Introducing Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management

Abstract

This book showcases a selection of current work and debates on weight and body management practices that are being produced from the vibrant arena of critical and postmodern approaches in the social sciences. Weight issues have become central to Western understandings of health and identity, but analyses of weight and body management have often failed to contextualise weight related issues. This timely book addresses this gap by examining three key areas, namely, representation, identities, and practice, to explore and interrogate how body and weight management, subjectivities, experiences, and practices are constituted within and by the normative discourses of contemporary western culture. Downloads per month over past year Loading... Critical bodies: Representations, identities and practices of weight and body management Research and enterprise Login Related links Related links Information Services

Doing weight: Pro‐ana and recovery identities in cyberspace

“…For example, there was no claim in the recovery site of having a larger body, a celebration of larger size, or talk of health/fitness at any size. The relevance of this discursive shift from size to health is particularly salient given the wider cultural discourses that compound health with weight, in that the terms weight and health are often employed synonymously (Lupton, 1996;Malson, 2008;Markula et al, 2008). Framing body-talk in terms of health may not therefore challenge the thin ideal.…”

“…Body size, whether it be fat, thin or 'normal', is saturated with a multiplicity of meanings that all circulate around an idealization of thinness. Recently, this thin-ideal has been constituted as healthy, good, attractive, 'normal' and representative of one's moral character (Bordo, 1993;Malson, 1998;Markula, Burns, & Riley, 2008;Riley, Burns, Frith, Wiggins, & Markula, 2008). As Malson notes: successful embodiment of femininity (or, increasingly, masculinity) and one's ability to properly conduct a self-directed life; one's health and, as a consequence of all this one might imagine, one's entire life (2008, p. 38).…”

Understanding The ‘Too Fat’ Body and the ‘Too Thin’ Body: A Critical Psychological Perspective

“…Thus, in contrast with weight-focused health promotion, HAES also avoids sanctioning problematic weight-loss practices as beneficial since it rejects the notion that "slim is always good and fat always bad". It thereby also disrupts our "cultural knowingness" about body weight where gendered, aesthetic, moralistic and health-related values all converge to produce the fat body as abject and which are arguably re-articulated and endorsed in contemporary mainstream health promotion (Riley et al, 2008;Gard 2005;Lebesco, 2009). The HAES approach may provide a solution to the seeming dilemmas of untangling the conflicting and complex evidence regarding the relationship(s) between health and weight (see Gard, 2009) and of promoting health without creating the iatrogenic effects of fatphobic discrimination, "disordered eating" and widespread bodydissatisfaction and distress outlined above.…”

“…In this context then, while the longer-standing gendered aesthetics and gender power-relations remain in place, the issue of body-weight and its management also take on new meanings -of health, responsibility and good (neo-liberal) citizenship -which apply to everyone regardless of gender, body-weight or any other indices of identity (Malson 2008, Markula et al 2008 (Malson 2009). Moreover, despite numerous explanations for the causes of overweight and obesity including genetics and environmental factors, in the early twenty-first century body weight is considered primarily a consequence of an individual"s lifestyle choices in respect of dietary intake and exercise and is thus seen as a matter of individual responsibility (e.g.…”

Deconstructing Disordered Eating: A Feminist Psychological Approach to the Body, Food, and Exercise Relationship in Female Athletes

“…While addressing all of the reasons for our limited understanding is beyond the scope of this paper, one potential reason may be that disordered eating has been conceptualized and studied using objectivist forms of theorizing. Thus, many inherent meanings tied to the term (e.g., disordered eating is a female disorder, disordered eating is an individual psychological problem residing within the mind) have been taken-forgranted and reproduced (Bordo, 1992;Malson & Swann, 1999;Markula, Burns, & Riley, 2008). Research within psychology, sociology, and anthropology employing feminist perspectives on the body and disordered eating in nonathletic populations supports these notions (Becker, 2007;Bordo, 1992Bordo, , 1993Malson & Swann, 1999;Markula, Burns, & Riley, 2008;Nichter, 2000;Piran & Cormier, 2005).…”