Few contemporary films delve as deeply and in such an original and impactful way into the issue of female body image as The Substance by Coralie Fargeat. The film revisits a long history of representing the female body, projecting sexism, ageism, abjection, disgust, beauty, and ugliness onto it. In Western art history, starting from the Renaissance, this classical theme of the confrontation between the beautiful body of the young woman and the abject body of the elderly woman is well-documented. Hans Baldung Grien (The Ages of Woman and Death, The Three Phases of Life and Death), Caravaggio (Judith and Holofernes), Albrecht Dürer, and later Goya also portrayed elderly women or witches with grotesque characteristics. A painting that epitomizes this theme is Lucas Cranach’s The Fountain of Youth (1546), which juxtaposes depictions of elderly women with flirtatious, youthful beauties, summarizing the plot of The Substance.

However, the film’s director introduces a rejuvenation device that merges both bodies into the same individual, who, now split, wages war against herself, transforming the elderly body into pure flesh and abjection. The final scene suggests a form of feminine revenge against the objectification of women’s bodies. Other films in the body horror genre have influenced the construction of Demi Moore’s monstrous transformation in The Substance, such as the infamous “bathtub woman” in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

In this presentation, I intend not only to provide a brief historical overview of the abject representation of the elderly female body but also to reflect, through Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, on the meaning of this (anti-)machist theater of horror that Fargeat presents. It is worth noting that the film also portrays the media mogul, played by Dennis Quaid, as an abject, grotesque figure. This character combines extreme sexism with a filthy male body, with a mouth transformed into an anus—eloquently illustrating how he speaks nothing but “crap.”

The 2024 drama Like a Rolling Stone (出走的决心) presents the story of a 50-year-old woman who has spent her life living for others. After enduring years of familial pressure, she ultimately decides to leave, marking a pivotal moment of self-liberation. Told from a female perspective, the film offers a contemporary reexamination of the “Nora’s departure” theme, positioning itself as a reimagining of the Nora myth in the new era. Unlike the 1920s, when Nora’s story first entered China and departure was often idealized, this film explores the practicalities of leaving, questioning not only the act of departure itself but also the complexities of life thereafter. The shift from idealism to realism reflects a more thoughtful, strategic approach to personal liberation. The film addresses not only the empowerment of women but also delves into the underlying societal structures that perpetuate their oppression.

The film’s deeper reflection on Nora’s departure is evident in three key aspects: First, the protagonist’s departure from both her father’s and her husband’s homes highlights the evolution of the Nora myth since the New Culture Movement. Nora’s original departure in A Doll’s House symbolizes a quest for personal independence, but as the myth entered China, it became a symbol of resistance to arranged marriages and evolved to reflect the pursuit of romantic freedom. In the 1930s, during the push for women’s liberation, the focus shifted to the call for women to leave their husbands’ homes.

Second, the protagonist’s careful preparations, particularly her focus on achieving financial independence, underscores the importance of economic autonomy in the process of liberation. This mirrors the growing recognition of economic rights within women’s liberation discourse. Initially, the emphasis was on the spontaneous act of departure, but with the introduction of Marxist theories, economic independence became central, prompting deeper reflections on the aftermath of Nora’s departure.

Finally, the film does not focus on a male-female binary but instead reveals the structural societal issues that contribute to women’s oppression. The protagonist’s daughter, driven by her own career concerns, pressures her mother to stay, suggesting that the forces oppressing women are not solely patriarchal but also tied to a capitalist, patriarchal system. This sophisticated treatment of women’s issues demonstrates a mature understanding of the complexities of liberation.

Like a Rolling Stone offers a contemporary reflection on the Nora myth, encapsulating the evolution of women’s struggles in China and providing new insights into the challenges of women’s liberation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jonathan Swift, an 18th-century English poet and satirical novelist, is dismissed as a misogynist for his anti-aesthetic treatment of female body images in Gulliver’s Travels and a series of scatological poems. Swift employed a strategy of depicting ugliness in female body images to challenge the conventional perceptions of women and the objective world held by male voyeurs or narrators. In Gulliver’s Travels, the passionate and lustful image of the female Yahoo with her disgusting filthy bodies subverts the traditional male courtship model and stereotypes of female physical attractiveness. Besides, his scatological poems, such as “The Lady’s Dressing Room”, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”, “Strephon and Chloe” and so on, delicately depict women’s excremental vision in private space and the real state of their bodies from the perspective of male gaze, which not only surpasses the aesthetic confines of libertine tendencies prevalent in early 18th-century England but also reveals the concurrent existence of beauty and ugliness in the objective world.

From Swift’s poems and personal letters, it can be seen that the purpose of uglitic appreciation of womanhood is not to disparage women, but rather to dismantle the pretension and ostentation built upon luxury consumption and the female image within the male aesthetic perspective. Swift's works are frequently misconstrued as expressing misogyny, yet in reality, his thoughts lean more towards a form of impartial misanthropy. Swift gets rid of Descartes’ mind-body dualism, emphasizing the integration of body and spirit in his works. He believes that physical ugliness is not limited to one gender. Swift’s poem “Cadenus and Vanessa”, published in the same year as Gulliver’s Travels, and his epistolary diary even hints that women have equal potential to men on a spiritual level. However, despite reshaping the female image and altering the paradigm of gender relations, Swift does not intend to subvert the social order; rather, he aspires to enhance the moral and spiritual realms of both sexes, particularly women. During that period, British society was contemplating the excesses of libertinism and luxury consumption, and embarked on a reform aimed at improving moral standards and public behavior, thereby enhancing social morality. Swift responds to the call for social reform through his appreciation of ugliness in his works, uncovering the ugliness of real life, and thus urging readers to awaken amidst the ugly yet authentic realities, ultimately fostering social progress and the refinement of humanity. Therefore, from the reflection of female body images to the hope for an elevation in the moral standards of both genders, misogyny and scatology ultimately reveals Swift’s sentiment of social reform.

The literary creations of domestic workers constitute a significant component of Chinese new worker literature. In these non-fiction works, the physical images of domestic workers evolve from victims of domestic violence and instrumentalized tools in labor to beings who attain subjective cognition through literary expression. This transformation process unfolds in three primary stages: in rural areas, their bodies are subjected to discipline and oppression, including shaming education during growth and domestic violence within marriage; in domestic labor, their bodies are neglected and objectified as tools of labor; and through literary creation, they re-examine their bodies and emotions, discovering their own value through sisterhood identification. The physical writing of domestic workers demonstrates the dual emancipation process of the bodies and emotions of new worker women: on the one hand, these women revisit their bodies through literature, resisting their fate of being oppressed and objectified; on the other hand, their emotional awakening is accompanied by reflection on gender oppression and class inequality within the urban-rural dual structure. This awakening of subjectivity, from body to emotion and from individual to collective, not only showcases the crucial role of literature as an empowering tool but also serves as a literary testament to the historical situation of new worker women in this era.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War,McCarthyism and the Cold War containment policy instigated a heightened sense of public sensitivity and panic regarding the underlying violations and deviant behaviors.As the cultural context trended towards popularization,it was inevitably and closely intertwined with regulatory discourses,which were disseminated through medical fields such as psychiatry.Richard Yates,an American writer,by focusing on the issue of mental illness in the cultural context from the 1950s to the 1960s,revealed the degradation of the middle class's subject power in the post-war American cultural narrative.In Yates's works,the mentally ill are depicted as malleable symbols,representing the public's anxiety and challenging and polysemous concepts.These characters,often referred to as "Foucaultian madmen,"diverge from the previous stagnant "simulacra" and are instead positioned as the other within Deleuze's "becoming" context.Through absolute freedom and acts of destruction,they subvert the implicit social regulations that govern them.While confronting the suspension of "bare life,"they compel readers to reevaluate the general medical premises represented by psychiatry.

On this basis,Yates' novel in different periods corresponded to the phased characteristics of the development of mental illness treatment in the United States,providing a clear perspective on the ever-changing mental health diagnosis methods in post-war America.In his early novels,Yates revealed the transformation process of the psychoanalytic discipline from experiencing a short-lived peak in the late 1950s to gradually declining in the early 1960s by depicting the disadvantaged position of women in the psychoanalysis and treatment system.This perspective is rooted in the practical needs of post-war medical care and cost-saving in medical expenses,as well as the continuous attention of the media and the film industry to "mental illness".He thus criticized the legitimacy and effectiveness of this discipline from the perspective of the private sphere.The exposure of the poor conditions in state-run mental hospitals by Life and CBS in the 1960s,and Kennedy's vigorous promotion of institutional reform for mental illness,prompted Yates to shift his focus to the public sphere in his later works.By capturing the psychological states and distinctive experiences of the protagonists,he made a thorough evaluation of institutionalized treatment services within the national public sphere from two aspects:the spatial power mechanism and the delayed-onset harm of custodial treatment.Yates' works rendered mental illness and its treatment as crucial components of body metaphor,revealing how individuals break free from coercion and bondage in the context of “impotentiality”.Consequently,a brand-new dialogue space was formed.While deconstructing the futile pursuit of regulation,the text also explores the human cost associated with the harmonious operation of a democratic society.

During the 1950s, the writers portrayed a series of images of nursing mothers, leaving a traceable legacy of visions of Chinese women. These images are not only a literary description of the movements, “The Campaign of Defending World Peace” “The Movement of Literacy” and “The Movement of Collective Parenting”, which documented the development of bio-politics in New China, but also a demonstration of the realization of bio-governance at the grassroots level and of the liberation and development of women during the 1950s. This article aims to investigate the images of these women and their bodies, which significantly affect the reformation of Chinese fertility culture, the improvement of daily life, the change of power dynamics between genders, and the development of bio-politics during the 1950s.

Xue Mo is a prominent contemporary novelist known for his authentic portrayal of rural village life in northwestern China. The fictional world that Xue Mo has created is imbued with a romantic longing for a lost nomadic lifestyle, a lyrical iteration of primitivity and rawness, rich surrealistic imagery, and folkloric figures that have long enthralled the Chinese readers, but this is also a world of misery, pain, violence, and depravity built upon the theme of the body in distress and the soul for salvation. This theme echoes through a number of Xue Mo’s award-winning fictions, including the recently translated novel Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia. With his characteristic style of “enchanted narrative” that breaks the barriers of time and space to tell an eternal story of suffering, romance, and redemption that lasts from the Kingdom of Xixia (1032-1227) to the present time, Xue Mo reconfigures the distressed body as a re-evocation of the Buddhist paradox about the body and the soul in an enriched modern context of empathy and enlightenment.

In their paper "On the Impaired Female Body Image in the U.S. Novels (1990-2020)" Peina Zhuang and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek analyze the representations and features of the impaired body images of women. They note that different periods (as divided into 1990-2000, 2001-2008 and 2009-2020) have their own focus on the images and also the causes they want to present. For instance, novels in the period from 2001-2008 devote large space to the depiction of an impaired body image related with natural disasters and modern medicine, as demonstrated by the bomb in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the reduced linguistic ability caused by a stroke in Everyman, the postoperative head scar in Exit Ghost, and the self-harm inflicted by Marilyn due to mental breakdown in Blonde. And the causes for the impairment in 2009-2020 change into factors, such as aging, rape, car accident, shooting and so on. So, the depiction of such images is not merely a simple writing of the physiological “scar.” This paper argues that the shift from portraying power dynamics in gender relations and social status to reflecting the impact of uncontrollable forces—such as war, disasters, and illness—on the human body highlights postmodern fiction’s meditation on the unpredictability of fate. It extends the focus on the dignity of marginalized and vulnerable groups to encompass the dignity of ordinary individuals.

In the poetry collection Put Dinner in the Drawer, Han Jiang attaches great importance to the "body" of human beings. While she depicts daily life in a true way, she also highlights individual consciousness in a way of "body writing", that is, she expresses the inner spiritual world with the extreme perception of the body, so as to realize the communication and commonality between the individual spirit and the real world. The perception of the body in Han Jiang's poetry is presented through three specific aspects: first, the embodied "anatomy of the body" presents the broken body, expressing the poet's attempt to achieve a complete personality; Secondly, the two kinds of media of bodily perception, "visual" and "anti-visual", give the body in her poems meaning that transcends individuality. Finally, the body perception in Han Jiang's poetry has a unique value in the aspects of humanistic concern and concern for South Korean traditional culture.