Brigitte Bardot: Liberation or body at the service of patriarchy?
Brigitte Bardot has died, and with her, a body that became a veritable battleground, as the artist Barbara Kruger would say. A fitting metaphor to explain how bodies, especially female ones, become stages where intense social, political, and cultural struggles are projected, often without women being able to control their own narrative. Bardot's body, despite its apparent empowerment within the framework of the sexual revolution, also functioned as a surface of constant dispute: celebrated as an emblem of freedom and female desire, but at the same time captured by a gaze that reduced her to an object of consumption.
In 1953, a very young Bardot starred in an iconic moment at the Cannes Film Festival dressed in a bikini, as part of the promotion for the film Manina, the daughter without veilsAlthough Louis Réard presented his first bikini in 1946, it wasn't until the 1960s that the uncovered body became normalized. France became a leader in this transformation, and Bardot was one of its great driving forces: while on the one hand she broke taboos that demonized the female body, on the other, that same body was exhibited and turned into a commercial lure.
Her image was used as a symbolic weapon between open and traditional minds. The French government instrumentalized her beauty as an emblem of modernity and freedom, but at the same time objectified her as a sexual object destined for the male gaze, presented as an untamed force that men were meant to tame.
A And God created woman (1956), Bardot appears in the very first scene with her naked body, sunbathing behind a white sheet. From the first frame, this ambivalence between sexual freedom and object of desire is established, a tension that will be repeated in the film's iconic dance and throughout her entire career. The label sex kittenThe concept of feminism, applied to women claiming the right to pleasure, was born precisely from the character of Juliette. Despite the reservations of some feminists, Simone de Beauvoir understood that, beneath Bardot's erotic facade, the normative family, gender stereotypes, and the traditional value system were threatened. "As soon as one myth is touched, all myths are in danger," Beauvoir asserted, and this was the underlying problem, both with the bikini and with Bardot. Suspended between emancipation and objectification, Bardot's body remained at the eye of the storm of the great ideological debates of the 1960s, not so far removed fromThe puppet Goya's paintings, elevated and shaken by forces beyond her control. Governments, feminists, and moralists attempted to appropriate them symbolically, almost never knowing what she thought. It wasn't until later in life that Bardot made her position explicit, aligning herself with the far right. National Front (today National Reassembly), defending Gérard Depardieu against accusations of sexual assault and declaring bluntly: "Feminism is not my style. I like men."
