ugly beautiful

In his first Progress in Human Geography report ‘following’, Ian Cook suggested that I ought to be a little more undisciplined in my work, to ‘go with the flow’. Freed from the academic conventions of journal-writing, I feel suitably liberated (if a little un-nerved) to contribute to this blog in a freer and less constrained style. I make two specific points. The first connects to Ian’s reflections on how our research can enhance our teaching in meaningful ways. The second relates to calls for consumers to be active agents and to engage in politically meaningful action.

In 2007-8 I devised a new final year undergraduate module with a colleague, Carol Morris, entitled Geographies of Fashion and Food. The module aims to encourage students to think through the connections between capitalism, consumption, food, fashion and the body. Whilst the module ranges over a whole number of scales (from global/local fashion and food through to the fridge and the wardrobe) our key focus is on the body. Both food and fashion are in many respects the most global and the most intimate of commodities (we ingest one into our bodies; we wear the other on our bodies). We argue that the body is an important space through which to think through the geographies of fashion and food and we encourage the class to reflect and contribute to discussion about the body as a key geographical site. In the first class, for example, we bring in a selection of food and fashion objects (Bernard Matthews turkey twizzlers, a pair of 25” Seven jeans) and ask groups of students to think about what the objects say to them and report back to the class who then all add in additional comments and ideas during the second hour of the session. In a later session we divide the 80+ students into groups who deliver a presentation that addresses a number of rhetorical questions including: ‘the inevitable outcome of the contemporary capitalist food system is obesity’; ‘those that succumb to the inevitability of fat are constructed by the fashion system as failed subjects in failed bodies’ and ‘those who achieve thinness amidst global plenty are viewed as rational, disciplined and ordered perfect subjects’. We draw heavily here on Guthman and Dupuis’ excellent piece on the politics of fat in which they argue that many of the central contradictions of global capitalism are literally embodied. The problem of obesity and anorexia, they suggest, in their multiple material and discursive senses, are partial spatial fixes to some of the contradictions of neoliberalism. The neoliberal shift in personhood from citizen to consumer encourages (over)eating at the same time that neoliberal notions of discipline vilify it. These issues are, of course, profoundly gendered too (as was the first intake of students for the module, who were predominantly women). As a number of authors have commented (Bordo, Colls, Greer, Longhurst) for many white Western women the ideal body is a “tight, controlled, “bolted down” form; in other words, a body that is protected against eruption and whose internal processes are under control” (Bordo, 1993: p190). The majority of the literature that looks at fashion, food and the body focuses on either the anorectic or the obese: those at the margins and/or extremes who `emit signs' (Foucault, 1985) of being out of control. As I argued in an earlier Progress in Human Geography report entitled the besieged body, our bodies have quite literally become battlegrounds that reveal a whole series of dark shadow geographies: about what, where and when to eat? And what not to wear? The body could be argued to stand at the very centre of the contemporary condition, voicing some of western capitalism’s deepest concerns. From the stylized model on the catwalk with a beauty so generic it might as well have a bar code on it, to the desperate consumer who spends hours looking, trying, gazing in and at mirrors, mannequins, models and changing rooms and who feels disgust and frustration as we are visibly reminded of the materiality of our bodies and haunted by their inability to fulfill our fantasies? And on to the credit-crunched consumer who may aspire to buying organic bananas but simply can’t afford to do so. Our bodies can betray us, act as markers of social and disciplinary failure and refuse to accomplish their intended effects. In spite of our best endeavours to be an imagined other, our bodies have the capacity to be the superior agent. We are bombarded and besieged by temptation to consume and yet condemned if we indulge. As Bordo argued so well, there is no need for arms or violence as means of control. Just the gaze (real or imagined) of others is enough to induce self-surveillance, regulation & body management. The female pre-occupation with fat, diet, slenderness is not ‘natural’. But nor is it seen as socially ‘abnormal’ – it is one of the most powerful normalizing mechanisms of the modern era.

This brings me onto my second point, and here I will try to be brief. Ian Cook asked us to have empathy and care for unknown others, to be active political and economic agents. Whilst at one level I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, let’s not forget that it isn’t just distant producers that are the dominated and oppressed. We as consumers are also ‘victims’ in all sorts of ways. In the specific case of fashion (given that this is where my research interests lie) the excessive attention paid to distant sweated labour practices within the fashion industry has masked a number of other inequalities, asymmetries
and connections that begin to scramble many of our trusted assumptions about the taken-for-granted distinctions between production and consumption, near and far, us and them, now and then. As recent press reports have revealed, hyper-thin has become the new industry standard in fashion, where a UK size 10 is seen as too large for the catwalk and emaciated size zerozero bodies cease to shock. Size minus-zero strikes me as terrifying: a body so small that it is less than nothing. While fashion has always been notorious for perpetuating abnormally thin bodies (the average model weighed 9% less than the
average woman in 1989, she now weighs 23% below the national average) skeletal thinness is increasingly ubiquitous across television, magazines and the screen – the everyday wallpaper of our lives. Victoria Beckham, for example, has a 23
inch waist and wears jeans designed for a seven-year old.

There may be some consumers who don’t feel the need to self-justify spending £250 on a pair of jeans, and others who bargain boast that they aren’t foolish enough to be ripped-off by up-market retailers as they stuff £3.00 Primark jeans into their shopping trolleys without a thought for the conditions that enable such pricing structures. These consumers may be one manifestation of commodified contemporary Britain, where consumers know everything about price, but nothing about value. But I suspect that a majority of consumers would dearly like to pay more for their commodities if only they could afford to, and who would love to act in caring and/or politically active ways to ensure more equitable systems of provision. If only they could afford to. Shopping can be an ethical, an economic and an embodied nightmare and citizen consumer may be doing all that he or she realistically can under precarious economic conditions at home and away.

Colls, R. (2002) Bodies out of bounds: fatness and transgression Gender Place and Culture
Colls, R. (2006) Outside/outsize: bodily bigness and the emotional experiences of British women shopping Gender Place and Culture: A Journal of feminist Geography
Colls, R. (2007) Materialising bodily matter: intra-action and the embodiment of fat Geoforum
Crewe, L. (2008) Ugly beautiful? Counting the cost of the global fashion industry Geography Vol 93 Part 1 Spring
Guthman J, & DuPuis, M. (2006)Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 427 - 448 Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat.
Longhurst, R. (2005) Fat bodies: developing geographical research areas Progress in Human Geography 29(3) 247-259

Louise Crewe, University of Nottingham, August 2008