Reclaiming the Body AND Soul

There are very few things we can do without our bodies. Consider, for a moment, the very act of getting up in the morning; you need your fingers, hands, and arms to silence the alarm, you need your legs to push you off the mattress and away from the floor, you need your eyes to (squintingly) find the lightswitch, breakfast, and clothing. In considering this, it’s bewildering to think about the ways in which North American culture completely condones the shrinking and diminishing of the female body and the ease with which women accept and feed into this shrinking and diminishing. In this week’s readings, we examined the female body as it fluctuates and shrinks at cultural whims in the form of beauty standards.

And the shrinking body is ever-prevalent. We read many testimonials from women who have battled the bulge and the binge who have stood bravely upon the precipice of diminishing one’s body for the sake of “satisfying” the soul. This powerful “tug of war” manifests itself on many bodies and advertises itself on the fronts of magazines, films, commericals, and throughout the estimated other thousands of advertisements we absorb daily. An additional attack against the female form is prevalent throughout our scholarship (in biology textbooks, sperm are forever “active” and “penetrating,” while the ovum are “passive”), causing little wonder as to why North American culture would create ideal images of the body that match the weakened, passive characterization we have so fervently placed on femininity itself. In this sense, the body and the things that feed the body—food—are forever the enemy and should be shrunk. Of course, our readings this week exposed the dangers inherent in accepting and adopting the shrinking female body and how it stems from larger patriarchal oppression.

In thinking about this, I find it important to recognize the practice of establishing binary opposition North American culture relies upon to create structure and meaning. Bodies are always oppositional to the mind or soul, with the soul being “housed” in the body. In aligning this opposition with others, the soul is characterized with maleness and the body with femininity, falling in line perfectly with how American women perceive, create, correct, and punish their bodies. This concept is by no means foreign to various forms of cultural ideology; even within Christianity, we find the Savior abandoning his body in order for his soul (and others) to succeed in resurrection and join his Father in Heaven. The message sent is ultimately the same we find in Aristotle and North American culture at large: the (temporary, dirty, unworthy) body must defer to the needs of the (eternal, clean, worthy) soul. I feel that the image above (though grotesque, sorry) reflects this hierarchy we place on the body and soul; the body is firmly placed below the soul and, while the soul can exist separately from the body, the body cannot survive without a soul.

So how can we fix this? By recognizing the soul/body dichotomy for what it is—a socialized, unnatural cultural construction—we can begin to correct and diminish the dichotomy and reconnect the body and soul, not as one thing that houses the other, but complimentary elements of the human experience.