong time or in an improper manner, appears to have ‘ignored the dictates of culture and has yielded to base, animal urges’.21 Although the ‘feeding clinic’ becomes the temporary home for both participants, the name dehumanizes the supersize individual to a greater extent because they are the one that ‘feeds’. The thin body consumes reluctantly, nibbling rather than gorging. They ‘dine’, eating at the correct times, without indication of voracious appetite and animalistic urges. Dr Jessen visually demonstrates the differences in supersize and superskinny diets by placing each participant’s typical weekly food intake into a transparent tube. When mixed together and viewed in this unusual way, the contents become unrecognizable as food. Suggesting both scientific experiment and bodily process, it looks like vomit or faeces. A large collection of takeaways and fizzy drinks neatly arranged on

Figure 10  ‘Louise and Josh’, dir. unknown, Supersize vs Superskinny, Season 4, Episode 1, 29 March 2011. London, 2012 [television broadcast]. Credit: Channel 4 Production.

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a table might signify a banquet, invoking pleasure. However, as the intention of the television programme is to vilify rather than celebrate overeating, the food must be transformed from desirable to abject matter. Both sets of participants are encouraged to treat the content of the tubes with disgust. For the superskinny person who already demonstrates an aversion to food, this does not come as much of a shock, although it is unlikely that viewing food in this manner would convince the participant to eat more. For the supersized participant who takes pleasure in eating, this is an uncomfortable experience of aversion therapy. This individual is being trained to treat a source of pleasure with disgust. The tubes symbolize a transparent body and the beginning of a process of cultural recoding of eating; the participant must eat with scientific precision, weighing ingredients and balancing calorie intake with energy expenditure. In each episode Dr Jessen and the supersize participant travel to America to visit a very fat individual, or they watch a ‘Postcard from America’ video message. The American, who is usually bed-bound in hospital or at home, describes their situation. The narrative centres on the consequences of the individual’s weight: lack of autonomy, immobility and dependence on family members and state assistance for everyday activities. Because health care in America is predominantly privatized, the patients also speak of the heavy financial cost of their illness. The superskinny participants do not receive comparable advice from very thin individuals, despite the serious health implications for those with very low body weight. Anorexia has a mortality rate of approximately 10 per cent, the highest of any psychiatric illness, and because it is very difficult to treat few patients fully recover.22 Strikingly, a study that reviewed research examining mortality rates in relation to body mass index found that mortality rates for moderately underweight women and men were equal to those who were severely overweight, leading Glenn Gaesser to recommend that ‘attention to the health risks of underweight is needed, and body weight recommendations for optimum longevity need to be considered in light of these risks’.23 Furthermore, in America eating disorder treatments are not covered by basic health insurance packages and they are not always covered by comprehensive health insurance, and the cost of treatment is beyond the means of many families.24 Extreme thinness and fatness can cause financial hardship for individuals and their families. However, their difference in treatment, on Supersize vs Superskinny and in society more widely, may be attributable to the sign-values that fat and thin bodies express in relation to neoliberal values of productivity and work ethic. The very fat Americans on Supersize vs Superskinny are often bedridden and usually receive disability benefits because they are unable to work, whereas anorexic patients tend to display a strong work ethic (see Chapter 7). In America employers frequently provide health insurance for workers, which suggests that health is not just a general and desirable condition of the body and mind but relates specifically to work. Lack of health leads eventually to lack of productivity and health care is provided to enable the individual to return to work. Society assumes that a fat individual chooses lack of health and refuses to undertake medical treatment or lifestyle changes that would help them return to work. Very fat bodies combine characteristics of the lazy person and the dying person, described by Michel de Certeau as ‘intolerable to society’ because the lazy person chooses not to work and the dying body ‘no longer even makes itself

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available to be worked on by others’.25 These forms of inaction are unbearable because they signify a body that can no longer be disciplined by social regulation, representing instead a lapse in cultural control. In order to attempt to recoup these disruptive bodies, fat is positioned as a sign of disempowerment and a failure of self-care. The ‘Postcard from America’ section of Supersize vs Superskinny foregrounds these neoliberal ideals of personal responsibility and self-control in a spectacle of suffering. The relationship between health and productivity is reinforced on Supersize vs Superskinny when increased activity is used as a measure of the participant’s weight-loss success. Jayne Raisborough writes that audiences are encouraged to compare ‘an inactive “before” “zombie” body, with the delighted grins and the joyful empowerment that comes from successful rehabilitation to an active life’.26 The participant escapes their immobilizing fat and emerges, energized, with a new lust for life. Weight-related make-over programmes also train fat consumers to undertake acceptable forms of consumption, for clothes and lifestyle goods as well as food. Rainsborough notes: ‘the new body needs a new wardrobe and it requires, and deserves consumer treats as rewards for all the hard work to date. We have shifted from a body that overconsumes, to the person who deserves to consume’.27 The fat individual is rewarded with consumption; they become productive consumers because they eat what the body requires for labour and buy commodities that increase the social value of the body In Supersize vs Superskinny, very fat Americans are presented to the supersize participants as bodies that are beyond repair in order to shock the participants (and the audience) into adopting a healthier lifestyle. In this instance, the very fat body signifies a potential future body in a manner that reverses the before and after view of the body in consumer culture. When watching the programme, the audience are taught to internalize the clinical gaze in order to ensure their own body conforms to the model of healthy, desirable body. The internalized gaze is a fetishistic gaze that reproduces the dominant way of viewing bodies in consumer culture. However, it has been legitimized as a clinical mode of looking. It is a powerful disciplinary gaze because it appears to be a neutral judgement about health.

Health and empowerment In advertising the term ‘healthy’ is often used in place of ‘desirable’ so that products associated with body improvement can be promoted in a manner that foregrounds the appearance of the body without being overtly objectifying. Rosalind Gill describes this trend, referring to Nike’s ‘just do it’ campaigns: The fetishization of fitness is arguably more pernicious than that of appearance because we are interpellated as morally responsible for how well we do. If we don’t have the looks of a fashion model we may be less socially valued but it is not entirely our fault. But if we don’t ‘keep in shape’ we are culpable: we let ourselves go – the most dreaded sin of contemporary affluent societies. The advert urges us to reject external templates of beauty, whilst simultaneously enrolling women

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in a regime of disciplinary power in which they become morally responsible for disciplining their own bodies, and where beauty work is redefined in terms of health and pleasure.28

By camouflaging beauty standards as health standards, adverts can promote beauty as a desirable attribute that can be achieved by consuming commodities, and preemptively counter complaints about sexism and objectification. ‘Health’ disguises comments that may otherwise be perceived to be discriminatory or narcissistic: wanting to achieve a desirable body becomes a quest for health, and fat bodies are criticized for being unhealthy rather than unattractive. Jonathan M. Metzl says that this enables magazine editors to ‘seamlessly construct certain bodies as desirable while relegating others as obscene …. The fat, the flaccid, and the forlorn are unhealthy, the logic goes, not because of illness or disease, but because they refuse to wear, fetishize, or aspire to the glossy trappings of the health of others’.29 Metzl says the rhetoric of health is stigmatizing, normative and consumerist. Adverts present the pursuit of health as a pathway to empowerment, particularly for women. This phenomenon is not new. In 1836 the Scottish physician and phrenologist Andrew Combe argued that feminine ‘weakness’ was not an innate characteristic but a social product. He writes that it is unsurprising that women lose their vigour: a ‘lively and bouncing girl … passes in a few months from the exuberant and playful indulgence of her feelings, intellect, and muscular system, to the quiet and composed inaction and confined dress of a sedate young lady, who never walks out, except at a measured pace to school or to church’.30 Similarly, in 1855 Catharine Beecher, the American advocate of education for women, advised that women should undertake ‘an hour of vigorous exercise each day’ to ‘shake off the chronic weaknesses brought on by sedentary habits and tight clothes’.31 More recently, in her workout books and videos in the 1980s, Jane Fonda advocated breaking ‘the weaker sex mold’ through ‘discipline as liberation’.32 However, feminist critics note that this view of aerobics conflates fitness, empowerment and beauty, and normalizes the idea that a healthy female body must be slender. Furthermore, the ‘association with the cosmetic and fashion industries made it, in many instances, another arena for women to compete for male attention’.33 The ‘health’ advocated by Fonda is individualized and competitive, in keeping with the burgeoning neoliberal political economy of the time. Equating slenderness with health and empowerment also masks the spread of white Western ideals. In an article that examines the global spread of the thin feminine ideal, Michelle Lelwica, Emma Hoglund and Jenna McNallie argue that ‘the slender ideal of white-Western femininity functions as a vehicle for spreading northern Euro-American “civilizing” values’.34 Slenderness is a sign of economic success, empowerment and neocolonialism: Just as unveiling has been presented to Muslim women… as a means for ‘liberating’ themselves from the weight of tradition, so the prospect of becoming thin symbolizes the presumed promises of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress.’ In both cases, white-Western notions of femininity provide the standard in-reference to which

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For some women, in addition to empowerment, thinness also connotes enlightenment and escape from oppression. In an examination of cases of eating disorders in South Africa after the fall of apartheid, Christopher Paul Szabo and Daniel le Grange identified a similar conflation of thinness and emancipation. They recall a Black woman who had worked as a domestic servant before becoming a spinning instructor at an affluent white health club. When asked if fat continues to be a status symbol in Africa, the woman replied that the idea is ‘a chauvinist thing’.36 For her, being thin is emancipatory and the preference for fat female bodies oppresses women. Szabo and Grange conclude that after apartheid, Black women associate success with discipline and self-control, and in the process, become more closely aligned to neoliberal ideals.37 Psychology experiments that demonstrate a connection between exercise and body image satisfaction appear to support the notion that exercise is empowering. A study of female and male undergraduate students in Western China found that high selfesteem and a positive body image correlate with high sports participation, and vice versa. However, Yiyi Ouyang, Kun Wang, Tingran Zhang, Li Peng, Gan Song and Jiong Luo write: ‘as most exercise behaviors involve body exposure in public places, those with poor body images often have increasing social physique anxiety, which hinders or reduces their sports participation’.38 There is a cyclical relation between body image, self-esteem and engagement with sports: Those who already have a positive body image are more likely to participate in healthful activities that will further increase their selfesteem and improve the appearance of their body, whereas those who feel anxious about their body are less likely to participate in sports and therefore will not gain the health and social benefits of exercise activities. Advertising campaigns, such as the one by Nike described by Gill, may exacerbate negative feelings when they extol fitness as a personal responsibility, while suggesting that fitness and an ideal body shape are achievable for anyone, providing they are disciplined. This ableist view of health is even more directly expressed in another Nike advertising campaign claiming, ‘Your only limit is you’ – a sentiment that conceals the personal and structural inequalities that limit an individual’s ability to purchase sports equipment and undertake exercise. Other studies suggest that exercise does not always improve self-esteem and body image. Research examining ‘Body Image, Self-Esteem, and Health-Related Behaviors among Male and Female First Year College Students’ found that female participants who exercise regularly do not display more body positivity than women who do not. They hypothesize that both women and men may exercise to feel more physically attractive and gain positive feedback from others, but men also gain a sense of achievement that women do not because ‘[f]or women, working out may be one piece of a long list of restrictions that may include dieting, avoiding certain foods, and avoiding certain types of clothing. With all the restrictions, being physically active may seem like just one more punishment for not being thin enough’.39 For women, the drive for health and a slender body is a pervasive form of discipline that requires almost continuous body-labour and hyper-vigilance.40 Feminist discourse

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of empowerment is incorporated into and de-politicized by a consumer discourse of individualism, self-interest and discipline, and the healthy body supplants the desirable body in advertising as a more palatable form of sexism.

#fitspo Social networking sites have increased the intensity of the disciplinary practices relating to health. #Fitspiration (or #fitspo) posts are shared on social networking sites in order to inspire other social media users to undertake fitness activities, eat healthy food and improve the physique of their body. However, content analysis has found that the images and posts focus heavily on appearance rather than fitness and are often objectifying and sexualized.41 Marika Tiggemann and Mia Ziccardo conclude that ‘fitspiration images of women feature a very limited range of body types’ that overwhelmingly conform to the thin and toned ideal, a body type that is difficult, if not impossible, for most women to achieve.42 Studies have found that exposure to #fitspiration increases body dissatisfaction in female social media users.43 Other studies have concluded that the negative effects of viewing thin-athletic bodies are even more pronounced than those caused by viewing traditionally thin body ideals.44 Because social media users are viewed as peers, the negative impact of upward comparison is likely to be greater than comparison with a celebrity who is expected to have more health and fitness resources (Chapter 4). Similarly, male #fitspiration photographs, which make up nearly 30 per cent of #fitspiration images, predominantly conform to a single body type: medium build and very muscular. Elise Rose Carrotte, Ivanka Prichard and Megan Su Cheng Lim analysed the gendered performances present in #fitspiration selfies. They found that women were significantly more likely to display the full body and exclude the face, whereas men were significantly more likely to include the face. This is problematic because people who are represented by the body signify bodily attributes such as thinness or fatness and attractiveness, whereas people represented by their face are more likely to be perceived to be intelligent and competent.45 Carrotte, Prichard and Lim conclude that the content suggests that ‘being fit and healthy is equivalent to fitting in with current masculine and feminine body ideals; in many posts, fitness and beauty were depicted as being essentially the same concept’.46 When fitness is represented by a select few types of bodies in selfies, the photographs infer that fitness is only defined by the achievement of those body types rather than any other measures and that only people who already have those types of bodies can achieve fitness. Although psychology studies have found that men are not as susceptible to body dissatisfaction as women, recent studies find that the increased objectification of male bodies in popular and visual culture and the targeting of young men by health and cosmetic commodity producers have caused an increase in body dissatisfaction in men.47 For example, Daniel Agliata and Stacey Tantleff-Dunn found that the participants exposed to images of ideal masculine bodies became significantly more depressed and expressed higher levels of body dissatisfaction than those who viewed

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neutral adverts.48 Another study found that internalization of masculine ideals promoted in lads’ magazines coincides with a high drive for muscularity, suggesting that representations of men in popular culture have a similar disciplinary effect to the effect of the slender ideal on women.49 Both slenderness for women and muscularity for men reinforce gendered body ideals and are coded to be signs of health. Content analysis of adverts in popular magazines found that women’s magazines predominantly contain diet adverts while men’s magazines contain a greater number of exercise and weight-lifting adverts. Agliata and Tantleff-Dunn conclude that ‘the print media encourages women to control their weight through dieting while urging males to mold their bodies through exercise’.50 This rhetorical difference in feminine and masculine fitness is far from neutral. Women and men exercise to improve their appearance, but the masculine imperative to increase muscle increases confidence, whereas exercising to lose weight and become smaller does not improve body image or self-esteem.51 In her ethnographic study of anorexic patients at an inpatient treatment centre in America, Helen Gremillion also noted the rhetorical difference between feminine and masculine fitness. She writes that, in contrast to feminine fitness, masculine fitness is a more optimistic project–not only because of a focus on building up the body (as opposed to slimming it down) but also because the male body is seen as relatively fit to begin with. Men are said to ‘keep’ fit; women, to achieve fitness …. It is significant that the promised body shape would be ‘new’: for women, a fit body must be forged, in spite of difficult odds.52

The female body is characterized as inefficient and difficult to control, whereas the male body requires only maintenance and improvement. This gender stereotype reinforces false notions about the natural capabilities of different bodies. However, gendered assumptions about bodies can provide some benefit for individuals attempting to stabilize their self-image. For example, fitness programmes enable some trans men to ‘achieve a more harmonized sense of self in accordance with their ideals of maleness and masculine embodiment’.53 Rebecca Farber writes: ‘Their strategies to “de-emphasize” hip size by enlarging other body parts reflects the creative and proactive processes of bodily modification; physicality, sex and gender are illusions, constructed through the cultural meanings attached to physical configurations.’54 Through fitness and muscle-building, trans men challenge the relation between masculinity and biological maleness. Participants find relief from gender dysphoria by building their bodies to conform to masculine body ideals; however, this process reinforces and reifies the gender binary as it resists it aspiring to reach particular norms of the male and masculine form also reflect[s] the ways that fitness is a regulatory technology that disciplines people to conform to hegemonic cultural ideals… [T]ransgender men’s ideals of male and masculine embodiment are also steeped in institutions and norms of health and fitness, emerging in an increasingly commodified and hierarchical context.55

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Idealization of the muscular male body continues. Because masculine bodies are built up rather than slimmed down, it may be easier for trans men than trans women to achieve a harmonizing sense of self through fitness programmes, because trans women, like cis women, are likely to have to undertake a long list of restrictions that negatively impact on the self-esteem and body satisfaction. Farber suggests that women can shape their bodies in a manner that disconnects ‘female bodies from static notions of femininity that position them as small or lean’.56 Indeed, despite reinforcing gender norms, fitness signifies a ‘gender-equalizing work ethic’ that ‘promises to counterbalance gender difference’ for white professional women, because being physically fit challenges the idea that the female body is weak: it makes the women ‘more “like men”’.57 Like the muscle-building work by some trans men, female fitness presents a paradoxical challenge to gender stereotypes because it reinforces the higher social value of masculine bodies. It also excludes marginalized women who are unable to achieve this level of fitness and trans women who may not want to challenge the small, lean feminine ideal.

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In capitalist societies, health is signified by slenderness for women and muscularity for men. For men, achieving a muscular physique increases self-esteem, but for women, slenderness is an ongoing aim that is never adequately achieved. The female body is viewed to be unruly, inefficient in burning calories and prone to temptation, and therefore requires constant vigilance and labour. However, Helen Gremillion says that anorexia exposes the cultural construction of the female body as ‘an inefficient, or uncooperative, resource for fitness’ that ‘cannot “work off ” consumption easily’.1 For the anorexic, ‘the “solution” to the seemingly unresolvable cultural tension between productivity and consumption is anticonsumption’.2 Anorexia is a culture-bound syndrome; the symptoms reproduce and exaggerate social ideals.3 It was first recognized as a medical condition in the 1870s, by Charles Lasegue in France and William Gull in Britain. Gull described anorexia as an affliction in which young women display excessive energy that leads to starvation.4 Lasegue classified anorexia as a form of hysteria and identified social class as a common factor in the cases he treated. He connected the emergence of anorexia in the late nineteenth century with social changes experienced by middle-class people: ‘Eating emerged as a new style that set the members of the middle class apart from the working class, and meal times began to symbolize the spirit and values of these new middle-class families.’5 Refusing food was one of the few ways that young women could express independence from the family and rejection of middle-class values. Lisa Appignanesi writes that anorexia was produced in a social and domestic environment in which ‘daughters are long infantilized, dependent and sexually ignorant, while being groomed for the competitive rites of courtship and marriage. Here a slim figure and the spirituality which a restrained appetite evokes are useful assets’.6 The emergence of anorexia as a medical entity coincided with first wave feminism. Like hysteria, anorexia was subsequently interpreted to be an illness that expresses the conflict between traditional female roles and the new values of the modern woman.7 Severe emaciation connoted the feminine ideals of delicacy and frailty, and wilfulness and a desire for autonomy. The symptoms of anorexia can also be interpreted as a desire for attention and a demand for space that is communicated through the diminishing, skeletal body. This paradox is described in Patricia Leavy and Lauren Sardi Ross’s contemporary oral history account of an anorexic woman: ‘She wanted to be heard and to be silent, to be seen and to be invisible …. In effect,

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anorexia made her smaller and more noticeable all at once. She began to occupy less and more space in the social world and within her family.’8 The symptoms of anorexia express a problem and seem to offer a solution. They communicate ‘loss of control, not knowing oneself, being inadequate and the experience of chaos and boundlessness’ through displays of extreme self-denial and an attempt ‘to become someone else by recreating one’s body’.9 The anorexic’s identity is stabilized through the transformation of the body, which symbolizes a hard boundary that clearly delineates self from other. Similar to feminist interpretations of hysteria, writers note that anorexia is a desperate unconscious articulation of distress, used when all other forms of expression seem unavailable or ineffective.10 Because eating disorders are experienced most frequently by girls and young women, feminists from different fields of expertise, including history, psychology and ethnography, examine the lived experiences of women to identify aspects of culture that may contribute to the onset of the disorder. Mervat Nasser writes that the presence of subclinical forms of eating disorder, estimated to be five times more common than full-blown eating disorders, places it on ‘a continuum of severity, with dieting representing one end of the spectrum and the extreme forms of disordered eating representing the other’ and argues that dieting is ‘a necessary if not sufficient factor for the development of the full syndrome’.11 In addition to the influence of diet cultures, Leavy and Ross say that the beauty standards expressed in mass media and advertising contribute to a ‘matrix of eating disorder vulnerability’.12 Stressful situations in the home or within peer relationships can lead the individual to avoid ‘intense emotional conflict by turning inward to the body in order to seek control’, and when this takes place in a mass media environment that idealizes impossible beauty standards, ‘the road is paved for negative body image, body dissatisfaction, and eating disorders’.13

Slenderness and assimilation In anorexia the body is a site of agency and achievement. The neoliberal view that the body is an object of prestige that displays sign-values of self-discipline, personal achievement and individuated competitiveness is reproduced to a pathological extreme. Claire Scodellaro, Jean-Louis Pan Ké Shon, Stéphane Legleye and Peter Hamilton say feminine thinness is a sign of a dominant position, a dominant social position. In addition to the marital market, thinness is profitable in the labour market, as thin women can more easily access a hierarchically higher job …. Thinness thus participates, in a hardly visible manner, in the reproduction of the social structure.14

Similarly, Nasser concludes that women have little choice but to try to achieve thinness because it is ‘an important credential for success and professional enhancement’.15 Thinness offers a mode of upward social mobility for working-class girls and women who are able to achieve it. There is also evidence that slenderness is equated with social mobility by women of colour, despite research that shows that the women may

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be protected from the disciplinary effects of the slender ideal because they tend to idealize more curvaceous bodies (see Chapter 9). A study of Black American women receiving treatment for anorexia describes the women as ‘achievement oriented [and] aspiring to higher social status than their parents …. They had a powerful need to fit into society and thought that this integration was only possible through rigid dieting and the adoption of the prevailing social standards of thinness’.16 Anorexia can be the result of an attempt to assimilate to a dominant culture that equates unachievable body types with success, self-control and a strong work ethic. According to Becky W. Thompson, anorexia is not simply a product of the ‘tyranny of slenderness’ but also the glorification of white, young, heterosexual, and ablebodied people.17 Diagnoses of eating disorder are impeded when they are assumed to be ‘problems developed by those who accept male models of beauty’, and so older women and lesbians are likely to be underdiagnosed.18 In addition, doctors may assume that working-class women are thin because they are poor, and not because they are suffering from anorexia. Maisie C. E. Gard and Chris P. Freeman reviewed thirteen studies to see if there is a positive correlation between high economic status and eating disorder. They conclude that anorexia sufferers exist across all classes, but remain undetected due to the assumption that anorexia is an illness afflicting young, heterosexual, white women.19 Idealization of white, middle-class values can also lead to underdiagnosis and lack of access to treatment for working-class people and people of colour. In her ethnography research in an eating disorder clinic in America, Helen Gremillion found that patients are classified as either internalizers or externalizers. Most eating disorder patients at the clinic are ‘internalizers’, who ‘turn problems inward, somatising or intellectualizing them’; they are rational and calm and ‘tend towards “law and order,” which explains their commitment to unit ideas of behaviour and orderliness’.20 Gremillion notes that staff at the clinic also tend to categorize themselves as internalizers. Most patients possess the character traits that the staff idealize and perceive themselves to possess, forming a positive identification between the two groups. ‘Externalizing’ patients do not intellectualize and rationally work through a problem; they act out and break rules. Gremillion notes that the patients who are labelled externalizers are ‘almost always nonanorexic patients, and significantly, they are often African American or Chicano boys and are usually working-class’.21 Externalizing patients are also unofficially diagnosed by staff as having borderline personality disorder; they have severely unstable boundaries and ‘do not have enough of a “sense of self ” even to work to acquire a stable identity’.22 Like hysterics, people with borderline personality disorder ‘latch onto various “external” specifications of personhood in an attempt to generate a (false) identity’.23 Reminiscent of Juliet Mitchell’s description of the hysteric’s contagious vortex that awakens the latent hysteria in its audience, the treatment programme staff say that borderline patients are particularly disruptive because they ‘create craziness’ and cause ‘splitting within groups, and particularly among caretakers, when they vacillate between idealization of others (reflecting dependency) and a devaluation of others (reflecting hostility)’.24 Hysteria is no longer diagnosed in contemporary medicine because its symptoms have been separated into a number of disorders, including borderline personality disorder

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and eating disorder (Chapter 3).25 Some psychoanalysts continue to diagnose cases of ‘hysteric anorexia’. Recalcati writes that hysteric anorexia differs from hysteria because the individual unconsciously aims to provoke anguish rather than desire in the other, and is unlike anorexia because the emaciated body is a form of insistent presence and not a bodily expression of a pathological desire for control.26 Like the hysteric, who copies a rival’s identity but is unable to integrate it into their personality, the hysteric anorexic unconsciously mimics the symptoms and personality traits of anorexia, without integrating what they mean (such as a need for control, order and boundaries). Sandra, a Chinana anorexic patient in the clinic, is labelled an externalizer and a borderline personality. According to the staff Sandra is ‘trying in vain to overcome a “gang minority status” by taking on the more prestigious status associated with the treatment program’.27 She is ‘doing’ anorexia, not ‘being anorexic’; it is her ‘current identity choice’.28 Like the hysteric, Sandra tries on the anorexic identity but does not intenalize their rational, rule-abiding ways. Furthermore, the team treating her were caught up in an aggressive identificatory process, ‘acting out her stuff ’.29 Because Sandra was deemed to lack the internalizing personality traits required to work towards her recovery, the staff took measures to prevent her re-admittance. In contrast, Pam, a white middle-class borderline personality patient, was re-admitted multiple times because she demonstrated the attributes deemed to be necessary for successful treatment: autonomy, personal responsibility, organization, resourcefulness and rationality. Despite frequently breaking the rules and requiring a great deal of attention and resources, she was a ‘good’ borderline personality patient. In contrast, Sandra is deemed to be untreatable because she does not possess these white middleclass identity traits, and the discrimination she is subjected to in relation to treatment is attributed to her pathological personality, and not racism and classism. Thompson correlates eating disorder with the thwarted ambition and loss of self-esteem produced by inequality.30 If unequal societies cause eating disorders ‘[p] ortraying them as individual “disorders” rather than as responses to physical and psychological distress is part of a historical tendency to mislabel the results of social injustices as individual pathologies’.31 Eating disorders, and other pathologies such as hysteria, express and expose social injustice.

The anorexic work ethic and the clinical gaze In anorexia, socially idealized traits are exaggerated and recoded to express distress. Similar to the body idealized by healthism, the bodily transformation produced by anorexia connotes a strong work ethic. Maude, one of the inpatients in Gremillion’s study, exemplifies the anorexic work ethic. A week prior to being admitted to hospital, Maude had ‘been going to high school, making straight As, and keeping up with all her extracurricular activities’.32 For Maude, weight-loss made her other achievements more valued: losing weight was no effort at all. But the effort it took to keep up with all her activities at increasingly lower weights balanced out the ease of losing weight. In

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this way, weight loss and achievement in other areas of her life were indirectly proportional. Maude implied that she kept losing weight so that she could continually test her ability to achieve.33

Maude did not experience body image distortion and was not preoccupied with fat. Instead, her thin body signified her work ethic and drive to achieve. Clinicians treating anorexics try to turn the ‘anorexic’ work ethic into a ‘healthy’ work ethic, ‘converting a relentless striving for weight loss into effort toward weight gain’.34 Notions of health and exercise are often central to treatment programmes. However, Gremillion notes that ‘fitness, sickness, and health converge in anorexic bodies. As a result, discourses of fitness are more visibly open to contestation than they otherwise might be’.35 In anorexia the association of thinness with fitness is problematic because excessive and compulsive exercise is a symptom of the disorder. In some cases, excessive exercise regimes precede the development of a full-blown eating disorder and then correlate to slower recovery and quicker relapse rates for anorexic patients.36 Riccardo Dalle Grave notes that anorexics who use exercise in this manner demonstrate higher levels of dietary restraint, perfectionism, persistence, obsessive compulsive traits and anxiety; they also tend to have lower BMI than patients who do not compulsively exercise.37 In the eating disorder clinic in which Gremillion conducted her research, exercise is restricted. Patients must reach a particular weight (known as their ‘exercise weight’) to be deemed medically safe to exercise.38 The exercise weight is also, usually, the inpatient’s discharge weight. Exercise is simultaneously a symptom of illness and a sign of recovery. A compromise between consumption and exercise means that thinness can still be valued, but the boundary between acceptable and excessive thinness is determined and controlled, teaching the patient how to manage their consumption in order to remain within the lower limits of the clinic’s acceptable body weight.39 For example, Sarah, an outpatient, ‘understood her admission weight quite literally: she saw it as a cut-off point for how little she could weigh and still stay out of the hospital, where she would be required to gain more than this. Sarah was thereby subverting her treatment plan-using it to support her anorexia’.40 Similarly, Rebecca, who was ‘admitted to the hospital because of a low pulse, caused by over-exercise at a low body weight … experienced her exercise weight, which is official permission to exercise, as an imperative to exercise’.41 The exercise weight also objectified her as a number, an experience that is common in anorexia. Obsession with numbers, constant surveillance and intense focus on the body characterize the pathological nature of anorexia, and they are activities that are supported and reproduced by the treatment programme. Treatment is defined by rules relating to minimum daily calorie intake, a minimum daily weight gain of twotenths of a kilogram, a discharge weight and a re-admission weight. Gremillion writes: ‘Ironically, when patients enter the program, counting their calories and weighing and measuring their bodies often already intensely preoccupy them. Unfortunately, some learn how to engage in these activities with greater precision during a hospital stay.’42 Processes and procedures of the treatment programme are internalized by the patients and used for their own aims. They try to manipulate their weight, using methods such as ‘waterloading’ (drinking extra water to temporarily increase their weight) and

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hiding batteries in their hair or underwear. In response to these tactics the programme developed more stringent surveillance techniques; patients can only wear underwear and a medical gown when they are weighed, urine density is measured each day to identify ‘waterloading’ and patients suspected of waterloading are weighed at random times when the extra water is likely to have been evacuated.43 The anorexics develop methods to disrupt the clinical gaze and the clinicians develop new techniques of surveillance in a cyclical, intensifying process. The methods of evasion used in the clinic are also shared on thinspiration or pro-ana (pro-anorexia) blogs created by individuals with eating disorders. The bloggers and subscribers form an online pro-eating disorder community that share thinspiration or thinspo images of emaciated bodies, weight-loss regimes and tips on how to evade detection by doctors, family members and friends. They share medical knowledge that enables them to ‘trick’ their doctors ‘into seeing a “normal” body, as signified by the quantification of weight, temperature, heart rate and urinalysis’.44 Bloggers suggest that in preparation for a medical appointment their readers should ‘wear heavy clothing; and, put coins in your underwear …. Dress warmly to increase body temperature temporarily … ingest salt to increase blood pressure’, and ‘practice meditation to control your heartrate’.45 Clinical techniques are subverted to mislead doctors and present the body with a veneer of health. In their belief that anorexia is a lifestyle choice rather than an illness, proana bloggers refuse to view their body as a medical object that requires treatment and cure; however, they must internalize the clinical gaze in order to subvert it. Bell writes that anorexia demonstrates the ‘limits of medical regulatory power’ but also attests to its power in the reliance on the (tricked) clinical gaze to give a prognosis of ‘normal’ rather than ‘pathological’.46

Hyperfocalization and recuperation In consumer culture the hysteric’s insistent presence (Chapter 3) and desire to fascinate the viewer is complemented by a fetishistic gaze that ‘hyperfocalizes’ on its object (Chapter 2). Hysteria is characterized by an absence in sense of self: to overcome it the hysteric insistently presents the self through overpowering, mimetic identification with others. Anorexia is characterized by an absence of sense of self along with a refusal of external identifications. The psychoanalyst Pierrette Lavanchy writes that anorexics want to present a different image in respect to the one people want them to present. But as their personal wishes are so much enmeshed with other people’s opinions, they cannot find an angle of themselves that is not inhabited by (and contaminated with) others’ thought or desire. Therefore they can express what they want only as a refusal of models.47

Unable to find a model for the self that is not founded on the desire of others, the anorexic absolutely rejects all models and chooses instead to reduce the body to its bare minimum. Unlike the hysteric who tries to conceal this lack through perfectionism and aggressive, seductive behaviour, the anorexic seems to celebrate the absence as a

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distinguishing difference. The hysteric cannot distinguish self from other but anorexia establishes and resolutely patrols these borders. The idea of the body being an object of desire for another is intolerable for both, but unlike the hysteric, the anorexic does not draw attention to the intolerable split through repeated provocative enticement of the other. The anorexic body is acknowledged as a degraded object, enabling the anorexic to dehumanize and damage their own body. This is structurally similar to the relation between the fetishist and the fetish object. When consumers internalize a fetishizing gaze, their body is the degraded part of the fetish and the perfect bodies in adverts are the idealized part. In anorexia, the idealized object is the mind that overcomes hunger and the despised object is the body that requires food. Anorexics internalize the dissecting clinical gaze to a pathological degree. Bodily imperfections dominate their visual field, and the rest of the body is obscured. This is demonstrated in thinspiration, a large volume of photographs devoted to the celebration of extreme thinness. On blogs and social media platforms, individuals post selfies that emphasize their skeletal forms, they are clearly proud of their bodily transformation. The photographs present the body in a way that says, ‘look at the transformations  I  have produced with the body that  I  have’ rather than ‘the body that  I  am’. Thinspiration selfies present the body as a separate, degraded thing and demonstrate the tyrannical rule of the mind over the body. In thinspiration, the body is rarely shown in its entirety and it is often decapitated. This relation to the body might signify shame or a regression to a pre-mirror phase ‘fantasy of the fragmented body’, that is uncontained and undifferentiated from the world (see Glossary for information on the mirror phase).48 But visible muscles and bones create the impression of a hard surface that will not be penetrated by others. The body is fragmented into parts, but the photographs do not reproduce the consumer culture mode of dissecting the body into problem areas. In thinspiration, hipbones, ribs, legs and collar bones are isolated and celebrated. They demonstrate achievement. Furthermore, thinspiration selfies do not reproduce the viewing positions to other selfies. In thinspiration the individual is given anonymity by decapitation. Because the selfie-taker does not look towards the viewer, there is no suggestion that the body has been laid out for the pleasure of the viewer, like the bodies in adverts described by Goffman (Chapter 4). The look of the  viewer is disarmed because it is not returned. A similar disfigurement is present in the nineteenth-century photographs of patients with hysterical anorexia at the Salpêtrière hospital. The faces in these photographs may have been defaced to protect the identity of the patient, but the coarseness of their treatment – at once aggressive and unsuccessful – seems excessive. In his writing about the photographs of hysteria at the Salpêtrière, Georges DidiHuberman implies that the act of looking has a physical effect on the viewed body. He describes Charcot’s clinical gaze as a ‘glance’ [coup d’œil], saying: ‘The clinical glance is already contact, simultaneously ideal and percussive. It is a stroke [trait] that goes directly to the body of the patient, almost palpating it.’49 The translator notes that coup  d’œil means ‘blow of an eye’ and trait has multiple significances in Didi-Huberman’s writing, including ‘shaft of an arrow’.50 If Charcot’s clinical gaze pierced  the body of the hysterics, perhaps the returning gaze could be equally penetrating. Although The Invention of Hysteria does not contain images of hysterical

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Figure 11  Two photographs of a woman suffering from anorexia, from the article ‘Deux Cas D’Anorexie Hystérique’ by Dr Wallet, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. 5, Plates XXXIV and XXXV, publiée sous la direction du professeur Charcot, Masson et Cie. Paris, 1892 [Journal] Wellcome Library: London.

anorexia,  Didi-Huberman’s  description of the images of the frozen gestures of hysterical patients suggests a petrifying potential: fear assaults us deeply, it alters us. It ruins but renews our desire to see; it infects our gaze, meaning that our gaze is devastated, but holds on, resists, returns. Fascinum: charm, meaning evil spell, ill fate. A kind of haunting takes hold of us.51

If the enigmatic and sometimes beautiful photographs of hysterics fascinate the viewer, the hysterical anorexia images menace them with death. Perhaps the doctors and photographers at the Salpêtrière also experienced passive and motionless horror when viewing the hysterical anorexic body and this is why they chose to disfigure them. The anorexic body has the unsettling appearance of a subject without subjectivity or the horror of a corpse returning to life. Ernst Jentsch characterizes the uncanny as confusion between animate and inanimate that occurs when a seemingly inanimate object appears to come to life or vice versa. Sigmund Freud argues that the sensation of the uncanny in The Sandman is created by a fear of castration that has been displaced onto the fear of losing one’s eyes. He suggests that Jentsch is wrong to point to the uncertainty of Olimpia’s lifelike appearance as a cause of uncanniness.52 But in the story it is the eyes that deceive. When Nathanael looks at Olimpia through a magnifying lens, he is initially disconcerted by the ‘singular look of fixity and lifelessness’ in her eyes.

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At first, he sees her as an inanimate object but his desire animates her and eventually ‘he fancied a light like humid moonbeams came into them’.53 The eyes are the part of her body to which Nathanael looks for confirmation that Olimpia is alive; they are the source of the confusion between subject and object, living and lifeless. It seems that objects of desire and abjection are only separated by the twinkle of an eye. Perhaps that is why the photographs from the Salpêtrière were so violently marked. If the eyes of the anorexic body were allowed to return the viewer’s look, they might be animated by desire, bringing the corpse to life. Alternatively, if they were lifeless and fixed, they would signify a living body stripped of animation and infect the viewer with death. By obscuring the eyes, the viewer can interpret the body as lifeless and living, and the issue of animation is disavowed. Today, the anorexic body is the logical result of the relentless pursuit of perfection. It demonstrates that conformity to impossible social ideals does not result in beautiful, commodified bodies such as the models in the Dolce and Gabbana adverts discussed in Chapter 5. The dissecting gaze cuts the body to the bone and produces a barely living corpse. If hysterical presentations of the body emphasize surface appeal to conceal an absence elsewhere, the anorexic body presents the surface as a paperthin veneer. The skin is translucent and the skeleton beneath captures attention. As Susie Orbach writes: She demands to be related to originally. Reflexive responses  –  for example, flirtatious or patronizing ones from men, or the ‘once over’ from another woman who needs to position herself … – are confounded. She defies easy, comfortable definition …. She is now looked at, not as someone who is appealing, but as somebody one cannot take one’s eyes off …. A presence which demands a response rather than a reflex.54

The anorexic body disrupts the process of identification and competitive hierarchical positioning that is experienced by women. Orbach continues: ‘anguish and defiance combine in the most curious way to make the observer passive and motionless in response. There is a simultaneous desire to retreat and move in closer. The conflict renders one immobile’.55 The anorexic body conforms to an entirely different value system and demands a look that is specifically created for its form. Anorexia signifies a refusal of social ideals and an expression of anti-consumption that may be interpreted as a repudiation of the commodified sign-values of the body. However, the internalization of the sadistic commands of capitalism can be seen in thinspiration blogs, where individuals reward their suffering with shopping trips and beauty treatments. Visitors to one website are encouraged to undertake some of the following activities to prevent them from giving in to hunger pangs: Exfoliate your entire body / take a long hot bath / pluck / wax your eyebrows / paint your finger and toe nails / use crest white strips / apply self tanner / try a new hairstyle / have your hair cut / straighten your hair / give yourself a make over with totally / different makeup / shave / wax your legs / put a face mask on / go for a manicure or pedicure.56

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Figure 12  Four photographs of a woman showing anorexia nervosa, from the article ‘Deux Cas D’Anorexie Hystérique’ by Dr Wallet, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. 5, Plates XXXVI and XXXVII, publiée sous la direction du professeur Charcot, Masson et Cie. Paris, 1892 [Journal] Wellcome Library: London.

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The diet industry also commodifies self-starvation by advertising appetite suppressants and metabolism boosters on thinspiration websites.57 These recommendations by bloggers and product endorsing posts turn self-starvation into an activity that enables consumption of commodities and produces sign-value for the body. Capitalism pursues the anorexic through illness to extend into new marketplaces.

#Bonespo Internalization of sadistic commands is also implied by the similarities of visual characteristics in selfies and thinspiration photographs. In some selfies the bodies are very slender, with visible hipbones and ribcages, characteristics usually associated with thinspiration; however, the clothes and clutter of ordinary selfies surround the individuals. These commodities are associated with the construction of identity, implying that the emaciated bodies do not function as signs that resist identificatory positioning. The multiple connotations have a normalizing effect and skeletal thinness appears as a style to copy when it is fashionable to do so. Images found on pro-anorexia websites also bear visual similarity to the selfies found on Instagram and other mainstream image-sharing websites. In some images the untidy room behind the figure has more in common with a selfie than a thinspiration photograph. This is noteworthy as it contradicts the descriptions of anorexic character traits found in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Anorexia is linked to obsessive compulsive disorders due to shared characteristics of perfectionism, rigidity, compulsive traits, high anxiety and harm avoidance.58 The need to control food intake coincides with a need to regulate all aspects of their life, everything has to be neatly organized.59 Disorganization and clutter would cause anxiety for the anorexic. An untidy bedroom behind the emaciated figure in the thinspiration photographs does not connote a pathological demand for control. Rather, it suggests that the codes of the emaciated body celebrated in thinspiration have been absorbed into popular culture, normalized and then disseminated as an ideal body. It seems that all signs can be recuperated in the system of sign-value exchange even if they appear to be signifiers of ill health, death and a refusal to consume. Fitspiration and thinspiration content on social media platforms are also comparable. As discussed in the previous chapter, fitspiration images predominantly promote fitness as a path to improved appearance. Similar to thinspiration, fitspiration photographs often depict thin female bodies that are objectified through the emphasis of particular body parts. However, in fitspiration the body parts that are emphasized tend to be stomachs and buttocks, rather than hipbones, collar bones and ribcages.60 Angela S. Alberga, Samantha J. Withnell and Kristin M. von Ranson’s content analysis of fitspiration and thinspiration posts found that messages promoting food restriction appeared with similar frequency in both types of online content, and that expressions of body guilt are more common in fitspiration than thinspiration. However, fitspiration  photographs are more likely to show a whole body, including the face.61 The fitspiration selfie-taker invites viewers to identify with their body and hierarchically position themselves, perhaps with an expectation of envious, upward social comparison on the viewer’s part. It also suggests that the body is not objectified

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and denigrated as a separate thing, as it is in thinspiration. However, in both types of imagery, body-labour and food restriction are celebrated. #Bonespiration or #bonespo is a hashtag trend that is common in pro-eating disorder communities. Centring on and emphasizing protruding bones, the images exaggerate some of the aesthetic tropes of thinspiration. In content analysis that compares thinspiration, fitspiration and bonespiration, Catherine Victoria Talbot, Jeffrey Gavin, Tommy van Steen and Yvette Morey found that bonespiration contains the most protruding bones, and that thinspiration and fitspiration contain this type of imagery with a similar frequency, leading the authors to conclude that there may be a subgroup of fitspiration producers that idealize extremely thin bodies more commonly associated with thinspiration.62 They write: ‘This subsample of fitspiration content could be potentially dangerous due to the popularity and greater acceptance of this content. The everyday user could, therefore, be at risk of viewing this potentially harmful content that idealises the extremely thin female body.’63 Similarly, Alberga, Withnell and Ranson conclude that problematic similarities between the thinspiration and fitspiration ‘may reflect larger changes in social conceptualizations of health and fitness, which may include mainstreaming harmful thinspiration sensibilities such as extreme food restriction and self-discipline’ and note that it is important to monitor these changing body ideals because the fit-ideal may become a ‘pathological concern like the thin-ideal has been for women in recent decades’.64 Emaciated anorexic bodies that signify illness and death call attention to the contradictory notions of health and slenderness, but the disparity is erased by fitspiration images that present signs of emaciation along with codes of fitness. Furthermore, pathologization of the fit-ideal is already evident in orthorexia and athletic nervosa  –  eating disorders that have emerged in the last two decades. Athletic nervosa is used to describe an excessive drive for muscularity more commonly experienced by young men.65 Orthorexia is a type of eating disorder in which the individual becomes obsessed with healthy eating to the point that many foods are removed from the diet and the person becomes severely malnourished. Like anorexics, orthorexics are prone to perfectionism, cognitive rigidity and guilt relating to eating; however, orthorexics are less likely to conceal their illness, and may even publicize it on social media, because the behaviours are deemed to be socially acceptable, if not desirable.66 In addition, individuals who have received treatment for other eating disorders in the past often display orthorexia symptoms, ‘suggesting that [orthorexia] may be a compromise by which patients continue to exercise control over food and their body, although to a lesser degree than in [anorexia]’.67 Both orthorexia and athletic nervosa signify forms of pathology in which the desire to adhere to aesthetic body ideals is displaced by the desire to adhere to health and fitness ideals. Orthorexia also signifies an unconscious compromise that retains an intense focus on food and the body, but does so under the cover of socially acceptable healthy eating practices. This pathological pursuit of health reflects the changing discourse of the body in advertising and popular culture in which ‘desirable’ becomes replaced by ‘healthy’ as a more acceptable way to objectify bodies (Chapter 6).

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The bulimic economy

As discussed in Chapter 6, the appropriation of feminist and left-wing health campaigns by right-wing groups contributed to the production of ‘healthism’.1 Similarly, the liberal political views presented in critiques of anti-obesity campaigns by fat activists have also been modified to suit a neoliberal agenda (fat activism is discussed in Chapter 9). Conservative organizations in the UK and America, such as the US Center for Consumer Freedom, are coalitions of food industry businesses working to limit the influence of health campaigns that call for individuals to reduce or modify their food consumption in order to improve their health. To protect profits and fight against regulation, the organizations argue that state intervention impedes consumer choice, autonomy and personal responsibility. Deborah Lupton writes that some think tanks even ‘represent anti-obesity advocates as “socialists” working against the appropriate forces of capitalism’.2 The consumption of unhealthy food is presented as a rebellious expression of free will and a protest against the ‘nanny state’. When consumers are expected to take personal responsibility for their health, the causes of and solutions to ill-health are also placed in the hands of the individual. However, neoliberal capitalism and the existing structural inequalities that are exacerbated by it produce many health problems. For example, the fast-food industry pays low wages, so that workers often have multiple jobs and work long hours. This increases the demand for fast food because the workers have less time to shop and cook, and cannot afford to buy food that is highly nutritious because it is often more expensive. It’s a win-win situation for the fast-food industry.3 Eating unhealthy food could also be ‘a kind of rest for the exhausted self, an interruption of being good, conscious, and intentional that feels like a relief ’.4 Lauren Berlant writes that ‘obesity’ ‘is an effect of the intensity with which so many people need more and more mental health vacations from their exhaustion’.5 In this perspective on health and illness, eating is a form of self-medication that enables workers to ‘become absorbed in the present’ and ‘feel more resilient in the everyday’.6 Pleasure in eating unhealthy food provides momentary release from the pressure of ‘building toward the good life’ in which life is a ‘projection toward a future’ and gratification is always deferred.7 However, Berlant says that people are not actually becoming more resilient because ‘bodies wear out from the pleasures that help them live on’.8 Eating unhealthy food jeopardizes physical health in order to protect mental health.

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Although eating fast food may signify an economic necessity for low-paid workers, an act of free will against a ‘nanny state’ or a break from the expectation of productivity and achievement, simply ‘letting go’ is not an option. Consumers must comply with the ‘mandates of production and consumption’ that require ‘both a work ethic and a pleasure ethic’.9 Robert Crawford describes this dual pressure: On one hand we must repress desires for immediate gratification and cultivate a work ethic, on the other, as consumers we must display a boundless capacity to capitulate to desire and indulge in impulse; we must hunger for constant and immediate satisfaction. The regulation of desire thus becomes an ongoing problem, constantly besieged by temptation, while socially condemned for over indulgence.10

This conflict produces what Julie Guthman calls a bulimic economy in which ‘consuming is encouraged and … deservingness is performed by being thin no matter how that is accomplished’.11 These contradictory imperatives to indulge oneself and to display self-control are difficult for individuals to successfully navigate and resemble the oscillation between self-control and impulsivity that is characteristic of bulimia nervosa. In bulimia nervosa periods of intense self-control are interrupted by instances of loss of control in which large quantities of food are ingested. The bulimic compensates for excessive consumption by vomiting, taking laxatives or exercising. Vomiting and laxative abuse are the most socially stigmatized methods of compensation and correlate to higher levels of depression in the sufferer. Excessive exercise, like restrictive forms of eating disorder, is less stigmatized because it connotes self-restraint and a strong work ethic – traits that are idealized in neoliberal societies.12 Like the bulimic individual, the bulimic economy has also had to develop a range of methods to compensate for the negative effects of consumption. Guthman writes that ‘bodies have emerged as a growth industry’ in contemporary capitalism and that the ‘obesity epidemic’ is a bodily spatial fix akin to geographic expansion and globalization, spatial fixes employed to increase consumption and profits in the wake of the financial crises of the 1970s.13 The body is subject to the law of inelastic demand: there is a limit to how much it can consume, and so the potential for profit increase is also limited. However, capitalist commodity producers have developed solutions to enable bodies to consume more: health and fitness commodities, diet foods, and anti-obesity products and procedures that make ‘new rounds of accumulation possible’.14 Pharmaceutical products that reduce the amount of fat that is absorbed into the body enable consumers to purge food as they consume it, similar to bulimic vomiting and laxative use. Food passes through the body undigested, enabling individuals to consume more while trying to achieve or maintain a slender body. These pharmaceutical products and diet products such as low-fat milkshakes, crisps and chocolate bars are exemplary commodities because they keep the craving to consume alive.15 Diet foods are the temptation and the solution for temptation because they tend to be ‘tempting treats’ that have less fat but more artificial sweeteners, and are sold in smaller portions than their non-diet counterparts. Desire for the food is maintained, if not exacerbated,

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Figure 13 ‘“Antipon”: permanently cures obesity’ by The ‘Antipon’ Company. Leaflet. London (1906). Credit: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.

by the smaller portion sizes. The pleasure of eating chocolate and crisps is transformed into a culturally regulated activity in which the contradictory demands of the bulimic economy are met. Furthermore, there is an in-built obsolescence to the diet system because calorie control and restriction of food can cause the metabolism to slow down, usually resulting in greater weight gain.16 The high failure rate of diets contributes to the prevalence of bulimia nervosa in capitalist societies: women who are prone to poor impulse control tend to develop bulimic symptoms within a year of the onset of dieting. Mervat Nasser writes one explanation for the increase in cases of bulimia ‘is that purging and vomiting are seen as perhaps more successful means of controlling weight than is dieting. The individual can engage in normal if not excessive eating and still keep weight within desired limits’.17 Bulimia nervosa is a deeply troubling bodily spatial fix that overcomes the law of inelastic demand.

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Quantified selves: Neoliberal archetypes Similar to bulimia nervosa, compensatory methods within the bulimic economy are stigmatized if they purge rather than work off the excess consumption. Diet products, pharmacological food supplements and weight-loss surgery are viewed as lazy, ‘easy’ options, whereas exercise demonstrates the individual has self-control, discipline and a strong work ethic. Hillel Schwartz writes that late capitalism’s surpluses must ‘literally be run off in a fury of exercises’ and that the fitness industries are ‘capitalism’s last best hope’.18 Working out not only works off calories already consumed, it makes the body stronger, healthier and therefore more productive at work. Having free time to undertake exercise, enjoying easy access to exercise facilities and safe outdoor environments, and the financial resources to employ personal trainers enable wealthy consumers to use a bodily spatial fix that increases their social and bodily capital. For people with money, health transforms leisure into a form of body-labour that compels them to purchase equipment and services. Via ‘health’ they are optimized as producers and consumers. The Quantified Self movement demonstrates how health can be used to increase consumption and produce optimized workers. It is a self-tracking phenomenon that emerged in the mid-2000s with the development of wearable devices and apps designed to record detailed measurements relating to the users’ physical, psychological and social well-being. The devices include smartwatches and wristbands, ‘[s]martbottles and forks [that] monitor water and food consumption’ and ‘smartpillows, mattresses, floors, chairs or rooms with sensors that can record bodily movement’.19 Founded in 2007 by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, the movement aims to ‘gain knowledge through numbers’ and ‘support new discoveries about ourselves and our communities that are grounded in accurate observation’.20 In an article for The New York Times Wolf writes: ‘We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimise an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?’21 Similarly, Martijn de Groot, a medical biologist and co-founder of the Quantified Self Institute, writes that self-tracking ‘can help you to become more in charge of yourself. Self-awareness is the first step towards selfregulation. And also self-control’.22 The body is viewed as a machine-like object that can be monitored and adjusted in order to eliminate weaknesses. Wolf writes: we tolerate the pathologies of quantification … because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually.23

Quantification removes the irrational, unreasonable emotions that might impede the process of optimization. The quantified body is viewed as being unhealthy, or at least not optimally healthy. The intense scrutiny and perfectionism that is characteristic of self-tracking can result in ‘cyberchondria’, extreme anxiety caused when small fluctuations in data are viewed as signs of illness.24 This creates an environment in which survival is felt to be a struggle that requires constant vigilance and labour, thus reinforcing the need for continuous, intensive, commodified self-surveillance.

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Health surveillance is not a new phenomenon. Michel Foucault writes that biopower is exerted over individuals via the ‘supervision of the smallest fragment of life and of the body’ that renders individuals visible and manageable.25 Bio-power segments time, space and bodies into ever smaller parts, requiring optimization and control. During the interwar years in Britain and America, state medical institutions undertook surveillance of entire populations via health surveys, screening programmes and prevention campaigns. David Armstrong uses the term ‘surveillance medicine’ to describe the process in which ‘the distinct clinical categories of healthy and ill’ disappear and different aspects of daily life are medicalized in order to make everyone visible to the clinical gaze.26 Lifestyle, including diet, exercise, sex, and stress, became the focus of state-led health promotions and preventative measures. As a result, large sections of the population are judged to be in a ‘semi-pathological pre-illness at-risk state’.27 Rather than being categorized as healthy or ill, bodies are placed on a continuum: not necessarily ill, but permanently at risk and always capable of achieving better health. In the process of medicalizing everyday life, people internalize medical surveillance techniques and become self-monitoring at-risk subjects. The self-tracking individual’s body and time are segmented and mapped out by selftracking devices. The devices are a surveillance apparatus that medicalize daily life, turning all activities into health activities. For example, in their promotional material, Fitbit state that ‘fitness is not just about gym time. It’s all the time’.28 Every action and minute of the day can be quantified. In one respect, this means that enjoyable social activities, such as dancing with friends, are deemed to be exercise, making exercise more social and fun. But it also extends the expectation of achievement and selfimprovement into leisure activities and reduces the opportunities for respite from this form of productivity.29 Techniques of self-surveillance are integrated into leisure time and social activities, further blurring the line between discipline and its release. Mike Featherstone says that ‘discipline and hedonism are no longer seen as incompatible’ because ‘diet and body maintenance are increasingly regarded as vehicles to release the temptations of the flesh’.30 Working out is a way of working off calories that permits the individual to consume indulgent commodities. It also promises to produce a desirable body and greater opportunities for sexual pleasure. The Quantified Self movement is criticized for valuing numerical data above cues about health and well-being deriving from the body. However, fans of the movement argue that the data are an ‘unsophisticated, intermediate stage towards more augmented senses’ that will enable greater self-reflection and a more intuitive understanding of the body when it supplements the information communicated by the body.31 Self-tracking becomes one part of the individual’s autobiography, in which data are a ‘new element in an aesthetic and continuous process of identity construction’ through which individuals ‘construct stories’ as well as learn about the self.32 Advocates of the Quantified Self movement also emphasize positive social aspects of self-tracking practice that enable individuals to share their achievements, gain motivating feedback and advice from others and belong to a community of like-minded individuals.33 The devices incorporate ‘gamification’ techniques to make self-tracking fun and competitive. For example, users may gain or lose points as a consequence of the quantity of time they spend exercising and the number of calories they consume, and

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their scores are shared and compared with other users on social media platforms, encouraging peer rivalry.34 Strava, an app that is popular with runners and cyclists, notifies users if another user, whom they may not be connected to on the apps social network, completes the same route in a faster time. The gamification of health compels users to compete to demonstrate their superior work ethic and ability to succeed. Self-tracking reinforces the neoliberal belief that ‘[t]he physically fit and active person is also a productive, successful worker’.35 This idea is not new, and capitalism has been concerned with health since its inception. The working conditions and long hours of labour in mid- to late-nineteenth-century factories actively diminished the health of workers, but public health discourses implied that illnesses were caused by germs rather than work or living conditions. These discussions around health implied that ‘undisciplined and ignorant people who failed to take appropriate care of themselves and those in their charge’ were responsible for outbreaks of illness.36 Steve Kroll-Smith and Joshua Kelley write: Imagining health as self-regulation rather than the outcome of bodies and their many intersections with industrial environments was truly a win-win for a capital, manufacture-based economy. Not only did a focus on the person and his or her body direct the medical gaze away from increasingly risky industrial environments, it also encouraged a policing of the working class. The habits of this class were surveyed, suggestions were offered, directives were issued, and workplace incentives and punishments were enacted. Mercantile and commercial doctrine became intertwined with medicine.37

In contemporary societies, the neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility further enmeshes health with labour and productivity, and enables employers to scrutinize the private lives of their employees. For example, in her field work examining employer policies in relation to depression, Katherine Teghtsoonian notes that health and wellbeing policies in the workplace enable employers to treat their employees’ bodies as property of the company that must be maintained in order to function properly.38 By suggesting that employees should undertake exercise, eat a healthy diet and avoid drugs and alcohol, company policies also downplay the role of the organization in the production of workplace stress: Rather than directing their energies to organizational or political change, ‘responsibilized’ employees diagnosed mentally ill are exhorted instead to undertake the work of self-care and self-management. Through their efforts to improve their psychological, spiritual, and physical selves, individual employees are understood to be enhancing their capacity to adapt successfully to their work environment.39

Wellness programmes condition employees to function more productively in the environment that contributes to their ill-health and to view the working conditions as unalterable. More disturbingly, these management practices are ‘designed to

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constrain  –  under the guise of politically neutral, disinterested expertise  –  the decisions of family physicians and those of the ill employees for whom they care’.40 In this respect, health is considered to be important only in its relation to employment, and as a result, the employee’s actual health needs may be disregarded or acted against. Additionally, employee well-being programmes imply that employers have the right to monitor and regulate their employees’ private life. Leisure time becomes the period in which workers are expected to recover from work and optimize their bodies and minds in order to increase their capacity for work. Self-tracking devices are also increasingly being used by employers to scrutinize the private lives and personal habits of their employees. Employers provide incentives so that employees use self-tracking devices, in order to ‘encourage their employees to lead healthy lifestyles and become more active, in such a way that leisure time is becoming more and more integrated into the sphere of labour as well’.41 When employees are compelled to share their data with employers, the employee’s freedom to undertake ‘unhealthy’ activities is greatly reduced. Leisure time becomes an unpaid extension of work time, in which the employee’s activities are monitored, measured and controlled. Because American companies often provide health insurance, there is a financial incentive to have a healthier workforce, as this will lead to lower premiums as well as greater productivity. For example, a study of participation in the Fitbit Health corporate health and workplace wellness plan found that over a two-year period employees who engaged in the programme cost on average $1,292 less than employees who did not.42 However, this financial incentive calls into question the idea of engagement with self-tracking practices as a free choice. For example, in 2016 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in America implemented new rules that enable employers to offer a 30 per cent reduction in insurance contributions if employees agree to sign up for wellness plans. The American Association of Retired Persons complained that the incentives undermine anti-discrimination laws that make it illegal for employers to collect sensitive health information that is not directly related to work. The wellness programmes are ‘voluntary’; therefore, employers are able to ‘financially coerc[e] employees into surrendering their personal health information’.43 Vassilis Charitsis writes that corporate wellness programmes that are linked to insurance schemes will ‘determine not only who will have access to affordable healthcare, but also who will be considered employable. Only the healthy or at least whose who are able to lead healthy lifestyles and can prove so through concrete numbers, through data, will ultimately be eligible for healthcare and employment’.44 This is deeply problematic because the ‘benefits’ of self-tracking are not equally enjoyed: a Nielson report states that ‘[o]wners of wearable devices were more likely to have a high household income’, and the Quantified Self movement is dominated by ‘American middle-class white men with high levels of digital technological knowhow’.45 Lower-income and lower-education levels, older age, disability and chronic health conditions, and being resident in a rural location all reduce an individual’s likelihood of using self-tracking equipment and apps, and so ‘self-tracking becomes a weapon that discriminates between people who can produce good data in their everyday activities and those who cannot’.46 In addition, the widespread adoption

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of self-tracking  devices could enable profiling and discrimination because hidden algorithms and data processing techniques are likely to disproportionately affect members of society who are already vulnerable due to illness, poverty and low levels of education such as ‘[c]ommunities of color [that] have long been subjected to disproportionate degrees of government surveillance and commercial mistreatment’.47 Individuals who already enjoy financial privileges can afford to ‘pay-for-privacy’, while those with lower incomes, who experience precarious employment and have complex health issues may be required to share their data in order to receive discounts, thus producing a ‘privacy divide’ and a new manner in which marginalized people are expected to contribute to  a spectacle of suffering that benefits the privileged (Chapter 6).48

Recuperating anorexia through quantification The devices and apps are predominantly designed by and for white, middle-class male bodies, and this shapes the way that health is measured. For example, women are more likely than men to quantify calorie intake, while men are more likely to track running speed, heart rate and blood pressure, suggesting that self-tracking devices ‘help to restabilise status-quo gender arrangements’.49 In addition, they reproduce a male idea of female health, and ensure that women have to submit to a male clinical gaze even when they are self-tracking. The devices also provide ‘an unprecedented degree of specificity, detail, and rigor’ for women who are already subjected to an expectation of stringent self-surveillance and self-discipline.50 Weight-loss apps such as DropPounds and MyFitnessPal enable the close surveillance of food intake. They employ an income/expense metaphor for calorie counting in which calories are viewed as an ‘expense’ the consumer must work off. Surplus calories remaining in the budget are ‘savings’ that produce weight-loss. The financial metaphor of tightening one’s belt is returned to the body by these apps. In MyFitnessPal users log their current body weight and a desired future body weight, and the app determines the quantity of calories that should be consumed in order to produce the desired weight-loss in five weeks. It also generates a predicted body weight, achievable in five weeks, if the user continues to consume the quantity of calories they consumed that day. The app states how many calories remain in their daily calorie budget in greencoloured text, or informs the user if they have exceeded the budget, with a red negative number, similar to the display of a bank balance. In research examining the use of diet-tracking apps by individuals with eating disorders, self-tracking is reported positively by individuals who are recovering from binge and purge eating disorders such as bulimia. Eating disorder sufferers with a propensity to binge tend to be characterized as experiencing high levels of anxiety, impulsivity and lack of control.51 In this emotional state, the ability to record and quantify food intake using the apps may delay the impulse to binge and reduce instances of loss of control. Reducing the anxiety-inducing experience of eating through quantification does seem to make eating ‘less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually’.52 Users on DropPounds’ discussion forums describe how

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imagining and expressing food with numbers reduces its emotional value, enabling them to gain perspective and self-control by considering the calorific value of the food they have eaten.53 One user writes: My usual pattern [of eating] included starving myself and then bingeing, compulsive eating, and sporadic, unsustainable diets. My self-esteem has always been tied to my weight and whether I had a ‘good eating day’ or a ‘bad eating day.’ Since I have been on DropPounds, I have finally learned how to eat 3 meals a day (and snacks).54

Quantified eating allows this user to manage the anxiety and impulsivity that results in uncontrolled eating, and reduce the negative moral value judgement they attribute to food after a binge. However, the apps can also exacerbate eating disorders. Psychology and medical texts describe individuals with anorexia as perfectionists who are prone to rigidity, high anxiety, an ‘excessive attention to detail …, obsessions about food and excessive concerns about weight and shape’.55 In some respects, attention to detail, obsessive rumination about weight and shape, and the concrete adherence to rigid rules are key methods of the Quantified Self movement. Unsurprisingly, apps that foreground concrete numerical data and produce detailed records of consumption habits can produce or intensify restrictive eating habits when used by individuals who already possess these personality traits. One of Eikey and Reddy’s participants says: [The app] made me more OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder], ’cause I’m like, ‘I have to hit this number,’ basically …. It’s made me more, very stringent on what I’m eating and making sure I hit those numbers … I feel like eating disorders stem from people trying to be perfect, and with this, you’re hitting numbers trying to be perfect.56

Even when these individuals wish to recover, they tend to return to obsessive thinking patterns if they continue to use the apps because successful self-tracking reproduces some of their eating disorder behaviours.57 For example, exercise can be entered into MyFitnessPal to generate surplus calories, enabling the user to eat more food. However, users with restrictive eating disorders manipulate the apps by under-recording exercise and overestimating food intake. Anorexics who compulsively exercise may use the apps to determine how much exercise they need to do to burn off the calories they have consumed.58 Similarly, DropPounds gives negative feedback to users when they exceed their calorie limit and positive feedback if the additional calories are purged with exercise, encouraging compensatory behaviours already familiar to users with restrictive and binge eating disorders.59 When the calorie budget is overspent, participants report negative feelings of guilt and shame, which sometimes lead to more severe calorie restriction or purging methods.60 For some users the competitive rivalry promoted by self-tracking turns inwards and exacerbates the ‘anorexic work ethic’.61 One participant said that she was ‘almost in competition with herself and the app to eat fewer calories each day’, and other

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participants discussed how the apps aggravate their restrictive behaviour ‘by making it seem like a game to eat less than the given amount and less than the prior day … which fueled their desire to continue and even intensify their restrictive behaviors’.62 As discussed in the previous chapter, the anorexic work ethic aims for maximum physical and intellectual output with a minimal calorie input. In the Quantified Self movement, achieving this calorific ‘efficiency’ connotes a body that is fully optimized by quantification. However, self-tracking users with restrictive eating disorders exceed and subvert the affordances of self-tracking devices to produce a dangerously emaciated body that no longer conforms to social definitions of health. Wolf writes that ‘we tolerate the pathologies of quantification’ because ‘[n]umbers make problems less resonant emotionally’.63 The pathologies of quantification are perfected by those with restrictive eating disorders. The reduced emotional response is also a reduction of subjective experience: quantified eating presents food as a fuel for labour and not a source of pleasure. Self-control, attention to detail, perfectionism and competitiveness are ideal neoliberal traits that are refined through the use of selftracking devices. The mind overcomes the body, pushing it to work harder with fewer resources, while denying its appetites and desires. Quantification seems to have ‘given the body unprecedented significance over the mind, casting it as a source of “instant truth”’; however, the body is also viewed as ‘a passive object of measurement that is amenable to improvement and intervention whether it likes it or not’.64 It is viewed as a separate thing. By viewing the self as an object of scientific study and gathering data on a range of tangible and intangible bodily attributes, the self-tracking devices intensify and multiply modes of surveillance. Smith and Vonthethoff write that data are ‘a window and conduit to interiority’ that makes visible ‘previously indiscernible or unintelligible bodily processes’.65 The more visible an individual is, the more amenable they are to control and for regulation. The Quantified Self is totally transparent. It is observed by a clinical hyperfocalizing gaze that sees internal and immaterial aspects of the self. Viewing the body as and through data reinforces the neoliberal view of the body ‘as bounded and compartmentalised into separate domains’ that can be ‘renovated or upgraded’ with the purchase of wearable devices, apps, diet supplements, health programmes, cryogenic treatments and blood transfusions.66 This mode of viewing the body reproduces the anorexic mode of looking (Chapter 7) in which the body is viewed as a separate, flawed object. Like the anorexic body, the quantified body is the cause of anxiety and site for the display of achievement. However, the quantifying gaze does not seek to reduce the body to non-existence. Instead, quantification recuperates the anti-consuming anorexic’s strong work ethic, perfectionism and obsession with numbers by shifting the desired end result from minimum calorie intake and thinness to optimum calorie efficiency and fitness. In this respect quantification can be compared to orthorexia and athletic nervosa, as another socially acceptable form of disorder. The Quantified Self combines the fetishistic dissecting gaze with hystericized insistent presence in a manner that produces health and an ideal neoliberal citizen. Like the hysteric who can never be perfect enough, the quantified self can never be fit

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enough. The numbers seem to tell the individual what their body needs. However, as Han states, ‘no insight into the self can result from data and numbers alone, no matter how exhaustive they are. Numbers do not recount anything about the self …. It is not counting, but recounting that leads to self-discovery or self-knowledge’.67 The question ‘who am I?’ is answered in abstract numerical terms that are, in one way, a true answer, but also fail to adequately answer the question. This abstraction is a satisfying response for a hystericized consumer.

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Many aspects of our bodies and our lives are integrated into the neoliberal economy as sign-values. The body is commodified as an erotic object (Chapter 2) and an at-risk subject that strives for health (Chapter 8). Even the anorexic’s refusal to consume is commodified via distraction methods (Chapter 7) and self-tracking devices (Chapter 8). However, Michel de Certeau suggests that the body might break free from capitalist recuperation during moments of intense pleasure or pain: the only force opposing this passion to be a sign is the cry, a deviation or an ecstasy, a revolt or flight of that which, within the body, escapes the law of the named. Perhaps all experience that is not a cry of pleasure or pain is recuperated by the institution. All experience that is not displaced or undone by this ecstasy is captured by ‘the love of the censor’, collected and utilized by the discourse of the law. It is channeled and instrumented.1

The anorexic body is recuperated because it embodies rational body-labour that can be ‘channeled and instrumented’ in a pursuit of health or illness. If the pain of selfstarvation can be appropriated in commodity culture, the pleasure of eating, when it is not bound by social propriety and disapproval, might signify an escape from social control. Perhaps this is why fat people are disciplined with such aggression. In the 1990s, medical and scientific research, along with government and celebrity health campaigns, focused their attention on body fat and the ‘negative health and economic effects of obesity’.2 Prior to this time, being ‘overweight’ was viewed as a potential symptom of a health issue and not an illness in its own right. The adoption of the Body Mass Index (BMI), a height-to-weight ratio devised by Lambert Quetelet in the 1830s and widely adopted in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, contributed to the medicalization of fat. BMI does not describe or incorporate any measurements of wellness, and bodies that might otherwise be healthy are deemed to be ill if their BMI score indicates that they are ‘under-’ or ‘overweight’. BMI 18 or below is categorized as ‘underweight’, while 25 to 29.9 is deemed to be ‘overweight’ and 30 and above signifies ‘obesity’. One of the (many) problems with the BMI is that it does not quantify body fat or distinguish between types of bodies. For example, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 11132 found that body fat ranged from 13.8 per cent to 42.8 per cent in participants with a BMI of 25, indicating a wide variety of

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body types in that classification.3 Women tend to carry more body fat than men but the BMI does not take that into account. In addition, Black people tend to have greater bone density, resulting in higher BMI than white counterparts who have the same percentage of body fat.4 Like many health measures used in neoliberal societies, the BMI was developed by white men with the white male body as the standard, against which all others are measured.

Unproductive citizens Since the 1880s in America and the UK, fat has been viewed as a sign of greed and ‘hoarding’ resources.5 Fat signified that the individual’s physiological ‘accounts’ were not balanced. This economic view of weight also took on a moral rhetoric because obesity was described as unpatriotic and ‘criminal negligence’, warranting punishment.6 During the First World War anti-fat rhetoric stated that Americans who hoarded calories as excess fat were depriving the soldiers in the trenches of their rations. Gordon Lusk, a professor of physiology at Cornell University, said that ‘there are probably a good many million people in the United States whose most patriotic act would be to get thin’.7 In addition, fat was linked to immigrant groups, particularly Italians and Jewish women, so being thin enabled people in minority groups to demonstrate patriotism and assimilation to the American way of life.8

Figure 14  Doctor Jukes pumping the stomach of Sir W. Curtis; several other aldermen wait to be operated on, representing the gross appetites of some civic dignitaries. Coloured etching by W. Heath, 1824. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.

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Contemporary consumer society conceptualizes fat as an ‘epidemic’ and a health ‘timebomb’ that necessitates a ‘war on obesity’. According to Michelle Obama fat is also a threat to national security: more than one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight. [Military leaders] tell us that childhood obesity isn’t just a public health issue, it’s not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well.9

In 2004, Richard Carmona, US surgeon general, described obesity as ‘every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat we face today. It is the threat from within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as weapons of mass destruction’10 – an apt comparison when considering the 2004 USA Intelligence report stating that the small quantity of chemical weapons found in Iraq did not constitute a significant threat.11 Anti-fat attitudes are found to be more prevalent in societies that promote individualism, such as the UK and the United States, than in collectivistically organized countries, such as India and Venezuela.12 Fat implies that an individual does not undertake enough productive activity to use the calories they consume: they take more than they contribute. These commonly accepted ideas present fat individuals as failed citizens and immoral consumers because neoliberal societies view body weight as a personal responsibility, implying that ‘people get what they deserve’ and ‘cause what they get’.13 ‘Responsible citizenship’ requires an individual to be ‘in good health’ and ‘not inflict (self-created) problems on health care’.14 In recent years fat has also been linked to climate change. The article ‘Luxus Consumption: Wasting Food Resources through Overeating’ calculates how much extra carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere when each fat person in America dies.15 Another article calculates the quantity of greenhouse gases that fat people are responsible for, based on the assumption that fat people eat and drive more than thin people, concluding: ‘staying thin’ is ‘good for you and it’s good for the planet’.16 At the level of the individual, it is believed that fat increases health risks, diminishes quality of life and leads to an early death. However, studies have found that men with the lowest mortality rate have BMIs between 23 and 29, many of whom are classed as ‘overweight’, and that men with BMIs 29 to 31 (‘overweight’ and ‘obese’) have the same mortality rate as men with BMIs between 19 and 21, suggesting that the ‘normal’ BMI range is not the healthiest. For women, BMIs 18 to 32 carry the lowest mortality risk, which includes all of the women categorized as ‘normal’ and ‘overweight’ and some women in the ‘obese’ bracket.17 A study led by Ricard Troiano concludes that increased death rates are statistically uncertain for individuals with a BMI less than 40.18 These research findings have been presented at conferences and in journals but have had very little impact on health policy. In fact, in 1997 the BMI threshold for ‘overweight’ was reduced from 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women to 25 for both, despite evidence that people in the higher BMI ranges are more healthy. In addition, weight-loss continues to be prescribed for ‘overweight’ patients despite overwhelming evidence that diets do not produce long-term weight-loss. Studies have found that a third of dieters weigh more after they have dieted.19 Paul Campos writes: ‘Ironically, this suggests that a significant portion of the weight gain observed

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in the American population, and elsewhere, over the course of the past century is attributable to dieting.’20 Susan Wooley and David Garner report that 90 to 95 per cent of weight-loss treatments fail and that dieting has a detrimental effect on the well-being of patients: It may provide patients with failure experiences, expose them to professionals who hold them in low regard, cause them to see themselves as deviant and flawed, confuse their perceptions of hunger and satiety, and divert their attention away from other problems. Such negative consequences … need to be given more serious consideration than they have in the past if we are to do no harm.21

Despite presenting these findings at the National Institutes of Health Technology Assessment Conference on Voluntary Methods of Weight Loss and Control in 1992, obesity and diet industry researchers continue to view fat as a medical condition that should be treated with weight loss. Wooley and Garner write that the ‘irrationality of hopes pinned on weight loss is so striking that dieting might almost be likened to superstitious behavior’.22 However, there are significant financial incentives for the continuation of this superstitious view of ‘obesity’ and dieting. Scientists who study obesity have access to more research grants, and government health agencies have access to more funding if they include weight-loss programmes. These financial incentives also justify the development of more drugs and diet plans, expanding the industry, increasing profits and raising stock prices. Insurance companies cover the costs of weight-loss commodities and surgery, which vastly extends the market for these products.23 J. Eric Oliver writes that the people who ‘proclaimed that obesity is a major health problem also stand the most gain from it being classified as a disease. For America’s public health establishment, an obesity epidemic is worth billions’.24 Fat is very profitable for the diet and health industries but it can impoverish fat people.25 Poverty can be fattening due to lack of access to exercise facilities, long hours of sedentary labour and reliance on low-cost fattening foods. However, Paul Ernsberger argues that ‘fatness is impoverishing’, writing ‘adiposity arises first, and then low [social economic status] results through societal discrimination and stigma’.26 For example, school counsellors are less likely to encourage fat students to go to university and they are less likely to be accepted if they do apply. Fat employees are less likely to be hired or promoted, and will earn significantly less than their thin counterparts.27 Fat discrimination causes downward social mobility, and the social and economic impact of fat is greater for those who are already marginalized: ‘High adiposity is more common among minority groups, including Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, further magnifying discrimination.’28 In her research into the health problems experienced by fat Black lesbians and bisexual women in America, Bianca D. M. Wilson found that the women experience multiple forms of discrimination that have a negative impact on their mental and physical health.29 However, different body ideals within minority cultures can provide protection against some of the self-esteem issues that arise from fat discrimination. Apryl A. Williams’ research on the Tumblr page ‘Fat People of Color’ found that Black women were less likely to diet than white women because they

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view a larger-sized body as feminine and attractive.30 Williams also notes that previous literature says that fat Latina women are more likely than Black women to be ashamed and try to lose weight; however, they were also active on the ‘Fat People of Color’ page.31 Fat gay men described as ‘chubbies’ and the ‘chubby-chasers’ who admire them are exposed to heterosexism and sizeism, and discrimination from within the queer community.32 However, by adopting the terms ‘chubby’ or ‘chubby-chaser’, individuals turn a term of derision into ‘size-positivity’.33 A similar appropriation takes place when fat heterosexual men reclaim the label ‘fat bastard’ to signify British working-class masculinity and ‘otherness from middle-class, biomedical and state expectations about the good consumer/citizen’.34 British men use the label as a badge of pride in order to construct an ‘acceptable’ identity around their fatness, which allows them to ‘distance themselves from the discrediting (emasculating) qualities commonly associated with fatness’.35 In both instances, derogatory language is used to construct positive identities around fatness. However, these labels demonstrate that fat men are socially discredited and must construct acceptable identities in order to resist the medicalized and consumerist imperatives to lose weight. Furthermore, resistance tends to be more successful for white men than for other people who are marginalized. Like the ideology of health, anti-fat discourse conceals structural inequalities that contribute to health inequalities. According to Jonathan Robison, the stigmatization of fat is the last acceptable social prejudice because it is reinforced by state, medical and popular culture discourse.36 For example, the third report of UK Parliament’s Select Committee on Health quotes a witness who suggests that greater obesity stigma would be beneficial so that ‘people made more effort to lose excess weight’. Despite disagreeing with this sentiment, the report concludes that ‘the average person is remorselessly getting heavier’, reinforcing the idea that being fat is personal choice.37 Fat people are more likely to be poor and from ethnic minorities, and so, fat discrimination may provide cover for racism and classism.38

The fetishistic gaze and hyperinvisibility The medicalization of fat as ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’ makes healthy individuals vulnerable to exploitation by weight-loss commodity producers.39 Since the 1990s, fat people have been ‘hypervisible’ to medical and commercial gazes. Paradoxically, fat people, particularly fat women, are also ‘hyperinvisible in that their needs, desires, and lives are grossly overlooked’.40 For example, fat women are hyperinvisible because they are absent from popular culture. Fat women appear in only 1.7 per cent of viewing hours on prime-time US television despite accounting for 33 per cent of the population of American women, and the few fat female characters that exist are ‘used as props against which thinner women are compared, judged, and valued’.41 They are treated as objects of ridicule who are sexually unappealing and invisible in romantic storylines. Fat women are presented as ‘profoundly outside the bounds of appropriate sexuality’.42 As described in Chapter 2, being an object of desire can be an affirming experience and, ‘to have that gaze skip over you, to be rendered sexually invisible by society at large, is to have your full personhood denied’.43

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In her discussion of diet magazines, Jana Evans Braziel expresses her surprise at being unable to find an image of a fat woman between their covers.44 She says that fat women are signified by numerous images of food but very rarely are shown openly because fat bodies are outside the frame of signification of capitalism. She describes the fat body as the absent body-in-excess: an all-consuming, uncontrollable monstrosity that can be represented only by what she consumes. Food, then, is a metonym that effectively obscures the grotesqueness of what cannot be depicted.45

Kathleen LeBesco writes that the fat body is invisible in popular culture because it is inseparable from fat body politics and a positive image of fat bodies would support the growing political movement campaigning to end discrimination against fat people. Magazines and television programmes frequently rely on funding from the diet, health and beauty industries, so any strategy to take a fat-body positive stand is a conflict of interest.46 Instead, magazines and television programmes respond to public demands for the representation of a greater variety of body types with ‘plus-size’ models who are actually an average body size, rarely exceeding size 12 in US clothing sizes (UK size 16). Madeline Jones, editor-in-chief of Plus Model Magazine, says that plus-size model sizes have changed from 12 to 18 in US clothing size (16 to 22 in UK clothing sizes) in 2002 to size 6 to 14 (UK sizes 10 to 18) in 2012.47 The fat body still remains invisible but a marginally greater number of average bodies are represented in commercial culture, and the variety has diminished since 2002. Depicting fat is deemed to be problematic because it always, instantly, says too much: greed, laziness, loss of control and failed citizenship. As Petra Kuppers writes, ‘the fat woman is fat, and this sign rules all her other aspects’.48 This is demonstrated by a predominance of photographs that reduce fat people to body parts that emphasize fat. For example, Charlotte Cooper uses the term ‘headless fatties’ to describe photographs in news reports about ‘obesity’ that show a fat person, seemingly photographed unaware, with their head neatly cropped out of the picture … the body becomes symbolic: we are there but we have no voice, not even a mouth in a head, no brain, no thoughts or opinions. Instead we are reduced and dehumanized as symbols of cultural fear: the body, the belly, the arse, food.49

Cooper’s critique is supported by a content analysis of photographs used by American news websites to accompany articles about ‘obesity’. Seventy-two per cent of images of fat people met at least one of the following stigmatizing tropes: they disproportionately emphasize abdomen or lower body, or depict the abdomen without clothes; the head is cut off the image; the individual is wearing tightly fitting clothing; they are consuming unhealthy food and drink; and they are engaging in a sedentary activity. Fat people are ‘reduced to being symbols of the [“obesity”] epidemic, rather than valued members of society who deserve compassion and respect’.50

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In order to be visible in consumer culture in a manner that does not express negative attributes, fat people must demonstrate their desire to be thin. For example, adverts for diet products, exercise regimes and surgical procedures juxtapose ‘before’ and ‘after’ images to ‘prove’ that the products work. The fat body is represented as a ‘before’ image: the ‘future conditional, suspended between what they are and who they will be when they are finally thin’.51 Le’a Kent writes: the self, the person, is presumptively thin, and cruelly jailed in a fat body. The self is never fat. To put it bluntly, there is no such thing as a fat person. The before-andafter scenario … consigns the fat body to an eternal past.52

Similarly, Niall Richardson writes that films and television programmes featuring fat characters frequently use prosthetic fat suits and flashback sequences to present fat in the ‘past tense’.53 For example, two episodes of Friends feature flashbacks of ‘fat Monica’, in which the actress wears a prosthetic fat suit. Weight watchers encourage their members to keep a ‘before’ photograph to hand. This is not to show the progress made but rather to act as a warning. Jean Nidetch, the founder of the diet company, says, ‘I pray I’ll never get to the point where I’ll think I’ve always been thin’ because ‘I don’t know of anybody who has been fat who ever feels totally safe again. We know we’re not cured. We’re merely arrested.’54 In an inversion of the ‘thin person trying to escape a fat body’ idea, weight watchers view thinness as a temporary state that is permanently threatened by the return of fat, reinforcing the need for continuous vigilance and body-labour.

Health and the ‘good’ neoliberal fatty In popular visual culture, fat bodies are absent or subjectively erased. However, since the 1960s, fat activists have fought to make fat bodies visible and valued. They organize demonstrations against fat prejudice, challenge dominant views, advocate for fat people and lobby companies accused of prejudice. Activists also reclaimed the word ‘fat’ as a descriptive term that does not carry the moral stigma or medicalization of ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’.55 In 1969, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) was established in the United States, and in the 1970s, former NAAFA members in San Francisco formed Fat Underground (FU), a radical feminist group. FU’s 1973 Fat Liberation Manifesto asserts that fat women are ridiculed and exploited by ‘commercial and sexist interests … thereby creating an immensely profitable market selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, that ridicule’.56 A member of the group wrote an open letter to a doctor, stating, ‘you see fat as suicide, I see weight-loss as murdergenocide, to be precise – the systematic murder of a biological minority by organised medicine’.57 Members of FU studied medical journal articles about obesity to draw attention to misleading claims made in the mass media and advertising.58 In the manifesto they demand that diet and ‘reducing’ industries should ‘take responsibility for their false claims [and] acknowledge that their products are harmful to the public health’.59 They also repudiated ‘the mystified “science” which falsely claims that [fat people] are unfit’.60

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Contemporary fat activists continue to draw attention to the prejudice experienced by fat people and challenge the assumed link between thinness and health. The Health at Every Size (HAES) movement emerged in the 1960s alongside the fat activist movement. HAES practitioners do not prescribe weight-loss treatments and instead focus on improving the emotional and physical well-being of fat people, in order to achieve good health at ‘the weight you turn out to be when you are living a good life’.61 Deb Burgard, a HEAS medical practitioner, writes: ‘Letting go of the goal of weightloss has made HAES controversial in a society where the pursuit of thinness is an unquestioned prescription for health and happiness’ and that it is ‘hypocritical to prescribe practices for heavier people that we would diagnose as eating disordered in thin ones’.62 The few existing research studies into HAES indicate positive outcomes for patients. One study comparing HAES to weight-loss treatments found that after two years HAES participants had maintained their weight and experienced health improvements, including lower blood pressure and improved self-esteem, but the weight-loss participants did not.63 Fat Acceptance activists differ from HAES advocates in their relation to health, claiming that ‘health’ is an ableist, moral value that pathologizes bodies.64 They reject the obligation to engage in healthy lifestyles, saying that ‘each person is free to decide for her or himself if they want to embrace the issues that may accompany long-term intake of unhealthful foods without being judged on the moral validity of their body’s existence’.65 In her analysis of comments made on the controversial blog post ‘Should “Fatties” Get a Room? (Even on TV)?’ featured on the American Marie Claire website, Marissa Dickins notes that comments that are critical of the anti-fat sentiment of the blog demonstrate differing relations to health. A small group of commenters ‘celebrated body autonomy’ and rejected the requirement of healthiness.66 A larger group justify their size using ‘socially acceptable reasons for their weights’ or express their ‘responsible citizenship’ by: emphasis[ing] their detailed knowledge surrounding weight, fitness and dieting …. [A]ccording to them their health and fitness level was superior  –  especially in relation to those who strove to stigmatise them and challenge their claims. Declarations of impeccable medical tests, metabolic health, physical fitness, and low service utilisation served to further this justification.67

Like the HAES movement, these commenters challenge the view that fat individuals are unhealthy and a burden to the state, but in doing so, they infer support for the ableist view that unhealthy fat individuals are irresponsible citizens.68 In the 1990s, the Body Positivity movement emerged, using feminist discourse of empowerment and a rhetoric of self-love to reduce social stigma and increase the visibility of fat bodies. However, in her discussion of three Body Positivity websites featuring user-generated content, Alexandra Sastre says, the websites frequently function as spaces where a particular mode of acceptability is modeled to those liminal bodies that … [are] not-quite thin enough to stand in as an ideal, not-quite large enough to incite panic, and not-quite visible enough to merit

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attention. Therefore, many of these sites problematically emerge as channels through which to construct proprietary boundaries around normativity despite their paradoxical emphasis on dismantling bodily standards altogether.69

By expanding but not rejecting the definitions of an acceptable body, the movement ‘re-inscribes, rather than liberates, the body’.70 Many of the photographs on the websites are visually similar to photographs of ‘headless fatties’ in which fat is the defining feature of the body. The bodies are presented as fragments, predominantly the torso but also ‘other body parts, often identified as the area of the body the subject feels most insecure about’.71 The bodies are presented in a manner reminiscent of the magnifying, dissecting gaze commonly found in advertising: the ‘flawed’ body parts are the only parts that are shown. As in thinspiration photographs, participants frequently omit the head or obscure the eyes. Sastre notes that the My Body Gallery website includes a tool that participants can use to obscure their identity when they upload a photograph.72 Like thinspiration selfies, the body positive photographs depict bodies in a way that suggests an ambivalent mix of pride and dissociation. Photographs are uploaded to the websites as an act of body acceptance, but when the identity is obscured, they seem to undermine this statement, instead reluctantly ‘confessing’ the imperfection of their body. Furthermore, self-acceptance and empowerment are achieved by sharing photographs of their bodies online, reinforcing the neoliberal ideals of self-disclosing subjects and hystericized insistent presence (Chapter 3). As Sastre writes: The ideology of body positivity frames the democratization of exposure as liberatory, and positions the inclusivity it embeds in the act of showing oneself as a radical move. Yet in so doing, it continues to imagine the relinquishment of privacy and the act of exposure as the devices through which bodily acceptance is obtained; rather than liberating the docile body, there is merely an extension of who is allowed to declare her compliance.73

In asserting that non-normative bodies have a right to be visible online, the Body Positive movement reproduces rather than challenges the capitalist transaction, in which individuals are given social acceptance if they agree to be exhibited and sexually objectified. This trend is repeated on social networking sites. Research shows that #HealthAtEverySize, #CurvyFit and #Fatspiration posts contain greater racial and body diversity than #BodyPositivity and #Fitspiration posts.74 In #HealthAtEverySize and #Fatspiration posts, full or three-fourth body length shots are common and body fragmentation is rare. However, like body positivity images, #HealthAtEverySize and #Fatspiration photographs predominantly show high ‘normal weight’ and low ‘overweight’ bodies, and so they marginally extend the boundaries of acceptable bodies without challenging them. Disturbingly, HAES posts have been found to contain the same amount of fat stigmatizing content as fitspiration posts.75 Similarly, #CurvyFit photographs do not depict very fat bodies, and like #Fitspiration, present ‘a stronger appearance-focus orientation to “fitness” and “health”’ and often emphasize ‘weight loss, body modification (e.g., before-and-after images), and objectification

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(e.g., exposing bare midriff and visible cleavage)’.76 HAES content tends to focus on exercise and healthy eating, whereas #Fatspiration posts are more likely to present fashion and beauty content ‘exemplifying how beauty and style are attainable and not privileges reserved only for thin women’.77 However, the authors note that the value placed on appearance in the fashion-oriented posts may expose the selfie-takers to the negative effects of body objectification.

#EmpoweringPresence Being visible is empowering or disciplining depending on the individual’s social status and the type of body they possess. People who conform to dominant body ideals ‘have the privilege of being visible when it is important to be acknowledged while simultaneously remaining invisible when it comes to public scrutiny’.78 The insistent presence demanded by neoliberal capitalism and social media create opportunities to be visible and an audience that is always present. It also provides ideal images for users to judge themselves against. Fat Acceptance bloggers critique the positive and negative aspects of creating and sharing selfies. Adwoa A. Afful and Rose Ricciardelli analysed the content of four blogs and found that gender stereotypical beauty ideals are reproduced in some of the posts. For example, Fierce, one of the bloggers, recommends that her readers become more comfortable with their fat bodies by dressing up in lingerie. Afful and Ricciardelli interpret the post as exposing a contradiction in which an apparently subversive act of displaying a non-normative body does not question why women are subjected to restrictive beauty standards and ‘instead asks for that standard to be expanded to include fat women’.79 In another post, Fierce asks why ‘big butts and big hips’ are desirable but other parts such as big arms and thighs are not. In answer to her own question, she writes: ‘These fat body parts are made acceptable because they contribute to the hyper-sexualization of women … they’re basically being rendered solely as an object of sexual desire and a source of pleasure for the male gaze.’80 Fat bodies are permitted to be visible if they submit to a fetishizing gaze (Chapter 2). Williams writes that users of the ‘Fat People of Color’ Tumblr page resist the fetishization of their bodies by adding disclaimers like the text accompanying a photograph posted by Adriana: And most of all it’s a fuck you to everyone who fetishes the fat body. I don’t want your fucking help. I am not your fucking fetish… ***DONT REBLOG THIS TO YOUR FETISH/PORN BLOGS that’s not what these are for.81

Fetishization reduces an individual to a single attribute so fat women continue to be defined by their fat as they are in ‘headless fatty’ photographs. The personal and political intentions of the photographs are erased and the sexualized fat body is commodified as pornography. Ann Cahill writes that ‘virtually every unsexed category can show up in pornographic subgenres as fetishes’, but this does not indicate ‘a compensatory objectification that seeks to rectify their absence from mainstream media’ but instead presents the bodies ‘as repulsive, and therefore worthy of degrading treatment’.82

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Fat people are allowed to be visible only as symbols of ‘obesity’, ‘before’ photographs of a body that wishes to be thin, or sexual fetishes. The content of fat acceptance selfies is also disciplined. Marianne Kirby, one of the bloggers that features in the study by Afful and Ricciardelli, writes: No bold colors, no stripes, nothing that would ever make us look bigger… . we draw less attention to ourselves when we comply with fashion rules. We occupy less space, metaphorically if not physically. We minimize ourselves for the comfort of other people. It reinforces the sense of shame we’re supposed to feel because of our bodies, until we police ourselves.83

Shame is an effective disciplinary tool because it is intensely personal and deeply social. Experiences of shame call into question our preconceptions about ourselves and compel us to see ourselves through the eyes of others – and to recognise the discrepancy between their perception of us and our own oversimplified and egotistical conception of ourselves.84

Shame is an unpleasant experience of exposure that forces the individual to recognize that they do not live up to social expectation.85 Gary Thrane writes: ‘I turn away from myself in disgust, and  I  expect others to do so as well ….  I  wish to be invisible.’86 Visibility and exposure are integral to shame. For example, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes seeing himself through the eyes of an imaginary spectator as he kneels before the keyhole, and says, ‘I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other … I recognise that I am as the Other sees me’.87 Shame requires an audience. Kirby does not feel shame because she rejects and disrupts dominant social ideals: ‘sometimes I like to dress to piss people off – I like to use color and texture and certain pieces of clothing really aggressively to provoke reactions’.88 She demands the right to be visible, and her performance of insistent presence is not a request for affirmation of desirableness. Kirby and other fat activists extend modes of fat embodiment … by refusing to present their size as an unfortunate reality that thinner people should tolerate, and instead embrace their bodies by performing their fatness (e.g., wearing clothes that highlight it) to pressure their audience to confront their own fat biases.89

Fat Acceptance activists reject the shameful fat identity. They demand to be seen as complex individuals rather than fetishes who more or less conform to social norms. Fat acceptance selfies are actively empowering. In forcing viewers to confront their own prejudice, they produce ‘a personal sense of power and control, which carries the potential for social impact through exerting influence on existing discourses and ways of looking’.90 Fat acceptance selfies express the desires and pleasure of the body, and threaten to undermine the neoliberal ideology of the ‘good thin body (a body good only because

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Figure 15 ‘#fat #fatshion#fashion #fatfashion #podcasts #femmes #femmesover40 #whatfatgirlsactuallywear #eldergoth’ by Marianne Kirby. Instagram Post (https://www. instagram.com/p/B2RfdH4HpGO/), Washington DC (2019). Credit: The author. Reproduced with permission from the author.

it is marked by the self ’s repeated discipline)’.91 The fat body represents pleasure, but not the circumscribed pleasure experienced by achievement-subjects and selftracking enthusiasts. For example, on Supersize vs Superskinny, the superskinny participant is presented with a seemingly endless succession of gargantuan meals, while the supersized participant is given small quantities of bland food. The bland and repetitive diet of the superskinny participant brings to mind descriptions of binge eating: mechanical, joyless eating in which the food loses its taste, texture and aroma.92 These analyses of binge eating assume that all experiences of uncontrolled eating are devoid of pleasure and wilful choice. But the supersize participant watches with envy and palpable excitement as the superskinny tucks in to their favourite food. It is precisely pleasure that is under attack in the disparagement of fat because fat signifies the pleasure of eating practiced outside the bounds of cultural control. At the end

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of each episode of Supersize vs Superskinny the two participants are reunited after a number of months dieting at home and their weight loss is revealed. The voice-over describing a superskinny participant says, ‘she’s even got a cleavage for the first time in her life’.93 The participant has submitted her eating habits to social regulation and her reward is to be acknowledged as an object of desire. The praise offered to the supersize participant is couched in terms of health and extension of life, rather than desirableness. The fat body continues to be de-sexualized because it already signifies a carnal pleasure, the forbidden pleasure of eating without restraint. Le’a Kent writes that we should view fat bodies as bodies marked by their desires, a change in signification that would allow fat people to relate to their bodies in the present and not as a ‘before’ image of a thin body. Referring to FaT GiRL, a fanzine made for and by fat lesbian women, she says: It uses the erotic to envision a good, pleasurable body in which there is an interplay between the body’s desire and the self ’s expressions – the good body is rewritten as the body that can tell the self its desires, act on its desire, provide pleasures. Suddenly the disciplined body, the dieting body, the subject of ‘self-control’, seems empty and impoverished.94

Fat acceptance selfies destabilize the body-labour ideology of self-denial when they are unapologetic in their display of enjoyment. The shameless insistent presence of fat acceptance activists disrupts the power of the fetishistic dissecting gaze by presenting the body as aggressively visible and whole, using clashing colours and textures to prevent hyperfocalization on parts. By refusing to view their bodies as flawed segments, they are insulated from the sadistic commands of capitalism.

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Consuming the Body examines contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of ideal gendered bodies, paying particular attention to the new mechanisms of interaction produced by social networking sites. It identifies instances in which the system feeds on individuality and difference in order to erase both, commoditizing the consumer and their desire, and compelling them towards fetishistic gender stereotypes in order to sell products to them. For example, body positivity and the HEAS movements have resulted in marginally greater body diversity in advertising and popular culture, provided that the individuals who are represented in them conform to normative ideals of attractiveness and heterosexuality. The modes of address described in this book which facilitate neoliberal erasure of differences are: sadistic commands, a fetishistic dissecting gaze and hystericized insistent presence. Alongside the production of gendered body ideals, these modes of address produce an ideal neoliberal subject who is characterized by perfectionism, competitiveness and mimetic identification. The neoliberal subject described in this book is a conceptual characterization of an imagined individual who will thrive in neoliberal capitalism, rather than a description of a real person. Precarious employment, reduced state support, zero-hour contracts and an audit culture that constantly monitors performance combine to produce individuals who are responsible for their needs, failures and achievements. They are flexible, adaptable and competitive, and view their body as a self-actualization project and a source of capital. Neoliberalism idealizes perfectionism and rivalry, producing hystericized individuals. Hystericized people often intensify competitive environments due to their compulsion to surpass and usurp their rivals. Crucially, they make ideal consumers because they can never be perfect enough and consequently are never satisfied. Advertisers sadistically address the hystericized consumer with an endless barrage of messages about their imperfections. Commodified body-labour is part of the hystericized individual’s self-actualization project, so it is undertaken willingly. The fetishistic dissecting gaze that carves up bodies and magnifies ‘problem areas’ in adverts is internalized by the hystericized consumer, intensifying their feeling of imperfection. Although some bodies are marginalized and disciplined to a greater extent than others, commodity culture causes most people to experience a future-conditional relationship with their ‘imperfect’ present self and so all consumers are visible to the discipline of the dissecting gaze. However, the modes of address also reinforce social hierarchies

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and inequalities because they function with different intensity for different groups of people. Being visible is experienced as empowering or disciplining depending on the individual’s social status and the type of body they possess. Those who are white, able-bodied, middle-class, heterosexual and thin are likely to be visible for praise but invisible to negative scrutiny. Marginalized people are likely to be visible for criticism and overlooked in terms of their needs, desires and values. For example, on social networking sites, people who are already privileged and closely resemble dominant beauty standards are more likely to achieve popularity and Instafame. Algorithms suppress posts by marginalized people who challenge norms, such as fat activists and non-binary influencers. Online aggression towards marginalized people is also common: ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, transsexual, and others with non-traditional sexual and/or gender identities tend to be attacked online at a much higher rate (two to four times higher) than their heterosexual counterparts’.1 On social networking sites, ‘self-enactment and disclosure’ via selfies is viewed to be liberatory and ‘radical’, but selfies are double-edged swords that subject the selfietaker to the disciplinary forces of the panopticon and the spectacle.2 Peer pressure, social expectation and shame compel people to post selfies, and the types of selfies they take are constrained by complex social expectations and ideals. They contribute to the competitive neoliberal environment in which the body is a sign of success and source of bodily capital. Research shows that selfies raise awareness and challenge stereotypes, and reinforce dominant ideals. Selfies can contribute to a more inclusive visual culture online and disrupt existing power hierarchies that determine who is worthy of being seen, but they also increase opportunities for surveillance and hostility. In their selfies, individuals are encouraged to assimilate to dominant social ideals that are gender-stereotypical, ableist, sizeist and predominantly white, middle-class and heteronormative. Contemporary consumer culture has produced a disciplinary gaze that is powerful and insidious because it has a medicalized, clinical façade. Healthism reinforces gender stereotypes and the idea of personal responsibility, both of which conceal how social inequality and discriminatory practices contribute to poor health. Neoliberalism is bad for health: it prevents people from accepting their self as imperfect but good enough, a process that is necessary to become a healthy, happy and integrated being.3 The body is viewed as an object of prestige, a source of capital, a sign of good citizenship and a risky and at-risk thing that is prone to fail. By viewing the self as an object of scientific study and gathering data on a range of tangible and intangible bodily attributes, social media and self-tracking practices intensify and multiply modes of surveillance. The consequence of conflating health, beauty and social value in unachievable body ideals can be seen in the similarity of content found in social media posts using hashtags relating to fitness, body positivity and eating disorder. Thinspiration photographs demonstrate the logical end point of the ideal commodified body and the internalized fetishistic dissecting gaze. Orthorexia, athletic nervosa and ‘cyberchondria’ may be the culture-bound syndromes of mid-twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism.4 The ideal neoliberal subject is sick. Evidence of this can be found in articles recently published in The Wall Street Journal reporting leaked information from Facebook relating to the impact of Instagram on mental well-being. Facebook employees with backgrounds in computer

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science, psychology, and quantitative and qualitative analysis carried out a ‘teen mental health deep dive’.5 The findings confirm conclusions already reached by researchers examining social media and selfies (some of which are outlined in Chapter 4): selfies intensify self-scrutiny and peer comparisons, which cause low self-esteem and poor body image. However, spokespeople from the platforms continue to downplay the impact on young people’s mental health. At a congressional hearing in March 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said: ‘The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits’, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram told reporters in May 2021 that negative effects on mental health were likely to be ‘quite small’.6 The negative impact of selfies and photo-sharing has been proven, but the drive for profit prevents meaningful action being taken. The platforms feed on low self-esteem and negative emotions such as outrage. However, discouraging users from taking selfies or encouraging them to withdraw from social media would disadvantage marginalized people because online social networks provide vital opportunities for communication, visibility and community. Therefore, it is important to find ways to participate online that are resilient to and resist the disciplinary modes of address and structures of the sites. In order to achieve this, the following questions must be answered: ●●

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How can people take selfies and resist the fetishistic dissecting gaze that makes people feel negatively towards their body and their life? How would selfies look if they do not present an idealized, aspirational and spectacular (branded) self? How can selfies present authentic images of the self that contribute to a more inclusive visual culture on social networking sites, but are not easily commoditized?

Empowering ambiguity On social networking sites, ‘the resistance and recalcitrance of otherness, of foreignness, troubles and impedes the smooth communication of the Same’.7 For example, thinspiration photographs interrupt the flow of identifications and social comparisons online. The viewer is temporarily incapacitated by the spectacle of the skeletal body but they are not changed by it. Fat acceptance selfies disrupt the power relations of looking because they present fat individuals in complex ways that force viewers to confront their own prejudice. They exude empowering presence. In the course of writing this book, I have identified a few methods that might be used when taking and editing selfies in order to challenge dominant ideals without assimilating to them. These ideas are heavily indebted to the researchers, theorists and selfie-takers that I have discussed in this book. To develop concrete approaches for reimagining selfies I also draw upon work by Hito Steyerl (artist), Legacy Russell (curator), Sara Ahmed, Elizabeth Freeman, Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi (feminist and queer theorists), and my collaborative work with Dr A.C. Davidson on the Bois of Isolation Instagram project.

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Disruption through pleasure/action Fat acceptance selfies express the desires and pleasures of the body, and destabilize the neoliberal body-labour ideology of self-denial. Pleasure can also be expressed by capturing bodily activity in blurred or montaged selfies. Mike Featherstone writes that, unlike the ‘body as image’ that must be improved in order to be compared and appraised, the ‘moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance’.8 Rather than concentrate on how the body looks, these selfies would show what the body can do.

Visual and emotional ambivalence Montaged selfies that recombine fragments of the body into a new form would make social comparisons between peers difficult, and could therefore reduce health and self-esteem issues that are caused by downward comparisons. These selfies would not reproduce the fragmentation and splintering that is expressed in hystericized insistent presence, or present the body as dissected into small imperfect parts by commodity producers. Rather, the fragments of the body dissected by consumer culture would be reassembled in a manner that expresses the feelings and capabilities of the body. Alexandra Sastre puts forward this idea for a radical body positive movement. She asks: ‘What if the visual rhetoric of body positivity were to embrace a Rabelaisian inversion, following the impetus of the fat positive movement’?9 Sastre draws on Tobin Siebers’ ‘new realism of the body’ that presents disabled bodies with ‘the raw expression of the baser dimensions of corporeality … through detailing a body that eats, shits, and convulses, a body that viscerally struggles with its vulnerability’.10 Sastre identifies entries on body positivity websites that ‘replace body positivity’s narrative of success with uncertainty and vulnerability’.11 Rather than presenting an idealized, commoditized and spectacular body, selfie takers could show their bodies ‘in chaos, in the truth of their instability’.12 Expressing vulnerability online (or anywhere else) is risky, particularly for individuals who are already marginalized and likely to experience hostility online. Montage offers a way to mask identity, shielding the individual without diminishing their complexity. Embracing a full range of emotions might also undermine the faux-positivity of the like economy on social media. Selfies produced during workshops and shared on the Bois of Isolation Instagram page sometimes presented an unsmiling or frowning face in direct response to the gendered request to ‘give us a smile’.13 These selfies reject the notion that people, and especially feminine people, should be positive and pleasing to others irrespective of how they actually feel. In her book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed writes that happiness is socially determined and normative because people learn to find happiness in certain middle-class, heteronormative objects, such as property, marriage, children and promotion at work. She writes: ‘Where we find happiness teaches us what we value rather than simply what is of value.’14 Happiness is a compromise and a constraint; it is ‘getting what you desire, and desiring what you get.

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You must give up desiring what you have not got, and cannot get’.15 When an individual fails to find happiness where it is supposed to be found and continues to desire other things, they are pathologized by society and labelled a ‘killjoy’. For Ahmed, feminists are killjoys who ‘disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places …. It is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by the objects that are supposed to cause happiness but that their failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others’.16 Feminist killjoy selfies would montage together images of the selfie-taker’s body in different physical and emotional states.

Ambiguity Commodity culture fixes meaning to objects and people in order to sell them. Adverts may seem confusing and unclear at times, even to the extent that we are not sure what is being sold, but the sign-value given to the commodity is fixed. Jean Baudrillard describes sign-value as ‘rooted in its exclusion and annihilation of all symbolic ambivalence on behalf of a fixed and equational structure …. Thus, the sign proffers itself as full value: positive, rational, exchangeable value’.17 He argues that ambiguity and misinterpretation may disrupt the dominant political economy of signs in capitalism: ‘only ambivalence (as a rupture of value, of another side or beyond of sign value, and as the emergence of the symbolic) sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign …. It brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill’.18 Consumers and commodities are fixed and exchangeable when they can be categorized and defined. In order to escape this fixedness, selfies might employ methods that produce visual ambiguity, such as glitches. Legacy Russell writes that queer bodies are glitchy because they ‘are encrypted: how we are coded is not meant to be easily read …. Our unreadable bodies can render us invisible and hypervisible at the same time’.19 Russell describes the glitch as a movement towards something that is unexpected and unintended, and also an obstacle that prevents from seeing or achieving an intended outcome. It is a form of ghosting, which dissolves the body and renders ‘our factual fragments … scrambled, rendered unreadable’.20 Through montage, visual obstruction and ghosting, selfies may represent bodies in ways that are ambiguous and difficult to decode. The individuals depicted can be visible and confrontational, and masked and obscured, preventing categorization and comparison. These selfies would present a visual form of symbolic ambivalence: ‘a rupture’ in sign-value exchange. Image degradation, such as blur and pixelation, may also produce images that disrupt the dominant modes of looking. Hito Steyerl writes: Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one’s value as an image. The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution … a high resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak.21

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Figure 16  ‘Glitch Selfie’ by Dawn Woolley and A.C. Davidson. Bois of Isolation Instagram Project (https://www.instagram.com/boisofisolation/), UK (2020). Credit: The authors. CC BY-NC-ND.

Low resolution, blurred images are outside the system of value that preferences sharpness and high resolution, and so ‘their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria’.22 Pixelated, blurred selfies may be exempt from comparison with neoliberal white, ableist, thin, and heteronormative body ideals.

Queer timelines Social networking sites encourage users to present their life as a series of noteworthy (Instagramable) events that fit into the structure of the Timeline, and they preference events and activities that reinforce dominant heteronormative time. Elizabeth Freeman writes that dominant heteronormative time is marked by social and state-sanctioned milestones such as birth, marriage and retirement. It is ‘event-centred, goal-oriented, intentional, and culminating in epiphanies of major transformations’.23 Rather than

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following a seemingly inevitable trajectory from birth to death punctuated by key events, queer time moves ‘through and with time, encountering pasts, speculating futures, and interpenetrating the two in ways that counter the common sense of the present tense’.24 In reference to the way that novels and films are able to manipulate time, Freeman writes that queer time exists in ‘moments when an established temporal order gets interrupted and new encounters consequently take place’.25 Her list of devices used in film that may queer time include: asynchrony, belatedness, compression, delay, flashback, pause, repetition and reversal. These filmic methods could also be employed in selfies to compress past, present, and (possibly) future into a single frame. Montaged selfies could disrupt the ‘eventification’ of life and also resist the message of linear transformation expressed in ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs in advertising that naturalize the aim of progress towards a perfect, finished and ideal body. Instead, they would allow for the depiction of ‘oscillating’ fluid identities and a ‘more complex narrative context’.26

Multiplicity Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi suggest that using both/and thinking will help us to escape the binarism of either/or thinking that pits female against male, healthy against unhealthy, fat against thin and good against bad, leaving no space in between for nuance and variation. They write: ‘Both/and requires us to move away from the rigid binary of either/or – which closes down possibilities – to consider a binary that opens up more possibilities.’27 They continue: ‘We can more fully embrace the many paradoxical feelings, experiences, and identities that most of us embody when we choose a both/and approach.’28 Employing this mode of thinking in selfies could result in montages or series of images showing different aspects of identity, lifestyle, pleasures and displeasures, presenting the self as a ‘multiversal being’, to use Barker and Iantaffi’s term. If people view themselves and others as ‘multidimensional’, they change ‘from flat, two-dimensional cartoon characters, to three-dimensional – at least – complex beings, and so does everyone and everything else around us’.29 A multiversal being would present a challenge to social media platforms that require each user to present a singular, coherent identity in order to more effectively sell their data and attention. It would enable ‘code switching’, blending sign-values to express a range of identity markers and potentially destabilize dominant sign-values in the process. These selfies could also challenge the human-centricity of consumer culture, blending the self with different objects, places and people, to give a complex impression of life in a moment in time. These ideas do not escape the need for self-presentation and self-exposure, and they carry the risks attached to being visible in the public sphere. However, they also present opportunities to play with identity in selfies and present the self in a radically different way. They offer a way of being present, without being spectacular and subjected to a disciplining gaze. #EmpoweringPresence #EmpoweringAmbiguity

Glossary Attention commodity For advertising to be effective, consumers have to pay attention to the adverts. As described by Davenport and Beck in The Attention Economy, attention has value; consumers are familiar with advertising practices and know how to avoid looking at adverts. Davenport and Beck call this an ‘attention-protecting feature’. Social media platforms are good at capturing users’ attention because they offer continuous new content, connections and activities. Reward systems such as likes make the user feel good and want to spend more time on the sites and produce more content. Social media users are sold to advertisers as attention commodities. Advertisers pay social networking sites to post adverts in the newsfeeds of their target demographic and pay the platform every time a user clicks on an advert. Christian Fuchs writes, ‘Advertisements on the Internet are frequently personalized; this is made possible by surveilling, storing, and assessing user activities with the help of computers and databases.’ Users self-select the marketing demographic they belong in because their actions and interactions online express what they like, and this makes advertising online more effective than other forms of marketing. However, as in wider society, the attention economy reproduces and reinforces social inequalities. Eileen Meeghan writes about gender inequality and sexism in advertising, saying that advertisers ‘discriminate against anyone outside the commodity audience of white, 18 to-34-year-old, heterosexual, English-speaking, upscale men’. This is because young, white, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class men are assumed to be the wealthiest and therefore most valuable audience. On Facebook, male attention commodities are more expensive than female ones. A user’s value is also determined by where they live: users from wealthy countries are assumed to have greater spending power than users in poorer countries so their attention costs more. According to Fuchs, advertisers will pay Facebook $4.48 per click through for Norwegian men (Norwegian women are worth $4.27) in comparison to Central African Republic female users, who are worth $0.17 per click (Central African Republic males are worth $0.23). Data commodification produces a racist, sexist and classist hierarchy. Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). Christian Fuchs, ‘Labor in informational capitalism and on the internet’, The Information Society 26 (2010), pp. 179–96, p. 192. Eileen Meehan, ‘Gendering the commodity audience: Critical media research, feminism, and political economy’, in Eileen Meehan and Eileen R. Riordan (eds), Sex and Money. Feminism and Political Economy in the Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 209–22, p. 220.

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Big data commodity As a result of the growth of the internet and rise of social networking sites, data has become easy to collect and very valuable. Bernard Harcourt writes that by 2012 the data brokerage market for personal data was worth $156 billion. Data brokerage companies troll the Internet to collect all available data. […] They then mine, analyse, organize, and link the data, creating valuable data sets for sale, and generating an entire political economy of publicity and surveillance that can only properly be described as neoliberal-privatized, deregulated, and outsourced (Harcourt).

According to Harcourt, the types of personal data that are sold include lists of rape and domestic abuse survivors, and people with HIV/AIDS. The companies produce lists of vulnerable consumers that can be targeted for commodities and financial services, such as ‘Rural and Barely Making It’, ‘Tough Start: Young Single Parents’ and ‘Zero Mobility’. When users are viewed as attention commodities, there is a hierarchy that views marginalized people to be less valuable because they have less money. As big data commodities, marginalized and vulnerable people are targeted for exploitation. On social networking sites, when users post content, interact with other users and respond to posts on commercial and person profiles, they create data about who they are and what they like. This data is packaged by the platform and sold to different companies and advertisers. For example, a health insurance company might buy data that clusters users who are over fifty years old, live in a rural area and have engaged with well-being websites. When advertisers buy big data and use it to target users on social networking sites by placing adverts on the user’s newsfeed, the user is both a data commodity and an attention commodity. Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 198–9 and 202.

Bio-power Michel Foucault noticed that in the seventeenth century, power was not exerted over populations using a threat of violence and death but using mechanisms that exert power over life, making it more useful and easier to control. He writes, ‘there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’. ‘Bio-power’ is a term he used to describe these techniques. He says: Bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production … it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.

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Using processes and apparatuses of bio-power, capitalists turn worker’s bodies into a regulated and reliable part of the production line. The workers became more efficient and more disciplined, and therefore easier to manage. Bio-power is a ‘continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism’ that can ‘qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize’ bodies in order to optimize and control them. Bodies are compared to a norm to determine if corrective measures are required. The norm is usually a healthy male body. Today, wellness programmes run by employers to reduce the impact of stress and other work-related illnesses are an example of bio-power. The worker may be advised to eat a healthier diet, undertake more exercise and reduce alcohol consumption. Although these actions may improve the worker’s mental and physical well-being, the aim of the programme is to make the worker more productive and reduce the need for sick leave. They also enable employers to influence the worker’s free time and the types of leisure activities they can undertake. The programmes place responsibility for the causes and solutions for workplace illness in the hands of the individual, so they are also an example of healthism. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 6th edn (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 139–40, pp. 140–1 and 144.

Culture-bound syndrome A culture-bound syndrome is an illness, characterized by a set of symptoms that are specific to a particular time and place. As Asti Husvedt writes: different cultures experience bodies  –  their organs and bones and blood  –  in different ways. The French suffer from mal au foie or liver ache. The Japanese can be afflicted by taijin kyofusho, an intense fear that their body is offensive to others. In Malaysia, epidemics of Koro have been reported. Koro produces symptoms of sudden and intense anxiety that one’s sexual organs will recede into the body and cause death. Each of these disorders is recognized by their respective medical communities as a valid diagnosis. Every culture molds bodies; bodies adapt and respond with the appropriate symptoms.

Kleptomania may be considered a culture-bound syndrome that was produced by changes in commodity culture and the way that people bought things in the nineteenth century. Similarly, hysteria is a culture-bound syndrome because the symptoms changed over time to express the ideals and contradictions of each period in which it was diagnosed. Lisa Appignanesi writes that in England the symptoms of hysteria characterized frailness, an idealized feminine trait associated with ‘refinement and spirituality’. She also notes that ‘the various anaesthesias – the lack of sensation – … also seem to hold up a mirror to the times’ because women’s bodies were expected to be confined in corsets and layers of clothing and therefore unable to feel. In reference to a famous hysteric at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, Asti Husvedt writes that ‘Blanche’s

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moment in the limelight provides an extraordinary opportunity to look at the ways in which cultures and bodies collide to produce new sets of symptoms, which in turn produce new diseases’. Like hysteria, eating disorders have been around for a long time and are linked to periods of social upheaval. Anorexia was first diagnosed in the 1870s and instances of the illness substantially grew in the 1960s and 1970s. The late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries are characterized by social reform, such as women’s suffrage and the women’s liberation movement. Globalization and the spread of neoliberal capitalism are also said to contribute to an increase in eating disorders. Mervat Nasser argues that experiences of conflict between different cultures, such as those experienced by the children of migrants who identity with the country of their birth and their parent’s cultural heritage, can contribute to the onset of eating disorders. In Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition scholars and clinicians argue that the increasing number of cases of eating disorders in African and Eastern European countries may also be caused by the contradictions an individual experiences when their countries transition towards neoliberal capitalism. Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (London: Virago, 2009), p. 150. Arthur Crisp, Anorexia: Let Me Be (London: Plenum Press, 1980). Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 140 and 139. Mervat Nasser, Culture and Weight Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1997). Mervat Nasser, Melanie A. Katzman and Richard A. Gordon (eds), Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2001).

Ego ideal In psychoanalysis, the ego ideal is like a conscience and a role model. Ego ideals are formed out of admirable aspects of other people that are integrated into the ego. For example, the individual may benefit from a friend’s generosity, and this experience is integrated into their ego ideal, making them strive to be more generous towards others in the future. According to Freud, the ego ideal restrains the ego, which is selfish because it is focused on pleasure and immediate satisfaction. The ego is enriched by positive properties of the ego ideal because it helps the person to act for the greater good. The ego ideal also tests reality – it is a critical voice that encourages caution. If an individual has a weak or underdeveloped ego ideal they are likely to be selfish, inconsiderate and easily led. If the ego ideal is too dominant, the individual will feel inferior, guilty and prone to making mistakes. Sigmund Freud, ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’ [1921], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 8th edn (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975), pp. 69–144.

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Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester, 2nd edn (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) [Le Séminaire Livre I, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975].

Exhibitionism In everyday use exhibitionism refers to attention-seeking behaviour. In psychoanalysis exhibitionism is a sexual perversion, usually diagnosed when a person compulsively exposes their genitals to other people. Through exposure, the exhibitionist transforms a past experience of helplessness into an experience of power by transferring the passivity to the other person. The exhibitionist robs the other of their ‘presence of mind … by interacting with her in ways that violate the unspoken but generally understood rules of interpersonal engagement’ (Tuch). According to psychoanalyst Alfred J. Siegman, actors and entertainers are driven by a form of exhibitionist desire to fascinate the audience that ranges from a benign desire to enchant them to an aggressive desire to possess them. Being completely absorbed by a theatre performance or sports game is an enjoyable experience of fascination. However, during unpleasant experiences of fascination, for example, witnessing an accident or an exhibitionist’s self-exposure: We become frozen, immobile, ‘rooted to the spot’ …. The outside object is perceived as controlling us. In addition, there is a threat of the loss of self-identity, which is experienced as a distinctly unpleasant, if not a dangerous state of affairs. At such times we strive … to avoid being ‘swallowed up’ by the experience.

In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey writes that there is an imbalance in the power of looking that tends to place women as objects of sight and men as the ones who look. She writes: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.

Mulvey applies an aspect of exhibitionism (and voyeurism, the sexual perversion that takes pleasure in looking, such as a peeping tom) to watching actresses in films. Unlike Siegman’s description of the power to fascinate, Mulvey views the exhibitionist role as passive and objectifying, rather than powerful. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Alfred J. Siegman, ‘Exhibitionism and fascination’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 12/2 (1964), pp. 315–35, pp. 320–1.

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Richard Howard Tuch, ‘Unravelling the riddle of exhibitionism: a lesson in the power tactics of perverse interpersonal relationships’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89/1 (2008), pp. 143–60, p. 147.

Fetishism In its popular use fetishism refers to clothes and apparatus, such as leatherwear, handcuffs and whips, commonly used by people who practice BDSM (bondage, discipline/domination, sadism/submission, masochism) as part of their sexuality. In psychoanalysis, an object is unconsciously selected by the fetishist, to help them to achieve sexual satisfaction. The relationship between the individual and their fetish is highly personal, and the sexual function of the object is often at odds with its everyday function. For example, objects used by fetishists described in psychoanalytic case studies include string, peddles and a rubber raincoat. Freud said that fetishism is initiated during the Oedipus complex, a period of development in which boys and girls realize they are different from each other because they have different genitals. Prior to this stage, the male child believes that all bodies are like his, and everyone has a penis. During the Oedipus complex he catches a glimpse of female genitals (usually the mother’s). Because he cannot see a penis he concludes that she has been castrated, and experiences castration anxiety because he thinks that he might also be castrated. In ‘normal’ development this realization leads the male child to split from the mother and identify with the father, who possesses a penis and, he suspects, may also have inflicted the mother’s castration. The fetishist is unable to accept the sexual difference demonstrated by the mother’s lack of penis. He disavows the knowledge: it is simultaneously denied and acknowledged by the existence of the fetish. The fetish prevents the fetishist from being overcome by anxiety and desperation, which could result in violence and retribution. Fetishism also protects the individual from encounters with real sexual partners that would be terrifying. The fetishist follows a rigid script that enables them to recreate a scene of trauma and transform it so they are powerful, enabling them to undo their powerlessness in the original scene. In ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (1905) Freud described how normal sexual relationships contain elements of fetishistic behaviour. People who are in love idealize the object of their desire and treat certain elements or body parts, such as hair colour or neck, with great reverence. He goes on to distinguish ‘normal’ fetishism within sexual relationships from pathological fetishism, in which the fetish becomes the only sexually satisfying object and replaces its human counterpart altogether. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ [1927], in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 345–57. Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1991). Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Madame Bovary (London: Penguin Books, 1993).

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Female fetishism Because of its connection to castration anxiety Freud said that fetishism can only occur in men: women cannot experience fear of castration because they do not have penises. However, in On the Genesis of Fetishism (1909) Freud proposed that all women are exhibitionists because they desire that their bodies will be looked at. According to this account of fetishism, all women who spend time on their appearances and aim to attract attention are fetishizing their own bodies. The desire to be looked at is repressed and the body is concealed in clothes, elevating the clothing to the status of a fetish. Elaborate and beautiful dresses designed and worn to catch the eye court the gaze while covering the real object of attraction. As Laura Mulvey describes, the fetish ‘does not want its forms to be overlooked but to be gloried in. It is a ruse to distract the eye and mind from something that needs to be covered up. This is also its weakness’. Other forms of female fetishism have been theorized by feminists. Mary Kelly writes and produces artwork in which a mother keeps objects, such as baby clothes, as fetishes that disavow the inevitable loss of her children when they grow up and leave her. Elizabeth Grosz theorizes a form of lesbian fetishism in which a woman disavows castration and displaces the fetishistic value of her body or her mother’s body onto the body of another woman. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen write that female fetishism is produced by disavowal of separation from the mother. The fetish is a mother/breast substitute rather than penis substitute. Gamman and Makinen say bulimia is a form of fetishism, distinct from sexual fetishism. However, like sexual fetishism it is characterized by an act of undoing: food is purged and the effect of the binge on the appearance of the body is undone. Gammen and Makinen say the object choice in bulimia is similar to the rigid specificity of sexual fetishism, because particular ‘indulgent’ foods such as a type of cake or cheese are eaten during a binge. Forms of fetishism are not gender specific: fetishes are substitute objects for a variety of losses, humiliations and traumatic events that are experienced by women and men. There are numerous psychoanalytic case studies of female fetishism to support this view. Sigmund Freud, ‘On the genesis of fetishism’, paper read to Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, 24 February 1909, in Louis Rose, ‘Freud and fetishism: previously unpublished minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 57 (1988), pp. 147–60. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism: A New Look (London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, 1994). Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Lesbian fetishism?’, in Emily Apter and William Pletz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 114. Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996). Emily Apter, ‘Fetishism and visual seduction in Mary Kelly’s “Interim”’, October 58 (1991), pp. 97–108. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1994). Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1996), p. xiv.

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Four discourses Lacan developed his theory of the four discourses to describe how different social positions are maintained through social interactions that are ‘determined by power, seduction, demand and desire’ (Jean-Michel Rabaté). He developed the theory of the four discourses and introduced the supplementary discourse of the capitalist in the aftermath of the student protests and wildcat strikes that took place across France in 1968. Like most of Lacan’s writing, his explanation of the discourses uses complex specialist language and diagrammatic equations that can be difficult to understand. It is also difficult to summarize the concepts using simplified language. The four discourses are: the discourse of the university, the hysteric, the analyst and the master. Each discourse contains four elements: the master signifier, knowledge, surplus enjoyment and the subject. Each discourse also encompasses four functions: the agent, the other, production and truth. Each discourse corresponds to one of the four elements as they come to occupy in turn the position of the agent and describes a specific power structure between subjects; an agent addresses someone and their discourse produces something. The truth is veiled from both parties because it is driven by the agent’s unconscious desires. For example, in the discourse of the master, the master is in the position of the agent – the individual who has the power of agency. The master acts like they are in charge but they must hide the fact that this power is limited and that someone else could take their position. A worker in a factory knows how to make the commodities that the master sells and the master does not. The master lacks knowledge but conceals the lack in order to maintain their position. In this discourse, the hysteric inhabits the position of truth and represents a division between self-confidence and self-doubt. Because the hysteric continuously questions the master, they threaten to reveal the limit of the master’s power and knowledge. In the discourse of the hysteric, the hysteric addresses their demands to the master. Mark Bracher writes that the hysteric’s discourse is one of ‘resistance, protest, and complaint’, because it demonstrates the subject’s failure ‘to coincide with or be satisfied by the master signifiers offered by society and embraced as the subject’s ideals’. For example, the hysteric’s discourse proves that commodity culture is dissatisfying because they continuously look for commodities that will make them perfect (as adverts claim they will), but each one is discarded when it fails. In seminars in 1976 and 1978 Lacan said there is a fifth discourse, the discourse of the capitalist, but he did not fully develop the idea. However, a number of theorists have attempted to flesh out the theory by conceptualizing the ‘universe of the capitalist’ in reference to Žižek’s analysis of social relations in capitalist societies. In the universe of the capitalist, the four discourses are: the discourse of the capitalist, the discourse of immaterial labour, the discourse of biopower and the discourse of the analyst. Like the discourse of the hysteric, the discourse of the analyst holds the potential to reveal the truth about the other discourses (Bryant). Levi R. Bryant, Žižek’s new universe of discourse: Politics and the discourse of the capitalist’, International Journal of Zizek Studies 2/4 (2008). Available at http:// zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/141/141 (accessed 25 April 2016).

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Mark Bracher, ‘On the psychological and social functions of language: Lacan’s theory of the four discourses’, in Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn Jr, Ronald J. Corthell and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (eds), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 107–28. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester, 2nd edn (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) [Le Seminaire, Livre XVII, L’Envers de la Psychanalyse, 1969–1970, Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1991]). Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘68 + 1: Lacan’s année érotique’, Parrhesia 6 (2009), pp. 28–45, p. 40.

Healthism The term ‘healthism’ was coined in 1980 by Robert Crawford, a political economist. Healthism developed in neoliberalism and reinforces the belief that health is the responsibility of the individual rather than the state. Healthism also elevates health to a key achievement for good citizens and gives it a moral value. Conversely, illness becomes a sign of failure in self-care and irresponsible behaviour. Crawford writes: ‘healthism situates the problem of health and disease at the level of the individual. Solutions are formulated at that level as well …. Further, by elevating health to a super value, a metaphor for all that is good in life, healthism reinforces the privatization of the struggle for generalized well-being’. Because health is seen as a personal responsibility, healthism conceals the structural inequalities caused by classism, racism, sexism and homophobia that contribute to ill-health and prevent marginalized individuals from accessing healthy activities, spaces and food. Healthism also contributes to the stigmatization of fat people, because weight is seen as a personal attribute that can be changed if the individual is willing to put the effort in. Robert Crawford, ‘Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life’, International Journal of Health Services 10/3 (1980), pp. 365–88, p. 365.

Hysteria Hysteria is an illness with a long history. Hippocrates, the Greek physician (b. c.460 bc), is considered to be the first to diagnose symptoms of hysteria as emanating from movement of the uterus – the wandering womb – making it a female illness. By the eighteenth century, hysteria was viewed as a neurological illness, an idea developed by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in the nineteenth century. Like fetishism, hysteria has a number of different meanings. In popular use it can refer to something that is very funny – a hysterical joke – or to someone who is overreacting to a situation – they are described as being hysterical. It has a history as a medical term and continues to be treated as a form of neurosis by psychoanalysts. It is a culturebound syndrome because the symptoms are informed by the society in which they take place and change over time (see Culture-bound syndrome). Elaine Showalter writes: ‘the hysterical emotionalism of an Emma Bovary in nineteenth-century Rouen, the neurasthenic symptoms of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Victorian New England, and

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the limps and coughs of Ida Bauer in fin-de-siècle Vienna were produced by the social expectations and cultural givens of the moments in which these women live’. In psychoanalysis, hysteria is a neurotic illness characterized by the denial of the individual’s desire. It can take the form of a wide range of symptoms that can resemble symptoms for other illnesses. For example, in the Salpêtrière hospital symptoms of hysteria took the form of epileptic fits when the hysterics were housed in the same wing of the hospital as epileptics. However, the range of symptoms was wide and included a ‘predilection for drama and deception, excessive emotionality, paralyses of the limbs, temporary deafness and muteness, heightened sensitivity of the skin, willful starving, spontaneous bleeding, feeling of strangulation, hallucinations and somnambulism, and fits of contortions and seizures’ (Hustvedt). Charcot believed he could understand the illness by producing a visual system of classification that would help to identify and sort the symptoms. The hysteric’s attacks were recorded in drawings, engravings and photographs, and contracted limbs were cast and reproduced in plaster. The photographs of the hysterics were published in the journal Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière and hysteria became a popular subject for novels, plays and carnival shows. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer further advanced knowledge of the illness by linking hysterical symptoms to childhood fantasies and repressed wishes. Deciphering the physical symptoms of hysteria assisted in Freud’s development of the discipline of psychoanalytic technique. Freud’s most famous case study of hysteria is Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’). Although hysteria has disappeared from contemporary medicine, writers and psychoanalysts such as Elaine Showalter, Asti Hustvedt and Juliet Mitchell argue that it still exists. Hustvedt says that if the hysterics in the Salpêtrière presented their symptoms to doctors today they would be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, conversion disorder, eating disorder, and bi-polar disorder. Throughout its history symptoms of hysteria have taken forms that mimic ‘culturally permissible expressions of distress’ (Showalter). Because it is a culture-bound syndrome the symptoms can be interpreted to reveal the anxieties and fantasies of contemporary society. Martha Noel Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, p. 19. Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1997) pp. 98–9 and 15. Cecilia Tasca, Mariangela Rapetti, Mauro Giovanni Carta and Bianca Fadda, ‘Women and hysteria in the history of mental health’, Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health 8 (2012), pp. 110–19.

Ideal ego During the mirror phase, the illusion of unity and promise of completeness of the mirror image initiates the creation of an ideal ego, an all-powerful ‘future self ’. It is the primary identification that influences all of the child’s future identifications with

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others. In trying to become its ideal ego, the child tries to regain the jubilant sense of mastery experienced during their first encounter with the mirror image. Unlike the ideal ego, the ego ideal is not modelled on the primary identification with the mirror image but on secondary identifications with external others that are integrated into the ego. Identification with the ideal ego directs the individual’s desire inwards towards a jubilant omnipotent self that is unachievable, whereas identification with an ego ideal directs it outwards and counters the wish to regress to the imagined jubilant omnipotence of the mirror image (see Ego ideal). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester, 2nd edn (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) [Le Séminaire. Livre 1. Les écrits techniques de Freud, Paris: Le Seuil, 1975].

Ideology An ideology is a set of beliefs or opinions held by a group that influence how the group thinks, speaks and acts. It might align an individual to a particular culture or political group, such as capitalism or socialism. Jim McGuigan says that ideology is a ‘distorted communication motivated by unequal power relations’. This is because the ideology of the ruling or dominant group in society is not viewed as an ideology but as the right or natural way to be. When an ideology is naturalized in this way it becomes invisible. It is difficult to challenge or imagine an alternative to ideological values that are invisible. Judith Williamson writes that ideology is always precisely that of which we are not aware. It is only ideology in as far as we do not perceive it as such. And how does it become “invisible”, what keeps it hidden from us? – the fact that we are active in it, that we do not receive it from above: we constantly re-create it. It works through us, not at us.

Capitalism is an ideology that has been naturalized and is viewed by many as the only form that contemporary society can take Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’, in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1970/1984). Jim McGuigan, ‘The neoliberal self ’, Culture Unbound 6 (2014), pp. 223–40, p. 230. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, 15th edn (London: Marion Boyars, 2010), pp. 41–2.

Kleptomania Kleptomania is defined by an irresistible impulse to steal. Unlike theft, kleptomania is diagnosed as a mental health illness because it is motivated by tension and distress rather than financial gain, need or revenge. The kleptomaniac will feel a huge amount

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of tension and distress, which can only be alleviated by stealing a particular object or type of objects, such as silk (as discussed in Chapter 1). The kleptomaniac often does not need or want the objects they steal and so they tend to remain hidden and unused after the theft. In psychoanalysis the stolen item compensates symbolically for the absence of ‘love, of a sense of wholeness, belonging and well-being’ (Kaplan). Kleptomania can be viewed as a culture-bound syndrome because it was enabled and influenced by changes in retail and shopping habits in the nineteenth century (see Culture-bound syndrome). Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 288. Petra Allen Shera, ‘Selfish passions and artificial desire: rereading Clérambault’s study of “Silk Erotomania’’’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18/1 (2009), pp. 158–79. Wilhelm Stekel, ‘The sexual root of kleptomania’ [1908], trans. and abridged Adalbert Albrecht, Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 2/2 (1911), pp. 239–46.

Mirror phase In Lacanian psychoanalysis the mirror phase marks the moment when a child understands that they are separate from the mother. Prior to this, an infant lacks the motor skills needed to fend for itself and experiences its body as sensory fragments indistinguishable from its environment. During the first years of life the infant comes to view another infant (often older, with more developed motor skills) as a reflection of its own body or views its own body in a mirror. At first the infant perceives the mirror image as another real infant, and experiences confusion between self and other. At the end of the mirror phase the infant comes to view the mirror image as their own image. By coming to understand the self through an image of a complete and separate body, the infant is able to define the boundaries of its own body, whose movements it begins to master. Joël Dor writes, ‘in re-cognising himself through the image, he is able to reassemble the scattered, fragmented body into a unified totality, the representation of his own body’. The illusion of unity and promise of completeness of the mirror image initiates the creation of an ideal ego, a projection of a powerful ‘future self ’ that retains the jubilant sense of mastery experienced with the first encounter with the mirror image (see Ideal ego). However, because the infant still lacks motor coordination the unified body is anticipated rather than experienced, resulting in a split between the real experience of physical immaturity and the ideal image of the body. Lacan writes that the split produced by the mirror image initiates the formation of the ego: the individual’s sense of who they are. They are able to differentiate the self from the rest of the world, and begin to reject some elements of the external world while others are internalized as ego ideals (see Ego ideal). However, some of the mental images produced during the mirror phase are ‘images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, and bursting open of the body’ which can produce aggressive tendencies. Experiences of inferiority can activate these images of the ‘fragmented body’ and produce feelings of self-hatred. The mirror phase also produces the infant’s first experiences of rivalry. The idealized

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and alienating mirror image produces an ‘inner conflictual tension, which leads to the awakening of [their] desire for the object of the other’s desire’. The ego develops through competition and rivalry, and produces a triangular relation between ego, other and object of desire. The split between subject and object that takes place during the mirror phase is intolerable for the hysteric. The individual cannot identify with the mirror image and is unable to construct an image of the self. Confusion relating to the nature of one’s desire causes a conflict that captivates the hysteric. Because they are unable to recognize their own desire they cannot imagine their body as an object of desire. Through their symptoms the hysteric repeatedly poses the questions ‘who am I?’, ‘what do I desire?’. Joël Dor, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, ed. Judith Feher-Gurewich, trans. Susan Fairfield, 2nd edn (New York: Other Press, 1989), p. 96. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester, 2nd edn (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) [Le Séminaire. Livre 1. Les écrits techniques de Freud, Paris: Le Seuil, 1975, pp. 85 and 92.

Neoliberalism Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, was integral in the development of neoliberal policies. Friedman applied economic models to public policy issues and argued that free markets would benefit the state and its citizens. Two of the main characteristics of a free-market economy are deregulation and privatization, both of which enable reduced government and welfare state provisions. Deregulation, privatization and reduction of welfare are the cornerstones of the neoliberal economic policies implemented by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the United States in the 1980s. Thatcher and Reagan argued that market competition would reduce costs and improve public services in a wide range of areas of social life, including health care and education. Alice E. Marwick writes that neoliberalism is the ‘infiltration of market logic into everyday social relations’. It is an economic system in which many aspects of life come to be viewed as part of the economy. John Gledhill writes that neoliberalism seeks to ‘commoditize the most intimate of human relations and the production of identity and personhood’ while also measuring social worth purely ‘in terms of consumption and marketed “lifestyle” symbols’. The increasing reliance on performance league tables of schools and hospitals and student survey ratings for academics and universities is an example of the neoliberalization, in which individuals or institutions are placed in competition with each other and ranked. Social networking sites neoliberalize social interactions because users are ‘ranked’ by the number of followers they have and the number of likes their posts receive. Individual workers are expected to view themselves as flexible entrepreneurs who are willing (and able) to take advantage of the opportunities the free-market economy provides. Seeming to offer equal opportunities for success, neoliberal capitalism

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conceals the social structures that make it difficult for marginalized people (with caring responsibilities, disabilities and who are discriminated against due to their race, class, gender or sexuality) to participate in and benefit from neoliberalism. It also produces precarious employment conditions, including zero-hour contracts and casualization. Alongside precarity, neoliberalism is characterized by an ‘audit culture’ in which ‘continuous assessment and demands for evidence that goals are being realized has powerful disciplinary effects’ (Gledhill). Being continuously audited makes workers feel that they are in competition with colleagues and those who wish to enter the workforce, which increases the pressure to maximize productivity, and in turn results in longer working hours and poorer working conditions for most workers, including white-collar and professional workers. Because neoliberalization changes the way people behave, it also implies that there is an ideal way to behave. The ideal neoliberal subject described by Jim McGuigan in his journal article called ‘The Neoliberal Self ’ is a conceptual characterization rather than a description of a real person. Conceptual characterizations are defined by ‘essential features that are accentuated in order to bring out the most salient aspects of a given form of life’; in other words, they are a blueprint for ‘the preferred form of life in the [current] economic, political and cultural circumstances’ (McGuigan). By determining the characteristics of the ideal individual for neoliberalism, it is possible to trace the ways in which people are coerced towards behaving in this way, and potentially find ways to resist and disrupt these expected forms of behaviour. The ideal neoliberal subject is ‘rational’ and ‘self-interested’, a mobile, flexible, enterprising and innovative individual who invests in the self in order to increase their value (Stedman Jones). According to Foucault this individual comes into being when ‘the economic model of supply and demand and of investment-costs-profit’ becomes ‘a model of social relations and of existence itself, a form of relationship of the individual to himself, time, those around him, the group, and the family’. Updating this idea, Byung-Chul Han describes the ideal neoliberal individual as an ‘achievement-subject’, who views the self as a project of continual ‘refashioning and reinventing’. Despite the enjoyment deriving from the freedom to reinvent the self, Han says the self-asproject is an efficient and effective ‘form of compulsion and constraint’ produced through ‘compulsive achievement and optimization’. According to Han, individuals willingly ‘autoexploit’ themselves, and feel responsible for their successes and failures, feeling ‘shame instead of questioning society or the system’. Alongside this focus on self-actualization and optimization, the neoliberal subject is characterized by individualism and competitiveness, and is ‘rather indifferent to the fact that his or her predicament is shared with others – and, therefore, incapable of organizing as a group to do anything about it. Such a person must be “cool” in the circumstances, selfishly resourceful and fit in order to survive under social-Darwinian conditions’ (McGuigan). Individualism is a double-edged sword: individuals must make their own choices, often without guidance and support, and when ‘things go wrong’ and they are ‘penalised harshly not only for personal failure but also for sheer bad luck in a highly competitive and relentlessly harsh social environment’ (McGuigan). Individuals blame themselves rather than the system if they are not successful. Han says this is the

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‘particular intelligence’ of neoliberalism: ‘no resistance to the system can emerge in the first place’. In other words, neoliberalism is deemed to be responsible for our successes but not our failures. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1999/2005). Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchill (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004/2008), p. 242. John Gledhill, ‘Neoliberalism’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 332–48, p. 340. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Eric Butler (London: Verso, 2017), p. 1 and 6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 5. McGuigan, ‘The neoliberal self ’, p. 234. Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 2

Panopticon The panopticon is a type of prison that was designed in the late eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher and social theorist. The design of the prison produces an unequal power structure of looking and visibleness: the guard can see into all the cells from a central viewing tower but the prisoners cannot see the guard from their cells. The prisoners do not know if they are being watched so they are forced to modify their behaviour, and act as if they are being watched all of the time. Foucault writes: There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost (1980).

Michel Foucault describes the disciplinary gaze of the panopticon as ‘the normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges them’ (1977). Although Foucault uses the panopticon prison as a model for the structures of power that are at work in disciplinary societies, he says that many institutions, including schools, factories, and hospitals, enable the supervision and regulation individuals. Academics have used the panopticon to discuss a number of contemporary technologies of surveillance including CCTV and webcams (e.g. Koskela). Bernard

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Harcourt writes that social networking sites also function like a panopticon. However, he notes that ‘we are not being surveilled today so much as we are exposing ourselves knowingly’. If fact, when including wearable self-tracking devices, Harcourt writes that social media and smart devices produce an environment that more closely resembles Bentham’s panopticon than CCTV or any other surveillance equipment: Digital surveillance capabilities have reached new heights in ordinary digital existence and have begun to converge on carceral monitoring. It is difficult, in fact, to tell the two apart …. The Apple Watch and the anklet bracelet, the malware and the GPS tracking, begin to blend into one indistinguishable mass of digital monitoring as our lives begin to resemble that of a supervised parolee.

He concludes, rather bleakly, that social media and tracking devices turn users into ‘subject-objects who are nothing more than watched, tracked, followed, profiled at will, and who in turn do nothing more than watch and observe others’. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 25. Michel Foucault, ‘The eye of power’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 146–65, p. 155. Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 90, pp. 242–3 and 26. Hille Koskela, ‘Cam Era’ – the contemporary urban Panopticon, Surveillance & Society 1/3: 292–313

Perversions In ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, Freud defines perversions as deviations from the assumed (hetero)sexual aim. As heterosexuality is deemed to be the norm, deviations in relation to the sexual object included homosexuality and activities in which genital (and reproductive) sex is not the aim, such as fetishism, sadism and masochism. Perversions can be ‘anatomical extensions’ which use body parts other than the penis and vagina, such as anal and oral sex, or they can focus on and find satisfaction in activities that are usually part of foreplay, such as voyeurism and exhibitionism. Freud clearly states that perversions are extensions or exaggerations of ‘normal’ sexuality, and that characteristics of perversion, such as a pleasure in looking at or an overvaluation of attributes of a loved one, are common in sexual relationships. He states that these activities become a perversion if they are characterized by exclusiveness and fixation. Robert Stoller describes perversion as an erotic form of hatred and an unconscious act of revenge for humiliations experienced in the past. Because of their violent unconscious wishes the individual suspects that any form of intimacy will allow the other person to retaliate by taking possession of their body, resulting in loss of control and loss of self. Perversions are protective because all contact with the other person is premeditated and controlled.

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In Female Perversions Louise Kaplan says, ‘every perverse scenario is intimately related to the social and economic structures of our westernized industrial societies’. For example, kleptomania developed along with the development of department stores and the opportunity for consumers to touch commodities before they bought them. Kaplan also argues that symptoms are also influenced by social body ideals and suggests that plucking, shaving, exfoliating and liposuction may be examples of socially acceptable body modifications that conceal unconscious desires for self-mutilation. She writes that ‘it is not the behaviour itself which determines if an act is a perversion but the mental strategy that empowers the act and the unconscious fantasies that accompany it. It might be perverse if it is designed to assuage anxiety and shame’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 33–169. Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Madame Bovary, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 523 and 367. Robert Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 31.

Political economy (of the body) The political economy refers to an interdisciplinary area of research that examines economic theories, such as capitalism or Fordism, to understand how they impact social life. It views economic activities as embedded within and inseparable from social, cultural, and political life. Vincent Mosco defines it as ‘the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources’. Studies, comprising approaches used in the fields of sociology, economics and political science, examine moments of social change and historical transformation (such as the agricultural revolution) in order to understand the impact that changing relations of power will have on individuals, and social and political structures. Examples of books that examine the political economy are The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776), Capital by Karl Marx (1867), The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen (1899) and Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). The political economy of the body entails analysis of how bodies are changed by and adapted to the economic environment in which they reside. For example, Foucault’s writing examines different institutions, including schools, prisons, the medical clinic and psychoanalytic treatment room, that have been developed to condition people to behave in a way that is beneficial to the political economy. Foucault’s ideas were influenced by another book that outlines the political economy of the body: The Productive Body by Didier Deleule and François Guery (1973). Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, p. 25. François Guéry and Didier Deleule, The Productive Body, trans. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), p. 1.

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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Vincent Mosco, ‘What is political economy? Definitions and characteristics’, in The Political Economy of Communication (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009), p. 24. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover Publications, 1994).

Semiotic privilege In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard writes that ‘dominant classes have always … endeavoured (in the capitalist bourgeois order) to surpass, to transcend, and to consecrate their economic privilege in a semiotic privilege, because this later stage represents the ultimate stage of domination’. Baudrillard argues that the dominant class determine the values, meanings and symbols of the society as well as possessing the wealth and means of production such as the factory or call centre. Controlling the sign-values (see Sign-values) of a society controls people’s aspirations and desires, and therefore determines what people will want to do and buy. For example, body ideals are a set of values and aspirations that are determined and controlled by a dominant class (commodity producers) in order to compel individuals to undertake particular diets, fitness activities and buy a wide range of commodities. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), pp. 115–16.

Shame Shame is an unpleasant emotion that ‘is provoked by experiences which call into question our preconceptions about ourselves and compel us to see ourselves through the eyes of others – and to recognise the discrepancy between their perception of us and our own oversimplified and egotistical conception of ourselves’ (Rycroft). It is also a ‘recognition of shortcoming with respect to an embraced ideal’ (Thrane). In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, shame finds its root cause in the mirror phase and the feelings of self-consciousness associated with self-recognition (see Mirror phase). Malcolm Pines writes: ‘The child, capable of being his own spectator, notices that he is visible to others, and this phase of painful self-consciousness might be related to… consequent body shame’. Visibility and exposure are integral to shame. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes seeing himself through the eyes of an imaginary disapproving spectator as he kneels before the keyhole, and says, ‘I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other …. Shame is by nature recognition. I recognise that I am as the Other sees me’. Things that are shameful differ between cultures and also change over time. Society decides if it is shameful to display an ankle or appear in public without a hat. Because shame is socially determined, it is also a mechanism that disciplines individuals in

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relation to an ideal. In capitalist societies many aspects of bodies, and particularly female bodies, are disciplined by shame. For example, some types of body hair cause shame. Fat is also shameful and disciplines the attitudes and behaviours of individuals who are fat or may become fat. Malcolm Pines, Circular Reflections: Selected Papers on Group Analysis and Psychoanalysis (London: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1998), p. 24. Charles Rycroft, Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Reference, 1995), p. 170. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2005), p. 246. Gary Thrane, ‘Shame and the construction of the self ’, The Annual of Psychoanalysis 7 (1979), pp. 321–41, pp. 329–30 and 328.

Sign-value Sign-value is related to but differs from use- and exchange-value. In Marxism the usevalue of a commodity is what it is used for; for example, bread will stop the consumer feeling hungry and will provide energy. Exchange-value is the value of the commodity in the marketplace – its price. Exchange-value is relational, in that a commodity’s price is not only determined by how much it cost to produce it, but also by the prices of other similar products on the market. For example, the cost of building a house does not determine its exchange-value, which is set by the overall state of the housing market and the exchangevalue of similar houses in the area. An object becomes a commodity when it has use- and exchange-value. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign Baudrillard writes that consumption does not take place through the satisfaction of objective needs but in the social act of exchanging signs. In the system of sign-value exchange a consumer purchases an object for the social prestige the object symbolizes, as well as its use- or exchange-value. The object, such as a particular brand of car or clothing, may signify privilege, desirableness or success, and this is the real aim of the purchase. Advertising is a key system through which commodities are inscribed with sign-values. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 91.

Spectacle Guy Debord, the author of The Society of the Spectacle, writes that power is exercised over individuals via entertainment and enjoyment when social relations are mediated by images. He writes: ‘In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.’ The spectacle requires that everything within it is spectacular, including consumers. Firat and Venkatesh describe this process as ‘ordinary gestures and the activities of daily life are prepackaged as glamorous and seductive;

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commodities come complete with preordained roles and lifestyles; even dissent and critique are commodified and sold to those who experience and produce them’. The spectacle produces the expectation that the body should be glamorous and seductive, which compels consumers to buy commodities and undertake leisure activities that will add to their spectacular appeal. In this sense the spectacle is not an addition to capitalism that helps to entertain and distract consumers but an integral part of the capitalist system along with production and consumption. Bernard Harcourt says that social networking sites are apparatuses of the spectacle because they put each user ‘on stage’ in front of other users. The imperative to be interesting and present a desirable ‘instagrammable’ life on social media is an imperative to spectacularize the self. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, [1967] 1983), p. 3. A. Fuat Firat and Alladi Venkatesh ‘Liberatory postmodernism and the reenchantment of consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research 22/3 (1995), pp. 239–67, p. 251. Harcourt, Exposed.

Notes Introduction 1

John Gledhill, ‘Neoliberalism’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 332–48, p. 340. 2 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchill (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004/2008). 3 Ibid., p. 242. 4 Gledhill, ‘Neoliberalism’. 5 Ibid., p. 340. 6 Ibid. 7 Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 2. 8 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 9 Jim McGuigan, ‘The neoliberal self ’, Culture Unbound 6 (2014), pp. 223–40, p. 223. 10 Katrin Tiidenberg, Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them (Bingley: Emerald, 2018). 11 Jill Walker Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 18. 12 Esther Rothblum and Sondra Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 13 Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 14 For example: Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Bristol: Allen Lane, 1974); Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Nancy J. Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990). 15 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 14. 16 Ibid., p. 15. 17 Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘68 + 1: Lacan’s année érotique’, Parrhesia 6 (2009), pp. 28–45, p. 40. 18 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The ambiguous legacy of ’68’, In These Times, 20 June 2008. Available at http://inthesetimes.com/article/3751/the_ambiguous_legacy_of_68 (accessed 24 August 2016). 19 Angela McRobbie, ‘Reflections on feminism and immaterial labour’, New Formations 70 (2010), pp. 60–76, p. 67. 20 Rosalind Gill, ‘Empowerment/sexism: Figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising’, Feminism and Psychology 18 (2008), pp. 35–60.

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21 Daniel Farey-Jones, ‘Hello Boys voted greatest poster ever created’, 31 March 2011. Available at http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/hello-boys-voted-greatest-posterever-created/1063405# (accessed 26 August 2016). 22 Gill, ‘Empowerment/sexism’, p. 42. 23 Ibid., p. 53. 24 Ibid., pp. 45–6 (emphasis original). 25 Ibid., pp. 43–4. 26 Ibid., p. 50. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 54. 29 Ibid. 30 bell hooks, ‘Selling hot pussy: Representations of black female sexuality in the cultural marketplace’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 61–77, p. 72. 31 Ibid. 32 Aisha Phoenix, ‘Colourism and the politics of beauty’, Feminist Review 108/1 (2014), pp. 97–105, p. 98. 33 Robert L. Harrison, Kevin D. Thomas and Samantha N. N. Cross, ‘Restricted visions of multiracial identity in advertising’, Journal of Advertising 46/4 (2017), pp. 503–20, p. 515. 34 Ralina L. Joseph, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (New York: New York University Press, 2018), p. 15. 35 Dara Persis Murray, ‘The entangled politics of feminists, feminism, advertising, and beauty: A historical perspective’, in Kim Golombisky and Peggy J. Kreshel (eds), Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising: Some Restrictions Apply (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 61–83, p. 79. 36 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981). 37 Sharon Shavitt, Duo Jiang and Hyewon Cho, ‘Stratification and segmentation: Social class in consumer behavior’, Journal of Psychology 26/4 (2016), pp. 583–93, p. 589. 38 Elizabeth Edgecomb, ‘Looking good and taking care: Consumer culture, identity, and poor, minority, urban tweens’, PhD dissertation (University of South Florida, 2010), p. 116. Available at http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3474 (accessed 19 March 2020). 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., pp. 189–90 41 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, pp. 92–3 42 Gledhill, ‘Neoliberalism’, p. 340.

Chapter 1 1

Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Pleasure and pain: At the crossroads of psychoanalysis and the political economy’, New Formations 72 (2011), pp. 117–30. 2 Rachel Bowlby, Shopping with Freud (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 115–16. 3 Ibid. 4 David Bennett, ‘“Money is laughing gas to me” (Freud): A critique of pure reason in economics and psychoanalysis’, New Formations 72 (2011), pp. 5–19, p. 14.

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5 Ibid. 6 Goux, ‘Pleasure and pain’, p. 120. 7 Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Madame Bovary (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 288. 8 Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991). 9 Ibid. 10 Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 285. 11 Octave Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand-même… ’ Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), pp. 9–3. 12 Kaplan, Female Perversions. 13 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ [1927], in On Sexuality, pp. 345–57. 14 Sigmund Freud, ‘On the genesis of fetishism’, paper read to Vienna PsychoAnalytical Society, 24 February 1909, in Louis Rose, ‘Freud and fetishism: Previously unpublished minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 57 (1988), pp. 147–60. 15 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, 2nd edn (London and New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2002). 16 For examples of female fetishism case studies, see David L. Raphling, ‘Fetishism in a woman’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 37/2 (1989), pp. 465–91; Arlene K. Richards, ‘Female fetishes and female perversions: Hermine HugHellmuth’s “A case of female foot or more properly boot fetishism” reconsidered’, Psychoanalytic Review 77 (1990), pp. 11–23; George Zavitzianos, ‘Fetishism and exhibitionism in the female’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 52 (1971), pp. 297–305 and ‘The perversion of fetishism in women’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 51/3 (1982), pp. 405–25. 17 Wilhelm Stekel, ‘The sexual root of kleptomania’ [1908], trans. and abridged Adalbert Albrecht, Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 2/2 (1911), pp. 239–46, p. 241 (emphasis original). 18 Petra Allen Shera, ‘Selfish passions and artificial desire: Rereading Clérambault’s study of “Silk Erotomania”’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18/1 (2009), pp. 158–79. 19 Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, ‘Passion erotique des etoffes chez la femme’, 1908, quoted in Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), p. 108. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 111. 22 Shera, ‘Selfish passions and artificial desire’, p. 179. 23 Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. April Fitzlyon, 4th edn (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2013), p. 258. 24 Ibid., p. 249. 25 Shera, ‘Selfish passions and artificial desire’, p. 179. 26 Ibid. 27 Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, Social and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), p. 19. 28 Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, p. 16. 29 Ibid., p. 16.

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30 Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, 15th edn (London: Marion Boyars, 2010), pp. 141 and 142. 31 Ibid., p. 150. 32 Stekel, ‘The sexual root of kleptomania’, p. 241. 33 Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 88. 34 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World [1932] (London: Flamingo, 1994), pp. 38–9. 35 Bernard Stiegler, ‘Pharmacology of desire: Drive-based capitalism and libidinal dis-economy’, New Formations 72 (2011), pp. 150–61. 36 Ibid., p. 151. 37 Freud, ‘Fetishism’, p. 351. 38 Ibid., p. 354. 39 Christopher M. Gemerchak, ‘Preface’, in Christopher M. Gemerchak (ed.), Everyday Extraordinary: Encountering Fetishism with Marx, Freud and Lacan (Figures of the Unconscious) (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), pp. 7–12, p. 9. 40 Stekel, ‘The sexual root of kleptomania’, p. 241 (emphasis original). 41 Arlene Kramer Richards, ‘Ladies of fashion: Pleasure, perversion or paraphilia’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 77 (1996), pp. 337–51, p. 344. 42 Benigna Gerisch, Benedikt Salfeld, Christiane Beerbohm, Katarina Busch and Vera King, ‘Optimisation by knife: On types of biographical appropriating of aesthetic surgery in late modernity’, in Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa (eds), Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 131–45, p. 135. 43 Gerisch and King, quoted ibid., p. 136. 44 Ibid., p. 133. 45 Ada Borkenhagen, ‘Fighting death with aesthetic medicine: The rise of minimally invasive procedures in times of self-optimisation’, in King, Gerisch and Rosa (eds), Lost in Perfection (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 146–52, p. 148. 46 Maria Rita Kehl, ‘Advertising, perversions, neurosis’, International Forum of Psychoanalysis 14/3–4 (2005), pp. 210–16, p. 215. 47 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, in Gilles Deleuze (ed.), Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 70. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 124. 50 Joël Dor, The Clinical Lacan, ed. Judith Feher-Gurewich in collaboration with Susan Fairfield (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2001). 51 Levi R. Bryant, ‘Žižek’s new universe of discourse: Politics and the discourse of the capitalist’, International Journal of Zizek Studies 2/4 (2008). Available at http:// zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/141/141 (accessed 25 April 2016), p. 14 (emphasis original). 52 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 53 Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, p. 70. 54 Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Eric Butler (London: Verso, 2017), p. 14. 55 Ibid., p. 36. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., pp. 25–6 (emphasis original).

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58 Shari L. Dworkin and Faye L. Wachs, Body Panic: Gender, Health and the Selling of Fitness (New York: NYU Press, 2009). 59 Ann J. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011). 60 Angela McRobbie, ‘Notes on the perfect’, Australian Feminist Studies 30/83 (2015), pp. 3–20, p. 7. 61 Aisha Phoenix, ‘Colourism and the politics of beauty’, Feminist Review 108/1 (2014), pp. 97–105. 62 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ‘Yearning for lightness: Transnational circuits in the marketing and consumption of skin lighteners’, Gender and Society 22/3 (2008), pp. 281–302, pp. 298–9. 63 Phoenix, ‘Colourism and the politics of beauty’, p. 100. 64 Ibid., p. 102. 65 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 6th edn (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 140–1. 66 Bryant, ‘Žižek’s new universe of discourse’, p. 27. 67 Han, Psychopolitics, p. 6. 68 Alice E. Marwick, ‘Instafame: Luxury selfies in the attention economy’, Public Culture 27/1 (2013), pp. 137–60, p. 142. 69 Alison Hearn, ‘“Meat, mask, burden”: Probing the contours of the branded “self ”’, Journal of Consumer Culture 8/2 (2008), pp. 197–217, p. 201. 70 Aslaug Veum and Linda Victoria Moland Undrum, ‘The selfie as global discourse’, Discourse and Society 29/1 (January 2018), pp. 1–18, p. 13. 71 Ibid., p. 14. 72 Ibid., p. 15. 73 Ori Schwarz, ‘On friendship, boobs and the logic of the catalogue: Online self-portraits as a means for the exchange of capital’, Convergence 16/2 (2010), pp. 163–83, p. 4. 74 Ibid., p. 4. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., p. 9. 77 Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 169, 199. 78 Ibid., p. 167. 79 Ibid., p. 199. 80 Ibid., p. 252. 81 Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, ‘I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience’, New Media and Society 20/1 (2010), pp. 1–20, pp. 12–13. 82 Han, Psychopolitics, p. 10 (emphasis original).

Chapter 2 1 2

Angela McRobbie, ‘Notes on the perfect’, Australian Feminist Studies 30/83 (2015), pp. 3–20, p. 10. L’Oréal Infallible Sculpt make-up [advertisement], dir. unknown, 2016. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-gTllMPy5I (accessed 10 May 2016).

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Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967] (Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1983), p. 3. 4 A. Fuat Firat and Alladi Venkatesh, ‘Liberatory postmodernism and the reenchantment of consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research 22/3 (1995), pp. 239–67, p. 251. 5 L’Oréal Infallible Sculpt make-up. 6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 25. 7 Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, ‘Editors’ Introduction to the English edition’, in François Guéry and Didier Deleule (eds), The Productive Body, trans. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), p. 1. 8 Michel Foucault, quoted in Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 83. 9 Ibid., p. 86. 10 Mike Featherstone, ‘Body, image and affect in consumer culture’, Body and Society 16/1 (2010), pp. 193–221, pp. 106 and 110. 11 Dr Randal Haworth, quoted in Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 2nd edn (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. xvii. 12 Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish – Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. xiii. 13 Louise J. Kaplan, ‘Fits and misfits: The body of a woman’, American Imago 50/4 (1993), pp. 457–80, p. 462. 14 Ibid., p. 469. 15 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel quoted in Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, p. 182. 16 Kaplan, ‘Fits and misfits: The body of a woman’, p. 469. 17 Benigna Gerisch, Benedikt Salfeld, Christiane Beerbohm, Katarina Busch and Vera King, ‘Optimisation by knife: On types of biographical appropriating of aesthetic surgery in late modernity’, in Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa (eds), Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 131–45, p. 136. 18 Ibid. 19 Meredith Jones, ‘Cosmetic surgery and the fashionable face’, Fashion Theory 16/2 (2012), pp. 193–210, p. 198 (emphasis original). 20 Ibid., p. 202. 21 Ada Borkenhagen, ‘Fighting death with aesthetic medicine: The rise of minimally invasive procedures in times of self-optimisation’, in King, Gerisch and Rosa (eds), Lost in Perfection (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 146–52, p. 147. 22 Jones, ‘Cosmetic surgery and the fashionable face’, p. 203. 23 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Random House, 1906), p. 81. 24 Jones, ‘Cosmetic surgery and the fashionable face’, p. 203. 25 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 1998). 26 Ann J. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p. 117. 27 Ibid., p. 32. 28 Ibid., p. 155 (emphasis original). 29 For example, see The Representation Project, http://therepresentationproject.org/. 3

156

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30 Robert Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 32. 31 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 345–57 [‘Fetischismus’, Almanach (1929), pp. 17–24], p. 357. 32 Interview with Olympia quoted ibid., p. 77. 33 Edouard Manet (1832–1883) Olympia 1863 [Oil on canvas], RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/ Hervé Lewandowski. Available at https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/ collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire_id/olympia-7087.html (accessed 6 September 2019). 34 Ernst T. A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’ [1817], in E. F. Bleier (ed.), The Best Tales of Hoffman, trans. J. T. Bealby (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1967), pp. 183–214, p. 203. 35 Kaplan, ‘Fits and misfits: the body of a woman’, p. 469. 36 Jann Matlock, ‘Masquerading women, pathologized men: Cross-dressing, fetishism, and the theory of perversion, 1882–1935’, in Emily S. Apter and William Pietz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 31–61, p. 58 (emphasis original). 37 Interview with Olympia quoted in Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination, p. 81. 38 Baudrillard, The Consumer Society. 39 Interview with Olympia quoted in Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination, p. 77. 40 Cahill, Overcoming Objectification, p. 47. 41 Interview with Olympia quoted in Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination, p. 73. 42 Interview with Olympia quoted ibid., pp. 76 and 77 (emphasis original). 43 Han, Psychopolitics.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

Maria Rita Kehl, ‘Advertising, perversions, neurosis’, International Forum of Psychoanalysis 14/3–4 (2005), pp. 210–16. Louise J. Kaplan, ‘Fits and misfits: The body of a woman’, American Imago 50/4 (1993), pp. 457–80, p. 460. Joël Dor, The Clinical Lacan, ed. Judith Feher-Gurewich in collaboration with Susan Fairfield (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 2001), p. 117. Cecilia Tasca, Mariangela Rapetti, Mauro Giovanni Carta and Bianca Fadda, ‘Women and hysteria in the history of mental health’, Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health 8 (2012), pp. 110–19. Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1997). Monique David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria [1891], ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955). Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 20.

Notes

157

Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (London: Virago, 2009). 10 Joël Dor, Structures and Perversions, trans. Susan Fairfield, 2nd edn (New York: Other Press, 2001). 11 Ibid., p. 26. 12 Ibid., p. 137. 13 Joël Dor, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, ed. Judith Feher-Gurewich, trans. Susan Fairfield, 2nd edn (New York: Other Press, 1989) [Introduction à la lecture de Lacan, 1: L’inconscient structuré comme un langage, Paris: Éditions Denöel, 1985], p. 96. 14 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1. Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester, 2nd edn (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) [Le Séminaire. Livre 1. Les écrits techniques de Freud, Paris: Le Seuil, 1975]. 15 Gérard Wajcman, ‘The hysteric’s discourse’, The Symptom 4 (2003). Available at http://www.lacan.com/hystericdiscf.htm (accessed 5 February 2016). 16 Jan Campbell, Freudian Passions: Psychoanalysis, Form and Literature (London: Karnac Books, 2013), p. 17. 17 Dor, The Clinical Lacan, p. 88. 18 Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 19 Showalter, Hystories, p. 63. 20 Dor, The Clinical Lacan. 21 Ibid., p. 81. 22 David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan, p. 130. 23 Catherine Millot, Horsexe. Essai sur le Transsexualisme (1983) quoted in Dor, Structures and Perversions, p. 193. 24 Dor, The Clinical Lacan, p. 86. 25 Hustvedt, Medical Muses. 26 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 30. 27 Hustvedt, Medical Muses, p. 145. 28 Iconographie de la Salptêrière (1878), quoted in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, p. 87. 29 Ibid., p. 169. 30 Ibid., p. 169. 31 Ibid., p. 169 (emphasis original). 32 Ibid., p. 247. 33 Showalter, Hystories, p. 67. 34 Emile Batault, Contribution à l’étude de l’hystérie chez l’homme, quoted ibid., p. 69. 35 Ibid., p. 69. 36 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 37 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Classics, 1980), p. 87. 38 Ibid., p. 76 (emphasis original). 39 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), p. 3. 9

158

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40 Ibid., p. 17 (emphasis original). 41 Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, pp. 59, 61 (emphasis original). 42 Ibid., p. 244 (emphasis original). 43 Ibid., p. 171. 44 Charles Richet, ‘Les démoniaques d’aujourd’hui et d’aurefois’ (1880), quoted in Showalter, Hystories, p. 82. 45 Ibid., p. 101. 46 Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 198. 47 Joseph Delboeuf, ‘Une visite à la Salpêtrière’ (1886), quoted in Hustvedt, Medical Muses, p. 93. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 92. 50 Ibid., p. 115. 51 Gilles de la Tourette, L’hypnotisme et les états analogues (1889), quoted ibid., p. 110. 52 Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p. 140. 53 Ibid., p. 378. 54 Micale, Approaching Hysteria, p. 182. 55 Showalter, Hystories. 56 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (“Dora”)’ [1905], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VII (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 3–122. 57 Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad. 58 Ibid., p. 126. 59 Showalter, Hystories, p. 10. 60 Ibid., p. 49. 61 Ibid., pp. 49–50. 62 Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1970), quoted in Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p. 370. 63 Showalter, Hystories, p. 43. 64 Freud, ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (“Dora”)’. 65 Ibid., p. 61. 66 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 67 Toril Moi, ‘Representations of patriarchy: Sexuality and epistemology in Freud’s Dora’, in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (eds), In Dora’s Case: FreudHysteria-Feminism, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 181–99, p. 191. 68 Maria Ramas, ‘Freud’s Dora, Dora’s hysteria’, in Bernheimer and Kahane, In Dora’s Case, pp. 149–80, p. 163. 69 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, ‘The Untenable’, in Bernheimer and Kahane, In Dora’s Case, pp. 276–93, p. 285. 70 Ibid., p. 286. 71 Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 25–6. 72 Ibid., p. 20. 73 Ibid., p. 100. 74 Ibid., p. 212. 75 Ibid., p. 227. 76 Ibid., p. 94.

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77 Ibid., p. 41. 78 Hustvedt, Medical Muses. 79 Showalter, Hystories, p. 15. 80 Naomi Segal, ‘Witnessing through the skin’, Journal of Romance Studies 9/3 (2009), pp. 73–85, p. 83 (emphasis original). 81 Ibid., pp. 83–4. 82 David C. Giles and Jessica Close, ‘Exposure to “lad magazines” and drive for muscularity in dating and non-dating young men’, Personality and Individual Differences 44 (2008), pp. 1610–16. 83 Dor, The Clinical Lacan, p. 85. 84 Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, p. 121.

Chapter 4 1

Mehita Iqani and Jonathan E. Schroeder, ‘#selfie: Digital self-portraits as commodity form and consumption practice’, Consumption Markets and Culture 19/5 (2016). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1116784 (accessed 5 January 2016), p. 6. 2 Agnès Rocamora, ‘Personal fashion blogs: Screens and mirrors in digital self-portraits’, Fashion Theory 15/4 (2011), pp. 407–24, p. 414. 3 Karin Tiidenberg, Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them (Bingley: Emerald, 2018), p. 81. 4 Ibid. 5 Rocamora, ‘Personal fashion blogs’, p. 218. 6 Derek Conrad Murray, ‘Notes to self: The visual culture of selfies in the age of social media’, Consumption Markets and Culture 18/6 (2015), p. 490. Available at http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1052967 (accessed 13 August 2015). 7 Ibid., p. 512. 8 Ibid., p. 495. 9 Ibid. 10 Tiidenberg, Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them, p. 95. 11 Katrin Tiidenberg, ‘Bringing sexy back: Reclaiming the body aesthetic via self-shooting’, Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 8/1 (2014), article 3. 12 Tiidenberg, Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them, pp. 134–5. 13 Fannie Liu, Denae Ford, Chris Parnin and Laura Dabbish, ‘Selfies as social movements: Influences on participation and perceived impact on stereotypes’, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Comput.er Interaction 1/2–72 (2017), pp. 1–21. 14 Ibid., p. 18. 15 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 16 David Nemer and Guo Freeman, ‘Empowering the marginalized: Rethinking selfies in the slums of Brazil’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015), pp. 1832–47. 17 Ibid., pp. 1843–4. 18 Stefanie Duguay, ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer visibility through selfies: Comparing platform mediators across Ruby Rose’s Instagram and Vine presence’, Social Media + Society, April–June (2016), pp. 1–12.

160

Notes

19 Son Vivienne, ‘“I will not hate myself because you cannot accept me”: Problematizing empowerment and gender-diverse selfies’, The International Journal of Media and Culture 15/2 (2017), pp. 126–40. 20 Ibid., pp. 133–4. 21 LB quoted ibid., p. 136. 22 LB quoted ibid., p. 137. 23 LB quoted ibid. 24 Duguay, ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer visibility through selfies’, p. 3. 25 Ibid. 26 Aya Yadlin-Segal, ‘What’s in a smile? Politicizing disability through selfies and affect’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 24 (2019), pp. 36–50, p. 38. 27 Ibid., p. 43. 28 Ibid., p. 47. 29 Ibid. 30 Apryl A. Williams and Beatriz Aldana Marquez, ‘The lonely selfie king: Selfies and the conspicuous prosumption of gender and race’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015), pp. 1775–87, p. 1784 (emphasis original). 31 Ibid., p. 1781. 32 Ibid. 33 Marijke Naezer, ‘Sexy selves: Girls, selfies and the performance of intersectional identities’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 27/1 (2018), pp. 1–16. Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506818804845 (accessed 26 August 2019). 34 Ibid., p. 9. 35 Ibid., p. 8. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 9. 38 Ibid., p. 12. 39 Koen Leurs, Migrant Youth 2.0: Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), p. 212. 40 Ibid. 41 Bois of Isolation is a platform on Instagram for women and gender non-binary people to share selfies of the spaces and process through which they queered gender binaries during the pandemic. When the pandemic closed so many queer common spaces, Davidson and Woolley wanted to see what could happen when queer community, bodily expression and identity move online. They asked whether, and to what extent, online social media spaces can disrupt normative, binarized gender identity and provide ways of reimagining the selfie. The spoof instructional selfies were produced to illustrate the gender stereotypes that are reproduced in selfies based on the research by Nicola Döring, Anne Reif and Sandra Poeschl. The project forms part of a wider creative participative project ‘Making Spaces: Feminist Responses and Survival Strategies in the COVID-19 Pandemic’, funded by the University of Huddersfield. 42 Nicola Döring, Anne Reif and Sandra Poeschl, ‘How gender-stereotypical are selfies? A content analysis and comparison with magazine adverts’, Computers in Human Behaviour 55 (2016), pp. 955–62. 43 Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1976), p. 68. 44 Mee-Eun Kang, ‘The portrayal of women’s images in magazine advertisements: Goffman’s gender analysis revisited’, Sex Roles 37/11–12 (1997), pp. 979–96. 45 Döring et al., ‘How gender-stereotypical are selfies?’, p. 960 (emphasis original).

Notes

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46 Ibid. (emphasis original). 47 Sarah Grogan, Leonie Rothery, Jennifer Cole and Matthew Hall, ‘Posting selfies and body image in young adult women: The selfie paradox’, The Journal of Social Media in Society 7/1 (2018), pp. 15–36, p. 18. 48 Ibid., p. 24. 49 Ibid., p. 18. 50 Ibid., p. 29. 51 Ori Schwarz, ‘On friendship, boobs and the logic of the catalogue: Online self-portraits as a means for the exchange of capital’, Convergence 16/2 (2010), pp. 163–83, p. 12. 52 Trudy Hui Hui Chua and Leanne Chang, ‘Follow me and like my beautiful selfies: Singapore teenage girls’ engagement in self-presentation and peer comparison on social media’, Computers in Human Behavior 55 (2016), pp. 190–7. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., p. 192. 55 Ibid., p. 193. 56 Ibid., p. 194. 57 Ibid., p. 191. 58 Ibid. 59 Astrid Rosenthal-von der Püttena, Matthias R. Hastall, Sören Köcher, Christian Meske, Timo Heinrich, Franziska Labrenz and Sebastian Ocklenburg, ‘“Likes” as social rewards: Their role in online social comparison and decisions to like other people’s selfies’, Computers in Human Behavior 92 (2019), pp. 76–86. 60 Naomi Coulthard and Jane Ogden, ‘The impact of posting selfies and gaining feedback (“likes”) on the psychological wellbeing of 16–25-year-olds: An experimental study’, Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 12/2–4 (2018). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.5817/CP2018-2-4 (19 February 2019). 61 Chua and Chang, ‘Follow me and like my beautiful selfies’, p. 196. 62 Ibid. 63 Facebook internal message board slide presentation, March 2020, quoted in Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, ‘Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show’, The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2021. Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-forteen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739 (accessed 20 September 2021). 64 Internal message board slide from 2019 quoted in Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Meredith Jones, ‘Cosmetic surgery and the fashionable face’, Fashion Theory 16/2 (2012), pp. 193–210. 67 Kelly Allen, ‘Love Island’s Malin ‘“I had £7K of surgery to look good on social media”: She had it all done for Instagram and Snapchat’, Heat 932 (22–28 April 2017), pp. 12–14. 68 Kelly Allen ‘Snapchat surgery hits the UK’, Heat 932 (22–28 April 2017), p. 15. 69 Qingqing Sun ‘Selfie editing and consideration of cosmetic surgery among young Chinese women: The role of self-objectification and facial dissatisfaction’, Sex Roles 84/5–6 (2021), pp. 670–9, p. 671. 70 Ibid., p. 672. 71 Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung, ‘Liquify, blur, and merge: Photographic and surgical adventures of 21st-century Korean women’, paper presented at the conference

162

72 73 74 75 76

Notes Twenty-first Century Photography, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, 5–6 June 2015. Patricia Marx, ‘About face: Why is South Korea the world’s plastic-surgery capital?’, The New Yorker, 23 March 2015. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2015/03/23/about-face (accessed 5 May 2016). ‘Korean plastic surgery monsters’, Korean Plastic Surgery, 26 March 2015. Available at http://koreanplasticsurgeries.com/korean-plastic-surgery-monsters/ (accessed 5 May 2016). Jones, ‘Cosmetic surgery and the fashionable face’, p. 205. Rocamora, ‘Personal fashion blogs’, p. 418. Angela McRobbie, ‘Notes on perfect’, Australian Feminist Studies 30/83 (2015), pp. 3–20, p. 11.

Chapter 5 Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 18–19. 2 Eran Fisher, ‘Audience labour on social media: Learning from sponsored stories’, in Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs (eds), Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 115–32, p. 126. 3 José van Dijck, ‘“You have one identity”: Performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn’, Media, Culture and Society 35/2 (2013), pp. 199–215, p. 213. 4 Fisher, ‘Audience labour on social media’, p. 120. 5 Marx, Grundrisse, quoted in Mark Seltzer, ‘The still life’, American Literary History 3/3 (1991), pp. 455–86, p. 478. 6 Fisher, ‘Audience labour on social media’. 7 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Random House, 1906). 8 Christian Fuchs, ‘Class and exploitation on the internet’, in Trebor Scholz (ed.), Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 211–24. 9 Christian Fuchs, ‘The digital labour theory of value and Karl Marx in the age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo’, in Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs (eds), Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 26–41, p. 27. 10 Marx, Capital. 11 Christian Fuchs, ‘Labor in informational capitalism and on the internet’, The Information Society 26 (2010), pp. 179–96, p. 191. 12 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 13 Fisher, ‘Audience labour on social media’. 14 Harcourt, Exposed, p. 42. 15 Reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, quoted ibid., p. 44. 16 Jessica Gunn and Kevin McCoy, ‘The story of Carol and Karen: Two experimental Facebook accounts show how the company helped divide America’, USA Today, 26 October 2021, Available at https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/10/23/ facebook-whistleblower-documents-divide-america-liberal-conservative-trumpqanon/8511263002/ (accessed 26 October 2021). 17 Ibid. 1

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18 Ibid. 19 Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond, ‘The like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web’, New Media and Society 15/8 (2013), pp. 1348–65. 20 Ibid., p. 1362. 21 James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). 22 Ibid., p. viiii. 23 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 24 Alison Hearn and Stephanie Schoenhoff, ‘From celebrity to influencer: Tracing the diffusion of celebrity value across the data stream’, in P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond (eds), A Companion to Celebrity (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), pp. 194–211, p. 204. 25 Juliet Flower MacCannell, ‘On the inexplicable persistence of strangers’, in Michael Corris, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Sharon Kivland (eds), Transmission Annual (London: Artwords Press, 2010), pp. 106–15. 26 Ibid., p. 109. 27 Sigmund Freud, ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’ [1921], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 8th edn (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975), pp. 69–144, p. 132. 28 Ibid., p. 78. 29 Ibid., pp. 77–8. 30 Kim Kardashian selfie. Available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ article-2720320/Undisputed-Queen-Selfie-Kim-Kardashian-release-352-pagehardcover-photo-book-aptly-titled-Selfish.html (accessed 16 July 2015). 31 Herbert Simon, ‘Designing organisations for an information-rich world’, quoted in Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001), p. 11. 32 Ibid., p. 51. 33 Jennifer Anette Lueck, ‘Friend-zone with benefits: The parasocial advertising of Kim Kardashian’, Journal of Marketing Communications 21/2 (2015), pp. 91–109, pp. 92–3. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 100. 36 Ibid., p. 103. 37 Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). 38 Alice E. Marwick, ‘Instafame: Luxury selfies in the attention economy’, Public Culture 27/1 (2013), pp. 137–60, p. 139. 39 Ibid., 141. 40 Hearn and Schoenhoff, ‘From celebrity to influencer’, p. 194. 41 Ibid., p. 203. 42 Fuchs, ‘Labor in informational capitalism and on the internet’, p. 188. 43 Hearn and Schoenhoff, ‘From celebrity to influencer’, p. 203. 44 Guy Debord, quoted in Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 109. 45 Stefanie Duguay, ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer visibility through selfies: Comparing platform mediators across Ruby Rose’s Instagram and Vine presence’, Social Media + Society, April–June (2016), pp. 1–12, p. 7.

164

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46 José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, ‘Understanding media logic’, Media and Communication 1/1 (2013), pp. 2–14, p. 7 (emphasis original). 47 Domenico Dolce [photographer], Dolce and Gabbana, Spring/Summer Collection (2016). A selection of the adverts can be viewed at https://www.fashiongonerogue. com/dolce-gabbana-spring-2016-campaign/ (accessed 5 March 2017). 48 Domenico Dolce [photographer], Dolce and Gabbana, Autumn/Winter Collection (2015). A selection of the adverts can be viewed at http://www.laiamagazine.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/dolce-and-gabbana-fw15-selfies-campaign.jpg (accessed 26 October 2021). 49 Agnès Rocamora, ‘Personal fashion blogs: Screens and mirrors in digital self-portraits’, Fashion Theory 15/4 (2011), pp. 407–24, p. 417. 50 Mehita Iqani and Jonathan E. Schroeder, ‘#selfie: Digital self-portraits as commodity form and consumption practice’, Consumption Markets and Culture 19/5 (2016), p. 7. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1116784 (accessed 5 January 2016).

Chapter 6 Robert Crawford, ‘Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life’, International Journal of Health Services 10/3 (1980), pp. 365–88. 2 Julie Guthman, Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 2011. 3 Paul Ernsberger, ‘Does social class explain the connection between weight and health?’, in Esther Rothblum and Sondra Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 25–36. 4 Bianca D. M. Wilson, ‘Widening the dialogue to narrow the gap in health disparities: Approaches to fat black lesbian and bisexual women’s health promotion’, in Esther Rothblum and Sondra Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 54–64, p. 58. 5 Lucy Aphramor and Jacqui Gingras, ‘Helping people change: Promoting politicised practice in the health care professions’, in Emma Rich, Lee F. Monaghan and Lucy Aphramor (eds), Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 192–218. 6 Emma Rich, Lee F. Monaghan and Lucy Aphramor, ‘Introduction: Contesting obesity discourse and presenting an alternative’, in Emma Rich, Lee F. Monaghan and Lucy Aphramor (eds), Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–35, p. 19; Lucy Aphramor and Jacqui Gingras, ‘That remains to be said: Disappeared feminist discourses on fat in dietetic theory and practice’, in Esther Rothblum and Sondra Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 97–105, p. 99. 7 Shari L. Dworkin and Faye L. Wachs, Body Panic: Gender, Health and the Selling of Fitness (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 104. 8 Ibid., p. 14. 9 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception [1963], 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 39–40 (emphasis in original). 10 Ibid., p. 40. 11 Ibid., pp. 149–50 (emphasis in original). 12 Kirsten Ostherr, Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 3. 1

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13 Mebbie Bell, ‘“@ the Doctor’s Office”: Pro-anorexia and the medical gaze’, Surveillance and Society 6/2 (2009), pp. 151–62, p. 153. 14 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 102. 15 Anna McCarthy, ‘Reality television: A neoliberal theater of suffering’, Social Text 25/4–93 (2007), pp. 17–42, p. 17. 16 Ibid., p. 30. 17 Ibid., p. 19. 18 ‘Jenette and Rosemarie’, dir. unknown, Supersize vs Superskinny, Season 1, Episode 1, 26 February 2008, Channel 4 Production: London, 2008 [television broadcast]. 19 ‘Anorexia’, dir. unknown, Supersize vs Superskinny, Season 5, Episode 11, 7 August 2012, Channel 4 Production: London, 2012 [television broadcast]. 20 Niall Richardson, Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 103 (emphasis original). 21 Ibid., p. 104. 22 Helen Gremillion, ‘The race and class politics of anorexia nervosa: Unravelling white, middle-class standards in representations of eating problems’, in Pamela Moss and Katherine Teghtsoonian (eds), Contesting Illness: Process and Practices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 218–38. 23 Glenn A. Gaesser, Big Fat Lies: The Truth about Your Weight and Your Health (Carlsbad, CA: Gurze Books, 2002), p. 98. 24 Helen Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). 25 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 190. 26 Jayne Raisborough, ‘Why we should be watching more trash TV: Exploring the value of an analysis of the makeover show to fat studies scholars’, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society 3/2 (2014), pp. 155–65, p. 161 (emphasis original). 27 Ibid., p. 162 (emphasis original). 28 Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media, 7th edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), pp. 86–7. 29 Jonathan M. Metzl, ‘Introduction: Why “against health”?’, in Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (eds), Against Health: How Health Become the New Morality (New York and London: New York University Press), 2010, p. 3. 30 Andrew Combe, Physiology of Digestion (1836), quoted in Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. 66. 31 Catharine E. Beecher, Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (1855), quoted ibid., p. 65. 32 Jane Fonda (1981), quoted in Jenny Ellison, ‘Not Jane Fonda: Aerobics for fat women only’, in Esther Rothblum and Sondra Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 312–9, p. 312. 33 Helen Lenskyj (1986), quoted ibid., p. 316. 34 Michelle Lelwica, Emma Hoglund and Jenna McNallie, ‘Spreading the religion of thinness from California to Calcutta’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25/1 (2009), pp. 19–41, p. 36. 35 Ibid., p. 37. 36 Christopher Paul Szabo and Daniel le Grange, ‘Eating disorders and the politics of identity: The South African experience’, in Mervat Nasser, Melanie A. Katzman and Richard A. Gordon (eds), Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2001), pp. 24–33, p. 30 (italics in original). 37 Ibid.

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38 Yiyi Ouyang, Kun Wang, Tingran Zhang, Li Peng, Gan Song and Jiong Luo, ‘The influence of sports participation on body image, self-efficacy, and self-esteem in college students’, Frontiers in Psychology 10/3039 (2020), p. 8. Available at https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03039 (accessed 27 May 2021). 39 Sarah E. Lowery, Sharon E. Robinson Kurpius, Christie Befort, Elva Hull Blanks, Sonja Sollenberger, Megan Foley Nicpon and Laura Huser, ‘Body image, self-esteem, and health-related behaviors among male and female first year college students’, Journal of College Student Development 46/6 (2005), pp. 612–23, p. 620. 40 Rosalind Gill, ‘Empowerment/sexism: Figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising’, Feminism and Psychology 18 (2008), pp. 35–60. 41 Marika Tiggemann and Mia Zaccardo ‘“Strong is the new skinny”: A content analysis of fitspiration on Instagram’, Journal of Health Psychology 1/9 (2016), pp. 1003–11. 42 Ibid., p. 1007. 43 Lily Robinson, Ivanka Prichard, Alyssa Nikolaidis, Claire Drummond, Murray Drummond and Marika Tiggemann, ‘Idealised media images: The effect of fitspiration imagery on body satisfaction and exercise behaviour’, Body Image 22 (2017), pp. 65–71. 44 Kristin Homan, Erin McHugh, Daniel Wells, Corrinne Watson and Carolyn King, ‘The effect of viewing ultra-fit images on college women’s body dissatisfaction’, Body Image 9/1 (2012), pp. 50–6 and Lily Robinson, Ivanka Prichard, Alyssa Nikolaidis, Claire Drummond, Murray Drummond and Marika Tiggemann, ‘Idealised media images: The effect of fitspiration imagery on body satisfaction and exercise behaviour’, Body Image 22 (2017), pp. 65–71. 45 Dane Archer, Bonita Iritani, Debra D. Kimes and Michael Barrios, ‘Face-ism: Five studies of sex differences in facial prominence’, Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 45/4 (1983), pp. 725–35. 46 Elise Rose Carrotte, Ivanka Prichard and Megan Su Cheng Lim, ‘“Fitspiration” on social media: A content analysis of gendered images’, Journal of Medical Internet Research 19/3 (2017), n.p. 47 For example: Shaun M. Filiaut, ‘Measuring up in the bedroom: Muscle, thinness and men’s sex lives’, International Journal of Men’s Health 6 (2007), pp. 127–42 and Deana A. Rohlinger, ‘Eroticizing men: Cultural influences on advertising and male objectification’, Sex Roles 46 (2002), pp. 61–74. 48 Daniel Agliata and Stacey Tantleff-Dunn, ‘The impact of media exposure on males’ body image’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 23 (2004), pp. 7–22. 49 David C. Giles and Jessica Close, ‘Exposure to “lad magazines” and drive for muscularity in dating and non-dating young men’, Personality and Individual Differences 44 (2008), pp. 1610–16. 50 Daniel Agliata and Stacey Tantleff-Dunn, ‘The impact of media exposure on males’ body image’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 23/1 (2004), pp. 7–22, p. 8. 51 Lowery et al., ‘Body image, self-esteem, and health-related behaviors among male and female first year college students’. 52 Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia, pp. 56–7 (emphasis original). 53 Rebecca Farber, ‘“Transing” fitness and remapping transgender male masculinity in online message boards’, Journal of Gender Studies 26/3 (2016), p. 11. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.1250618 (accessed 13 March 2020). 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 12. 57 Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia, p. 53.

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Chapter 7 Helen Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 55. 2 Ibid. 3 Arthur Crisp, Anorexia: Let Me Be (London: Plenum Press, 1980). 4 Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (London: Virago, 2009). 5 Mervat Nasser, Culture and Weight Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 3. 6 Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p. 385. 7 Ibid. 8 Patricia Leavy and Lauren Sardi Ross, ‘The matrix of eating disorder vulnerability: Oral history and the link between personal and social problems’, The Oral History Review 33/1 (2006), pp. 65–81, p. 79. 9 Finn Skårderud, ‘Commentary’, in Mervat Nasser, Melanie A. Katzman and Richard A. Gordon (eds), Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition (Hove: BrunnerRoutledge, 2001), pp. 37–9, p. 37. 10 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 2nd edn (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1993); and Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, 2009. 11 Nasser, Culture and Weight Consciousness, p. 7. 12 Leavy and Ross, ‘The matrix of eating disorder vulnerability’, p. 67. 13 Ibid., p. 73. 14 Claire Scodellaro, Jean-Louis Pan Ké Shon, Stéphane Legleye and Peter Hamilton ‘Disorders in social relationships: The case of anorexia and bulimia’, Revue française de sociologie 58/1 (2017), pp. 1–30, p. 17 (emphasis original). 15 Nasser, Culture and Weight Consciousness, p. 6. 16 Ibid., p. 25. 17 Becky W. Thompson, A Hunger so Wide and so Deep: A Multiracial View of Women’s Eating Problems (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 18 Ibid., p. 15. 19 Maisie C. E. Gard and Chris P. Freeman, ‘The dismantling of a myth: A review of eating disorders and socioeconomic status’, International Journal of Eating Disorders 20/1 (1996), pp. 1–12. 20 Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia, p. 163. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 166. 23 Ibid., p. 168. 24 Ibid., pp. 185–6. 25 Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 26 Massimo Recalcati, ‘Separation and refusal: Some considerations on the anorexic choice’, Lacunae 3/2 (2014), pp. 98–116, p. 112. 27 Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia, p. 170. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 186. 30 Thompson, A Hunger so Wide and so Deep. 31 Ibid., p. 6. 1

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32 Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia, p. 49. 33 Ibid., pp. 49–50. 34 Ibid., p. 45. 35 Ibid., p. 71. 36 Riccardo Dalle Grave, ‘Excessive and compulsive exercise in eating disorders: Prevalence, associated features, and management’, Directions in Psychiatry 28/21(2008), pp. 273–82. 37 Ibid. 38 Helen Gremillion, ‘In fitness and in health: Crafting bodies in the treatment of anorexia nervosa’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27/2 (2002), pp. 381–414. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 394. 41 Ibid., p. 403 (emphasis original). 42 Ibid., p. 398. 43 Ibid. 44 Mebbie Bell, ‘“@ the Doctor’s Office”: Pro-anorexia and the medical gaze’, Surveillance and Society 6/2 (2009), pp. 151–62, p. 157. 45 Ibid., p. 157. 46 Ibid., p. 159. 47 Pierrette Lavanchy, ‘Anorexia and femininity’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis 6 (1998), pp. 109–23, p. 115. 48 Joël Dor, The Clinical Lacan, ed. Judith Feher-Gurewich in collaboration with Susan Fairfield (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2001). 49 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 28 (emphasis original). 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., p. 278 (emphasis original). 52 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny [1919], trans. David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003). 53 Ernst T. A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’ [1817], in E. F. Bleier (ed.), The Best Tales of Hoffman, trans. J. T. Bealby (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1967), pp. 183–214, p. 203. 54 Orbach, Hunger Strike, p. 68. 55 Ibid., p. 79. 56 ‘Distractions’, Live Journal. Available at https://liteasheir.livejournal.com/ (accessed 18 April 2020). 57 ‘Hoodia product range’, Prothinspro.com. Available at http://www.prothinspo.com/ HOODIA.html (accessed 20 March 2019). 58 Janet Treasure, ‘The trauma of self-starvation: Eating disorders and body image’, in Mervat Nasser, Karen Baistow and Janet Treasure (eds), The Female Body in Mind: The Interface between the Female Body and Mental Health (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 51–71. 59 Ibid. 60 Leah Boepple, Rheanna N. Ata, Ruba Rum and J. Kevin Thompson, ‘Strong is the new skinny: A content analysis of fitspiration websites’, Body Image 17 (2016), pp. 132–5.

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61 Angela S. Alberga, Samantha J. Withnell and Kristin M. von Ranson, ‘Fitspiration and thinspiration: A comparison across three social networking sites’, Journal of Eating Disorders 6/39 (2018). Available at https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-018-0227-x (accessed 19 March 2020). 62 Catherine Victoria Talbot, Jeffrey Gavin, Tommy van Steen and Yvette Morey, ‘A content analysis of thinspiration, fitspiration, and bonespiration imagery on social media’, Journal of Eating Disorders 5/40 (2017). Available at https://jeatdisord. biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s40337-017-0170-2.pdf (accessed 18 August 2020). 63 Ibid., no page number given. 64 Alberga, Withnell and von Ranson, ‘Fitspiration and thinspiration: A comparison across three social networking sites’, n.p. 65 David C. Giles and Jessica Close, ‘Exposure to “lad magazines” and drive for muscularity in dating and non-dating young men’, Personality and Individual Differences 44 (2008), pp. 1610–16. 66 Pixie G. Turner and Carmen E. Lefevre, ‘Instagram use is linked to increased symptoms of orthorexia nervosa’, Eat Weight Discord 22 (2017), pp. 277–84. 67 Ibid., p. 282.

Chapter 8 Robert Crawford, ‘Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life’, International Journal of Health Services 10/3 (1980), pp. 365–38. 2 Deborah Lupton, Fat (London: Routledge Shortcuts, 2013), p. 22. 3 Julie Guthman, ‘Neoliberalism and the constitution of contemporary bodies’, in Esther Rothblum and Sondra Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 187–96. 4 Lauren Berlant, ‘Risky bigness: On obesity, eating, and the ambiguity of “health”’, in Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (eds), Against Health: How Health Become the New Morality (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010), pp. 26–39, p. 26. 5 Ibid., p. 27. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 35. 8 Ibid., p. 27. 9 Robert Crawford, ‘A cultural account of “health”: Control, release, and the social body’, in John McKinley (ed.), Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care (London: Tavistock Publications, 1984), pp. 60–103, p. 92. 10 Ibid., p. 99. 11 Guthman, ‘Neoliberalism and the constitution of contemporary bodies’, p. 187. 12 Claire Scodellaro, Jean-Louis Pan Ké Shon, Stéphane Legleye and Peter Hamilton ‘Disorders in social relationships: The case of anorexia and bulimia’, Revue française de sociologie 58/1 (2017), pp. 1–30. 13 Julie Guthman, Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), p. 163. 14 Ibid., p. 182. 1

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15 Richard Klein, ‘Fat beauty’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (eds), Bodies Out of Bounds (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2001). 16 J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 17 Mervat Nasser, Culture and Weight Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 8. 18 Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. 327. 19 Deborah Lupton, ‘Self-tracking’, preprint version of essay written for Samuel Frederick, Michele Kennerly and Jonathan Abel (eds), Information: Keywords (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming), pp. 1–2. 20 Anonymous, ‘What is quantified self ’, Quantified Self: Self Knowledge through Numbers. Available at http://quantifiedself.com/about/what-is-quantified-self/ (accessed 3 August 2019). 21 Gary Wolf, ‘The data-driven life’, The New York Times Magazine, 28 April 2010. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t. html?_r=0 (accessed 6 January 2019). 22 Martijn de Groot, quoted in 1130 Days: The Quantified Self Institute Three Year Report (2015), Hanze UAS: Hanze University of Applied Science. 23 Wolf, ‘The data-driven life’. 24 Deborah Lupton, The Australian Women and Digital Health Project: Comprehensive Report of Findings (Canberra: News and Media Research Centre, University of Canberra, 2019), p. 5. 25 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 140–1. 26 David Armstrong, ‘The rise of surveillance medicine’, Sociology of Health & Illness 17/3 (1995), pp. 393–404, p. 395. 27 Ibid., p. 401. 28 Fitbit band Apple Watch (2017), quoted in Steffen Krüger, ‘The authoritarian dimension in digital self-tracking: Containment, commodification, subjugation’, in Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa (eds), Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 85–104, p. 95 (emphasis original). 29 Ibid. 30 Mike Featherstone, ‘The body in consumer culture’, in Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth and Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991), pp. 170–96, p. 171. 31 Tamar Sharon and Dorien Zandbergen, ‘From data fetishism to quantifying selves: Selftracking practices and the other values of data’, New Media and Society 19/11 (2016), p. 6. Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816636090 (accessed 12 June 2017). 32 Ibid., p. 11. 33 Btihaj Ajana, ‘Digital health and the biopolitics of the quantified self ’, Digital Health 3 (2017), pp. 1–18. 34 Deborah Lupton, preprint version of ‘Self-tracking.’ 35 Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), p. 69. 36 Steve Kroll-Smith and Joshua Kelley, ‘Environments, bodies, and the cultural imaginary: Imagining ecological impairment’, in Pamela Moss and Katherine Teghtsoonian (eds), Contesting Illness: Process and Practices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 304–22, p. 309. 37 Ibid., p. 309.

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38 Katherine Teghtsoonian, ‘Managing workplace depression: Contesting the contours of emerging policy in the workplace’, in Pamela Moss and Katherine Teghtsoonian (eds), Contesting Illness: Process and Practices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 69–89. 39 Ibid., p. 72. 40 Ibid., p. 83. 41 Ajana, ‘Digital health and the biopolitics of the quantified self ’, p. 4. 42 Phil Daniels, Rod Reasen, Grayon Wieneke and Kristy Brittles, ‘Wearable technology: Unlocking ROI of workplace wellness. An employer case study in health care cost management’, Springbuk, 2016. Available at dailycaller.com/wp-content/ uploads/2017/08/Wearable-Technology_Unlocking-ROI-of-Workplace-Wellness.pdf (accessed 8 May 2020). 43 David Certner, ‘New rules on workplace wellness programs make employees pay for privacy’, AARP Where We Stand Blog, 10 October 2016. Available at http://blog.aarp. org/2016/10/10/new-rules-on-workplace-wellness-programs-make-employees-payfor-privacy/ (accessed 13 June 2017). 44 Vassilis Charitsis, ‘Survival of the (data) fit: Self-surveillance, corporate wellness, and the platformization of healthcare’, Surveillance and Society 17/1–2 (2019), pp. 139–44, p. 141. 45 Nielson (2014), quoted in Lupton, The Quantified Self, p. 31; and Lupton, The Quantified Self, p. 32. 46 Charitsis, ‘Survival of the (data) fit’, p. 142. 47 Kathryn Montgomery, Jeff Chester and Katharina Kopp, ‘Health wearables: Ensuring fairness, preventing discrimination, and promoting equity in an emerging internetof-things environment’, Journal of Information Policy 8 (2018), pp. 34–77, p. 63. 48 Ibid., p. 64. 49 Rachel Sanders, ‘Self-tracking in the digital era: Biopower, patriarchy, and the new biometric body projects’, Body and Society 1/28 (2016), p. 4. Available at DOI: 10.1177/1357034X16660366 (accessed 12 June 2017). 50 Ibid., p. 17. 51 Samantha Jane Brooks, Mathias Rask-Andersen, Christian Benedict and Helgi Birgir Schiöth, ‘A debate on current eating disorder diagnoses in light of neurobiological findings: Is it time for a spectrum model?’, BMC Psychiatry 12/76 (2012). Available at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22770364/ (accessed 12 June 2017); Janet Treasure, ‘The trauma of self-starvation: Eating disorders and body image’, in Mervat Nasser, Karen Baistow and Janet Treasure (eds), The Female Body in Mind: The Interface between the Female Body and Mental Health (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 51–71. 52 Wolf, ‘The data-driven life’. 53 Elizabeth Victoria Eikey, Madhu C. Reddy, Kayla M. Booth, Lynette Kvasny, Johnna L. Blair, Victor Li and Erika S. Poole, ‘Desire to be underweight: Exploratory study on a weight loss app community and user perceptions of the impact on disordered eating behaviors’, JMIR mHealth and uHealth 5/10 (2017). Available at https:// mhealth.jmir.org/2017/10/e150/ (accessed 2 August 2019). 54 Ibid. 55 Brooks et al., ‘A debate on current eating disorder diagnoses in light of neurobiological findings’, n.p. 56 Elizabeth Victoria Eikey and Madhu C. Reddy, ‘“It’s definitely been a journey”: A qualitative study on how women with eating disorders use weight loss apps’, in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Denver, CO: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017), pp. 642–54.

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57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Eikey et al., ‘Desire to be underweight’. 60 Eikey and Reddy, ‘“It’s definitely been a journey”’. 61 Helen Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). 62 Eikey and Reddy, ‘“It’s definitely been a journey”’. 63 Wolf, ‘The data-driven life’. 64 Ajana, ‘Digital health and the biopolitics of the quantified self ’, p. 5. 65 Gavin J. D. Smith and Ben Vonthethoff, ‘Health by numbers? Exploring the practice and experience of datafied health’, Health Sociology Review 26/1 (2017), pp. 6–21, p. 12. 66 Mike Featherstone, ‘Body, image and affect in consumer culture’, Body and Society 16/1 (2010), pp. 193–221, p. 205. 67 Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Eric Butler (London: Verso, 2017), p. 60.

Chapter 9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 149. 2 Deborah Lupton, Fat (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 4. 3 S. Margot Finn, Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017). 4 Julie Guthman, Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 5 Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat, 2nd edn (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), p. 141. 6 Dr Robert H. Rose, quoted ibid., p. 175. 7 Quoted ibid., pp. 141–2. 8 Ibid. 9 Quoted in E. Cassandra Dame-Griff, ‘“He’s not heavy, he’s an anchor baby”: Fat children, failed futures, and the threat of Latina/o excess’, Fat Studies 5/2 (2 July 2016), pp. 156–71, p. 167. 10 Richard Carmona, TIME/ABC News Summit on Obesity, 2–4 June 2004, Williamsburg, VA. 11 Iraq Survey Group, ‘Comprehensive report of the special advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD’ (Duelfer Report), submitted to Congress 2004. 12 Christian S. Crandall, Silvana D’Anell, Nuray Sakalli, Eleana Lazarus, Grazyna W. Nejtardt and N. T. Feather, ‘An attribution-value model of prejudice: Anti-fat attitudes in six nations’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27/1 (2001), pp. 30–7. 13 Charlene D. Elliott, ‘Big persons, small voices: On governance, obesity, and the narrative of the failed citizen’, Journal of Canadian Studies 41/3 (2007), pp. 134–206, p. 141. 14 Ibid., p. 140. 15 Dorothy Blair and Jeffery Sobel, ‘Luxus consumption: Wasting food resources through overeating’, Agriculture and Human Values 23 (2006), pp. 63–74. 16 Phil Edwards (Landau, 2009), quoted in Guthman, Weighing in, p. 7. 1

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17 Paul Campos, ‘Does fat kill? A critique of the epidemiological evidence’, in Emma Rich, Lee F. Monaghan and Lucy Aphramor (eds), Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 36–59. 18 Finn, Discriminating Taste. 19 Campos, ‘Does fat kill?’. 20 Ibid., p. 47. 21 Susan C. Wooley and David M. Garner, ‘Obesity treatment: The high cost of false hope’, Journal of the American Dietetic Association 91 (1991), pp. 1248–51, p. 1251. 22 Ibid., p. 1251. 23 J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 24 Ibid., p. 6. 25 Paul Ernsberger, ‘Does social class explain the connection between weight and health?’, in Esther Rothblum and Sondra Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 25–36. 26 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 27 Marilyn Wann, ‘Foreword: Fat studies: An invitation to revolution’, in Rothblum and Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. xi–xxvi. 28 Ernsberger, ‘Does social class explain the connection between weight and health?’, p. 27. 29 Bianca D. M. Wilson, ‘Widening the dialogue to narrow the gap in health disparities: Approaches to fat black lesbian and bisexual women’s health promotion’, in Rothblum and Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 54–64. 30 Apryl A. Williams, ‘Fat People of Color: Emergent intersectional discourse online’, Social Sciences 6/1 (2017), pp. 6–15. 31 Ibid. 32 Nathaniel C. Pyle and Michael I. Loewy, ‘Double stigma: Fat men and their male admirers’, in Rothblum and Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 143–50, p. 144. 33 Ibid., p. 143. 34 Lee F. Monaghan and Michael Hardey, ‘Bodily sensibility: Vocabularies of the discredited male body’, in Rich, Monaghan and Aphramor (eds), Debating Obesity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 60–89, p. 84. 35 Ibid., p. 62. 36 Jonathan I. Robison, ‘Weight, health, and culture: Shifting the paradigm for alternative health care’, Alternative Health Practitioner 5/1 (1999), pp. 45–69. 37 UK Parliament Select Committee on Health Third Report, 10 May 2004. Available at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhealth/23/2302.htm (accessed 3 June 2002) (emphasis added). 38 Oliver, Fat Politics. 39 Ibid. 40 Jeannine A. Gailey, The Hyper(in)visible Fat Woman: Weight and Gender Discourse in Contemporary Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 8. 41 Dina Giovanelli and Stephen Ostertag, ‘Controlling the body: Media representations, body size, and self-discipline’, in Rothblum and Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 289–96, p. 294. 42 Ann J. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p. 84. 43 Ibid., p. 84.

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44 Jana Evans Braziel, ‘Sex and fat chics: Deterritorializing the fat female body’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (eds), Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 231–54. 45 Ibid., pp. 233–4 (emphasis original). 46 Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 47 Madeline Jones, ‘Plus size bodies, what is wrong with them anyway?’, Plus Model Magazine, 8 January 2012. Available at http://www.plus-model-mag.com/2012/01/ plus-size-bodies-what-is-wrong-with-them-anyway/ (accessed 5 November 2015). 48 Petra Kuppers, ‘Fatties on stage: Feminist performances’, in Braziel and LeBesco (eds), Bodies Out of Bounds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 277–91, p. 281. 49 Charlotte Cooper, ‘Headless fatties’, 2007. Available at http://charlottecooper.net/ publishing/digital/headless-fatties-01-07 (accessed 10 May 2016). 50 Chelsea A. Heuer, Kimberly J. McClure and Rebecca M. Puhl, ‘Obesity stigma in online news: A visual content analysis’, Journal of Health Communication 16/9 (2011), pp. 1–12, p. 8. 51 Schwartz, Never Satisfied, p. 325. 52 Le’a Kent, ‘Fighting abjection: Representing fat women’, in Braziel and LeBesco (eds), Bodies Out of Bounds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 130–50, p. 135 (emphasis original). 53 Niall Richardson, Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 54 Jean Nidetch quoted in Schwartz, Never Satisfied, p. 208 (emphasis added). 55 LeBesco, Revolting Bodies? 56 Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, ‘Fat liberation manifesto’ (1973). Available at https:// laurietobyedison.com/body-impolitic-blog/tag/fat-liberation-manifesto/ (accessed 20 January 2019). 57 Quoted in Schwartz, Never Satisfied, p. 324. 58 Charlotte Cooper, ‘Fat lib: How fat activism expands the obesity debate’, in Rich, Monaghan and Aphramor (eds), Debating Obesity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 164–91. 59 Freespirit and Aldebaran, ‘Fat liberation manifesto’. 60 Ibid. 61 Deb Burgard, ‘What is “health at every size”?’, in Rothblum and Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 42–53, p. 44. 62 Ibid., p. 42. 63 Pat Lyons, ‘Prescription for harm: Diet industry influence, public health policy, and the “obesity epidemic”’, in Rothblum and Soloway (eds), The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 75–87, p. 84. 64 Zoë Meleo-Erwin, ‘Disrupting normal: Toward the “ordinary and familiar” in fat politics’, Feminism and Psychology 22/3 (1 August 2012), pp. 388–402. 65 Apryl Williams, ‘Fat People of Color: Emergent intersectional discourse online’ Social Sciences 6/1 (2017), p. 3. Available at https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/6/1/15/htm (accessed 2 August 2019). 66 Marissa Dickins, ‘Weight-related stigma in online spaces: Challenges, responses and opportunities for change’, PhD thesis, Monash University, 2013, p. 110. 67 Ibid., p. 104. 68 Ibid., p. 111.

Notes

175

69 Alexandra Sastre, ‘Towards a radical body positive’, Feminist Media Studies 14/6 (2014), pp. 929–43, p. 930. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 936. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., pp. 936–7. 74 Jennifer B. Webb, Erin R. Vinoski, Adrienne S. Bonar, Alexandria E. Davies and Lena Etzel, ‘Fat is fashionable and fit: A comparative content analysis of Fatspiration and Health at Every Size® Instagram images’, Body Image 22 (2017) pp. 53–64. 75 Ibid. 76 Jennifer B. Webb, Erin Vinoski Thomas, Courtney B. Rogers, Victoria N. Clark, Elizabeth N. Hartsell and Davina Y. Putz, ‘Fitspo at every size? A comparative content analysis of #curvyfit versus #curvyyoga Instagram images’, Fat Studies, 2018, p. 11. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2019.1548860 (accessed 2 August 2019). 77 Webb et al., ‘Fat is fashionable and fit’, p. 60. 78 Gailey, The Hyper(in)visible Fat Woman, p. 138. 79 Adwoa A. Afful and Rose Ricciardelli, ‘Shaping the online fat acceptance movement: Talking about body image and beauty standards’, Journal of Gender Studies 24/4 (2015), pp. 453–72, p. 464. 80 Fierce, ‘Fat bottomed girls’ (2011), quoted ibid., p. 467. 81 Adriana, quoted in Williams, ‘Fat People of Color’, p. 12. 82 Cahill, Overcoming Objectification, pp. 104–5. 83 Kirby (2011), quoted in Afful and Ricciardelli, ‘Shaping the online fat acceptance movement’, p. 463. 84 Charles Rycroft, Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Reference, 1995), p. 170. 85 Gary Thrane, ‘Shame and the construction of the self ’, The Annual of Psychoanalysis 7 (1979), pp. 321–431. 86 Ibid., p. 328. 87 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2005), p. 246. 88 Kirby (2011), quoted in Afful and Ricciardelli, ‘Shaping the online fat acceptance movement’, p. 464. 89 Ibid., pp. 463–4. 90 Katrin Tiidenberg, Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them (Bingley: Emerald, 2018), p. 95. 91 Kent, ‘Fighting abjection’, p. 131. 92 Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue, 2nd edn (London: Arrow, 2006), p. 123. 93 ‘Jenette and Rosemarie’, dir. unknown, Supersize vs Superskinny, Season 1, Episode 1, 26 February 2008, Channel 4 Production: London, 2008 [television broadcast]. 94 Kent, ‘Fighting abjection’, pp. 142–3.

Conclusion 1 2

Diane Felmlee, Paulina I. Rodis and Amy Zhang, ‘Sexist slurs: Reinforcing feminine stereotypes online’, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 83/1–2 (2020), pp. 16–28, p. 17. Alexandra Sastre, ‘Towards a radical body positive’, Feminist Media Studies 14/6 (2014), pp. 929–43, pp. 936 and 937.

176 3

Notes

Benigna Gerisch, Benedikt Salfeld, Christiane Beerbom, Katarina Busch and Vera King, ‘Optimisation by knife: On types of biographical appropriating of aesthetic surgery in late modernity’, in Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa (eds), Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 131–45. 4 Deborah Lupton, The Australian Women and Digital Health Project: Comprehensive Report of Findings (Canberra: News and Media Research Centre, University of Canberra, 2019), p. 5. 5 Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, ‘Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show’, The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2021. Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagramis-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739 (accessed 20 September 2021). 6 Ibid. 7 Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Eric Butler (London: Verso, 2017), p. 83. 8 Mike Featherstone, ‘Body, image and affect in consumer culture’, Body and Society 16/1 (2010), pp. 193–221, p. 193. 9 Sastre ‘Towards a radical body positive’, p. 940. 10 Ibid., p. 940. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 A. C. Davidson and Dawn Woolley, ‘Bois of isolation’, Instagram, https://www. instagram.com/boisofisolation/. 14 Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 13. 15 Ibid., p. 192. 16 Ibid., p. 66. 17 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), p. 149. 18 Ibid., p. 150 (emphasis original). 19 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London and New York: Verso, 2020), p. 147. 20 Ibid., p. 68. 21 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2012), p. 33. 22 Ibid., p. 38. 23 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 5. 24 Ibid., p. xv. 25 Ibid., p. xxii. 26 Son Vivienne, ‘“I will not hate myself because you cannot accept me”: Problematizing empowerment and gender-diverse selfies’, The International Journal of Media and Culture 15/2 (2017), pp. 126–40, pp. 133–4. 27 Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn’t Binary: On Being Both, beyond, and inbetween (London and Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2019), p. 202. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

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Index Achievement-subject (also see Han, Byung-chul) 8, 11, 18, 20, 23, 120, 143 Advertising 8, 11, 15–16, 17, 26, 30, 31, 45, 86, 95, 117, 123, 127, 137, 148 Attention commodity/economy 62–3, 65–8, 130, 131 Before and after 50, 129 Cosmetic surgery 27, 58, 60 Fitness (also Health/Healthy) 78–82, 96, 115 Gender stereotypes 46, 54–5, 91 Perverse master 17–18, 33 Race 5–6, 19 Selfies/advertising the self 20–1, 23–5, 69–70, 93 Ageing/anti-ageing 7, 17, 19, 27, 28 Anorexia (also see Restrictive eating disorder) 9, 44, 85–6, 90–1, 93–6, 109, 133 Class 86–7 Exercise (also Fitness) 89, 105–6 Hysteric anorexia 87–8, 91–3 Race 87–8 Treatment 77, 82, 89–90 Work ethic (also Productivity) 77, 88–9, 106 Athletic nervosa 96, 106, 124 Attention commodity 62, 63, 65, 130, 131 Attention economy 8, 65–6, 130 Authenticity 8, 21, 56, 64, 66–8, 70, 125 Baudrillard, Jean 6, 28, 30, 127, 147, 148 Beauty standards 4, 5, 15, 19, 36, 45, 48, 49, 56, 57, 59, 60, 78, 79, 86, 118, 124 Binge eating disorder (also see Bulimia) 104–5, 120, 136 Biopower (also see Foucault) 20, 101, 137 BMI (body mass index) 75, 89, 109–10, 111

Body ideal (also Ideal body) 2, 6, 26, 44, 81, 82, 88, 96, 112, 118, 123, 124, 128, 129, 146, 147 Body image 56, 58, 68, 80, 82, 86, 89, 95, 125 Body positivity 9, 48, 80, 114, 116–17, 123, 124, 126 Bonespiration (also Bonespo) 9, 96 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley 15 Bulimia (also see Binge eating disorder) 9, 98–9, 100, 104, 136 Bulimic economy 9, 98–9, 100 Celebrity 8, 28, 59, 61, 64–8, 69, 81, 109 Charcot, Jean-Martin 8, 33–4, 35, 36–40, 42, 91, 138–9 Clinical gaze (also see Foucault) 8, 9, 72–3, 78, 90–1, 101, 104 Commoditization 1, 7, 8, 9, 31, 62, 70, 123, 125, 126, 142 Consumption 1, 4, 6–7, 8, 19–20, 64–7, 68–70, 79, 95, 127, 142, 146, 148–9 Alienation (from body) 17, 23–8, 31, 44–5, 59–60, 100–2, 114–15 Anxiety (also Perverse consumption) 11, 14–16, 17–19, 146 Food 73–8, 85, 89, 97–8, 104–6, 111–14 Hystericized consumer 8, 33, 45, 60, 70, 107, 123 Context collapse 8, 22 Cosmetic surgery 7, 8, 17, 19–20, 25–6, 27–8, 36, 58–60, 100, 112 Crawford, Robert 71, 98, 138 Culture-bound syndrome (also Culturebound illness) 6, 41, 85, 124, 132–3, 138–9, 141 Data commodity (also Big data commodity) 61–3, 130, 131 Derivatization (also Cahill, Ann) 8, 19, 28–9, 31, 35, 118

194

Index

Didi-Huberman, Georges 36–7, 39–40, 91–2 Diets 80, 101, 102, 111–12, 116, 121, 132, 147 Adverts 50, 82, 114 Diet products and weight loss products 95, 98–9, 100, 106, 112, 115 Eating disorder 86, 87, 89, 96, 99, 104–6 Supersize vs Superskinny 73, 75–6, 120–1 Disavowal 12, 16, 17, 26, 28, 34, 93, 135, 136 Discourse of the capitalist (also see Lacan) 3–4, 18, 137 Dissecting gaze 8, 9, 25–6, 91, 93, 106, 117, 121, 123, 124, 125 Dolce and Gabbana 8, 69–70, 93 Dor, Joël 33, 34, 36, 45, 141 Ego ideal 35, 64–5, 68, 69, 133, 140, 141 Empowering presence 2, 9, 119–20, 125 Empowerment 4, 6, 9, 27, 116–17, 118, 124, 146 Health 73, 78, 79–81 Selfies 3, 47–9, 51, 52–3, 70, 119, 125 Exercise (also Fitness) 19–20, 36, 71, 78–80, 81–3, 100, 102, 112, 115, 124, 132, 147 Body image 9, 80–2 Eating disorder 85, 89, 95–6, 98, 105–6 Fat acceptance/HAES 116, 117, 118 Self-tracking 100–1, 105–6 Exhibitionism 12, 24, 48, 60, 134, 136, 145 Facebook (also see Social networking sites) 50, 57–8, 61, 62–3, 66, 68, 69, 124–5, 130 Fashion 5, 7, 8, 16–17, 21, 27–8, 47, 59, 65, 69, 79, 118, 119 Fat 45, 80, 81, 89, 98, 109–10, 118, 129 Discrimination (also Sizeism and Antifat) 3, 5, 9, 60, 71, 79, 110–13, 116, 124, 138, 148 Popular culture 113–15, 117 Supersize vs Superskinny 75, 77–8 Fat acceptance (also Size-positivity) 2, 3, 9, 69, 113, 115–16, 118–21, 125, 126 Fat activism 2, 97, 115–16, 119–21, 124

Fatspiration (also CurvyFit) 2, 117–18 Female fetishism 13, 136 Fetishism 7, 11–14, 15, 16, 26–8, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 62, 78, 79, 91, 135, 136, 138, 145 Fetishistic reduction (also see Olympia) 12–13, 29, 30, 35, 118–19, 123 Fetishistic gaze (also see Dissecting gaze and Hyperfocalization) 2, 7–9, 23, 26–7, 34, 45, 60, 78, 90, 106, 121, 123, 124, 125 Fitspiration (also Fitspo) 81, 95–6, 117–18 Foucault, Michel (also see Biopower, Clinical gaze and Panopticon) 1, 8, 20, 24–5, 72–3, 101, 131–2, 143, 144, 146 Four discourses (also see Discourse of the capitalist) 3, 18, 137 Fragmentation (also Fragmented) 25, 30, 34, 44, 75, 91, 101, 117, 126, 127, 141 Freud, Sigmund 8, 11, 43, 64–5, 92, 133 Fetishism 12–13, 16, 26, 29, 135, 136 Hysteria 33–4, 41–3, 44, 139 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 12, 145 Gender stereotypes 53–5, 82–3, 123, 124 Gremillion, Helen (also see Anorexia, Treatment) 82, 85, 87–90 Han, Byung-chul 8, 19, 20, 22, 31, 107, 125, 143–4 Harcourt, Bernard 61, 131, 145, 149 Health (also see Exercise) 3, 6, 8, 9, 72, 81–2, 85, 98, 124–5, 126, 129, 131, 132, 140, 142 Advertising 78–81 Eating disorder 89–90, 95–6 Inequality 71–3, 97, 112–13, 124, 138 Self-tracking 100–4 Weight 73, 77–8, 104–7, 109–18, 121 Health At Every Size (HAES) 116–18 Healthism (also The ideology of health) 8, 9, 71, 88, 97, 113, 124, 132, 138 Heteronormative 4, 17, 29, 52, 60, 124, 126, 128 Heterosexuality 5, 12, 13, 29, 43, 50, 87, 113, 123, 124, 130, 145

Index Hustvedt, Asti 40, 44, 139 Hyperfocalization (also see Fetishistic gaze) 26, 34, 121 Hysteria (also see Anorexia, Hysteric) 6, 8, 33–5, 40–1, 43–5, 85, 86, 87–8, 90, 91, 132–3, 138–9 Dora (Ida Bauer) 41, 42–3, 44 Salpêtrière hospital 36, 37, 39–40 Hystericized insistent presence 2, 8, 9, 44–5, 56, 88, 90, 106, 117, 118, 123, 126 Ideal Ego 42, 43, 139–40, 141 Ideology 9, 61, 71, 102, 113, 117, 119, 121, 126, 140 Influencer (also Instafame and Microcelebrity) 8, 67–8, 70, 124 Instagram (also see Social networking sites) 20–1, 54, 56, 57–8, 62, 69, 95, 124–5, 126, 128, 149 Kaplan, Louise 11, 26, 141, 146 Kleptomania 7, 11–13, 15, 132, 140–1, 146 Lacan, Jacques (also see Mirror phase, Four discourses and Discourse of the capitalist) 3, 12–13, 18, 34–5, 42–3, 137, 141–2, 147 Ladies Paradise, Émile Zola 14–15 LGBTQI+ (also Homosexuality) 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 47, 49–50, 69, 71, 82–3, 87, 112–13, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 136, 145 Likes 52, 57, 60, 63, 66, 68, 106, 126, 130, 131, 142 L’Oréal Infallible Sculpt makeup 8, 23–5 Marwick, Alice E. 21, 67, 142 Marx, Karl (also Marxism) 28, 61–2, 146, 148 Microcelebrity (see Influencer) Mirror phase 34–5, 91, 139, 141–2, 147 Mitchell, Juliet 43–4, 45, 87, 139 Mulvey, Laura 3, 39, 134, 136 Muscularity (also Muscular ideal) 37, 44–5, 79, 81–2, 83, 85, 96 Nasser, Mervat 86, 99, 133 Neoliberalism 1–2, 4, 6, 18–19, 20–2, 97–8, 109, 118, 131, 133, 142–4

195 Body 23, 24, 28, 77, 86, 106, 119, 124, 126, 128 Health 8, 9, 71–3, 79, 102, 106, 110, 111, 138 Ideal neoliberal subject 2, 8, 33, 45, 61, 80, 117, 123 Theatre (theater)/Spectacle of suffering 72–3, 78, 104

Olympia 30–1 Orthorexia 96, 106, 124 Panopticon (also see Foucault and Surveillance) 8, 24–5, 45, 50, 56, 59, 61, 124, 144–5 Perversion (also Exhibitionism, Fetishism, Kleptomania, and Sadism) 11–13, 14, 16, 17, 33, 134, 145–6 Photography (also Photograph) 13–14, 30–1, 39, 47, 50, 59, 64, 81 Adverts/Commercial 5, 20–1, 25, 54, 69, 129 Fat 9, 114–15, 117, 118–19 Hysteria 36–9, 91–3, 139 Thinspiration 2, 91–3, 95, 124, 125 Political economy (also Political economy of the body) 79, 127, 131, 146, 147, 148 Psychoanalysis (also see Freud and Lacan) 3, 7, 12–13, 18, 26, 33, 34, 42, 95, 133, 134, 135, 139, 141 Quantified self movement (also see Self-tracking) 9, 100–1, 103, 105–7 Restrictive eating disorder (also see Anorexia) 105–6 Sadism 7, 18–20, 23, 24, 33, 45, 60, 93, 95, 121, 123, 135, 145 Sadistic commands 2, 7, 18–19, 20, 23, 45, 60, 93, 95, 121, 123 Salpêtrière hospital (also see Hysteria) 33, 34, 36–41, 42, 44, 73, 91–3, 132, 138–9 Sandman, The, E.T.A Hoffmann 30, 92 Self-branding 8, 20–2, 64, 67, 68, 70

196

Index

Self esteem 9, 11, 57, 63, 68, 71, 80, 82, 83, 85, 88, 105, 112, 116, 125, 126 Selfie 20–1, 45, 48–9, 50–5, 118–19 Advertising/celebrity 23–5, 64–6, 68–70 Body image 56–60, 81, 91, 95, 117–18, 124–5 Empowering 2, 47–50, 118–19, 121, 125–9 Self-tracking (also see Quantified self movement) 100–6, 109, 124, 145 Semiotic privilege 67, 147 Sexuality 7, 12, 13, 15, 29, 30–2, 34, 48, 50, 51, 52, 67, 71, 113, 123, 135, 143, 145 Shame (also Shameless and Unashamed) 19, 49, 51, 91, 105, 113, 119, 121, 124, 143, 146, 147–8 Showalter, Elaine 35, 37, 42, 138–9 Sign-value 6–7, 19, 20, 24, 28, 30, 31–2, 67, 71, 72, 77, 86, 93, 95, 109, 127, 129, 147, 148 Slender ideal (also Slenderness) 9, 19, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86–7, 95–6, 98 Social networking sites (also Social media) 25, 48, 50, 51, 55, 64–7, 123, 125, 126, 129, 131 Body image/self-esteem 57, 58–60, 81, 91, 95–6, 117, 124–5 Data 130, 131

Marxist interpretation 7, 61–3, 70 Neoliberal 20, 21, 22, 102, 142 Panopticon (also see Surveillance) 22, 23, 50, 56, 59, 118, 124, 145 Spectacle 45, 68, 128, 149 Spectacle 8, 28, 45, 56, 59, 60, 61, 124, 125, 126, 129, 148–9 Debord, Guy 23–4, 68–9 Foucault, Michel 25, 73, 78, 104 Hysteria 34, 36, 39, 40 Supersize vs Superskinny 8, 73–8, 120–1 Surveillance 9, 21, 24–5, 45, 56, 89, 90, 100–1, 104, 106, 124, 131, 144–5 Tiidenberg, Katrin 47, 48, 50 Thin (also see Slender ideal) 75–7, 79–80, 81, 86, 87, 89, 91, 95, 96, 98, 106, 124, 128 Fat 110–13, 115, 116, 118–19, 121, 129 Thinspiration (also Pro-anorexia blogs) 2, 90, 91, 93, 95–6, 117, 124, 125 Twitter (also see Social networking sites) 21, 62, 66, 69 Unhealthy food (also Fast food) 71, 73, 80, 96, 97–8, 112, 114, 116, 136 Weight-loss 78, 88, 90, 100, 104, 111–12, 113, 115–16

197

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