Cover Girls

Abstract

Martha Reinke has argued that the body, as an intimate source of boundaries, has been used to reflect back on a smaller scale the issues of the social structure. This essay argues that women’s bodies function as an inscriptive surface of power and knowledge for patriarchal society. This function is related to the inmate in the Panopticon who is surveyed and then internalizes the gaze of the surveyor. A cultural phenomenon such as “cover girls” demonstrates how women’s bodies are locations for the incarnation of the male gaze. Luce Irigaray’s strategic mimesis, Rosi Braidotti’s theory of female embodied materialism, and bell hooks’ oppositional gaze are possible sites of strategic resistance for female subjectivity against the male gaze. In feminist theology “Being-a-woman” provides a strategically essential identity location to think about God/dess, especially as it relates to female embodiment and incarnation. Women become able to reject dominant modes of representation and incarnation, such as “cover girls,” and become subjects of divine identity. Feminist theorists’ and theologians’ work destabilizes patriarchy’s incarnational notion of women’s bodies and then constructs a notion of divinity that valorizes all women’s experiences and aids in a formulation of an epistemology of embodiment.