Resultados de las entrevistas semidirigidas

“The feelings of inadequacy produced by the presence of beauty standards in women’s lives are, arguably, among the most personal manifestations of gender inequality in our lives” (Craig 2006: 163). Beauty norms are socially constructed, historically situated, materialized in and articulated through everyday appearance work routines. Women’s bodies are “deeply inscribed with an ideological construction of femininity emblematic of the period in question. The construction…is always homogenizing and normalizing, erasing racial, class, and other differences by insisting that all women aspire to a coercive, standardized ideal” (Bordo 1993: 311).

The importance of external “beauty” to women’s value is relatively new. Brumberg’s research (1997) on girls’ diary entries highlights the ways in which a woman’s beauty, once an inner quality, came to be about her external appearance. Wolf

([1991] 2002) further explains, “most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about “beauty” date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented” (15). Forbes et.al. (1997), adds, “Women’s economic and social progress has been paralleled by increasingly strict beauty standards and increasingly severe assaults on both women’s bodies and their psyches” (266). Beauty norms are a component of contemporary ideologies of femininity that function to “signal women’s inferior status and identify their differences from men, shift social awareness from women’s competencies to superficial aspects of their appearance, undermine women’s self-confidence, dissipate their emotional and economic resources, and reduce them to sex objects” (Forbes et. al. 1997: 273; see also Andre 1994). Naomi Wolf ([1991] 2002) adds that, “the qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: the beauty myth is actually prescribing behavior and not appearance” (13-14); thus, beauty norms prescribe women’s beauty work. Male dominance is secured by creating unattainable standards of appearance for women: “women are mere “beauties” in men’s culture so that culture can be kept male” (Wolf [1991] 2002: 59). This means that, ultimately, women’s beauty work involves work towards an unattainable goal. Like doing “good” motherhood, appearance work is time and labor intensive, expensive, and never good enough. Regardless of what physical space a woman occupies at any given time, her appearance in relation to the ideals of feminine beauty is always evaluated, and based on how closely she resembles the ideal, she is deemed a success or a failure. “Appearance, not accomplishment, is the feminine demonstration of desirability and worth” (Brownmiller 1984: 50). A woman’s failure to

properly discipline her body “in a world dominated by men” has serious consequences and can result in “the refusal of male patronage. For the heterosexual woman, this may mean the loss of a badly needed intimacy; for both heterosexual women and lesbians, it may well mean the refusal of a decent livelihood” (Bartky 2010: 90).

The development of empirical measures of beauty has been problematic for feminists. Scott (cited by Forbes et. al. 2007), however, identified the following four themes in the feminist literature:

(1) “Beauty is fundamentally feminine.” This refers to beauty as a gendered trait that is both specific to women and required for femininity; (2) “Beauty is imperative for women.” That is, almost irrespective of the consequences and the cost, women are expected to be beautiful; (3) “Beauty is paramount among women’s qualities.” This reflects the belief that beauty is a woman’s most important attribute; (4) “Women’s beauty requires substantial modification of the natural appearance.” That is, in its natural state the female body is not beautiful. To achieve beauty, women must shape, color, shave, or in other ways conceal or modify the natural appearance of their bodies. (266)

In a hegemonic masculine system of stratification, femininity is situated opposite masculinity, consistently devalued, and women’s bodies and each of our parts are represented as being inherently deficient, yet consistently lean toward detailing a white/upper-/middle-class/Western/young woman’s body. Further, as system of stratification, gender places men above women (race and class being equal). If one gender is dominant, the other must be subordinate, deficient, lacking the qualities of the dominant (Lorber 2007). People “construct their bodies in ways that comply with accepted views of masculinity and femininity” (Lorber and Martin 2011: 281). Of course, these views are always in flux. What is consistent, however, is the representation of women’s bodies, or at least women’s body parts as out of control and in need of repair. This allows for the regular “creation” of new problem areas from which ALL women suffer and that all women must fix. What results is an ever-increasing level of body

dissatisfaction among women (Dworkin and Wachs 2009; Frost 2005; Bartky 2010), and new opportunities for corporations to capitalize on women’s insecurities (Kilbourne 2010). For example, Unilever, the global corporation that produces the Dove® brand, recently launched a new deodorant product for women, inspired by recent research conducted by the company “that found 93% of women consider their armpits unattractive” (Byron, March 30, 2011). The new “Ultimate Go Sleeveless” product feeds not only on women’s insecurities related to how they smell, it creates and capitalizes on something new – ugly armpits. It also contributes to the objectification of women by turning women’s bodies into a set of deficient parts that must be modified in order to look a certain way.

Feminist theorists also have difficulty reaching a consensus on the meaning of beauty in women’s lives. Some feminist scholars describe the ways in which beauty can be a source of potential pleasure, and a tool that women can use to achieve certain ends (Craig 2006). For example, feminist research on women who have undergone cosmetic surgery suggests that in the face of all of the risks that accompany surgical procedures, women’s body transformations through cosmetic surgery can be for her, and can also be a way for women to feel “normal” (Gimlin 2013; and Davis 2000). Furman (1997) and Weitz (2004) highlight the ways that doing hair work (or having hair work done) can be a source of pleasure for women. In Hope in a Jar (1998) Kathy Peiss describes women as agentic in their approach to beauty work. “Women knew then – as they do now – precisely what they were buying. Again and again they reported their delight in beautifying…” (6).

Other feminist scholars, however, situate beauty within a structure of oppression and assert that women’s bodies are ornamented surfaces, objects inscribed with inferior status as a result of the strict disciplinary practices required to achieve femininity (Bartky 2010; Andre 1994). To be successful, women must make daily sacrifices and constantly monitor not only their demeanor and comportment (Bartky 2010), but also their appearance in relation to beauty norms. Brumberg (1997) refers to beauty work as a “body project,” and suggests that every part of the female body is something to be constantly policed. Bartky (2010) discusses the ever present power of this disciplinary gaze “that inscribes femininity in the female body is everywhere and it is nowhere; the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular…. The system aims at turning women into docile and compliant companions of men just as surely as the army aims to turn its raw recruits into soldiers” (Bartky 2010:103). Andre (1994) argues, the time, money and energy that women put into responding to gendered appearance norms take away from time, money and energy that could be spent on friendships, nurturing intimate relationships, and paid work. Because a woman’s identity and personhood are intimately associated her body, she is continuously tied up in bodily matters that she sacrifices important ways of being with and in the world. Further, Bordo (1993) suggests beauty norms prescribe that women constantly judge, and measure themselves (and other women) against cultural representations of ever changing, never attainable beauty ideal.

These divisions suggest that oppression and pleasure do not co-exist. Craig (2006) points out the difficulties in theorizing beauty, and offers a suggestion to those of us attempting to locate the complex meanings of beauty in women’s lives. She notes:

The difficulty of theorizing beauty is that any body which might possibly be characterized as beautiful exists at a congested crossroads of forces. Bodies

provide us with a principal means of expression, yet our bodies are read in ways that defy our intentions. We act on others through our bodies, but nonetheless our bodies are the sites of the embodiment of social controls. The body is the locus of our pleasures and it is the vehicle through which we consume. Our bodies are the targets and the subjects of advertisements. Our bodies mark us in ways that place us in social categories and these categories may form the bases of political solidarities. Each of these uses and meanings of the body can involve beauty. The meeting of these diverse forces in our bodies confounds broad generalizations we might make about the meaning of beauty in women’s lives.

I suggest that we look at beauty as a gendered, racialized, and contested symbolic resource. Since beauty is contested, at any given moment there will be multiple standards of beauty in circulation. By thinking about competing beauty standards and their uses by men and women in particular social locations, we can ask about the local power relations at work in discourses and practices of beauty and examine the penalties or pleasures they produce. If we take this approach, oppression and the production of pleasure, domination and resistance no longer exclude each other. (Craig: 2006: 160)

Women’s relationships to socially constructed ideas about beauty are complicated. Women are neither fully agentic, nor are they cultural dopes. Rather, women’s responses to beauty norms reflect that she can be both.