Body Image: I Can Work with That

Abstract

Our bodies are a medium of culture, both as ‘made’ by the daily rituals through which we subject them (e.g. manners, diet, fitness regimes, eating times), and as ‘texts’ for representing culture on their surface through personal appearance (e.g. dress sense, hairstyle, body art, jewellery, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery) (Askegaard et al., 2002; Bordo, 1993; Grogan, 2010). In addition to ‘made’ and ‘text’, our body can also be conceptualised as a ‘schema’ (Inoue, 2006). That is, a sensory body. This includes not just the five senses which mediate our interaction with the external world such as sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch but also our own sense of inner body movement, the physical feelings we experience from illness and stimulants such as caffeine and alcohol, and emotional responses such as happiness and feeling sad or low. Of course, all of these aspects – the ‘made’, ‘text’ and ‘schema’ – of the body act as a whole to produce our embodied experiences from our interactions in everyday life. Those experiences as a whole will be interpreted within the confines of gender. As I aim to show, certain aspects of bodily management tend to be associated with a specific gender and challenges to these cultural norms often produce ‘backlashes’.