Forced Femininity: Corsets and the Cultural Body Nineteenth-century dress reformers who worked to liberate women from the oppressive nature of the corset, with its rigid bodice, tightlacing, and vertical-diagonal boning, would be surprised to see that it has made its way back into women’s closets in 2020, showing that despite its conflicted past and reputation as being a garment that punished, oppressed, regulated, and sculpted the female body, women’s relationship to the corset is complicated and conflicted. Historically, the corset has idealized, hyper-feminized, and sexualized the female body. At present, middle- and upperclass women are spending substantial sums of money on custom-made corsets, influenced by the hyper-sexualized bodies of pop stars, models, and media influencers embellishing them on social media. Melis Mulazimoglu Erkal writes that the conflict between the historically subversive nature of the corset and its contemporary approval can be demystified by feminist critic Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, 2002). Quoting Wolf, Erkal explains that corsets, plastic surgery, diet, and extreme physical exercise show “that Western patriarchal culture still has a lot to shape and correct, [in] deciding what is beautiful, proper, and accepted and what is not.”1 Catherine de’ Medici is considered to be the first advocate of the corset in European courts.Courtesy Germain Le Mannier, www.flickr.com.
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