“Consuming themselves endlessly”

This chapter analyzes how power operates in the lives of Livi Michael's women and girls and demonstrates how they negotiate the workings of social control over their minds and bodies by drawing on Michel Foucault's discussions of bodies and power. As one of the most insidious aspects of dominant masculinist discourses, the issue of gender and women's bodies, and the social expectations placed upon them, function as underlying themes in all the stories in Their Angel Reach, but most negatively in the stories centred on Helen and Janice. Power operates on these bodies through mandates, particularly as endorsed and expounded by mass media, of how a woman should look. Although Janice characterizes herself and every woman she knows as "consuming themselves endlessly in their different ways", these women, consumed and self-consuming, resist hegemonic discourse in subtle and overt ways.