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Abstract

This paper attempts to present a feminist critique of the social and political promotion in Western culture of a univocal model of female corporeity imposed on women, and consequently detrimental to female subjectivity and agency. Starting from the Foucauldian position concerning social oppression determined by the disciplinary gaze of power structures, the paper discusses perspectives of resistance to the patriarchally-motivated scrutiny of the female body, and to the mass-media induced coercion of conformity to the normatized model for the female body in contemporary society.

Author Biography

Diane Ponterotto is full professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy. Her research interests are Cognitive Linguistics and Metaphor Theory, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, Gender and Cultural Studies. In the area of Gender Studies, she explores the relationship between language and gender, with a particular focus on the verbal violence perpetrated by media and institutional discourse against women and female agency.

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