Changing times, future bodies? The significance of health in young women’s imagined futures¹

1. This paper arises from the UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series ‘Young Women in Movement: Sexualities, Vulnerabilities, Needs and Norms’ (ESRC RES-451-26-0715), based at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2009–2011.

Abstract

A growing number of authors recognise the increasing expectations placed on young women as the vanguard of economic, social and cultural change. This paper explores how these imaginings have come to bear upon young women’s bodies, as part of a special issue on pedagogical responses to the changing position of girls and young women. In examining how ‘girlhood’ has been constituted as the vanguard of cultural change, attention is cast specifically towards the central role of embodiment, health and subjectivity in these images of the future.

Keywords:

• girlhood
• embodiment
• health
• future lives
• obesity

Notes

1. This paper arises from the UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series ‘Young Women in Movement: Sexualities, Vulnerabilities, Needs and Norms’ (ESRC RES-451-26-0715), based at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2009–2011.

2. Stanley Cohen, in his work Folk Devils and Moral Panics, refers to a moral panic as ‘a condition, episode, person or group of persons which emerge to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’ (1972, 9). Cohen makes specific reference to the role of the media in intensifying and shaping these moral panics.