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    ‘The Free-Flying Natural Woman Boobs of Yore’? the Body Beyond Representation in Feminist Accounts of Objectification

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    Author
    McCann, H
    Date
    2020-11-01
    Source Title
    Feminist Review
    Publisher
    Sage Publications
    University of Melbourne Author/s
    McCann, Hannah
    Affiliation
    School of Culture and Communication
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Document Type
    Journal Article
    Citations
    McCann, H. (2020). ‘The Free-Flying Natural Woman Boobs of Yore’? the Body Beyond Representation in Feminist Accounts of Objectification. Irish Feminist Review, 126 (1), pp.74-88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778920944550.
    Access Status
    This item is embargoed and will be available on 2021-11-01
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/11343/254285
    DOI
    10.1177/0141778920944550
    Abstract
    This article takes up references to breasts as a key case study to examine white Western feminist debate around embodiment and objectification. Tracking shifting understandings of ‘the gaze’ in these accounts, we find that objectification is often rendered singular, ahistorical and, increasingly, individually internalised. The history of these approaches to objectification helps to explain why during the early 2000s, theorisations of feminist politics-lost were often rhetorically located alongside discussions of surgically modified breasts as a symbol of a new era of ‘fake’ feminism. In contrast, the 2010s saw several feminist movements premised on exposure of flesh and claims to individual recuperation of bodily autonomy. This article contends that both of these perspectives rely on a notion, built over successive eras of white Western feminist thought, that political work can and ought to be done through the body as a site of representational politics. This article subsequently offers a brief insight into how we might queer our approach to breasts to better account for the messiness of experiences of the flesh, considering the personal as political, while not investing in the body as the site where politics must be enacted.

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