This article takes up references to breasts as a key case study to examine white Western feminist debate around embodiment and objectification. Tracking shifting understandings of ‘the gaze’ in these accounts, we find that objectification is often rendered singular, ahistorical and, increasingly, individually internalised. The history of these approaches to objectification helps to explain why during the early 2000s, theorisations of feminist politics-lost were often rhetorically located alongside discussions of surgically modified breasts as a symbol of a new era of ‘fake’ feminism. In contrast, the 2010s saw several feminist movements premised on exposure of flesh and claims to individual recuperation of bodily autonomy. This article contends that both of these perspectives rely on a notion, built over successive eras of white Western feminist thought, that political work can and ought to be done through the body as a site of representational politics. This article subsequently offers a brief insight into how we might queer our approach to breasts to better account for the messiness of experiences of the flesh, considering the personal as political, while not investing in the body as the site where politics must be enacted.

中文翻译：

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“昔日自由飞翔的自然女性胸部”？女性主义客观化描述中的超越表征的身体

本文将乳房作为一个关键案例研究，以检验西方白人女权主义围绕具身化和客观化的辩论。追踪这些描述中对“凝视”的理解不断变化，我们发现客观化经常被呈现为单一的、非历史性的，并且越来越多地被个人内化。这些客观化方法的历史有助于解释为什么在 2000 年代初期，女权主义政治迷失的理论经常与手术修饰的乳房作为“假”女权主义新时代的象征的讨论一起出现。相比之下，2010 年代出现了几次女权主义运动，其前提是暴露肉体并要求个人恢复身体自主权。本文认为这两种观点都依赖于一个概念，建立在西方白人女权主义思想的连续时代，政治工作可以而且应该通过作为代表性政治场所的身体来完成。这篇文章随后简要介绍了我们如何改变对乳房的态度，以更好地解释肉体体验的混乱，将个人视为政治，而不是将身体投资为必须制定政治的场所。