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Hi,
I'd appreciate the citation very much.
Thanks,
Phyllis Rubenfeld

On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Dona Avery wrote:

> Judy Singer writes
> > Cross-cultural studies that I have read about recently,
> >admittedly in the popular press, have shown that there is wide agreement
> >about what constitutes an attractive person across disparate cultures and
> >ethic groups.
> >
> 
> I would argue that "There is wide agreement" because hegemony makes it
> so.  Recall the testing that Thurgood Marshall did in the segregated
> American South, where he gave African American children the option of
> choosing a white doll or a black doll as the one they would most like
> "to be" and as the one which was "good." The black children invariably
> chose the white doll as the ideal, because they were, at that young age,
> aware that white is the privileged skin color.
> 
> There has been a similar experiment using "disabled" dolls and
> nondisabled figures, and the results were parallel (I'd have to look up
> the cite for that).
> 
> The "popular press," it would seem, makes an assessment about "wide
> agreement" without understanding cultural forces which coerce that
> consensus.
> 
> 
> As to:
> >Tim Flannery, a well-known Australian scientist and scientific
> >populariser.. . argues that symmetrical features are our best outward
> >sign of healthy genes, and that we are genetically programmed to prefer
> them.
> 
> I would argue that this, likewise, is (to put it in a ladylike way)
> b******t.  It is of the same hegemonic manufacture that provoked Edmund
> Burke to write a treatise in the 18th C, called"(partially) "The Sublime
> and the Beautiful.  Burke tried to demonstrate that Giants, small
> people, dark and/or angular bodies or those marked with difference, were
> *sublime* or "naturally" untasteful...while (duh) those bodies who were
> symmetrical, fair, and rounded were "beautiful."  When we look at the
> context of Burke's times, of course, we see that Linnaeus (among others
> in science and criminology) were meanwhile "proving"that differently
> shaped body parts were signs of evil, pathology, or deviance.  Linnaeus
> measured people's NOSES, LIPS, SKULLS, and even the width and kinkiness
> of hair strands, and "determined" that (duh) black people were obviously
> inferior.  (I remember all this from my MA research on slavery, because
> I possess the deviant nose/lip/skull and kinkiness of hair myself!)
> 
> This brand of phrenology goes back, I believe, to Medieval times, when
> the Church also actively played a role in delineating the Sublime from
> the beautiful.  Today, church, science, criminology, medicine, and all
> the other ISAs --MOST OF ALL the media and advertising-- merely
> perpetuate the beauty ideal of a specific culture.  The Western ideal,
> it seems, is becoming more and more global...but there ARE cultures
> whose preferences are proof that beauty is a social construct and
> historically specific, as well.
> 
> When Judy writes:
> > Getting ourselves into extreme social constructionism and denying an
> >element of biological necessity will see the disability rights movement
> >becoming increasingly marginalised, confined to fighting unwinnable
> >battles over incomprehensible semantics.
> 
>    I would deferentially transpose some of your words to say that:
> To AVOID serious critique of socially constructed beliefs is to succumb
> to and internalize the deficit model--a process of inferiorization for
> which false claims of "inherent biological essence" are designed.
>  
> We need not fear that the disability rights movement will "become
> increasingly marginalised, confined to fighting unwinnable battles over
> incomprehensible semantics," if we ALSO attend to the uniquely
> individual (thus, nonessentialized) elements of the physical condition
> each disabled person person experiences.  This is not a question of
> semantics at all, but a reality check on what is REAL and what is
> fabricated by dominant society.
> 
> Finally, to Laurence, who writes:
> >I really enjoy hearing the explanations of why men are attracted to the
> >shape of a woman.  It's to do with the viability of the species.  Big
> >breasts and (relatively) big hips denote good breeding stock.  It seems
> >all attractiveness standards are based on an assumption of
> >heterosexuality. 
> 
>      It would seem that the remarks you speak of have more to do with
> machoism than with the "good breeding value" rationalization.  But
> that's another list topic. 
> 
> Dona Avery
> U of Bristol/AZ State U.
> [log in to unmask]
> www.public.asu.edu/~donam
> 



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