GENDER BODY AND EVERYDAY LIFE 33 the woman is viewed as a charming, beautiful body admired and applauded for her flawless beauty, as indeed our national beauty icons Sushmita Sen and Ashwariya Rai have recently been, the person remains perceived only as a body and not much more. This 'objectification' of the female body is clearly linked to sexuality to the extent that it is the woman's body as a sex object as well as her presentation of her embodied self as an expression of her sexuality that take precedence over everything else. It is therefore important to emphasise here the all pervasive nature of sexuality which, as Mackinnon points out, is *a dimension along which gender occurs and through which gender is socially constituted' (1994: 260). Thus, 'the restriction and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the self-mutilation and requisite presentation of self as a beautiful thing, the enforced passivity, the humiliation—are made into the content of sex for woman' (Ibid,). Sexuality, gender, and the body, in a complex interplay of dominant forces, are clearly at the root of women's oppression in contemporary society through the objectification of the female form in everyday life.5 It would appear that the female body could be experienced as both celebratory as well as oppressive. Experiencing the body as celebratory implies that desire attains fulfilment in our perceptions of our bodies as well as in the gaze of the other. Film stars, fashion models, professional dancers, theatre professionals probably experience the celebratory aspect of their embodiment. We however experience our bodies as oppressive when our desires remain unfulfilled and we see this unfulfilment reflected in the other's gaze so that if we do not have shapely, well adorned and well clothed bodies, we feel not only depressed and alienated from our bodies but also experience the situation as oppressive. A woman may therefore experience, in intimate relationships, what one woman has called 'mental torture' if her physical self is continuously denigrated or remains unappreciated by her partner. In order to be free of this oppression women devise strategies to negotiate a space for themselves in what they consider 'the real world' which is also a make-believe world, to the extent that it doesn't really exist. It is created by the media, through film and women's magazines, through popular cinema, and above all, through what Bartky (1990) calls the 'fashion-beauty complex'. And it is a world to which a woman aspires because it is so very different from her everyday experience of a normatively defined femininity and domesticity. The question might arise, at this point, as to why the female body is of any significance at all. Let me be very clear at the outset that I do not want to fall into the trap of simply revaluing the female body and all it stands for. As Currie and Raoul so insightfully point out, such a