Summary Of The Good Body

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Semiotics is a system that attempts to make meaning of reality through signs. Semiotics posits that all things in reality or the socialized imagination—all percolation after the “I” stage—conform to signs. Composed of two parts, the signifier (the manifestation or expression of the sign) and the signified (the relayed concept evoked by the signifier), signs further interact with one another to form complex systems that gain power, which dominant cultures wield to skew towards a specific goal. Bordo uses semiotics as the theoretical framework within her essay The Empire of Images and expertly masks that framework using a narrative style that follows her experience of being a woman and her daughter’s socialization. Bordo renames semiotics, to better suit her application of the theory, “perceptual pedagogy: How to Interpret Your Body 101,” (Bordo 58). I see that this shift allows Bordo to appropriate semiotics onto the native people of Fiji—who experienced an uptick in eating disorders…show more content…
Ensler focuses on the materiality of the body in how it determines our health, career potential, sexual/romantic confidence and influence on others. Her fascination with how her own body, and the bodies of other women of disparate cultures, gain and lose social status. This cross-section of bodies creates an air of intersectionality that the script vaguely upholds.The performer, acting as Eve Ensler, alternates between monologues from the perspective of different women of varying ethnicity, age, and economic status—for example, Bernice who is a heavyset black teenager from a troubled home—and the perspective of Eve. This structure, with the archetypes selected by Ensler, proves problematic to contemporary, intersectional

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