Sa Ham- I am She (2024 series): Cybernetics of Body Image

Maa Kalaratri (Source unknown, Wikimedia Commons)

(This is the seventh post of the 2024 Sa Ham series. To read first post, please click here. To read the second post, please click here. To read third post, please click here. To the read the fourth post, please click here. To read the fifth post, please click here. To read the sixth post, please click here.)

I have been studying a lot of South Asian Goddess images and the diversity of forms has stirred me around. Here is the thing, while the Goddess is perceived and worshipped in different bodies, there are also some standards of what-is-sensual that comes through in the stories.

The goddess is worshipped in different skin-colours, skin textures, facial shape, teeth types, waist girth (including a nearly hollow abdomen), and legs and nails and eyes and so on. However, the portrayal of sensuality has some common threads – narrow waist, fully-formed luxurious breasts, and a fertile-looking bum. You will find this in the descriptions, in the poetry for the goddesses, and in the sculptures. There are also aspects about the eyes that ancient south Asians were obsessed about. Eyes like a fish or that of a lotus or a deer and so on.

I realised that across time and geography, there are parameters of what constitutes womanly beauty and attractiveness in a given time period.

The collective sense of what is beauty is a description of the culture of that time. I want to bring your attention to how this collective sensing is being shaped in the 20^th and 21st century. What are the conditions that shape the current crisis of Body Image?

I call it the Cybernetics of Body Image (h/t or flowers to Gregory Bateson for his many essays that explore Cybernetics). You can also call it wide-boundary analysis.

In my view, scanning across the last few centuries through different pathways, I notice some patterns:

• è The increased sharpness and fixedness of categories along with the notion of representation of that category (h/t to Foucault for his Archaeology of Knowledge and the Genealogical method): For example, Modern Enlightenment period saw a distinct separation of heterosexuality from homosexuality. And people performing the sexual identities to reinscribe the boundary conditions of the category. We perform to stay in the same box. You can apply to any other category, say, religion or caste. Who is a proud Hindu? Who is a good Muslim? Who is a faithful Catholic?

• è The hierarchical comparison of categories that came with eugenics: There are superior genes that form superior bodies creating superior cultures. And there are ways to measure superiority. Brain size, IQ, bone structure and such. And as Nora Bateson writes about tautology in her essay, It’s Fantastic, the measuring reinscribes the superiority of the measurer. The ways in which the centre is formed. And also, the ways in which the Other becomes ever so distant and inferior.

• è The rise of visual media: The last century saw many newspapers and magazines being published. Newspapers, by the very nature of layout, had to prioritize what kind of news should go in which page. And which news will have how many columns. As newspapers became more business than journalism, the question was what sells. How do headlines get written? Which page has most traction? Magazines were developed with an eye on certain demographics along with a business sense of what works. Medium is the message and more. More seeing, less touch. Less possibility of differing feedback to arrive. And the visual form in media is fixed, dead and carries authority.

• è The rapid innovation of audiovisual and digital media: Technological innovation is the hallmark of the last few decades. Television was created. And within few decades there were multiple private channels competing for audience attention. With internet, social media and digital media emerged. Now more entities participate in competing for shrinking audience attention. Further, visual form leads the way. Time shrinks and cycles in short bursts. Those who capture audience attention quickly are superior. And that is a category others aspire for.

• è Easy global communication: Through multiple messaging services, apps, platforms, the audience for any communication is easily global. Overlay the continuing tradition of gazing at Europe in all contexts and the fact that origin of most of these innovations is in the West, there is a bias towards popular European parameters. Including, how to rebel.

• è Increased orientation towards structures of thinking that privilege the external. What Schuon (1984) called as the exoteric view of the world as against the esoteric view of the world as a psychic organic whole. He said in his 1984 book, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, “One wonders if anything separates the modern world from its predecessors more than its leveling of reality into a single dimension” (p. xvii).

• è Rise of fashion industry or clothes as the new medium of communication. And the medium shapes what we need to look at, what to appreciate and how. Which in turn is caught in the trap complex mentioned above.

• èCameras: A camera is capturing life into two dimensions. A photographer who spends time and skills and exquisite attention brings perspective to life. One who doesn’t, flattens life. The camera also prefers body contours that yield well to a kind of play of light and shadow which transfers well to the film. With the rise of easy-to-use everywhere cameras, the trending focus is on producing photos that conform to social media likes or get internet track. It is like sugar is metaphorically added even to the production and consumption of images. Which are in turn shaped by the trap complex mentioned above.

• è In the meantime, soil, water and air pollution increases affecting food, water and breath which affects the body’s biochemical process and microbiome health. The rise of food processing industry and their business needs also impacts what we eat. Inflammation, disrupted metabolic pathways, poor oxygen delivery and epigenetic activation are some of the cascading consequences.

• è Increased stress through the many conditions of urban living and modern workforce in turn affecting bodily functions and the state of nervous system. There are hurricanes that hit the body.

• è And this: Our perception is increasingly mediated by machines, reductive, and linear.

 It is in this mix we experience the "body image" crisis.

What is body image? It is how we perceive and assess our bodies. How we perceive is already tainted by the patterns pointed above. How we assess is also already gamified.

There isn’t much space for fuzziness. In-person encounters and topics of conversations are already pre-disposed to “looking good or not”, “diet plans”, and so on. Touch as a way of perceiving another sexually is threshed quickly in favour of performance of a preconceived notion of the “erotic.” In liu of touch exploration, orgasm is privileged just as success is privileged in the world, irrespective of means. And the history of measurement continues – how many orgasms in a day or how many orgasms with how many people.

The trap is deeper – the ritual performance into the desired category is a must for other contexts too. You are a singer; well, get into shape. You are a senior leader; it is very important to be in shape. You are a coach; how can you be a coach unless you are in shape? You are a writer; oops you need to be in shape for book-reading and photo shoots. You are a young upcoming politician; umm, get in shape. Want a date? Marriage? Be in shape.

Or learn to be photographed well. Oops, it helps to be in shape.

The efforts to fix the crisis in the “mind” also end up reinscribing the same patterns. Weight-loss programs reinscribe the importance of certain body parameters. Medical research digested into short news items also bark about weight and medical crisis and make it as an individual failure. Empowered rhetoric like plus-size fashion and models simply create new categories around the issue. Efforts to reclaim body by various workshops or photo shoots, whether a celebration of various body shapes/types in different oh-you-can’t-wear-this apparel, or nude, once again reinscribe the gaze on individual body. To say body doesn’t matter, only inner beauty counts, is, besides being delusional, again an individual-centred discourse. To deliberately cross-dress and confound gender binaries also doesn’t help—for it is still feeding the visual form and riding the social media sugar likes. To colour hair or tattoo/pierce body parts in unusual ways is beautiful but it continues keeping the gaze on the individual body.

We are either shamed for not being in shape or shamed for adulating those in shape or shamed for not modelling the rebels. We are forced to perform into some category.

“Meanwhile the world goes on” (Mary Oliver, Wild Geese)

As Nora Bateson writes in her essay, “So where is the change? It is everywhere except where we try to make it. The trying and the making of change are contaminated with the familiar scripts and blue prints. Watch the swirl, try not to be distracted by what is swirling.”

As long as we live in the realm of “Body Image,” the crisis will continue.

The beauty of the worship of the Goddesses in different forms is simply this –that it is very fuzzy and edges blur. The beautiful Parvati is also the dishevelled Kali.

Aum Kalaratreya Namah!