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Main photo by Dalel Tangour, Tunisian photographer
Have women always had to bear the burden of their bodies? “In part, yes,” says historian and feminist Michelle Perrot. In ‘Mon histoire des femmes’ (Points, 2006), she writes, “A woman is, first and foremost, an image. A face, a body, dressed or naked. Women are appearances.” This holds even truer in Judeo-Christian culture, where women have often been consigned to silence in the public sphere. Perrot adds, “The first commandment for women is beauty. ‘Be beautiful and keep quiet’ is what they’ve been told since time immemorial.” The Renaissance further underscored this gender divide, with an emphasis on feminine beauty versus masculine strength.
Every era has its own standards of beauty. Until the nineteenth century, attention was focused on the “top”—the face and breasts—while in the twentieth century, it shifted to the “bottom”—legs— especially as sheer stockings became popular.
In the southern Mediterranean, women’s bodies are a matter of honour for the family, the tribe, and society as a whole. Codes and laws, particularly in Syria, as explored by Rahada Abdouch, as well as practices—such as female genital mutilation described by Sheima Al Youssef—are among the measures implemented to control, lock down, and objectify them.
Arab feminists, like Egyptian writer Nawal Saadawi, have explored the condition of silenced bodies. Through her writing, Saadawi deconstructs the power dynamics and societal expectations surrounding the body, challenging the pact of silence.
“A woman is, first and foremost, an image. A face, a body, dressed or naked. Women are appearances.”
Arab feminists, like Egyptian writer Nawal Saadawi, have explored the condition of silenced bodies. Through her writing, Saadawi deconstructs the power dynamics and societal expectations surrounding the body, challenging the pact of silence.
The individualization of society in the West has amplified the focus on appearance. Simultaneously, the rise of social media is contributing to the globalization of beauty standards.
Younger women are increasingly turning to cosmetic surgery to reshape their bodies and faces. But isn’t it contradictory, asks Anaïs Delmas in her piece on aesthetic medicine, to use marketing and media to pressure women into artificially altering their appearance while simultaneously condemning them for doing so?
The sanctity of virginity, hypersexualization, and pornography, along with societal pressure to be beautiful and thin starting in adolescence— leave women’s bodies trapped—subject to both patriarchal control (see Rania Hadjar’s report) and the tyranny of beauty stereotypes..
