Bartky's Panopticon Essay

When one learns gender, they learn to mindlessly understand that the masculine overpowers the feminine; they learn that the male is phallic while the female is castrated and to represent their body accordingly. The male body’s representation includes being powerful and taking up as much space as humanly possible. The female body’s representation is being weak, more easily violated, and taking up as little of space as humanly possible. To the feminist belief though, society should consider the feminine physique as the stronger in the binary due to how much pain a woman’s body must go through throughout its years, between menstruation, birth, and molding her body, while a man will crumble to the ground if his phallic area receives a light

Irigaray explains “that it is necessary to become a woman, a ‘normal’ one at that, whereas a man is a man from the outset. He has only to effect his being a man, whereas a woman has to become a normal woman, that is, has to enter into the masquerade of femininity.” (Irigaray, p. 134). Bartky likewise explores the masquerade of femininity through Foucault’s theory of the Panopticon. The Panopticon is how every human experiences and lives in their own body and how each person self-masters and self-disciplines, similar to a guard tower in a jail cell. Women created makeup, diets and exercising in order to keep the body controlled, disciplined, and mastered according to patriarchal standards. The magazines, like Cosmopolitan, became guard towers for women to read through and realize what standards they still are not living up to. Self-discipline and self-mastery from a patriarchal perspective is a woman’s outer beauty being ‘flawless.’ (Notes,

Daly, Anzaldua, and Bartky all expressed similar theories and desires to Irigaray’s in wanting to remove the patriarchal views that remain in a constant framework and remove the normative constraints of patriarchy. Irigaray’s discussion of female pleasure connects to the rebelliousness of Anzaldua’s Shadow Beast; Irigaray’s discussion of language connects to Daly’s rejection of man, masculinity, and patriarchy; and Irigaray’s discussion of the female body connects to Bartky’s masquerade of femininity. Due to how the patriarchy raises them, the female body is under constraint by female’s own minds. The body needs a meaning and the change begins within the female mind when she allows herself to think for herself and be her true