The Politics of Women's Body Images and Practices: Foucault, the Panopticon, and Shape Magazine

This study demonstrates how the metaphor of the panopticon, a particular prison structure that renders prisoners self-monitoring, offers a useful way of understanding the mechanisms that inculcate an unrealistic body ideal in women. Foucault's notion of panopticism and a critical approach are used to show how textual mechanisms in two issues of Shape magazine—a women's fitness glossy—invite a continual self-conscious body monitoring in women. An analysis of two panoptic mechanisms, “The Efficacy of Initiative” and “Feeling Good Means Looking Good,” is supplemented with a discussion of Foucault's notion of confession/shame, and specific features of Shape' s discourse are analyzed for their panoptic content.