Reviewed by Rosalyn Diprose
University of New South Wales

Body Images begins with and builds on models of the constitution of the body image from Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Schilder. For these theorists, the body image is the corporeal schema or map that accounts for posture, for the way we move, for our sense of position in relation to the world, for perception—in short for our style of being. This idea of the body image is important for Gail Weiss because it suggests, not only that the body is central to social identity as well as practical existence, but also, and consequently, the body is neither given nor finished. Hence, insofar as the body might also be the site of social subjection, it is also open to transformation towards other possibilities for existence. However, while rich sources for their accounts of the corporeal dimension of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, these foundational theorists of the body image tend to neglect the socially and historically specific dimension of corporeality. As Weiss suggests on the opening page of her book:

there is no such thing as "the" body or even "the" body image. Instead, whenever we are referring to an individual’s body, that body is always responded to in a particularized fashion, that is, as a woman’s body, a Latina’s body, a mother’s body, a daughter’s body, a friend’s body, an attractive body, an aging body, a Jewish body (1).

Weiss sets out to remove the definite article from accounts of "the" body image by attending to the plurality of body images, not just among bodies but within the same "individual." Second, she sets out to challenge the assumed neutrality of "the" body image by attending to the socio-historical specificity of the body images that we variously live.

In the context of a proliferation of accounts of the corporeal dimension of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, what sets this book apart is the path Weiss takes toward achieving her aims. Hers is a two-sided approach. She develops the insights from Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Schilder that she finds most useful for removing the definite article from the body image—particularly Merleau-Ponty’s and Schilder’s theses about the intercorporeal basis of human embodiment, and their suggestion that body images are multiple and/or dynamic, evolving in response to corporeal and contextual changes. Second, Weiss draws on feminist analyses of the socio-historical basis of human embodiment (Bordo, Beauvoir, Braidotti, Butler, Grosz, Haraway, Irigaray, Kristeva, Young) in correcting the failure of foundational accounts of the body image to consider body images as sites of cultural contestation. But this is not a case of simply adding the two sides of the story together to patch up the deficiencies of each. Their intertwining effects a transformation of both with some startling and fascinating results.

For example, in a chapter entitled "The Abject Borders of the Body Image," Weiss addresses the issue of how "distortions," contradictions, and sometimes pathologies arise in body images in the process of attempting to attain a self-contained and socially acceptable identity. She draws on feminist accounts of abjection (Kristeva, Butler, and Grosz) to emphasize how this constitution of distinct corporeal borders is socially mediated as well as to confirm the ultimate impossibility of forming "coherent" identities or unified body images. And she invokes Susan Bordo’s account of anorexia nervosa as a way to understand how, in the context of ideal body images that feature in the social control and normalization of the female body, contradictions and distortions can arise in a subject’s body image, bringing detrimental consequences. While giving these accounts their due, Weiss averts the negativity associated with the impossibility of maintaining a coherent identity apparent in models of abjection and she argues, against Bordo’s account of anorexia, that it is not distortion or contradiction between the body and body images or between the subject’s body image and the perception of others that is the problem here. In a remarkable twist, she contends that "[p]aradoxically… the deadly distortions in the anorexic’s body image stem from its excessive coherence, a coherence that can only be maintained through her disidentification with and repudiation of her own multiple body images" (99).

This claim, put in general terms, is the central thesis Weiss develops in her book: Oppression, some pathology and intolerance to different ways of being can be understood in terms of living an impossible ideal of coherent corporeal identity rather than remaining open to the transformation of body images born of a necessary tension between maintaining some body equilibrium and the destabilization brought by continual changes in both our body and our social situation. Weiss explains the impact of racism (on both the body image of the racist as well as that of his/her object) and the impact of sexism in these terms of "excessive coherence." Put more positively, Weiss’ claim is that both a sense of self and an ethical relation to the other (whether human or non-human) rests on corporeal flexibility in response to different body encounters; and this flexibility depends, at the same time, on not repudiating the multiplicity of body images that constitute our existence and that are derived from those different encounters. While, unlike some other accounts of embodied existence, Weiss thus bases the origin of subjectivity on intercorporeality, she is careful to argue that the openness to others that is the origin of the self and of ethics does not eliminate alterity. This important point is drawn in part from two particularly interesting readings of Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeality that highlight an aspect of his work overlooked by some of his critics, namely, the idea that the touch of intercorporeality takes place in "untouchable of the touch, the invisible of the visible" (56) and the idea of the cart, the space of non-coincidence "between" bodies "that resists articulation" (120). Weiss’ readings allow her claim that self and other, body and world come together, are constituted and transformed, not through what they share, but through their differentiation (56).

Supporting this central thesis is a related claim about the relationship between the (material) body and (social) body images. While foundational theories of the body image are found to be deficient for their neglect of the social dimension of corporeal existence, some feminist and cultural theorists make the equally problematic mistake, Weiss argues, of reducing the body images that we live to their social dimension. To present bodies as "merely the discursive effects of historical power relationships" is to "lose sight of the physiological dimensions that also play such a crucial, continuous role" in the construction of body images (2). While Weiss is to be applauded for reinstating the materiality of corporeal existence in her account, she seems to fall short of spelling out what she thinks the relationship between the material and the social might be. As this point, arguably, is less well developed than the central thesis, the direct comments Weiss does make about the relationship can leave the reader with the impression that there are two distinct layers to corporeal existence - the physiological body, overlaid by social body images that the material body interacts with and animates. I do not think Weiss intends this base/superstructure model as an antidote to the idealist social constructionism she justifiably opposes, since much of the analysis of body images that dominate the book would tend to work against it. That Weiss does not resolve the perplexing and controversial issue of the relationship between the matter of the body and its socially mediated style is not a serious criticism. That intertwining is still taking place in that just as the body images that are the subject of Weiss’ philosophy are not yet finished, neither are the encounters that constitute her book.