Craving Freedom

Throughout history, women have been objectified and judged according to their appearance and according to the harsh ideal standards that define beauty. The issue of female sexual objectification has been a controversial topic in feminist discourses for decades. This study investigates how objectifying women bodies adopted by media, society, essentialist and patriarchal ideologies leads to serious psychological problems including internalization of cultural standards of beauty and self objectification, body shaming problems, appearance anxiety, and body dissatisfaction that end in serious medical issues like disordered eating symptoms, anorexia nervosa and plastic surgeries to achieve the so called beauty standards. This is explored in two different theatrical performances; namely, John Binnie’s Breakfast at Audrey’s (2005), representing Aerial theater, and Julia Cho’s BFE (2006), representing traditional theater. The study relies on a psychological approach applying the objectification theory with a Marxist feminist dimension added to the study.