When the editors of Radical Psychology approached me to edit a special issue on gender and bodily difference — I thought the focus of this issue was long overdue. Over the last 35 years, western feminists working in the areas of health, cultural, and women’s studies have written passionately about the pernicious effects on women’s body perceptions and practices of pervasive beauty ideals (Brownmiller, 1984; Orbach, 1979; Wolf, 1992). Concerns of activists and clinicians about the harmful consequences of “the body beautiful” first mounted in economically privileged, image-oriented, media- driven cultures, where an “acceptable” image had become integral to women’s self and emotional health (Bordo, 1993; Székely, 1988). More recently, transnational feminist scholars, in tracking the rapid spread of western-controlled companies, have uncovered how beauty commodities and campaigns capitalize on a global hierarchy of physical traits. Rooted in colonial, patriarchal, and biomedical histories and legacies, these industries not only are reproducing sexist but classist, racist, and ablest normalized and idealized images as well (Mire, 2005; Rice, 2009a).

Rice, C. (2011). Gendering bodily difference: An introduction to contemporary feminist thinking. Radical Psychology: A Journal of Psychology, Politics and Radicalism, 8(1).