Everyday Embodiment: Rethinking Youth Body Image

✍ Scribed by Julia Coffey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 169
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book offers an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to one of the most significant health and wellbeing challenges for contemporary youth: body image. The social and cultural dimensions shaping body ideals and young people’s body image concerns have not been adequately explored in the current landscape of social media and youth body cultures. The author provides a sociological reframing of body image, foregrounding the social and cultural dimensions which are critical in shaping young people’s everyday bodily experiences. Chapters explore the significance of ‘gender’ and ‘wellbeing’ norms and the ways that circumstances of hardship and inequality are significant in mediating body concerns. In this, the book complicates simplistic understandings of body image, instead showing the complex processes by which body concerns are formed through the circumstances of embodied experience. The book advocates for the non-individual dimensions of body concerns―the social and cultural conditions of young people’s lives―to be foregrounded in strategies aimed at addressing this complex youth wellbeing issue.

This text will be of interest to scholars in gender studies, youth studies, and feminist sociology.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
1 Reframing Youth Body Image as ‘Everyday Embodiment’
Introduction
Approaches to Youth Body Image
Body Work and Gender Ideals
Media and Social Media Images
Bodies as ‘Becoming’
Reframing Body Image as ‘Everyday Embodiment’
Theorising the Body
Feminism, Gender, and the Body
Gender as an Assemblage
Chapter Overview
2 Embodied Methodologies: Photo-Voice, Affect, and the Body
Introduction
Theory-Method: New Materialist Perspectives
Expanding Methodologies: Images, Visual Methods, and Photo-Voice
Re-orienting Photo-Voice
Study Design: Affect in Everyday Embodiments
Recruitment and Participant Details
Overview of Key Themes and Findings
Analysis: Writing Across Qualitative and Non-representational Approaches
‘The Feeling in the Moment’: Photo-Voice as More-Than-Representational and Enabling an Ethics of Encounter
Conclusion
3 Work, Study, and Stress: The Material Conditions of Youth Wellbeing
Introduction
Study, Work, and Financial Stresses
Casual Working Conditions
Domestic Abuse and Financial Hardship
The Impact of Stress on Gendered Body Concerns
Embodiment, Affect, and the Conditions of Possibility for Wellbeing
Jarrod: Driving to Escape ‘Hovering Anxiety’
Tim: Negotiating ‘Toxic Tendencies’
The Conditions of Possibility for Wellbeing
Conclusion
4 Ugly Feelings: Gender and the Qualities of Feeling of Body Concerns
Introduction
Theorising the Body, Affect, and Gender
Body and Appearance Concerns
The Qualities of Feeling of Body Concerns: From Worry, Body Criticism and Judgement, to Disgust
Gendered Neoliberal Appearance Ideals
Conclusion
5 Assembling Gender: Heterosexual Femininities, Socialities, and Body Concerns
Introduction
Social Dimensions of Gendered Body Relations and Embodiment
Body Comparison, Comments from Others, and Regulative Social Spaces
The Beach and the Gym
Social Media Comparisons
Heterosexual Femininity and the Double-Bind of ‘Body Acceptance’
Conclusion
6 Value Beyond the Aesthetic: Masculinities and Non-binary Embodiments
Introduction
The Body’s Significance in Studies of Men and Masculinities
Heterosexual Masculinities, Functional Value, and the Body
Non-binary Embodiments
William: ‘I Liked Being Mistaken for a Girl’
Inverse: ‘Becoming More Masculine Has Made Me Freer Being Feminine’
Gender as Affective Relations
Conclusion
7 Materialising Gendered Body Concerns and Unsettling Sexual Difference
Everyday Embodiment and the Potential to ‘Become Otherwise’
References
Index