"A Habit of Waste" and "Unbearable Weight"

“What the child want to go and do this kind of stupidness for? Nothing ain’t wrong with the way she look!” (“A Habit of Waste” p. 266)

This story stood out to me in that it wasn’t so much science fiction as it was “speculative fiction.” I know that the terms are often used interchangeably, but throughout the story I was acutely aware of how different this story was from the other works we’ve been reading. I was trying to figure out why this was, and I realized that it’s because the only thing that has changed in this world is the ability to clone human consciousness into a new body. Writing it out like that makes the process seem strange and definitely in the realm of science fiction, but while reading it, it just seemed like a logical extension of the plastic surgery we have today—not that far-fetched at all.

I like the way that Hopkinson focuses on changing only this one aspect of society in order to strengthen her commentary on our society today. It is interesting that she chose this aspect to change, especially in relation to the article we read by Susan Bordo—both focus on women’s image of their bodies and the way they exert control over themselves and their bodies. Bordo describes the body as the “text of culture” and by changing the way in which the body is portrayed in this story, Hopkinson uses the body to express the pressures of the dominant culture in her story.

These pressures do not change in this alternate reality—they are the same in our world as they are in Bordo’s and Hopkinson’s: namely, the pressure to control the female body and fit it to the “ideal.” The mother’s reaction to the daughter’s caving in to this pressure, as quoted above, reflects the reaction many of us have to people we know with eating disorders or other body-image issues. We may not see anything wrong with the way they look, but they can see nothing else. In starving themselves or otherwise changing their body, however, Bordo argues that they are not so much trying to improve it as they are trying to exert control over their own life in response to the cultural pressure telling them what they should or shouldn’t look like.

Body image is ultimately a struggle of powers: the power of society telling a woman what she should look like versus her power over her own body and her image of it. It is significant that in this story, the only thing Hopkinson has changed is in giving women complete control over their bodies—they now can, for a price, become the ideal that society pressures them to be. But even with this level of control, there is no peace of mind. This is because the ideal presented is never truly attainable. The only way of getting the “perfect” body is to learn to love the one you have.