Análisis interno

Idealised media representations of the body have allowed unattainable images to become normal standards of beauty (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Shalma, 2008; Soley-Beltran, 2004). This has resulted in an ethos of personal responsibility (Featherstone, 1982; Shalma, 2008). Featherstone (1982) and Turner (1993) argue that discourses of dietary management exemplify ‘disciplining technologies’; encouraging an ethos of self- discipline in order to meet up to expected bodily standards. Studies show the negative impact this has on women and girls, attributing the prevalence of anorexia and bulimia, for example, to the pressure to conform to unattainable bodily ideals (Bordo, 1993; Fallon, Katzman, & Wooley, 1994). Hassouneh-Phillips and McNeff (2005) argue that these images can be particularly harmful for disabled women (discussed further in Chapter Eight). One expectation is to retain a ‘youthful’ body (Heiss, 2011).

71 That youth is a commonly recurring feature of the idealised body becomes anecdotally apparent when considering the number of products available on the market claiming to prolong youthful looks. The invisibility of older people within the advertisement industry has been noted (Carrigan & Szmigin, 2000). An article appearing in The Guardian in 2010, however, claimed that “the fashion industry is over its obsession with youth” (Cartner-Morley, 2010), before going on to support this with a list of ‘older’ women being used in advertising campaigns (the oldest being Madonna, at aged 51, modelling for Dolce and Gabbana). The Guardian is not unique in now hosting a fashion column in its Saturday magazine supplement sporting ‘all ages’ models. Furthermore, popular make-over television shows such as, How to Look Good Naked, a programme claiming to show “women how to look fantastic with their clothes on or off no matter what their body shape - and all without a surgeon's scalpel in sight” (Channel 4, 2011b), have been accredited within the popular media with challenging notions of idealised feminine beauty, and lessening the pressure to conform to such an ideal through cosmetic surgery. The show’s presenter, Gok Wan, also endorsed the UK strand of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Attributing the media as the main cause of bodily unhappiness, the

campaign aimed to counter dominant notions of feminine beauty to “ensure that the next generation [of young women] grows up into happy and content adults, free from

misconstrued beauty stereotypes and the burden of self-doubt” (Dove, 2011).

There are now popular television reality shows aiming to bring disability into the realms of the ‘beautiful’. 2009 saw the BBC’s Britain’s Missing Top Model, a spin off Britain’s Next Top Model (itself the British sister of an American counterpart), pit disabled women against each other to win a modelling contract. The following year, Channel 4 produced a spin off version of ‘How to Look Good Naked’, entitled, ‘How to Look Good Naked... with a Difference’. Three programmes subjecting disabled women to the public

undressing and stylistic tips of Gok Wan. Channel 4 later went on to produce Beauty and the Beast: The Ugly Face of Prejudice. This six part series, endorsed by the facial

disfigurement charity, Changing Faces, attempted to “investigate the extremes of

discrimination”. Each episode brought together one ‘beauty’ (a person “preoccupied with their appearance”) and one ‘beast’ (a person with a “facial disfigurement”) in an attempt to challenge dominant notions of beauty (Channel 4, 2011a). For all these series

disability was the hook, drawing us in by asking us to gaze upon the disabled body. When disability appears within our mainstream media without ‘warning’, or not as a ‘feature’, the audience reception is less favourable. This became shockingly apparent

72 when the BBC chose Cerrie Burnell, a young, conventionally ‘attractive’, disabled

woman, able to ‘pass’ as acceptable by most beauty standards if it was not for the ‘missing’ lower portion of her right arm, to present their children’s television channel CBeebies. A move which resulted in complaints from parents claiming Burnell was “scaring their children” (Mangan, 2009). The same year, a 22-year-old shop-assistant sued designer fashion label Abercrombie and Finch after they insisted she moved from working on the shop floor to the stockroom, claiming her prosthetic arm did not fit their image (BBC News, 2009). Furthermore, when US fashion magazine, Glamour, published a 7.5cm, un-airbrushed photograph of ‘plus size’ (yet young, attractive, blond, and with no visible impairment) model Lizzie Miller with a small roll of fat around her stomach, the generated media frenzy was phenomenal (Sanie, 2009).

From the above examples The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty claims to work towards wider social change. As well as using women who would not meet conventional

‘modelling standards’ in their adverts, Dove also launched The Self-Esteem Fund and encouraged audiences to participate in its campaign through its interactive website. Heiss (2011) uses feminist-disability theory to engage with the campaign. She argues that Dove does not go far enough in its attempts to include a diverse range of female bodies, instead acting within “an ideology of naïve integration”. That is, an ideology that rhetorically insists upon a respect for diversity, yet, in reality, results in tokenism; (re)inscribing dominant notions of the ‘normal’, ‘beautiful’ and idealised ‘feminine’ body. Not only does Dove not use a model with a visible impairment, those models that are used could ‘pass’ as traditional models, albeit for one feature. Heiss (2011) maintains, for example, that the ‘fat’ model “hardly looked overweight” and, apart from grey hair and a few wrinkles on her face, the body of the ‘older’ model “could have been that of any typical fashion model and was unrepresentative of many women”. Similar criticisms could be made of the shows cited above. The winner of Britain’s Missing Top Model could have ‘passed’ as any other model if it was not for her ‘missing’ forearm. Interestingly, although celebrated in this show, this is the same impairment that caused such

controversy in relation to the BBC’s children’s television presenter when disability was not the ‘hook’. Furthermore, Dove insisted we look upon women’s bodies as “separate parts to be examined” (Heiss, 2011). Rather than viewing the women holistically the models were separated by discrepancy from ‘modelling standards’: the ‘old’ model, the ‘fat’ model, the ‘freckled’ model, and so on. Heiss (2011) insists that this is dangerous:

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“Because the campaign was situated as a safe place for social change, when the campaign suggested that women should gaze upon and evaluate the body it reified beliefs that objectifying the body is acceptable and natural”

(Heiss, 2011)

Heiss (2011) argues that, despite claiming to challenging the objectification of women, Dove reifies an objectifying gaze. Rather than delivering celebratory messages of diversity to, amongst others, disabled youth, normativity prevails.

Garland-Thomson (2002), however, complicates arguments of objectification in relation to disability. She highlights that images of disabled people traditionally fall into four categories: charity advertisement, freak show exhibits, medical depictions or “sensational and forbidden pictures” (Garland-Thomson, 2002, 23). With disability sometimes comes an assumption of asexuality, therefore, the gaze placed upon disabled women is not one of (explicit) sexual objectification but one of medical spectacle. Disabled women should be allowed the same “freedom to be appropriated by consumer culture” that non-disabled women have, even if this means increased sexual objectification, as, “to reject this

paradoxical liberty is one thing; not to be granted it is another” (Garland-Thomson, 2002, 24). We see in Chapter Eight, that some young disabled women whom I spent time with agree with Garland-Thomson. This is not to dismiss Heiss’ (2011) important point that Dove does not go far enough in including a diverse range of female bodies. Nor is it a call to reject critical engagement with such imagery. Rather, Garland-Thomson’s (2002) analysis highlights the additional level of scrutiny a feminist-disability perspective allows for. Whereas a purely feminist analysis may dismiss programmes such as Britain’s Missing Top Model as reifying the sexual exploitation of women, a feminist- disability perspective considers the complex histories and intersections between gazed upon disabled and female bodies.

Interestingly, in Dove’s campaign and the other non-disability specific texts claiming to challenge dominant discourses of beauty, there is an emphasis on the ‘normal’ or the ‘average’ woman replacing the ‘spectacular’ or ‘extraordinary’ model. Heiss (2011) herself points to the discrepancy between the weights of models compared to the “average female” and writes of “narrow representations [of bodies that] have led to individual and societal dissatisfaction with the actual lived bodies that comprise most of the public” (my emphasis). This approach is perhaps justified to re-appropriate what we view as ‘normal’. Discourses of beauty and medicine have worked together to make

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unmodified bodies appear unnatural and abnormal, whereas those that have been

surgically altered (whether through reconstructive or cosmetic surgery) are conceived to be natural and normal (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Heiss, 2011; Shalma, 2008; Soley- Beltran, 2004). Models, Soley-Beltran argues, act as a figurehead to these normalising discourses of power-knowledge:

“By embodying alleged physical perfection and permanent self-confidence, models’ images and public personas make us believe in the utopian possibility of avoiding the discredit and abjection that menaces many women for not conforming to aesthetic and behavioural norms.”

(Soley-Beltran, 2004, 37)

Images of ‘perfection’ mean we falsely believe in the normality of modelling

conventions, and place an expectation on women to comply with these perceived norms. This explains the disproportionate interest when Glamour magazine chose to use a model with a stomach not meeting modelling convention. However, when such minute

differences provoke such frenzied attention, we can only imagine the extrapolated responses that would be evoked if, without warning, a body further from this pseudo- norm was employed. Research question one asks what dangers young disabled people face if normative discourse remains unquestioned. We begin to see how normalised discourses of Youth for Sale function to Other disabled youth (discussed further in Chapter Eight). Furthermore, it seems reclaiming normality does not stretch as far as those ‘differently-embodied’ (Shildrick, 2009). Despite supposed similar aims of

challenging bodily ideals, when campaigns focus specifically on disability, the discourse of ‘normal’ moves to one of ‘difference’ (illustrated by the shift from How to Look Good Naked to How to Look Good Naked…With a Difference). We are not incorporating the bodies of ‘normal’ women, but the bodies of ‘different’ women into notions of beauty. The focus shifts from reclaiming normality to appreciating diversity.

Drawing on both personal experience as a model and empirical data from research, Soley-Beltran (2004, 40) writes that although models are “a mechanism defining and regulating the normative standards of acceptable identity”, there is also a ‘fascination’ surrounding them. Models are simultaneously “the object of envy” but also “alienated from [their] own image [and] considered unreal or intellectually handicapped [sic]” (Soley-Beltran, 2004, 40). Although she does not specifically use the term ‘freak’, Soley- Beltran’s (2004) discussion of feminine beauty hints at an ‘enfreakment’ of models – objectified, gazed upon, at once the objects envy and disgust, and their bodies read as a

75 signs of their intelligence (Hevey, 1992). Although perhaps the beauty standards models embody have been encompassed to become a ‘normal’ part of society, the models that embody them are read as ‘abnormal’ – and judgements about their mind, made from the surface of their body.

Other feminist theorists have recognised that ‘character’ and ‘state-of-mind’ judgements are made from surveying the female body (Grosz, 1994). Furthermore, feminist-disability scholars have highlighted the additional gaze placed upon the bodies of disabled women (and, to a lesser extent, men). Shildrick (2009) notes that when the body is normative, Western discourse separates mind and body as wholly separate entities; the mind

priviledged as free, rational and disembodied. Yet when the body is marked as ‘different’ the mind is also considered ‘damaged’. Such a reading of the body can result in

infantalising disabled people, but also, following the logic of Soley-Beltran (2004), all those whose bodies we consider ‘different’ – even if this is a difference we are

encouraged to aspire to. As ‘youthfulness’ is an expectation of the ideal body, youth becomes equated with bodily perfection. The aesthetic project of youth, therefore, is one of meeting the modelling body conventions; youth comes to stand for, the tall, the slim, the ‘beautiful’. Youth is abstracted from young people’s lived-realities. Arguably, this is especially the case for disabled youth. Soley-Beltran’s (2004) argument, that there is both envy and an ‘enfreakment’ of models, can here be applied to youth. Although youth is a desirable outcome of the aesthetic project we are encouraged to set out upon, this does not mean young people themselves are positioned as ‘ideal’. Youth for Sale leads the enfreakment of non-normative youth, including disabled young people. Although the ideal body is always young, the young body is not always ideal.