Body Image as an Everyday Problematic

Looking Good

Félix Martínez, Félix Díaz Martínez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138052321
• eBook ISBN: 9781351684224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

It is well known that body image has been associated to health risks related to eating habits. However, to what extent do identity categories, everyday social interaction and common discourses affect our preoccupations and sufferings related to body image in contemporary society, and our coordinated ways of confronting them?

In Body Image as an Everyday Problematic, Diaz seeks to offer a comprehensive perspective on body image as an everyday problematic, grounded on verbal accounts of biographic experience. The main body of the book unfolds through five analyses: (1) a framework for how persons are categorized on the grounds of their beauty, weight, or physical appeal; with reference to heterosexual and friendship relations; (2) how men position themselves with respect to culturally provided images of beautiful women in relation to their heterosexual partners; (3) biographic processes through which people locate problems with the body, confront them and interpret them after some time; (4) the role of mothers in providing help across different kinds of problems; and (5) the experiences and contradictions of caring for relatives or partners who suffer for their body image. Indeed, these five analytical threads together compose a structured and rich understanding of the meaningful social order that lies at the core of our everyday preoccupations with the body.

Challenging conventional psychological theories of body image, this enlightening volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Clinical Psychology and Sociology.

1
Introduction

This book is about a contemporary problematic that traverses the lives of many people, mostly women, broadly in Western and Northern societies. Through the second half of the last century, it came to be theorised as ‘body image’, and Psychology made sense of it as Psychology usually does with human preoccupations and problems: purifying it as a measurable construct located in individuals. Within or outside this purification, discourses of body image affect our decisions and concerns on an everyday basis, and constitute an important part of the way we organise our social lives. This book is about how discourses of body image traverse and organise our identities and social relations.

My primary aim in this introduction is to propose an initial approximation to body image as a social problematic. For this purpose, I will start by briefly tracing its social and historical origins through the last two centuries. Within this historical process, I will locate the emergence and basic parameters of ‘body image’ as a psychological construct; I will argue that the installment and institutionalisation of body image in the psychological disciplines through the second half of the twentieth century was an outcome of a broader historical cultural process and also had consequences for contemporary everyday life, affecting our ways of thinking about the body and dealing with it.

Still, it would be inaccurate and misleading to confuse Psychology’s ways of categorising and managing ‘body image’ with people’s preoccupations with it. To highlight these crucial differences, I will introduce the problematic as something different from the construct but engendered within the same cultural process. Finally, I will present the empirical data that compose the material base for the analyses in the book, and I will give an overview of their content.

Historical roots

The historical process at the background of the body image problematic runs through late contemporary European culture with the emergence of an association between practices of body control and aspects of individual identity. Let me start with Hepworth’s account of the historical evolution of self-starvation (Hep-worth 1999). In the twelfth century it was associated to religious asceticism; as the Church developed a perspective on women as a source of evil, self-starvation later became an indicator of a sinister existence, such as witchery. Along the nineteenth century, the institutional control of deviant women moved from the Catholic notion of witchery to the medical concept of hysteria, and self-starvation became a symptom for this diagnosis, indicating a disorganised mind. Through the twentieth century, ‘anorexia’ gained independence from ‘hysteria’ as a diagnostic category.

In other words, the changing meanings of self-starvation practices are each associated to a different identity construction for the woman involved. The application of dietary restrictions as a pathway to a purified soul is again described by Griffin and Berry (2003), showing how ‘fasting’ and the exposure of independence from physical need has since been established as a route to salvation for women. This may well be related to constructions of femininity relating it to nature, desire and the ‘primitive’, which have historically been devaluated and required to stay under control. In a similar line, Vandereycken and Van Deth (1996) remind us of physical self-punishment practices, including self-starvation, among saints in the Middle Ages, as a way of expiating sin.

In her well-known historical revision of notions of illness, Sontag (1989) traces the cult for slimness involved in contemporary women’s fashion metaphors back to romanticised tuberculosis at the end of the eighteenth century. Tuberculosis involved an aesthetic; the gloomy appearance that it furnished was idealised among romantic writers of both sexes, and gradually became the ideal look for women generically.

In line with Hepworth, Shoewalter (1987) locates the emergence of ‘anorexia’ within notions of hysteria in the nineteenth century. Gull (1874) is recognised as the first medical doctor to clinically describe it in this context. Yet the emergence of the diagnostic category runs parallel to the consolidation of discourses promoting slim feminine beauty and sophisticated culture. Bishop (2001) has deconstructed the cultural discourse, particularly promoted in women’s magazines, which invites women to reach their beauty ideals through a healthy and careful diet as well as exercise. Griffin and Berry (2003) analysed messages transmitted in Western food advertisements, noticing that food consumption (especially high-fat food) is culturally associated to excess in freedom, sin and weakness. These cultural analyses suggest a continuity between religion, psychiatry and consumerism in the regulation of women’s behaviour through food consumption.

Academic and professional concerns about body image emerged in the context of these historical and cultural developments, through two different but concurrent developments. The rise of anorexia and other body-consuming eating disorders related to the cult for slimness brought the emergence of new dangers attributed to extreme obsession and pathological imagery; at the same time, health practitioners were also making female fat a focus of concern and intervention (Schwartz 1986; Gilman 2008), where the risk was the excess of body mass. Too much fasting and too much fat, particularly in women, became concerns not only for common people, but increasingly for health professionals. This would be no wonder in societies where, through the second half of the century, the body ideal promoted in the media was steadily growing thinner while the physical weight of actual women was increasing (Murnen & Seabrook 2012).

The psychological discipline would take part in these institutional changes by providing a multidimensional construct which integrates cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects (Smolak & Thompson 2009), to which I will turn attention in the following section of this chapter.

Through this process, clinical attention to anorexia gradually developed a concern with the pathological management of the self. Bruch (1978) suggested that many women diagnosed with anorexia talk about two selves in permanent struggle with one another: a spiritual one, with a strong ‘masculine’ will, and an uncontrollable, impure, passive ‘feminine’ other. In line with this dissociation, a key issue in eating disorders was the ‘delusion’ of not owning the body and its sensations (see also Bruch 1982).

But this masculine/feminine dissociation does not only pertain to the extreme cases of women who reach a diagnosed status. MacSween (1993) relates the development of the self through the vital cycle to contemporary cultural demands imposed on women. In contemporary patriarchal societies, women and girls have to find balance between the ideology of passive femininity and that of masculine independence and success. Starvation represents a precarious and provisional way of attending to this conflict, integrating an impenetrable and independent self (defined by food restriction) in a slim feminine body. The chimerical quest for beauty and slenderness in itself runs against women’s power as they channel their emotional, physical and economical resources towards the aim of reaching body ideals (Wolf 1992).

Pursuing slenderness, usually but not exclusively through the self-regulation of eating practices, became a women’s issue through the second half of the twentieth century. ‘Body image’ as a cultural commonplace came into existence with respect to this pretension, conforming a discursive domain which provided a language to address it, and images and parameters for comparison and assessment.

But, above all, for ‘body image’ to consolidate as a discourse, it required the contribution of professional and academic disciplines responding to a cultural concern while providing the public with theories and technologies to deal with it. As Nikolas Rose (1990, 105–6) would put it, it required “languages of government” to “make new sectors of reality thinkable and practicable”. The individual and social psychology of body image would define categories and establish systems to measure those categories as technical instruments which would allow a double self-regulation: the regulation of body size and shape, and the regulation of feelings, impressions and affordable vital positions with respect to the individual’s own body. Psychology thus would provide a language for people to deal with their own bodies and concer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Table
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Methodological foundations
• 3 The social organisation of body image: categories and relations
• 4 Men’s images of women’s bodies: from shared conventions to personal intimacy
• 5 In narrative: changing bodies through life
• 6 Helping mothers
• 7 Dilemmas of support: the caregiver’s perspective
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix: Transcription conventions
• Index