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3. The Female Body: Object of the Gaze, Forbidden Subject (1/2)

The female body is not just a biological object, it is shaped by gazes, norms and silences. From psychoanalysis to society at large, this article explores how the female body becomes a site of projection, constraint and resistance.

The female body is never simply a body. It carries myth and memory. It feeds both fantasy and repression. It often appears where it is least expected, slips through language, escapes definition and resists categorization. From cave paintings to fashion runways, from fairy tales to biology textbooks, the female body has been spoken about, displayed, fragmented, desired, punished, adorned, concealed, yet rarely heard.

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1974. Decades later, the line still resonates. She added, “Being a woman is not a natural fact. It is the result of a history.” At its core, the message is clear: the female body is shaped by how it is seen, spoken about and expected to behave. It is not a given, but a construction, sometimes formed in quiet ways, sometimes through violence, beginning long before birth and continuing throughout life.

Psychoanalysis extends this idea, suggesting that a woman becomes a female body through the desires of the Other, shaped by what society, parents, partners and the unconscious project onto her.

From a young age, girls’ bodies are closely observed, commented on and compared. They learn to “sit properly,” “keep their legs closed” and “mind their skirts.” Boys, meanwhile, enjoy a relatively freer childhood with less scrutiny. A girl’s body quickly becomes a space under constant vigilance, restraint and strict expectations. Her flesh is lived through the ever-present anticipation of being watched.

What is unsettling about the female body is less what it reveals than what it refuses to say. Throughout history, men have often been portrayed as the actors, the subjects, the ones who speak. Women, on the other hand, are watched. They are silence, opacity, objects of desire or fear. This is captured in the famous phrase by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “The woman does not exist.” Not because she is absent, of course, but because what we call “the woman” is often a mask, a projection, a fiction. She does not exist as a whole, as an essence, she slips away.

One of the major Freudian figures linked to the female body is the hysteric. She does not pretend. With her body, she expresses what she cannot put into words. Paralysis, pain, loss of voice, spasms, her body becomes the stage for psychological conflict, a site where repressed desire is inscribed. The hysteric reveals herself, she seeks to make the Other speak: “Tell me what I am to you.” She lays bare the question of femininity in its rawness: What does a woman want?

What we call “the feminine” is less a biological state than a position within language, within the relationship to the Other. It is the part that accepts not having to master everything, understand everything or say everything. It is what slips through control, through norms, through completeness. The feminine, perhaps, is just that: a way of inhabiting absence, shadow and intuition. A presence that cannot be grasped.

This is why so many discourses on women miss the mark: they seek to define. But the female body, in its most intimate experience, refuses to be pinned down. It is always slightly elsewhere, in sensation, in pain, in fantasy and in dream.

We now know that the human body is never purely biological. It is shaped by language. We do not inhabit our bodies as natural objects, but as territories marked by signifiers like “woman,” “mother,” “feminine,” “desired,” “impure,” “sacred,” “fertile,” “forbidden,” “prostitute” and so on.

In the early 20^th century, Sigmund Freud was among the first to approach the female body as a site of unconscious conflict and desire. But he did so with the words of a Viennese man of his time, and his theory of penis absence sparked endless debate. What he described as “penis envy” may have been, in fact, a reflection of a patriarchal society in which men held symbolic power. Behind this so-called “envy” lay not biology, but a deeper relationship to exclusion and lack of representation.

Later, Lacan took up this idea and fundamentally reversed it. For him, the feminine was not a deficiency but an enigma, not an absence, but an alternative mode of being in the world and relating to desire. The feminine can never be reduced to a single identity or a fixed totality. It eludes rigid categories. It is the space where language falters, where jouissance overflows words, and where the law begins to waver.

With Françoise Dolto, a new perspective was cast upon this enigmatic body, that of childhood. She regarded it as a linguistic journey, a narrative in formation. Dolto introduced a pivotal concept: the unconscious body image, which describes how a child, whether girl or boy, comes to perceive their own body through the gaze, words and gestures of those around them. Once again, the body is experienced, imagined, dreamed and interpreted.

For a young girl, this image is often shaped within a fractured mirror. Her body is shown to her, yet she is taught to distrust it, to hold it in check, to make it desirable, but never too much, to offer it without giving it away. This fundamental paradox creates an intimate tension, a gap between what the body feels and what it is meant to represent. Dolto understood that many physical symptoms in women, such as eating disorders, unexplained pain and symbolic infertility, arise from this fracture between the lived body and the social body.

In a 2015 interview with La Croix, psychoanalyst Jeanne Defontaine observed, “For young girls, the body becomes a substitute language. When words are absent or forbidden, it is the skin that speaks, or the absence of the body, the refusal to eat, to feel, to live within one’s own flesh. It is a body crying out without a voice.” These “message-bodies,” as she describes them, do not aim to seduce but to convey shame, exile and erasure. They express the profound exhaustion of being confined to a shape, a norm, a display of femininity.