Young Women and the Body: Some Conclusions

Abstract

The central concern of this volume — the questions of whether, why, and how do young women experience chronic dissatisfaction and disassociation from their bodies — has been addressed. This concluding section will not attempt to offer a summary of each specific chapter, as summaries are included in the text, but will draw together the arguments under four major themes that seem of outstanding importance to how modern girl’s subjectivities are formed. They encapsulate both the kinds of social meanings which form girls’ senses of how they can be, and also the unequal power relations which girls inhabit which will render their access to resistance to these prevailing ideas relatively limited.