This image
has a big underlying message in it, which is that love handles are not good and
people should not have them, especially women. Through the use of Foucault’s theory about
docile bodies, I can clearly dissect this image and uncover the truth about
societies perception of what the female body should look like. In this ad, we can clearly we can see that Katy
Perry is looking super fit and is a good template of what the typical woman
should look like today. Through this image, our ideas about having a certain
body type are being altered. Pop Chips
are tying to say, if you eat our snack then you will not get love handles
because we hate love handles.
If we take a look at the weight watchers
campaigns, in relation to docile
bodies, then we can also see this idea that having this slender body type
will make us happy. This certain impression has been placed in our mind that we
want to be healthy and happy, but if we go beneath the surface, we see that we can
only be happy because we fit the norm of what society wants. That is what the
docile body theory is trying to convey in this photograph. Jennifer Hudson and Katy
Perry are very famous celebrities and they are super skinny, so in return I
should try my best to eat right, in the hopes that one-day I too can look like
them.
I like the idea here of connecting these images to the concept of docile bodies, since the images themselves suggest that the bodies are active. In fact, what Foucault points out is that the bodies are anything but active; they instead are recipients of a socially mandated process of surveillance, control, and discipline. The construction of the "right" also constructs the "wrong," and the wrong must be disciplined into normativity.
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