Femininity Versus the BRCA1 Mutation Gene

“Pretty isn’t beautiful, Mother, pretty is what changes. What the eye arranges is what is beautiful.” –Stephen Sondheim, “Sunday in the Park with George”

One would imagine that if in the quest for health, beauty was compromised it would be acceptable. Consider if in the quest for life, your essence as a person became compromised. This horrific situation brings to consciousness what it means to be alive in the face of death, what it means to be human, and ultimately for Jessica Queller, what it means to be a beautiful, feminine woman. Faced with her mother’s stage II breast cancer and then six years after that, facing her mother’s stage IIIC ovarian cancer and death, Jessica was soon hit with another terrifying discovery. She tested positive for the BRCA1 genetic mutation; Jessica had in fact inherited the very genetic disposition that brought upon her mother’s death. In her touching novel, "Pretty is what Changes," she describes if knowledge really is power and how decision to have a mastectomy came to redefine her life, her femininity, and her future.

Being raised by a mother that believed beauty was the most important attribute a woman could have, Jessica and her sister learned to embody, “not that femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine” (De Beauvoir 1265). Jessica said her mother would, “tell [her] how important it was for a woman to have a career, but, she added, a woman also had to be beautiful. ‘All girls are pretty when they’re young,’ she’d say. ‘Once they’re grown up it’s another story. Luckily you and your sister have my genes” (Queller 2). The irony of this statement is of a high emotional caliber when one is presented with the decision Jessica came to face. The very genes that her mother claimed gave Jessica her beauty, were now threatening to eventually take her life in the most violent way, or deprive her of the very things that made her a woman: her ovaries and breasts.

Before Jessica knew about her genetic mutation, before her mother’s untimely death, Jessica saw her mom fight for life. Jessica remembers her mother as, “a willful creature-she’d worked as a fashion designer with her own label for over thirty years among aggressive, conniving men, some of them gangsters. As tough as she was, she had a damsel quality-an elusive aspect that made people want to take care of her” (Queller 13). In Stephanie Queller’s life, playing the role women were expected to play worked in her behalf. She allowed people that wanted to take care of her to give her an advantage, and she understood that, “to decline to be the other, to refuse to be a party to the deal-this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste” (De Beauvoir). This superior caste was of course the conniving men who fell in love with her damsel quality. This damsel was now up against cancer for the second time, and the doctors gave her the grim time span of five years to live, “in fact, she would live less than two” (Queller 20).

Jessica remembers her mother fondly, yet realistically. She says, “My parents were self-made dynamos in their respective careers. They typically came home from work after Danielle and I had already been put to bed by the housekeeper. To make up for this, they devoted weekends to us children” (Queller 25). This didn’t leave much time for interaction between parents and children and it was evident that the need for monetary gain had, “torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and [had] reduced the family to a money relation” (Marx 659). Despite this, Stephanie did her best to create a connection between herself and Jessica. Jessica recognized this, but didn’t appreciate it as a teenager. She says, “My mother’s attention was fixed on exteriors. When I was in high school, she’d devote two hours to setting my thick hair in hot rollers for an audition, yet she would not know the names of my teachers or friends, never mind the name of the play I was trying out for… That was her way of giving-through the material” (Queller 17). This lack of understanding between mother and child lead all the way into Jessica’s adult life where she says, “the only signpost I had was my desire to differentiate myself from my mother” (Queller 28). Jessica didn’t want to become a “model of a real without origin or reality,” (Baudrillard 1557), simply a simulacrum of femininity. She desired individuality.

When Jessica was born, her mother “named [her] Tiffany after Breakfast at Tiffany’s the movie starring Audrey Hepburn. Her [mother’s] name was Stephanie and [Jessica’s] name was Tiffany, and [Stephanie] reveled in telling everyone [they] were exactly alike” (Queller 28). Jessica despised being called Tiffany, and felt she “could not escape the stigma of [her] powder-puff name,” (Queller 29), and so she legally changed it to Jessica. Tiffany came to represent all the things Jessica did not want to be; “the value of [this] term [was] accordingly determined by it’s environment” (Saussure 859). Tiffany wasn’t just identification, it became a representation of “shallow, frivolous women” (Queller 29). The individuality that she fought for her entire life thus far, would fade into the background when she found out her body harbored the same genes that brought breast and ovarian cancer upon her mother.

Once the reality of losing her hair from chemotherapy sunk in, Stephanie “reflectively stroked her pretty, dark mane over and over. Only worse than losing her hair, she said, would be to lose her breasts… To her mind, a little more advanced cancer was far preferable to losing her breasts” (Queller 30). Stephanie Queller with breast cancer was life as usual; despite “nausea, vomiting, mouth sores, or lymphedema, my mother exercised on the StairMaster every weekday morning, got dressed in her Armani suits and Manolos, caught the subway, and was in her designer showroom by nine. When her hair started falling out in clumps, she put on custom-made wigs. She never missed a day of work, scheduling chemo appointments during her lunch hour, and wowed nurses and patients with her spike heels and movie-star clothes” (Queller 31). Stephanie Queller was one who exemplified the claim, “we shall not, then, permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks launched against women,” (De Beauvoir), that violent attack being breast cancer.

Stephanie beat breast cancer triumphantly, with her femininity in tact until six years later, “until the age of fifty-eight, when she was struck again – this time with ovarian cancer” (Queller 31). Jessica’s mother was hit harder by this bout of cancer, and Jessica relocated from Los Angeles to New York to live with her, to take care of her. Meanwhile, Jessica was having a secret relationship with her boss, “my new secret romance was having a blissful, drug like effect on me and took the edge off of those long nights. It was a scary kind of drug-like heroin. A crash was inevitable” (Queller 44). Jessica began to define herself in terms of this man, who already had a wife. Jessica’s life at this point was an example of Simone De Beauvoir’s theory that, “man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man” (De Beauvoir). He was her drug,the way to escape the terror of her mothers illness, whereas she was just another girl he could do with or without, since he had another one at home anyway. Soon Jessica realized that Adrian was “a man who would never be good for anyone. You’d think I would have summoned my strength and left him, told him to go back to his wife, his children, his responsibilities. That I did not do” (Queller 48). Of course, Adrian wouldn’t go back to his wife, or his children because he doesn’t see them as directly his responsibilities. His mindset was that, “woman has ovaries and a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature,” (De Beauvoir), and thus he was home free. After enduring Adrian’s last trip to Los Angeles to see his wife, Jessica finally ended things, but not before she allowed herself to be taken advantage of by this man.

When discussing this occurrence with her therapist, Mark, Jessica “described how [she’d] laid down the law with Adrian. Mark listened in silence. When I was through, he took a beat, then asked if I thought I was creating turmoil in my personal life to distract myself from what was going on with my mother” (Queller 49). Mark understood the concept that every utterance is a response to what has come before it and the reply that will come after it (Bakhtin). He then gave the reply that preceded his above statement since Jessica was silent, “your mother is going to die from cancer, Jessica. There is nothing you can do but bear witness” (Queller 49).

Stephanie’s cancer was indeed progressing in a terrible manner. The plan had become to send her home to be in peace because there was no more the hospital could do for her. “In the days before her discharge, my mother sat up in the hospital bed, looking like a wide-eyed little girl. The brutal effects of the surgeries had knocked any worldliness out of her. She no longer had the filter that exists between impression and response” (Queller 67) Since “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others,” (Saussure 878) bridging the gap between impression and response became impossible. Stephanie couldn’t control the thoughts that come along with the signified/signifier relationship. The immediate connotation of an event, action, or object was what she reacted to. Soon, Stephanie became so sick, so fearful that her “eyes were filled with terror, her mouth frozen in a permanent O. She refused to get near the bed – she equated the bed with death – and insisted on walking” (Queller 78). She might not have been able to filter impressions and responses, but she understood that, “the linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image” (Saussure 852). To her, death was the concept and bed was the sound image.

Being that, “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” (Burke 459) Stephanie Queller’s defeat in the face of ovarian cancer qualifies. Despite the absolute horror of losing a parent especially in such a dehumanizing condition, it provoked a curiosity in Jessica Queller’s mind. In this way, Stephanie Queller’s passing was sublime as well; “there is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place. It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit” (Longinus 139). This terror, this sadness, this grief is what encourages Jessica to take the BRCA test, and what brought her to writing this moving chronicle of her experience.

Once confronted with the daunting word: positive, Jessica Queller was introduced to the statistics that went along with that word. These “deleterious mutations in BRCA1 may confer as much as an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 44% risk of ovarian cancer by age 70 in women. Mutations in BRCA1 have been reported to confer a 20% risk of a second breast cancer within five years of the first as well as a ten-fold increase in the risk of subsequent ovarian cancer” (Queller 85). Jessica was surrounded by these statistics, a genetic counselor, and the advice to “consider chemoprevention or prophylactic surgery like mastectomy or oophorectomy” (Queller 90). A personal friend of Jessica’s endowed her with more in depth knowledge of what she might have to endure, “ she went on to say that Kim the breast surgeon saw cases of deadly cancer every day and felt it was essential for me to get a bilateral mastectomy as soon as possible. But not to worry – plastic surgery could do marvels these days – I could pick out a lovely new pair of breasts” (Queller 92). From this moment of knowledge on, Jessica would be “haunted by a sense of [her] femininity” (De Beauvoir). When “there is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future,” (De Beauvoir) the difficulty becomes choosing a savior that will delete both sexuality and an element of nurturing in motherhood. When woman “appears essentially to the male as a sexual being and for him; she is sex-absolute sex, no less” (De Beauvoir) the removal of breasts becomes life threatening as well for woman who wants to have a family. Will removing breasts simultaneously remove the possibility of a husband or a family? Being a single woman, Jessica intensely considered this question; she thought, “Maybe I should have waited, say, until forty-five to take the test; that would have given me a decade of blissful ignorance in which to fall in love, have kids, breast-feed…” (Queller 92).

Even doctors were torn about recommending a double mastectomy to a woman who hadn’t yet contracted cancer, who also hadn’t yet contracted a husband or children. One doctor replied, “prophylactic bilateral mastectomy was the gold standard for preventing breast cancer in BRCA-positive women, and that he would strongly advocate it for a woman who was married and had finished bearing children. But for someone like [Jessica], who was single and whose personal life was not yet settled – he couldn’t recommend it in good conscience” (Queller 97). To this doctor, this male professional in the medical field, Jessica was seen as being the other, as simply being a woman who needed to fulfill her duty in life, not a woman whose life could be at risk. He represented the culture that “still widely advertises domestic conceptions of femininity, the ideological moorings for a rigorously dualistic sexual division of labor that casts a woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer” (Bordo 2245). This need for a woman to be the chief emotional and physical nurturer took precedence over the need for a woman to be alive and healthy.

It took Jessica a year to decide if she should have the life altering surgery or not. She questioned, “If I had a mastectomy and reconstruction, would men no longer find me desirable? Would I feel deformed? Would I ever want to be touched again? Would I no longer feel like a whole woman?” (Queller 113). Jessica was so haunted by these questions because “particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power ‘from below’ as Foucault puts it; for example, of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate – rather than repress – desire, generate and focus out energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance” (Bordo 2242). The debate between normalcy and health raged on.

When Jessica decides that waking up without breasts is “the lesser of two evils and [that she’ll] be more traumatized if [she] woke up with cancer” (Queller 152) she also realizes that “at the farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead [her] to utter demoralization, debilitation, and death” (Bordo 2241). Despite the fact that, “our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, and femininity” (Bordo 2240) none of those things matter when one realizes that “Having surgery is taking care of myself. My true self. My spirit, my character, stuff on the inside. Whatever the cosmetic result of my body, my breasts, is not all that consequential” (Queller 195). In this way, Jessica is living the essence of the Rene des Cartes’ Cogito. Without the essence of herself, her character, her life, she would not truly exist. Her ability to think makes her human, makes her woman, and makes her Jessica.

Post double mastectomy, Jessica reminisced on her feelings about the surgery; “I was afraid I’d feel deformed, afraid I wouldn’t feel at home in my reconstructed body, afraid that my sexual partners would find me unappealing. Afraid that somehow the physical and emotional consequences of my choice would sabotage my ability to find love. None of this turned out to be the case” (Queller 226). Jessica still wanted to fulfill her role as a woman, but first she had to experience that “cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed – that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values” (Bordo 2543). She had to assess her breasts for their true value, and see if they were truly attached to future love, children, family life, and ultimately womanhood. Once detached from her breasts, it became possible to see them as simply breasts, not as the inscriptions that were written on them.

A transformation of the ideals of beauty occurred. Through her mother’s cancer struggles and death, through her own journey from BRCA1 test to mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, Jessica came to truly understand what it meant to be a woman in this modern day society. She found that “through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity – a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes… female bodies become docile bodies – whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’” (Bordo 2241) but also that if one takes their destiny into their own hands, they can absolutely rewrite it.

Jessica Queller defamiliarizes what it means to be a woman. In this way, she is refusing to accept the notion that women must put themselves in danger and risk their health in order to live up to the standards society has placed on them; that they must attract men sexually, they must produce and nurture children, and that they must be perfect and pretty. She exemplifies the theory that, “today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging” (Gilbert and Gubar 1930). She creates a source of comfort and advice for women experiencing the same decision, and a source of inspiration and self-assuredness for all women to believe in who they are and accept their feminine characteristics, while not settling for less in life because of them.

“We are living in an age in which scientific advances give us new opportunities to live. Seize them.” – Jessica Queller

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "Discourse in the Novel."Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.

Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition . W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.

Burke, Edmund. "Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.

De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex Introduction: Woman as Other." Web. 9 Aug. 2010.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm

De Beauvoir, Simone. “From The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "Madwoman in the Attic." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.

Longinus, Cassius. "On Sublimity." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.

Marx, Karl. "The Communist Manifesto." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.

Queller, Jessica. Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, the Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009. Print.

Saussure, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdMUGziS2Kc&NR=1

The Racial Mountain: Too Difficult for Michael Oher to Tackle

“The Blind Side,” novel turned mega Hollywood hit, not only depicts a family that adopts, nurtures, and saves a young, black, male’s life from being a part of the street life he was born into, but it also portrays Langston Hughes’ idea that “this urge within the race towards whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible” (1192). Of course on the outside, as one can see from the movie trailer, Michael Oher was indeed saved from a life of violence, poverty, and struggles by this kind hearted family who welcomed him into their home. However, most Americans might fail to see the larger implications of watching a movie like this. They might fail to see how the movie perpetuates a master slave relationship between whites and blacks; how “The Blind Side” screams out, just as Langston Hughes claimed even the “high-class Negro” does: “Look how well a white man does things” (1193).

In the trailer Leigh Anne Touhy’s grand, upper class, white status is immediately juxtaposed with Michael’s downtrodden, impoverished, gang and violence-ridden life. Thus, the audience automatically feels that this family has the opportunity, even the obligation to help poor Michael. In this movie, it is evident that “the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money” (1193). Because the Touhy lifestyle is placed right next to Michael’s less than safe lifestyle, it becomes a natural transgression for one to think that this white family has it all. The Touhy’s have beauty, morality, and money; Michael, being black, has nothing.

Another element to note in the trailer is that the focus of this movie, Michael Oher, has very few lines. He speaks a total of three small phrases throughout the trailer, while Leigh Anne Touhy (played by Sandra Bullock) speaks nearly the entire two and a half minutes. This implies that despite being adopted by the Tuohy family, Michael is still the other in the relationship; he is “still Negro enough to be different” (1193). Once again, this movie perpetuates the stereotype of the poor, uneducated, silent black person.

One could argue that there are many implications to tease out of this trailer alone, let alone the film in its entirety. It could be argued that “The Blind Side” is simply a portrayal of one of the few kind families left in America who would be willing to open their home to a complete stranger. It could be argued that this movie depicts the harsh and growing gap between classes as well as races in modern America. It could be a commentary on Hollywood, and how they will capitalize on any story that comes their way; commodify the story and change it to fit what the consider to be marketable even if the end product is completely different from the story it was originally based off of. And this very fact is what makes “The Blind Side” such a great platform to discuss the Racial Mountain that Langston Hughes writes about. When the media “chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand” (1194). This array of themes available to tease out of “The Blind Side” allow those who don’t want to admit to the racist and stereotypical elements of the movie, to not have to do so. They can be completely ignorant of the larger implications of this movie, and regard the Tuohy family as loving, and Michael Oher as simply lucky.

This intersection between accurately portraying the story at hand, and giving the public what they want to see is where things become difficult. The movie should, “ ‘be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes” (1195). But at the same time, “ ‘be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites” (1195). Caught in the middle of this junction is “The Blind Side.” It shows the negative aspect of poor black communities, while showing the potential a young black man can have if given the right opportunities. However, it also shows the stereotypical way some people view blacks, as uneducated, silent when faced with people of a higher stature, poor, and violent. In this way, the movie fails to reveal truth about humanity; it only extends the idea of white supremacy.

Something important to consider when thinking about how this movie affects the United States on a larger scale, is seeing how the actual person this story was based on, reacts to the movie.



Based on that interview, it is evident that Michael Oher was uncomfortable, even annoyed by the questions being asked. He could only say that the movie is, “a great story, it gives people hope.” When asked about Sandra Bullock and her awards, it seemed evident that Michael Oher recognized the focus on the Tuohy family in the movie; he only played the role that allowed the family to be seen as a grand savior. It’s also interesting to consider that Sandra Bullock, the person playing his adoptive mother in the film, never met him. Actors and actresses often meet the people they play, or are supposed to be related to in movies as to make sure they get the part just right. The question comes to mind then, why have these two not met? Michael Oher and Quinton Aaron (the actor who played him in “The Blind Side”) supposedly haven’t met either. These facts raise the question, was the entire movie based on the Tuohy family’s impression of Michael Oher? Perhaps, the movie is just a simulacrum of double-consciousness… Now the entire country gets to view Michael Oher through the eyes of the white family who saved his life.

Works Cited

Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ3kwMq18-8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz5C9D-bPqk

My Contribution to Project Feminism

For the group presentation on Feminism and Gender Studies, our group (consisting of Ashley, La Tiere, Kelina, and myself) decided to split up each theorist's work and conduct our own activity from it. By doing this, we could cover a large amount of information, keep the class entertained, and wouldn't have to meet that often outside of class which works better for a group of people with schedules that just simply can not mesh together. We decided that since my part of the presentation was based mostly on the class's ability to contribute to the discussion and make connections between the novel and the theories as well as the fact that some members had less material that they could present on, my activity would need to take more class time.

My presentation was on Simone De Beauvoir's "Introduction to the Second Sex: Woman as Other", and a little of Sanda M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "Madwoman in the Attic". I decided that in order to induce a more active discussion in our classroom environment, I would need to strike up some controversial ideas. The class was quite involved in the discussion, which I was pleased about. The handouts I put together I hoped would help the class understand that even on the surface level of reading a simple synopsis from a female author's novel, this relationship of the One to the Other is present. This relationship is the way a female author can represent the world she lives in, while marketing her book to a world that is male dominated. This lead into the idea of the anxiety of authorship, and how the female author feels she can not create because she hasn't had the same relationship with writings ancestry as men have. I tried to link this idea to the fact that Emily Giffin's five novel's are evidently about the plight of women, and how this is her way of relating to her audience; in the same way in which all women are acknowledged in the world. Which is her way of I had my own handout on which I wrote down quotes from the critical essays that I believed would help the class get talking. However, the class participated more than I expected them to, and were able to raise some good points.

I hope the class enjoyed our discussion, and was able to understand more about feminism, its use in fiction, and it's relativity in the relationship of man to woman.

Femininity is How Many Pounds Exactly?

Excerpt from “Good In Bed” by Jennifer weiner
Loving a Larger Woman
by Bruce Guberman
I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.
She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder -- a palm-sized folio with notations for what she'd eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she'd been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.
I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I'd seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting, reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I'd ever dated before.
What, I thought scornfully. Both of them?
I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.
Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.
But being out with her didn't feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I'd absorbed society's expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker's build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team's roster, C. couldn't make herself invisible.
But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.
As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn't matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world's voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.
And I knew it wasn't paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you'll find out how true it is. You'll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You'll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine's Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you'll watch her agonize, balancing what she wants against what she'll let herself have, what she'll let herself have against what she'll be seen eating in public.
And what she'll let herself say.
I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who'd been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to Inside Edition and People magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate mail, including one letter from a guy who began: "I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you." And it was that letter -- that word -- that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true -- the "overweight" part -- then the "nobody loves you" part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.
Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn't believe that she herself was worthy of anyone's love.
And now that it's over, I don't know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body -- no, herself -- and whether she was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself.
I wept straight through Celebrity Weddings, slumped on the floor in front of the couch, tears rolling off my chin and soaking my shirt as one tissue-thin supermodel after another said "I do." I cried for Bruce, who had understood me far more than I'd given him credit for and maybe had loved me more than I'd deserved. He could have been everything I'd wanted, everything I'd hoped for. He could have been my husband. And I'd chucked it.
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This excerpt from Jennifer Weiner’s novel “Good in Bed” highlights the pressures every woman feels at one point, or many points in her life. It exemplifies the need for feminist intervention, the need for women to begin to see themselves as their own individual essence, instead of what society tells them their essence needs to be.

In the section above, the audience lays eyes upon the article Cannie Shapiro’s ex-boyfriend has written about her. Calling his once-upon-a-time lover by the discreet initial, “C.” Bruce begins hacking away at a daunting description of Cannie. Bruce claims, “Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome” (Weiner). Now this strikes the average modern reader as unnatural; a girlfriend physically as large as her boyfriend? Why, that’s preposterous! A woman should be smaller than her significant other for numerous reasons, it’s pleasing to the eye, it makes the man feel more masculine, and the woman more feminine. If every man only dated, married, loved a woman who was smaller than himself, “it would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity” (De Beauvoir). If a woman isn’t feminine, is she still a woman? If a woman has rounded hips and full cheeks, is she still a woman? The character Bruce might say so, as long as he isn’t in public.

In this case, both Bruce and Cannie suffer from the weight of public expectations. The reader gets the sense that, “the attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity” (De Beauvoir). Cannie had to “agonize, balancing what she [wanted] against what [she'd] let herself have, what [she'd] let herself have against what [she'd] be seen eating in public” (Weiner). This weight struggle wasn’t a simple diet to drop five pounds, for Cannie, and many women in society today, weight and image are constant battles that consume every thought and every second of the day. Cannie was haunted by her lack of femininity, and her lack of control to comply with the rules of femininity or to reject the weight struggle completely.

The pressure that a woman endures to be an acceptable weight is so intense that she can no longer separate herself from the number on the scale. Her value has been sewn to that number, sealed to it by surgical tools and super glue. Thus, “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” (Bordo 2246). Because Cannie has yet to meet these demands of ultimate femininity and thinness, she will not believe what anyone else has to say. Society has the last word, and in this case society says “fat.” Despite the fact that Bruce used to tell Cannie that she was beautiful, that what the world said she ought to look like wasn’t a part of his criteria, he could never change her mind.

In this article, Bruce takes on the role of the victim, claiming that, “loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility” (Weiner). In this way, Bruce is able to play his nice guy role claiming that he loved the way Cannie looked, and that it was society who ruined their relationship, while maintaining power in the no longer existing relationship through his playing of the victim role; he decided to engage in the futile act of loving a larger woman. Bruce “shows a certain duplicity of altitude which is painfully lacerating to women; they are willing on the whole to accept women as a fellow being, an equal; but they still require her to remain the inessential” (De Beauvoir 1272).

Once Cannie reads this article in its entirety, she begins to see herself as even more inferior due to her lack of this man. “He could have been my husband. And I’d chucked it” (Weiner). Cannie feels like she needs this man to complete her, because who else in this vast world could love a heavier-than-seen-on-T.V. woman, besides Bruce? Cannie was already empty based on her lack of femininity. She has been “told not that femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned with it are not feminine” (De Beauvoir 1265). After reading this article, Cannie has been reduced to the absolute negation of a woman: she is not attractive in the way society wants her to be, and she lost the one man who could ever truly love her.

Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2001. Print.

De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex, Woman as Other." Web. 9 Aug. 2010.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm

De Beauvoir, Simone. “From The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2001. Print.

Weiner, Jennifer. "Good in Bed" a Novel. New York: Pocket, 2001. Print.

Grey's Anatomical Discipline and Punishment

"Sympathy for the Devil" Watch the clip below from 5:07 to 5:53



"Stairway to Heaven" Watch the clip below from 2:11 to 4:29




Season 5, episode 12 and 13 of “Grey’s Anatomy” ( Sympathy for the Devil and Stairway to Heaven) place on the table heart wrenching questions of morality, judgment of the innocent and guilty, and ultimately judgment of oneself. The doctors at Seattle Grace Hospital find themselves trapped in a maze of right and wrong decisions. What’s moral in one’s heart might not be the protocol of the hospital, the institution that the doctors have devoted their lives to. Seattle Grace serves as the doctors own prison where “a body of knowledge [is] being constantly built up from the everyday behavior of the inmates; it [is] organized as an instrument of perpetual assessment” (Foucault 1491). Being that Seattle Grace is a teaching hospital, perpetual assessment is a given, however when grappling with questions as weighty as if a convicted murder about to walk down death row deserves to have medical rights, the assessment becomes questionable as does the knowledge that determines what the assessment’s outcome should be.

A critical patient, young Jackson is admitted to Seattle Grace with an extreme and life threatening diagnosis. In order to save his life, he will need new intestines and a new liver. A convicted serial killer, Mr. Dun is also in the hospital in need of brain surgery. This man, this criminal, knows he will die from lethal injection in 5 days, but wants to die sooner. Second year resident Meredith Grey intervenes in efforts to save Jackson’s life and to grant Mr. Dun’s dying wish. Watching "Stairway to Heaven" from 13:34 to 14:29 shows the conflict that ensues when the brain surgeon Dr. Shepherd finds out about Dr. Grey’s morally questionable actions.

It is notable that Dr. Grey has been going about letting Mr. Williams suffer from a seizure that caused hemorrhaging, in order to fulfill his wishes. When Dr. Grey knows she is not under supervision, she engages in actions that are against hospital policy. However, when faced with her superior, she has no authority, no power and thus must allow Dr. Shepherd to proceed with the surgery to save Mr. Dun’s life. This shows that Seattle Grace Hospital exemplifies that “the acquisition of skills is inextricably linked with the establishment of power relations” (Foucault 1491). Dr. Shepherd is an attending, while Dr. Grey is only a resident, meaning she has to respect the demands of the higher-ranking doctor. She must allow this murder a second chance at life.

In this episode the audience see’s Dr. Bailey, Jacksons lead surgeon grappling with the morality of letting Mr. Dun die in exchange for his organs as well. In the beginning of the "Stairway to Heaven" episode, at about 3:55 to 4:29, Dr. Bailey initially speaks the words, “were doctor’s, Grey were not executioners,” only to have those same words spoken back to her by Dr. Shepherd. At 18:48 to 20:25 in "Stairway to Heaven" the audience sees a different side of Dr. Bailey, a side that has been watching an innocent boy die. A side of her emerges that wants to fight for her patient at any cost, even the cost of another life. The reason she is able to do this is because this man gave up his right to life when he took five other lives himself. Being a criminal has reduced this man to simply organs. Dr. Bailey feels as though Mr. Dun being buried with his organs intact is a crime in itself because he no longer deserves this right, because her own patient is someone who deserves them more than he does. In this way, the audience sees the effects of living in a carceral society; “by operating at every level of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished” (Foucault 1498). Dr. Bailey is using the idea that because it is natural for Mr. Dun to have a severe punishment for his severe crimes, then it’s justifiable to let him die before his execution date in efforts to save another person, an innocent person. Even though at the end of that scene, Dr. Bailey allows Dr. Shepherd to continue surgery on Mr. Dun, in that moment she created her own knowledge, her own logic, her own truth. That truth could have cost Mr. Dun his life. Dr. Shepherd’s truth could cost Jackson his life. When the pledge to save lives includes saving a person who has taken lives on his own accord, does the oath still ring logical?

Two times so far, we have seen doctors ask the question, “Am I an executioner or am I a surgeon?” These doctors see themselves through a panoptic lense. They walk into the operating room seeing themselves as others see them, as surgeons who save lives. However when confronted with a different perspective the line between what one sees themselves as and the subject view of that same being, brings into question the validity of their knowledge, and the solidity of their values.
In the conclusion of the episode, Mr. Dun survives his surgery and gets to proceed to his own execution by lethal injection, and young Jackson receives organs from a patient in the hospital who is comatose. Mr. Dun escapes the hospital carceral system only to head right into another one. The audience can thus understand the hospital as an extension for the completion of the carceral system. In order to fulfill the sentence for Mr. Dun, he needed to be alive for 5 more days, which meant hospitalization and surgery. It is evident that “the carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what it punishes. It is unwilling to waste even what it has decided to disqualify” (Foucault 1496). The justice system, as well as the doctors are guilty of this. We see Dr. Shepherd uttering this same idea in "Sympathy for the Devil" from 5:07 - 5:53, "He's trying to cheat the system, and we're not going to let him do it." For Jackson, there is a light at the end of the tunnel signaling his recovery, and eventual leave from Seattle Grace.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michael. "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=YI6MXE60

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