Terminus of the Pursuit

If someone felt the ideal that Susan Bordo put down about double binds and the self destructive "pursuit without terminus" was impossible to defy, I would show this photo. Her points were strongly based on females, but men are often caught in the same bind.

Mascoting has grown into a particular subculture that thrives on escaping the intelligible body. Many of them craft the suits themselves with hard labor, personalizing everything to express what they love in life. They walk how they want to, stand comfortably, and many are anonymous to gender. There are no advertisements telling you how your hips should look, or a particular way to sit down that a parent taught. Susan Bordo states that an intelligible body is "... our culture conceptions of the body, norms of beauty..." but how does that stand to people who can mask it. What may seem strange and crossing the thin imaginative line of hegemony in our society, is really nothing more than an escape from that very idea. You are covered in a veil, face masked from identity. They play sports, goof around, dance and mingle as if it was completely normal. I interviewed on of these "suiters", asking what attracted them to this practice. They simply said because they felt comfortable, no one could judge them.

We are informed on how the world is very much viewed as a man, through studying famous paintings of Hans Baldung, and how society cheats our minds into happily following Bordo's idea of praxis, such as how to walk and hold oneself. However there are subcultures out there that fight this very idea. To be free of social views and prejudiced. How would you act if no one around you knew who you were or what you looked like? Black, White, Asian, female male, hairstyle, everything that society brings to the table could not be viewed. Are you being looked at like a man? Could you declare it to be a man's view, or are you even viewing a man or woman?

The thing that most suiters dread is that their created anonymous figure does come off. They enter the world that we are in now, where every eye is searching out the clothes they wear, the position of their stance and the background of their heritage. It may only be a temporary rest against the constricting practices of our body being broken down and shaped, but it certainly fights the idea that everyone wants to try to be that perfect modern body.