Monday, August 19, 2013

randoms

four year old niece: "I want to be three again!" 
me: "I'm sorry but you can't be three again. You can only grow up!=)"
niece: "OH NO!!!!," starts screaming and crying.







"Why is ‘the suit’ or ‘corporate uniform’ so important for managers? I suggest that it is because the highly tailored, dark-coloured (often black, dark grey or navy) business suits function to seal the bodies of men and women managers. Firm, straight lines and starched creases give the appearance of a body that is impervious to outside penetration...Business suits not only give the impression of a body that is impervious to outside penetration but also of a body that is impervious to the dangers and threats of matter that is inside the body making its way to the outside. It is considered inappropriate for matter to make its way from the inside to the outside of bodies (for example, farting, burping, urinating, spitting, dribbling, sneezing, coughing, having a ‘runny nose’, crying and sweating) in most inner city workplaces. This observation about people wearing business suits avoiding farting, burping and so on in public almost seems too banal to mention. The performative (Butler 1997) takes on the appearance of the natural. Phillip Garner (1983: 30) destabilizes this naturalness in his comic photograph of the ‘half-suit’...."The suit helps to create an illusion of a hard, or at least a firm and ‘proper’, body that is autonomous, in control, rational and masculine. It gives the impression that bodily boundaries continually remain intact and reduce potential embarrassment caused by any kind of leakage. When bodies are draped in soft, light fabrics it is often possible to see the boundaries of the body – the rise and fall of the chest, mound of the breast, contour of the muscle. It is possible to see a spot of blood, a smear of dirt, a piece of flesh. Such matter signifies a body that cannot be neatly contained, a body that is not always rational and in control, a body that is both desirable and disgusting." 


Theweleit (1987) discusses some of ways in which young boy’s bodies (through the military academy) are reconstructed into soldiers’ bodies: the boy becomes ‘a man with machine-like periphery, whose interior has lost its meaning’.




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