Women's Bodies: "codes Of Production And Consumption,

In the long process of the development of human culture, the patriarchal system likes a ubiquitous ghost, which could be sensed everywhere. In the literary texts and the cultural texts, the women's body becomes the field where men and the patriarchal society commit violence and oppression to women, and the tool that the patriarchal modes used to enslave women spiritually and maintain the gender system. The women's body, as a sign, is rearranged by the patriarchal symbolic order, produced and organized by the language program and turned into the males' consumed object, that is to say, being put under the males' gaze, the subjectivity without images becomes the process of infinite protrusion and enlargement of physical organs and the factors of sex and re-produces the values needed by the patriarchal society. During this transformation, males' control over the female body has experienced the development trend from dominant to recessive, from the protrusion of desire narration in literary texts to the incorporation of desire in the enlightenment, to the commercialization, visualization and simulacrum of female body, demonstrating the historical trajectory of the patriarchal tactics of controlling. Especially in modern society, by virtue of encoding, patriarchal society interprets sex code as the re-constructed consumption model of aesthetics of sensibility, and re-interprets cultural production and consumption as commodity production and consumption. Moreover, with the help of the dissemination and inducement of the mass media and the motivation of the commercial culture, it meticulously fabricates a sex fable with modernity characteristics and internalizes the connotation of the fable as the values and life styles of the consumers. Its essence is the replay of patriarchal cultural texts in the context of consumerism. This thesis, setting the literary works in the Reading Age and the advertisements in the epoch of images as examples, tries to illustrate the effects of patriarchy in these two textual codes and the characteristics of its combination with the commodity consumerism and reveals the unequal gender concepts in the production and consumption of the sex code.This thesis consists of introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction makes a summary of women's body as a prophet about sex.,and points out its essence clearly.In the body part, four chapters entitled women's body—a prophet about sex, from symbol to code---modern transition of sex prophet, production and consumption of sex code in reading era, production and consumption ofsex code in image era, textual analysis in different eras------taking certain kind of sex code in Tailiand national TV commercials for example are elaborated. In the conclusion part, the whole content of this thesis is reviewed and summarized. In the chapter entitled from symbol to code---modern transition of sex prophet, the definitions of symbol and code are distinguished and then the development of women's body from symbol to code in different texts is traced. Then the author analyzes the production and consumption of sex code in reading era and image era, shows the traits of sex code from explicitness to implicitness and the changes of consumers' cultural concept. The writer further points out that the relationship between texts containing sex code and the mainstream culture results in different treatments of women's body as sex code in different periods, and reveals the historical circumstances of patriarchal system. Based on specific texts, the last chapter illustrates how the patriarchal system is inserted in the texts to deconstruct the subjectivity of women's body and how it is combined with consumerism to spread and reproduce the patriarchal ideology. After analyzing Taili and other works written by Zhang Ziping, readers can find out that the limited resistance of women's body as sex code is caused by its deviation from the theme of enlightenment. Since 1990s, with the rise of consumerism, patriarchy has controlled consumers completely by merging with consumption culture.The production and consumption of sex code by subject of desire are not generated automatically but completed with the help of patriarchy desire machine. It aims at improving the operation system of the machine under the dominance of patriarchal cultural code, stimulating the consumers' desire and realizing the possession and dominance of women's body in concept with the help of consumerism. Therefore, getting rid of modern aesthetic redemption and perceptive liberation, destroying the production and operation system of sex code and the symbolic order of patriarchy are not only an important issue for feminism to handle but also an essential prerequisite to fulfill women's physical liberation and harmonious coexistence between two sexes.