Abstract
Reviewed by: Octavia Calder-Dawe, The University of Auckland, New Zealand
In her monograph Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture, Carla Rice sets out to tell “the story of becoming woman in image culture” (p. 267). To do so, Rice draws from interviews conducted with 81 Canadian women who came of age in the 20 years prior (women aged between 20 and 45 in the late 1990s). This cohort piques Rice’s interest for two reasons. Her interviewees belong to the first generation of Canadian women to grow up in what Rice describes as an “image-saturated world” (p. 4), where girls and women are relentlessly subjected to narrow bodily ideals and imperatives as a consequence of mass media. Furthermore, like Rice herself, these women came of age in the lull between two peaks of feminist activity: squeezed between the activism of the 1970s and the 1990s and party to neither. Rice contends that these women’s voices are absent from most scholarly accounts of feminism in North America, and offers her work as a corrective.
Rice has curated her interview sample with care in an effort to represent the diversity of women living in Canada. According to Rice, the storytellers who animate Becoming Women are drawn from “all walks of life” (p. 4) with diverse bodies and experiences of embodiment. Surveying their stories, Rice asks how these women come to build a sense of bodily self. As she demonstrates, divergently positioned women navigate this process differently. Rice actively foregrounds the narratives of women living with disabilities along with women of African, South Asian and Asian Canadian heritage, groups whose experiences are often neglected in popular media and academic treatments of women’s embodiment.
Rice’s approach to her subject material is unconventional, layering extracts from interviews with women into overviews of academic research, along with snippets of historical analysis and close readings of media and policy drawn from the contemporary social milieu. The result is a creative, wide-ranging book that weaves together elements of embodied experience seldom treated together. One would surely struggle to find another piece of scholarship addressing school life and medical systems, Barbie dolls and freak shows, colonization and puberty. Reading Rice’s work, one is convinced of the analytic value of these unexpected juxtapositions. Her book builds a complex account of the body imperatives facing women and girls, studded with examples that demonstrate how these imperatives are organised along lines of privilege.
Becoming Women is structured thematically in a manner that turns out to be loosely chronological, though Rice is clearly wary of linear, step-wise models of female development. The first chapter introduces the reader to the social construction of difference. Here, Rice lays the conceptual foundations for the analyses that follow, explaining her decision to foreground experiences of diversity, difference and marginalisation as a foil to mainstream scholarship that places the white, middle-class and able-bodied girl centre stage. From here, Rice dives into participants’ childhood memories of becoming gendered (Chapter 2) and their growing awareness of bodily differences (Chapter 3) before moving into interviewees’ experiences of schooling (Chapter 4), puberty (Chapters 5 and 6) and beauty (Chapter 7). Each chapter sets interviewees’ descriptions of their experiences against a social and political background, emphasising how participants’ becoming is entangled with sexism, racism, ableism and shadism. Overall, coming into view as a woman in a sexist context entrained a variety of mostly negative emotions and consequences for the women interviewed: shame, fear, objectification, embarrassment, ridicule, violence and insufficiency.
Rice lays out her novel conceptual framework, what she names a “body becoming account of embodiment” (p. 27) informed by new materialism and body becoming theories, in the book’s introduction and again in Chapter 3. She distinguishes it from both mainstream essentialist and social constructionist approaches, though her claim that the latter do not attend to the material world and embodied experience will raise some eyebrows. In practice, theory takes a back seat in Rice’s analyses of her interviewees’ narratives, which are content-driven and more reminiscent of critical realism than Barad.
Rice describes her work as a bridge between critical theory and mainstream developmental theories. Accordingly, Becoming Women has two conceivable audiences, and offers something different to each. To readers conversant with critical feminist approaches to embodiment and femininity, Rice’s work is a welcome illustration of the micropractices of power in women’s everyday lives – and their embodied consequences. For example, Rice draws on interviewees’ narratives to show how the sexual anxieties surrounding girls’ maturation are differentially calibrated by race, culture, size and ability. Rice demonstrates how Black girls’ bodies come to be marked as oversexed and promiscuous, a positioning that intersects with racialised and classed arguments about obesity, health, responsibility and good character. With a similarly deft touch, Rice takes a leaf from disability studies, arguing that “moralizing anti-fat pedagogies” (p. 132) work to produce unfitness.
At the same time, critical feminist readers might note some missed opportunities. Given Rice’s own critiques of puberty education that addresses young women as reproductive rather than sexually desiring, it is surprising that Becoming Women follows the same pattern, devoting two chapters to women’s experiences with puberty and sexual objectification with only the most fleeting reference to narratives of sexual becoming. Similarly jarring is the persistent invocation of a tension between feminists who champion women’s empowerment and those who see women as cultural dupes. Much has changed in the 15 years since these interviews took place, and Rice’s work would benefit from deeper conversation with feminist thinkers who have been engaging with the complexities of women’s embodiment – and exploding this dichotomy – for some time (one thinks, for example, of the work of feminist philosopher Ann Cahill and critical feminist researchers Virginia Braun, Nicola Gavey and Rosalind Gill).
The book’s more natural audience is, I suspect, on the other side of the gap Rice seeks to bridge: mainstream developmental psychology and related fields. In Becoming Women, these readers will find a compelling and accessible introduction to critical approaches to the study of bodies and bodily experience. There are clear lessons here, too, for policy makers, clinicians and educators whose actions shape the conditions of possibility for what Rice might call young women’s body becomings. Finally, the book could be an excellent resource for undergraduate and graduate students looking for an entry point into critical studies of gender, race, the beauty industry, disability and puberty, flush with real-world examples. These readers may, however, need to look elsewhere for a thicker account of contemporary feminist theories of embodiment.
Certainly, Rice has written a book of scholarly and social value. She has achieved what she sets out to do: Becoming Women shows its readers how women’s capacity for inhabiting a socially valued self are entwined with their bodies, bodies hailed by overlapping discourses of race, health, beauty and character.