1.4 Research population and location I this thesis I try to unravel how women answer to the bodily expectations and in what way they rebel against this structural influence. I focus on the expectations of the female body and research the way women work on their bodies and therefore work on themselves in order to negotiate the self. I study how women reposition themselves, consciously or unconsciously, in relation to societal expectations of the body. For this thesis I have chosen to explore a lifestyle that is based on altering the body in order to make or keep it healthy. Personal Body Work (PBW) (Gimlin 2002, Greenhalgh 2012) is about living a healthy lifestyle wherein women consciously make healthy decisions concerning food and exercising. It can be seen as a lifestyle because Personal Body Work are attempts to altering the body where the rest of one’s life is wrapped around. I am exploring in what way Personal Body Work is used as a tool in order to judge someone’s self, but also as a tool to influence one’s status as a ‘good’ person. PBW is about following certain diet rules and having exercising routines in order to maintain or develop the desired body. I chose to research body work in Los Angeles, California, among the community of ‘L.A. fitgirls’. Even …show more content…
Part Three examines how Personal Body Work can create a feeling of acceptance and community in Los Angeles. I will explore how Personal Body Work is practised to gain a sense of inclusion in the community of L.A. fitgirls. Body Work seems to be an important factor in order to measure up to the unspoken rules such as fashion trends, behavioural codes and attitude norms. One must spend thought and time into increasing the value of the body and answering to the ideal LA body, which is thin, slim and toned in order to answer to the image of a good
"Skin blemishes made it impossible for me to really enjoy myself. I was always worrying about the way I looked" (Brumberg, p. 87). Woman all around the world share the same problem, they feel unhappy and self-conscious with the appearance of their bodies. In The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, she successfully illustrates the way adolescents begin to change focus from inner to outer beauty in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Through use of personal diaries and historical research, Brumberg shows her readers the physical differences between girls then and now.
Society is obsessed with fitness and weight loss. Ever since I was in sixth grade I have had issues with my weight and self-image. The article “Fat Is a Feminist Issue”, by Susie OrBach focuses on how our society puts this unrealistic image of what women should look like into everyone’s heads. The media and magazines urge women to conform, at any cost, into a constantly changing expectation of what is beautiful. Women are taught to look at themselves from an outside view, to be a sex image for men and fuel the diet and fashion industries. Society thinks if women do not fit within the unrealistic image something is wrong with them. The highly glorified concept of beauty marketed by the media contributes to the concern over body image that causes many women, including myself, to eating disorders and poor self-image.
Moe’s book focuses on how our culture is preoccupied with weight and appearance. She begins her book with the history of body image and how at different periods over centuries, fat and thin body types have both been considered “fashionable”. From the late Middle Ages until the 1800s, the rounded figure of a women’s body remained the prevailing image. The rounded figure was a sign of wealth, fertility, and prosperity. The thin “waif look” didn’t enter our society until 1967 when Leslie Hornby, known as Twiggy, began showing up in the media.
In terms of Crawley’s argument of illegitimacy when it comes to the construction and idealizing of gendered norms, which she personally counteracts with butchness, Simone De Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (1949) supports the idea that we create what men and women value. Beauvoir looks at gender not as a natural occurrence, but rather the normalization and expectations related to female bodies; women should be feminine and adapt to physical responsibility different from men.
Redefined, Beauty. "Body Positive Sticky Notes." BEAUTY REDEFINED. Beauty Redefined Blog, Jan. 2014. Web. 05 Apr. 2014. .
Mackler, Carolyn. Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image. Ed. Ophira Edut. Emeryville, CA: Seal, 2004. Print.
My mother was taught, as her mother before and so on, that these conversations are to be kept private and talked about quietly. In response to this, the power of men has an increasingly strong hold on the ideal physical beauty and how the changes of the body, such as menstruation, are in private and never spoken of. The Body Project gives a disturbing look at how women in the past few centuries and the present should act, look like, and keep hidden in response to what men think is most desirable. No matter how free women think they are, we are still under the control of men, even if it is not directly. This book opens the conversation on the problems that are still plaguing women and how society needs to change to have a healthier environment for women to be comfortable in their skin.
Fresh from the womb we enter the world as tiny, blank slates with an eagerness to learn and blossom. Oblivious to the dark influences of culture, pre-adult life is filled with a misconception about freedom of choice. The most primitive and predominant concept that suppresses this idea of free choice involve sex and gender; specifically, the correlation between internal and external sex anatomy with gender identity. Meaning, those with male organs possess masculine identities, which involve personality traits, behavior, etcetera, and the opposite for females. Manipulating individuals to adopt and conform to gender identities, and those respective roles, has a damaging, life-long, effect on their development and reflection of self through prolonged suppression. This essay will attempt to exploit the problems associated with forced gender conformity through an exploration of personal experiences.
Roxane Gay, an American feminist writer and author of “My Body is Wildly Undisciplined” writes about a reality television show of people making sacrifices to reduce their body weight. Roxane Gay is successful in persuading her audience due to the evidence and persuasive personal anecdotes. Roxane focuses on “The Biggest Loser” too much in her article. She uses many examples to explain her argument which were “The Biggest Loser” and “Weight Watchers”, and herself. Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. She only talks about the issues that may have a negative effect of these television shows to persuasive her audience to agree with her. For an example, she uses “The Biggest Loser” to confirm her opinion to explain to her audience that harming your body to feel better is not okay at all. There are other suggestions to reduce your body weight, instead of harming your body. Additional, she gives vivid description on how she felt which made a connection between the author and her audience. The summary of the overall text was satisfying because her audience had better understanding on how she
"Introduction to Body Image: Teen Decisions." Body Image. Ed. Auriana Ojeda. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2003. Teen Decisions. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 20 May 2014.
my personal stance 1 my personal stance 4 My Personal Stance Jason S. Eadens Benedictine University My Personal Stance I guess one of the hardest things to write, is a reflection on yourself. In the class, Human Dignity/ Common Good I have had the chance to reflect on myself, and see the room where improvement needs to be made.
Excerpt from K. Conboy, N. Medina and S. Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (401-17). NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Dworkin, Shari L. and Faye L. Wachs. 2009. Body Panic : Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness.New York: New York University Press.
Exact Beauty: Exploring Women's Body Projects and Problems in the 21st Century. Mandell, Nancy (5th ed.). Feminist Issues: Race, Class, and Sexuality (131-160). Toronto: Pearson Canada, Inc. Schulenberg, Jennifer, L. (2006).
Here, the distinction is made between the physiological aspect of sex and the meanings inscribed in it. In this discussion, Merleau-Ponty is referenced in explaining that the body continually realizes a set of possibilities. In framing the body in such a manner, one does not merely have or one is not merely a body – one “does” one’s body. However, there is a constraint to these possibilities made by historical conventions. What this means is that when Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir claim that the body is a historical situation, the body does three things with that historical situation: it does it, dramatizes it, and reproduces it. These can be seen as the elementary structures of embodiment. This embodiment can then be viewed specifically from the perspective of the act of gender. Gender can then be understood differently from the biological sex as gender has a cultural interpretation that is used as a strategy for cultural survival. In its deep entrenchment, gender seems almost natural in the punishments that arise from deviating from acting in a way that creates the very idea of