On the colonial logic of beauty standards, the economy of the female form, and the insurgent act of self-possession
The body has always been a battleground. Not metaphorically — though the metaphor is useful — but materially, historically, in the flesh. The female body in particular has been subject to a centuries-long process of expropriation: claimed, named, regulated, and narrated by systems and structures that have had every interest in keeping women alienated from the most immediate territory they inhabit. To speak of desire under these conditions — to speak of who gets to want, and how, and under what terms — is necessarily to speak of power.
This essay begins there: with the recognition that desire is not a private matter. It is a political one. The feelings that move through a woman’s body, the wants she identifies or fails to identify, the hunger she indulges or suppresses — none of these emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by the same historical forces that have shaped everything else: capital, patriarchy, race, medicine, law, and the long, accumulated weight of cultural representation. To analyse desire without analysing those forces is to treat the symptom while ignoring the disease.
And yet that is precisely what the dominant cultural conversation about women’s bodies tends to do. It pathologises, individualises and aestheticises. It offers women better diets, better self-talk and better product formulations while leaving entirely intact the structural conditions that make women feel alienated from their own skin in the first place. This series refuses that bargain. It insists on the structural analysis — not because personal experience is unimportant, but because personal experience is always embedded in material conditions, and naming those conditions is the beginning of any genuine transformation.
The Script on the Skin: The Male Gaze, Self-Objectification and Body Surveillance
In 1972, art critic John Berger published a slim but seismic volume called Ways of Seeing, in which he argued that the organisation of European oil painting — and, by extension, modern advertising — was built on a fundamental asymmetry: men act, and women appear. Women, Berger wrote, come to “survey their own femininity”, to internalise the surveyor’s gaze and make it part of themselves. The woman walking down the street is not simply walking; she is watching herself as she walks. She has been taught to inhabit her own body as both subject and object simultaneously — and the cognitive and emotional labour of that split costs her something.
Berger was writing about painting and advertising, but the insight extends far beyond. It describes a condition of subjectivity — a way of inhabiting a body — that feminist philosophers have repeatedly returned to. Sandra Bartky, writing in the 1990s, described the Foucauldian ‘docile body’ as it applies specifically to women: a body produced through constant surveillance, discipline, and normalisation. The woman who diets, who monitors her posture, who moves through the world aware of being seen, is not simply exercising personal preference. She is the product of a disciplinary apparatus so pervasive that it has become indistinguishable from nature.
“The body has always been a battleground — claimed, named, regulated, and narrated by systems that have had every interest in keeping women alienated from the most immediate territory they inhabit.”
What makes this apparatus particularly effective is that it operates through pleasure as much as through punishment. The woman who successfully performs femininity — who is thin, groomed, decorative, and appropriately desirable — is rewarded. She receives approval, attention, employment advantages, romantic success, and social legibility. The rewards are real, even when the system producing them is unjust. This is what makes resistance complicated: you cannot simply opt out of beauty norms without paying a material cost, and demanding that women pay that cost in the name of liberation is itself a kind of idealism that ignores the conditions of real life.
The body, then, is not a neutral or pre-social thing. It is produced — shaped, trained, interpreted, and valued — through systems that precede and exceed any individual woman’s experience. The desire she feels about her own body, the desire she feels or doesn’t feel towards others, the desire she believes herself entitled to — all of this is downstream of material and ideological conditions. The project of reclaiming desire must grapple with those conditions honestly, not pretend they can be individually willed away.
Intersectionality and the Racialised Body: Colonial Afterlives of Control
The analysis of the body-as-territory becomes considerably more complex when race is introduced — and any feminist analysis that fails to introduce it is incomplete in ways that are not merely academic. The history of how female bodies have been defined, surveilled and exploited is inextricable from the history of colonialism and white supremacy. The specific forms of bodily alienation experienced by Black women, Indigenous women, Asian women, and other women of colour are both continuous with and distinct from the gendered alienation that white feminist theory has tended to centre.
Saartjie Baartman — the Khoikhoi woman exhibited across early nineteenth-century Europe, racistly billed as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ — stands as perhaps the most visceral example of what happens when colonialist and patriarchal gazes converge on a Black female body. Baartman’s body was displayed, examined, and after her death at twenty-six, dissected and analysed by the naturalist Georges Cuvier, who sought to use it as scientific evidence for racial hierarchy. Her story is not an aberration but a crystallisation: it makes visible the extractive logic that has organised the gaze towards Black women’s bodies, a logic that persists, in transformed but recognisable forms, into the present.
Scholar and activist Angela Davis, writing across five decades, has consistently insisted on the interconnection between racial capitalism, gender oppression, and bodily autonomy. The history of Black women’s reproductive lives in America — forced breeding under slavery, coercive sterilisation programmes, the ongoing crisis of maternal mortality that kills Black women at three to four times the rate of white women — is a history of a particular kind of expropriation: the taking of reproductive and bodily labour without consent or compensation. This history shapes desire in ways that extend beyond any individual psychology.
Indigenous feminist scholars have added another dimension: the colonial project has always involved the erasure of non-Western relationships to the body, to land, to sexuality, and to community. The imposition of Eurocentric beauty standards, of Christian sexual morality, of nuclear family structures — these are not culturally neutral preferences. They are instruments of colonial governance that severed Indigenous women from their own frameworks for understanding embodiment and desire. Reclaiming those frameworks is, in this context, not merely personal liberation but a form of decolonisation.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality — developed in the context of discrimination law but with far-reaching implications for theory and organising — provides the analytical vocabulary for understanding how these multiple axes of power operate simultaneously on the body. A Black woman’s experience of bodily surveillance is not simply a woman’s experience plus a Black person’s experience; it is a specific, qualitatively distinct experience produced by the interaction of race, gender, class, and other vectors of social power. Any adequate theory of desire must be intersectional in this sense — not as a rhetorical gesture of inclusion, but as a structural commitment to understanding how power actually works.
Capital and Manufactured Lack: Beauty, Diet Culture, and Profit
To understand the political economy of female desire, it is necessary to understand who profits from women’s alienation from their own bodies. The answer is not obscure. The global beauty industry is worth well over half a trillion dollars, and its business model depends, as all commodity markets do, on the manufacture of need. The particular need it manufactures — the sense that the body is a problem requiring constant expensive solution — can only be sustained by keeping women in a permanent condition of dissatisfaction.
Naomi Wolf made this argument compellingly in The Beauty Myth (1990), tracing the history of modern beauty standards as a backlash mechanism against women’s increasing social and economic power. As women entered the workforce, gained legal rights, and claimed public space, the culture intensified its demands on their bodies: thinner, younger, smoother, more carefully maintained. Wolf argued that this intensification was not coincidental but functional — an enormous drain of time, money, and psychic energy that diverted women’s attention from political life and kept them tethered to an endless project of self-improvement.
Wolf’s analysis has been critiqued for its second-wave limitations — its relative inattention to race and class, its tendency towards a top-down model of ideological imposition. Still, its core insight holds up under scrutiny. The aestheticisation of female existence is economically productive for capital. The woman who spends forty minutes applying makeup before work, who buys a new wardrobe every season, who pays for laser treatments, fillers, nutritional supplements, and fitness classes, is a remarkably productive consumer. Her insecurity is not incidental to the economy; it is a structural requirement of it.
The diet industry deserves particular attention here, given that its product — weight loss — is one it systematically fails to deliver, while successfully delivering repeated sales. Studies consistently show that the overwhelming majority of intentional weight loss is not sustained over periods longer than five years; the weight returns, typically with additional weight, and the dieter returns to the market. The industry does not solve the problem it sells solutions to, because a solved problem is a lost customer. Permanent dissatisfaction is the product. The body is the site of the transaction.
This is not to suggest that all expressions of interest in one’s appearance or body are false consciousness — that analysis is both patronising and incorrect. But it is to insist on a distinction between genuine, self-generated desire and manufactured desire — desire produced through systematic campaigns of insecurity, comparison and normalisation. Making that distinction requires understanding the conditions of its production, which requires structural analysis.
The woman who believes she wants to be thinner because she will be happier, healthier or more herself is not simply wrong; she is partially right, in a world that materially rewards thinness. But the demand that she continuously work towards a body that the culture has arbitrarily designated as acceptable is not a natural fact. It is a political one.
