Critical Bodies Representations, Practices and Identities of Weight and Body Management

by Riley, Sarah; Burns, Maree; Frith, Hannah; Wiggins, Sally; Markula, Pirkko

• ISBN13: 9780230517738
• ISBN10: 0230517730
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book show cases a selection of current work and debates on weight and body management practices that are being produced in the vibrant arena of critical and postmodern approaches in the social sciences. Understanding weight issues in the developed world now occurs against a backdrop in which Westernised cultural ideals about the body constitute the slim body as healthy, good moral, attractive and 'normal'. Simultaneously the World Health Organization has declared that the Western world is in the grip of an 'obesity epidemic' despite the fact that so-called eating disorders and extreme dieting and body management practices are shown to be increasing. This timely book uses the three key areas of representation identities and practice to contextualise weight and body management practices, providing readers with innovative examples of how to explore and interrogate the way our understandings of health, identity and weight are constituted within and by normative discourses of contemperary Western culture. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
Notes on Contributors	p. viii
Introducing Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management	p. 1
Representations and Constructions of Body Weight and Body Management	p. 23
Deconstructing Un/Healthy Body-weight and Weight Management	p. 27
'I Feel Ridiculous about Having Had It' - Critical Readings of Lived and Mediated Stories on Eating Disorders	p. 43
Learning to Be Healthy, Dying to Be Thin: The Representation of Weight via Body Perfection Codes in Schools	p. 60
Constructing Embodied Identities	p. 77
Starving in Cyberspace: The Construction of Identity on 'Pro-eating-disorder' Websites	p. 81
Body Talk: Negotiating Body Image and Masculinity	p. 101
Feminist Object Relations Theory and Eating 'Disorders'	p. 117
Meanings of Body Management Practices: Women's Experiences	p. 135
Dis/Orders of Weight Control: Bulimic and/or 'Healthy Weight' Practices	p. 139
Sustaining Imbalance - Evidence of Neglect in the Pursuit of Nutritional Health	p. 155
Older and Younger Women's Experiences of Commercial Weight Loss	p. 175
Conclusion: Critical Bodies: Discourses of Health, Gender and Consumption	p. 193
Index	p. 204
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