Anatomy of the before and after: photovoice for (en)during weight loss

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I situate the body as a visual storytelling device and explore photovoice as a technology of the self, giving (visual)voice to my embodied sensemaking. Photovoice boldly embraces subjective lived experience as the catalyst for action and advocacy through the incorporation of photography (self- or other-focused) into the research process. These (auto)ethno-(photo)graphic endeavors fit within the wider spectrum of performance- and arts-based research, which are guided by aesthetics. Through reflexive, critical analysis of my conflicting experiences with identity and weight, I situate the body as a site where meaning is both imbued and embedded. I argue that photography, employed as a critically reflexive practice, provides multilayered storied (in)visibility. I hope to inspire others to utilize photovoice as a pedestrian mechanism of sensemaking with great utility for interrogating epistemological standpoints, sensemaking, and identity, ultimately telling our visual stories in ways that aural- or text-centric mechanisms alone cannot convey, particularly for narratives of progress.

KEYWORDS:

• photovoice
• weight loss
• identity
• before and after

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge and thank Robin M. Boylorn, the anonymous reviewers, and the production team for their kind, insightful, critical, and helpful feedback.

Notes

1 Rosalind Hurworth, “Photo-Interviewing for Research,” Social Research Update 40, no. 1 (2003): 1–4; Alice Vera Sampson-Cordle, “Exploring the Relationship between a Small Rural School in Northeast Georgia and Its Community: An Image-Based Study Using Participant-Produced Photographs” (Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 2001); Deborah D. Heisley and Sidney J. Levy, “Autodriving: A Photoelicitation Technique,” Journal of Consumer Research 18, no. 3 (1991): 257–72; Katie Branch Douglas, “Impressions: African American First-Year Students’ Perceptions of a Predominantly White University,” Journal of Negro Education 67, no. 4 (1998): 416–31; Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris, “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment,” Health Education & Behavior 24, no. 3 (1997): 369–87; Douglas Harper, “Visual Sociology: Expanding Sociological Vision,” The American Sociologist 19, no. 1 (1988): 54–70.

2 David R. Novak, “Democratizing Qualitative Research: Photovoice and the Study of Human Communication,” Communication Methods and Measures 4, no. 4 (2010): 294.

3 Karen Tracy, “The Role (or Not) for Numbers and Statistics in Qualitative Research: An Introduction,” Communication Methods and Measures 1, no. 1 (2007): 32.

4 Wayne Brekhus, “A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus,” Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 38.

5 Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Letters and Notes, ed. Roman Jakobxon (Hague, Germany: Mouton, 1975).

6 Trubetzkoy, paraphrased in Brekhus, “A Sociology of the Unmarked,” 35.

7 Novak, “Democratizing Qualitative Research.”

8 Dona Schwartz, “Visual Ethnography: Using Photography in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Sociology 12, no. 2 (1989): 119–54; Patricia Leavy, Methods Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2015).

9 Melvin Delgado, Urban Youth and Photovoice: Visual Ethnography in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

10 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

11 Kiran Pienaar and Ian Bekker, “The Body as a Site of Struggle: Oppositional Discourses of the Disciplined Female Body,” Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 25, no. 4 (2007): 539.

12 Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs, Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 39.

13 Ibid., 11.

14 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

15 See, respectively, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (New York: Penguin, 1979); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1994); Valerie Harwood, “Theorizing Biopedagogies,” in Biopolitics and the “Obesity Epidemic”: Governing Bodies, ed. Jan Wright and Valerie Harwood (London: Routledge, 2009), 15–30.

16 See, respectively, Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 108; Geneviève Rail, “The Birth of the Obesity Clinic: Confessions of the Flesh, Biopedagogies and Physical Culture,” Sociology of Sport Journal 29, no. 2 (2012): 229.

17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 61.

18 Ibid., 20.

19 Dworkin and Wachs, Body Panic, 14.

20 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 10–11 original emphasis.

21 Laura Azzarito, “Panopticon of Physical Education: Pretty, Active and Ideally White,” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 14, no. 1 (2009): 21. See also Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

22 Christine M. Caldwell, “Body Identity Development: Definitions and Discussions,” Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 11, no. 4 (2016): 224.

23 See, for example, Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray, eds., Queering Fat Embodiment (London: Routledge, 2016); Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

24 See, for example, Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1.

25 See Jimmie Manning, “Interpretive Theorizing in the Seductive World of Sexuality and Interpersonal Communication: Getting Guerilla with Studies of Sexting and Purity Rings,” Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 2507–20.

26 Richard Godfrey, Simon Lilley, and Joanna Brewis, “Biceps, Bitches and Borgs: Reading Jarhead’s Representation of the Construction of the (Masculine) Military Body,” Organization Studies 33, no. 4 (2012): 583 original emphasis.

27 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 155.

28 Godfrey, Lilley, and Brewis, “Biceps, Bitches, and Borgs,” 548.

29 David Lyon, “9/11, Synopticon, and Scopophilia: Watching and Being Watched,” in The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, ed. Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 36.

30 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 236.

31 Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books, 1980).

32 Susan J. Woolford et al., “A Picture May Be Worth a Thousand Texts: Obese Adolescents’ Perspectives on a Modified Photovoice Activity to Aid Weight Loss,” Child Obesity 8, no. 3 (2012): 230–36; Amy Kristen Foster, “Perceptions of Weight-Related Health in African American Families: A Photovoice Study” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2009).