Creating Distance from Body Issues: Exploring New Materialist Feminist Possibilities for Renegotiating Gendered Embodiment

Abstract

The body’s active role in the production of gendered embodiments is a key focus for feminist cultural studies and leisure studies. The article draws on new materialist feminist scholarship to explore how gender relations are produced and negotiated in physical culture through one case study example taken from a wider study of young people’s experiences of the body and self-image over time. The article explores how gendered embodiment is assembled through the socio-material circumstances of everyday life. For one particiapnt, 'Ann', “creating distance” from appearance concerns was an embodied process which involved new practices and encounters (e.g., walking for leisure, reading feminist literature) and relationships and engagements with others (e.g., a partner, friends, family). The potential for feminism to open possibilities to imagine the body otherwise is also discussed in relation to recent efforts to foster social justice imperatives in leisure sciences and feminist physical cultural studies.

Keywords:

• body image
• embodiment
• feminism
• gender
• the body

Acknowledgements

I sincerely thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of this special issue for their insightful and generous feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1 Fifteen young people ages 18–29 participated in the study. Participants were recruited through advertisements at university and TAFE campuses and via snowballing. Participants included a mix of gender, with nine participants identifying as female and six as male. The majority (n = 13) were 13 studying, the majority (11) at university, with two undertaking TAFE courses. All those studying were also combining study with paid work. Two participants were working and not studying; one in full time work and the other in casual work. The majority (9) lived with parents; one lived on campus at university, and the remaining five lived independently with partners, friends, or alone. Most identified their ethnicity as white Australian (9), with others describing Filipino, Indian, Sri Lankan, and British heritage. Eleven identified their sexuality as heterosexual; others chose not to define or selected bisexual or pansexual.

2 Following the theoretical framework, the methods of interviewing and photo elicitation do not aim to capture or represent the “speaking subject.” Rather, these methods are intended to “enter into a discussion” and “gather the relations of affect…that affect an individual” (Fox & Ward, 2008, p. 1013). Others have also methodologically reworked traditional qualitative methods such as interviewing, photo elicitation and photo-voice, approaching text and images as affective and relational rather than flat representations of experience (Bell, 2012; Fox & Alldred, 2015; Higgins & et al., 2016).

3 Barad’s concept of “‘folding” is useful here to describe the process of “analysis” in merging my own embodied history and force (through which I carry around the voices of numerous previous women from studies of gendered embodiment and body image) with Ann’s own words. In Barad’s (2007) theorisation, “enfolding” describes the process by which forces intra-act, producing the “ongoing reconfigurings of the world” (p. 41). In this, the “knowledge” I am producing in the analysis is clearly “situated” (Haraway, 1988), aligned with Barad’s onto-epistemology: we as researchers are “part of the world and its differential becoming” (Barad, 2007), decentreing the researcher as a knowing subject.

4 The experience of financial hardship for young Australian students alongside the context of increasingly insecure working conditions have been shown to have particularly severe wellbeing impacts (Landstedt, Coffey, Wyn, Cuervo & Woodman, 2017).

5 The study of leisure practices seeks to explore the ways various power relationships and inequalities are articulated within spaces and practices of leisure (Silk, Caudwell, & Gibson, 2017, p. 157). Leisure studies represents an important mode through which forms of gendered embodiments and inequalities are lived, blurring across other everyday domains including work and study contexts. Gendered embodiments associated with appearance and body image pressures are produced across the intersections of all contexts of a person’s life, including leisure, often where no clear “cut” can be made as to what constitutes leisure as separate or distinct from other aspects of life. The increasingly blurred lines between leisure and work has been articulated in the affective labour literature of post-Fordist labour markets (Farrugia, Threadgold, & Coffey, 2018). “Leisure” can be identified in Ann’s examples in the practices of reading feminist literature and in exploring themes of sexualisation and socio-cultural gender structures in her university studies, and walking for pleasure. She defines these practices of reading and walking – and the deliberate mobilisations of these practices “for herself” (rather than goal-oriented for appearance and weight loss) are two important ways in which Ann tried to recover from a “destructive” relationship with her body and self-image, and re-draw new possibilities for gendered embodiment.

6 Managing the body’s appearance continues to be a central aspect of femininity because women’s worth and value is still largely based on heterosexual notions of attractiveness within the heterosexual matrix of desire (Bordo, 2003; McRobbie, 2009). The affective power of appearance pressures (Featherstone, 2010) is shown in Ann’s example stemming from highly restrictive binary gender assemblages focussed on weight control and appearance paramount for embodying successful femininity (Budgeon, 2011).

7 Feminist scholarship has analysed the importance placed on the body’s appearance and conventions of (hetero)sexual attractiveness in mainstream popular discourse. Wood (2017), for example, highlights that advice on body confidence for women in magazines such as Cosmopolitan overwhelmingly focuses on the significant work required to improve the female body for sex with a male partner. Against this context, it is little wonder Ann felt relieved to be in a formalised monogamous sexual relationship (heterosexual marriage) with someone whom she knows values her on a “deeper level” beyond her physical appearance. In this way, the heterosexual matrix of desire (Butler, 1990, 1993) can be seen as a key relation through which gender territorializes the body. Somewhat ironically, the ultimate territorialisation provided by the formalised heterosexual institution of marriage (and the quality of the supportive relations provided by her male partner) provided an avenue for Ann to renegotiate gendered and sexualized appearance pressures in this context.

8 Feminist critiques of beauty pressures and cosmetic surgery (Leve et al., 2012; Mears, 2014) highlight the broad social forces including norms of heterosexual desirability which reduce women to their bodies and appearance within the social context of a cultural obsession with the body and perfection.

9 Studies have shown the ways the gendered fashion-beauty complex of late capitalism increasingly encourages those dissatisfied with their appearance to undertake intensive body work practices (such as punishing exercise regimes and diets and undergoing cosmetic surgical procedures), rather than re-orienting or reducing the value placed on appearance (Featherstone, 2010; Gimlin, 2007; Mears, 2014).