ABSTRACT
The ideal of slenderness, then, and the diet and exercise regimens that have become inseparable from it, offer the illusion of meeting, through the body, the contradictory demands of the contemporary ideology of femininity. The body may also operate as a metaphor for culture. From quarters as diverse as Plato and Hobbes to French feminist Luce Irigaray, an imagination of body-morphology has provided a blueprint for diagnosis and/or vision of social and political life. The shift to the practical dimension is not a turn to biology or nature, but to another "register," as Foucault puts it of the cultural body: the register of the "useful body" rather than the "intelligible body." All the cultural paraphernalia of femininity, learning to please visually and sexually through the practices of the body–media imagery, beauty pageants, high heels, girdles, make-up, simulated orgasm – were seen as crucial in maintaining gender domination.
