The politics of women's body transformation, self- panopticon : Example of Women's Health magazine

This study was conducted by using Panopticon (an ideal correctional facility model aiming to push inmates to self-control and discipline) as a metaphor to analyze the mechanisms leading women to interiorize - "in statu nascendi" - an unreachable and continuously renewing body ideal and the supervision they voluntarily expose themselves regarding each and every part of their body. Women who are enabled to transform their bodies within the market supported freedom discourse are also subordinated to certain dietary and exercise practices with the expectation of health, weight loss, beauty and rejuvenation; concepts who become more and more embedded with each other as their boundaries become abstract. Acting as a benefit of deregulation, liquid modernity increases risk and uncertainty and accumulates knowledge-power mechanisms. With the definitions of "normal", "ideal", "truth" and "health" that these mechanisms broadcast via media, women's identities are shattered due to their disoriented self-panopticons and the constantly varying truth. These definitions also act as ethic discourses, and as their result some bodies are labeled or cast out. In the samples section of the study, magazines who function as "power-knowledge mechanisms" are analyzed and the "health and fitness" discourse that they reproduce is stated as gendered in reducing health to a thin body ideal. The cover photographs of Women's Health and Men's Health magazines which broadcast new definitions of womanhood and manhood are subjected to a body language analysis. The contents of Women's Health magazine which activate a panoptic gaze is analyzed under 4 headlines by using a post structruralist discourse analysis method developed by taking Foucault's works as a base: Confession Discourse, Medicalization Discourse, Commitment/Responsibility of Transformation Discourse, and the "Looking Fit Is Healthy" Discourse Keywords : Panoptic Gaze, Ideal Body, Power- Knowledge Mechanism, Liquid Modernity, Gender, Normalization, Discipline, Self- Control, Governmentality