The ``grip of culture on the body'': beauty practices as women's agency or women's subordination

In the 1990s a fundamental disagreement emerged between feminist scholars regarding the extent to which western beauty practices represent women's subordinate status or can be seen as the expression of women's choice or agency. Ideas emerge in particular time periods because of a concatenation of social forces that make them possible. In the 1960s and 1970s the new social movements of feminism, black power, animal liberation, lesbian and gay politics came into being in response to a mood of hopefulness about the possibility of social change. These social movements were fuelled by a belief in social constructionism and the idea that radical social transformation was possible in the pursuit of social equality. These ideas underpinned the thoroughgoing radical feminist critiques of beauty that emerged from that period.