ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 interprets feminist criticism of the diet and beauty industry as knowing that there is even more at stake than the mental and physical suffering involved in attempts to conform the body to a governing aesthetic norm. Rather, the sexual politics of beauty are oppressive insofar as the aestheticization of female embodiment re-produces women into the compliant hypostases of a feminine ideal, evacuating them of agency and historicity. The chapter goes on to contextualize Naomi Wolf and others’ theorizations of the diet and beauty industry as backlash phenomena intended to disable women’s personal confidence and self-esteem and defuse their collective political energies in the wider feminist criticism of idols. For it is when the active substance of actual female bodies is replaced by an appearance of the feminine that women’s primary value and operation accrues the formal, controllable properties of an idol or doll.
