The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction
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The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

Chapter :  Introduction
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practice, culture. If the body is treated as pure text, subversive, destabilizing elements can be emphasized and freedom and self-determination celebrated; but one is left wondering, is there a body in this text? (38)

Bordo is calling for a renewed materialism that is absent in post-structural analysis. Though she employs different methodology, Bordo embraces Butler's challenge to hierarchical binaries. In Unbearable Weight she explores the “gendered nature of mind/body dualism,” and argues that, in the Cartesian split between mind and body, women are most often linked to the lower order of the body (Bordo 14). Bordo acknowledges the importance of denaturalizing the assumption that physical experience is determined primarily by biology and approaches issues such as fat, eating disorders, and motherhood through the lens of cultural criticism: “We are creatures swaddled in culture from the moment we are designated one sex or the other, one race or the other” (36). Nevertheless, she suggests that, in the age of affordable plastic surgery and a pervasive beauty industry, too radical a divorce between body and self encourages a risky sense that the body is “malleable plastic, to be shaped to the meanings we choose” (Bordo 38). Though liberating, such an attitude can distract from meaningful debate about real concerns for women's bodily lives and may encourage the troubling notion that women's bodies should be treated as a blank canvas upon which individual identity, but also culturally generated expectations of beauty, must be painted.

In more recent works, Judith Butler has put greater emphasis on the historicity of ideology through which physical experience ultimately plays out, thus acknowledging limits to individual control over gender identity. In the introduction to her 2004 collection Undoing Gender, she argues:

[Gender] is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not “do” one's gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make up one's own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself). (1)