‘She’s very slim’: talking about body-size in all-female interactions.
Introduction
Body-image is an area of research that has been given a great deal of attention within the feminist debate, not only in academic literature (e.g., Mansfield and McGinn, 1993), but also in the popular press. The influence of the media on women’s body-satisfaction is often at the heart of this debate. As Harrison has noted ‘the link between exposure to thin-ideal media and eating disorders has been studied in some detail’. McRobbie (2000) suggested that young women have been depoliticized by the bland and blonde Hollywoodization of mainstream media. Young successful television presenters, actresses, and music-stars are presented as icons of women’s new freedom and success, yet they all represent a similar standardized body-image; for the MTV generation, female role models are generally young and extremely slim.
The ‘direct connections made every day for women between slenderness and love, admiration and respect’, result in a belief system where, ‘being thin is extremely important in our kind of culture’. More recently the growth of the fitness industry has added a further dimension to the pursuit of the ‘perfect body’, not only are we seeking to be thin, we must also be perfectly proportioned and toned. Hepworth claims that in western society, the belief that ‘external appearance represents the inner self’ has resulted in a ‘consumer culture’ with a ‘high evaluation of youth and beauty’, where conceptions of the ‘ideal body’ are based on being ‘active’ and ‘youthful’. He notes that ‘the increasing concern with the pursuit of physical fitness is an attempt … to integrate external appearance with one’s inner self-concept’.
Images of what constitutes the ‘ideal’ female body have varied throughout history. Social issues such as war, famine and fertility affect the ideals of what a culture considers acceptable or desirable in any particular era. It was in the late 19th century that ‘practices of body management’ began to be middle-class preoccupations, and concern with diet became ‘attached to the pursuit of an idealized physical weight or shape’. Bordo notes that the ‘tyranny of slenderness’ gave rise to the development of a completely new range of restrictions: diet, exercise, and, more recently, pharmaceuticals and surgery—‘technologies’ which Bordo claims are aimed at a purely physical transformation. She further notes that the current era.
Discussion relating to women’s bodies reflects ideological positions, not only in relation to social expectations, but also in the ways in which the individuals discursively construct their own sense of gendered ‘self’ within talk. ‘Gendered subject-positions are constituted in various ways by images of how one is expected to look and behave’.
Discourses of body-size: the ‘thin woman’
Research on the attitudes of teenage girls has explored the ‘intersection of the body and society’, particularly looking at how ‘the body becomes a site of struggle for women’. Wetherell’s work suggests that in western society, the current emphasis is on ‘defining femininity and heterosexual identity through ideal standards of thinness, physical beauty and fashion’. Within her data, Wetherell identifies several ‘interpretative repertoires’ or themes that she terms Individualism; Body Processes: The Natural Self; Personological Discourse of Fatness and Thinness, and The Confessional: Pathological Discourse. Individualism relates to the girls’ attempts to rebel against societal pressure.
Wetherell’s respondents repeatedly mentioned several ideal women. Two of the positive images she found are the thin woman and the natural woman. The corresponding negative images were the fat woman, a woman who lacks self-control, and the fashion victim, someone who is sufficiently weak in character to be swayed by media pressures. These latter images were qualified as negative in the sense that the girls distanced themselves from these identities through their talk, or otherwise they were ‘confessed to’ as in ‘pathological discourse’. While Wetherell pointed to the fact that for her respondents, the priorities verbalized were not fixed identities, and like all discourse positions were open to negotiation and re-construction, they were the dominant discourses within her data. Wetherell’s discussion focused upon the contradictions and restrictions the girls faced within the limited cultural repertoires available. It is ultimately the thin woman in control of her own body who is perceived as the best option for self-identification, yet to be an individual calls for resistance to societal ‘norms’. As Wetherell notes the very best identity logically in terms of this way of looking at the world is the ‘ethereal’ woman. The woman who is ‘naturally’ thin and who does not worry about what she eats … because her appetite is so naturally under control that she wants to eat only half the amount that will keep her slim.
Face threats in discourses of self
Recent feminist theory has drawn on the work of social constructionists in assuming identity as a social practice that speakers constantly negotiate within their everyday interactions. Social constructionists have addressed the issue of ‘self’ as a concept that is given ontological status primarily through our social interactions. Shotter has suggested that the ‘primary human reality is face-to-face conversation’. Conversations thus can be seen as an interactional site in which speakers enact social roles and negotiate self-images. Goffman (1957) has suggested that each individual has a self-image or face that can be ‘lost, maintained or enhanced and must be constantly attended to in interaction’. Face becomes ‘significant in interaction as people work jointly to present and preserve one another’s public image’. Drawing on Goffman’s notion of face, Brown and Levinson (1987) developed a theory of politeness that attempted to account for the instances within a conversation where a speaker’s choice of conversational strategies can be seen to orient towards discursively protecting his/her own positive face (or self-image) and the positive face of others. Speakers will also select conversational strategies oriented towards negative face, strategies that avoid any imposition upon self or other. Positive face encompasses the desire to be accepted and gain the approval of others, while negative face reflects a desire for ‘autonomy’.
Face becomes a salient issue in an interaction when communicative behaviors are perceived by participants as face threatening. Certain types of speech forms, insults, for example, are seen as Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). As Trees and Manusov note, ‘positive face is threatened by acts that overlook the hearer’s feelings or wants to express disapproval’; speakers, therefore, are likely to adopt discursive strategies that will minimize or alleviate face threat within their interactions. Given the societal pressures on women to conform to an acceptable physical ideal, talking about body-size and the need to diet can be seen as a discursive site that is likely to produce FTAs and speakers, therefore, may find it necessary to use conversational moves that attend to their own positive face and rely on listener support.
Conclusions
The conversations examined here suggest that the relationship that women have with their bodies is complex. While in the enactment of their everyday lives, the women may be satisfied with their own body-size, their talk shows they are subject to social pressure in relation to attaining perceived ideals of body-size. For the older women, weight and diet appear to be key factors when discursively aligning to a socially acceptable body-size; for the teenage girls, working-out to achieve a ‘toned’ body-shape appears to be the most salient feature within their talk. This intergenerational difference can be seen to reflect the current media icons available to younger women. The media currently presents a world view that implies women should not only be slender but also ‘perfectly-toned’, and as shown above, both the teenage girls and the older women acknowledge, discursively at least, the need to control body-size and present a socially acceptable, idealized body-shape. We can also see that for the younger girls, the thin woman is a social ideal which is becoming replaced by the toned woman. The toned woman is ultimately harder to achieve because (unlike the thin woman who merely needs to diet) the toned woman may also need to resort to punishing fitness routines and ultimately surgery.
Accounting for body-size and issues relating to control of food intake or energy output are discourses that frequently surface in the interactions analyzed here. As shown above, topics relating to body-size and dieting have, for the teachers, become phatic routines embedded within their everyday conversations. Body-image is a dimension of socialized gender identity that is complexly interwoven with the symbolic capital women accumulate in the social marketplace. The data suggests that the participants of these interactions view other women as potential comparative threats to their own successful presentation of physical self. The discursive strategies used to resist the ideal of the thin woman vary between the two groups. The teenage girls appear to account for a friend’s ‘better’ body through negative associations with bulimia and by engaging in bitching, while the teachers use verbal play to parody and subvert the threat posed by a peer group member’s perceived perfection. As noted above, cooperative verbal play can be seen as a highly effective conversational strategy in dealing with threats to both group and individual positive self-image.
The conversations of the teachers can be seen to orient towards positive politeness moves, for example the teachers often question another’s need to diet. In contrast, the talk of the teenage girls shows less evidence of redressive strategies, such as FSMD moves, being used to mitigate interactionally situated face threats posed by a non-present peer group member. While it is not possible to generalize from the limited data presented here, the frequency with which the topic of body-size surfaces in both data-sets suggests that for these women, discursively acknowledging the social identity of the thin woman is an everyday discourse practice within their lives, a discourse practice which at times represents a dialectical dilemma between what is personally acceptable and what is socially acceptable. As Foucault has claimed, ‘discourses [are] … practices that form the objects of which they speak’; thus, the talk examined here both reproduces and helps to create the social ideal of the thin woman.
The data examined not only provides insights into the sequential management of body-talk; it shows that the discourse practices and versions of ‘self’ discussed in Wetherell’s study (1996) are also salient for these women. Discourses of pathological confession, revealing weakness in controlling appetite, were shown to open a speaker to the threat of potential loss of face; and the specter of the thin woman emerges from these conversations as the social ideal for both younger and older women alike. As the analysis shows, issues of individual acceptability versus social acceptability may conflict. The women’s resistance through verbal play and bitching reflects a desire to enact a theme of ‘individualism’ in that these strategies appear to be conversational moves that rebel against social pressure. However, the ways in which the women enact their individualism involves critical evaluation of other women. Although on the one hand the women’s verbal resistance can be seen as a positive factor, it also raises questions about women’s role in terms of active agency in their own ‘self-feminization’.
Nearly 30 years ago Berger noted that a woman’s appearance was a crucial factor in her presentation of identity. His comments still ring true today:
a woman… is continually accompanied by her own image of herself … she has to survey everything she is and everything she does because of how she appears to others
Whether or not we accept the notion of a ‘post-feminist’ world of equality, physical appearance is still arguably the focal characteristic by which women are evaluated, and the media plays a powerful role in recycling and reproducing idealized physical images of women that are often ‘unattainable’. As Coates (2000) notes, a salient social role model for today’s liberated girl-power generation is that of the television presenter, a young, predominantly blonde, very slim woman. The amount of exposure, via digital and satellite television, that media celebrities are being given has resulted in their rapidly becoming the global icons of ‘acceptable’ body-shape. Given such widespread media influence, it is difficult for women to resist these constrictive images. After all, as the media would have women believe, achieving the perfect body that appears daily on magazine pages and television screens, is simply a matter of controlling their appetite, working-out and if all else fails, opting for surgical styling. It is ironic that in controlling their own bodies, women are in turn being constrained and controlled by socially sanctioned media-led images. Journalist Deirdre Sanders, commenting on the rise in demand for cosmetic surgery by teen-age girls in Britain, asks whether
we are in danger of developing a Barbie Doll culture… where girls whose bodies haven’t even finished developing are turning to the surgeon’s knife… just to fit some magazine-model fantasy’.
Women, it would seem, are still far from being truly free to be themselves in our society. On the contrary, in controlling their own bodies and appetites they are being controlled both by society and their own self-actualizing discourse practices. Women gain social capital in a social ‘marketplace’ that offers admiration and ‘self’-validation on the basis of their physical appearance rather than of their actual achievements; but women also reproduce these social ideals through their own competitive discourse practices that place ‘other’ women as their rivals in the body-stakes.
The ‘direct connections made every day for women between slenderness and love, admiration and respect’, result in a belief system where, ‘being thin is extremely important in our kind of culture’. More recently the growth of the fitness industry has added a further dimension to the pursuit of the ‘perfect body’, not only are we seeking to be thin, we must also be perfectly proportioned and toned. Hepworth claims that in western society, the belief that ‘external appearance represents the inner self’ has resulted in a ‘consumer culture’ with a ‘high evaluation of youth and beauty’, where conceptions of the ‘ideal body’ are based on being ‘active’ and ‘youthful’. He notes that ‘the increasing concern with the pursuit of physical fitness is an attempt … to integrate external appearance with one’s inner self-concept’.
Images of what constitutes the ‘ideal’ female body have varied throughout history. Social issues such as war, famine and fertility affect the ideals of what a culture considers acceptable or desirable in any particular era. It was in the late 19th century that ‘practices of body management’ began to be middle-class preoccupations, and concern with diet became ‘attached to the pursuit of an idealized physical weight or shape’. Bordo notes that the ‘tyranny of slenderness’ gave rise to the development of a completely new range of restrictions: diet, exercise, and, more recently, pharmaceuticals and surgery—‘technologies’ which Bordo claims are aimed at a purely physical transformation. She further notes that the current era.
Discussion relating to women’s bodies reflects ideological positions, not only in relation to social expectations, but also in the ways in which the individuals discursively construct their own sense of gendered ‘self’ within talk. ‘Gendered subject-positions are constituted in various ways by images of how one is expected to look and behave’.
Discourses of body-size: the ‘thin woman’
Research on the attitudes of teenage girls has explored the ‘intersection of the body and society’, particularly looking at how ‘the body becomes a site of struggle for women’. Wetherell’s work suggests that in western society, the current emphasis is on ‘defining femininity and heterosexual identity through ideal standards of thinness, physical beauty and fashion’. Within her data, Wetherell identifies several ‘interpretative repertoires’ or themes that she terms Individualism; Body Processes: The Natural Self; Personological Discourse of Fatness and Thinness, and The Confessional: Pathological Discourse. Individualism relates to the girls’ attempts to rebel against societal pressure.
Wetherell suggests that, while they were aware of the social ideal, the girls adopted verbal strategies that showed they were not going to be pressured into conforming to this ideal. Body Processes or Natural Self related to instances where the girls attempted to equate dieting with healthy eating, or the regulation of eating by natural appetite. Personological Discourse of Fatness or Thinness related to talk that attributed weight or size to either character traits, or lifestyle factors. The final category, The Confessional: Pathological Discourse is a ‘moral discourse’ reflecting a negative social identity of ‘the weak and wicked self’. This is a discourse of guilt, lack of control, and unrestrained appetites, where failure to subjugate the body is confessed. As Wetherell points out, most examples in this category related to ‘binge-eating’ or indulging in ‘fattening foods’.
Wetherell’s respondents repeatedly mentioned several ideal women. Two of the positive images she found are the thin woman and the natural woman. The corresponding negative images were the fat woman, a woman who lacks self-control, and the fashion victim, someone who is sufficiently weak in character to be swayed by media pressures. These latter images were qualified as negative in the sense that the girls distanced themselves from these identities through their talk, or otherwise they were ‘confessed to’ as in ‘pathological discourse’. While Wetherell pointed to the fact that for her respondents, the priorities verbalized were not fixed identities, and like all discourse positions were open to negotiation and re-construction, they were the dominant discourses within her data. Wetherell’s discussion focused upon the contradictions and restrictions the girls faced within the limited cultural repertoires available. It is ultimately the thin woman in control of her own body who is perceived as the best option for self-identification, yet to be an individual calls for resistance to societal ‘norms’. As Wetherell notes the very best identity logically in terms of this way of looking at the world is the ‘ethereal’ woman. The woman who is ‘naturally’ thin and who does not worry about what she eats … because her appetite is so naturally under control that she wants to eat only half the amount that will keep her slim.
Face threats in discourses of self
Recent feminist theory has drawn on the work of social constructionists in assuming identity as a social practice that speakers constantly negotiate within their everyday interactions. Social constructionists have addressed the issue of ‘self’ as a concept that is given ontological status primarily through our social interactions. Shotter has suggested that the ‘primary human reality is face-to-face conversation’. Conversations thus can be seen as an interactional site in which speakers enact social roles and negotiate self-images. Goffman (1957) has suggested that each individual has a self-image or face that can be ‘lost, maintained or enhanced and must be constantly attended to in interaction’. Face becomes ‘significant in interaction as people work jointly to present and preserve one another’s public image’. Drawing on Goffman’s notion of face, Brown and Levinson (1987) developed a theory of politeness that attempted to account for the instances within a conversation where a speaker’s choice of conversational strategies can be seen to orient towards discursively protecting his/her own positive face (or self-image) and the positive face of others. Speakers will also select conversational strategies oriented towards negative face, strategies that avoid any imposition upon self or other. Positive face encompasses the desire to be accepted and gain the approval of others, while negative face reflects a desire for ‘autonomy’.
Face becomes a salient issue in an interaction when communicative behaviors are perceived by participants as face threatening. Certain types of speech forms, insults, for example, are seen as Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). As Trees and Manusov note, ‘positive face is threatened by acts that overlook the hearer’s feelings or wants to express disapproval’; speakers, therefore, are likely to adopt discursive strategies that will minimize or alleviate face threat within their interactions. Given the societal pressures on women to conform to an acceptable physical ideal, talking about body-size and the need to diet can be seen as a discursive site that is likely to produce FTAs and speakers, therefore, may find it necessary to use conversational moves that attend to their own positive face and rely on listener support.
Conclusions
The conversations examined here suggest that the relationship that women have with their bodies is complex. While in the enactment of their everyday lives, the women may be satisfied with their own body-size, their talk shows they are subject to social pressure in relation to attaining perceived ideals of body-size. For the older women, weight and diet appear to be key factors when discursively aligning to a socially acceptable body-size; for the teenage girls, working-out to achieve a ‘toned’ body-shape appears to be the most salient feature within their talk. This intergenerational difference can be seen to reflect the current media icons available to younger women. The media currently presents a world view that implies women should not only be slender but also ‘perfectly-toned’, and as shown above, both the teenage girls and the older women acknowledge, discursively at least, the need to control body-size and present a socially acceptable, idealized body-shape. We can also see that for the younger girls, the thin woman is a social ideal which is becoming replaced by the toned woman. The toned woman is ultimately harder to achieve because (unlike the thin woman who merely needs to diet) the toned woman may also need to resort to punishing fitness routines and ultimately surgery.
Accounting for body-size and issues relating to control of food intake or energy output are discourses that frequently surface in the interactions analyzed here. As shown above, topics relating to body-size and dieting have, for the teachers, become phatic routines embedded within their everyday conversations. Body-image is a dimension of socialized gender identity that is complexly interwoven with the symbolic capital women accumulate in the social marketplace. The data suggests that the participants of these interactions view other women as potential comparative threats to their own successful presentation of physical self. The discursive strategies used to resist the ideal of the thin woman vary between the two groups. The teenage girls appear to account for a friend’s ‘better’ body through negative associations with bulimia and by engaging in bitching, while the teachers use verbal play to parody and subvert the threat posed by a peer group member’s perceived perfection. As noted above, cooperative verbal play can be seen as a highly effective conversational strategy in dealing with threats to both group and individual positive self-image.
The conversations of the teachers can be seen to orient towards positive politeness moves, for example the teachers often question another’s need to diet. In contrast, the talk of the teenage girls shows less evidence of redressive strategies, such as FSMD moves, being used to mitigate interactionally situated face threats posed by a non-present peer group member. While it is not possible to generalize from the limited data presented here, the frequency with which the topic of body-size surfaces in both data-sets suggests that for these women, discursively acknowledging the social identity of the thin woman is an everyday discourse practice within their lives, a discourse practice which at times represents a dialectical dilemma between what is personally acceptable and what is socially acceptable. As Foucault has claimed, ‘discourses [are] … practices that form the objects of which they speak’; thus, the talk examined here both reproduces and helps to create the social ideal of the thin woman.
The data examined not only provides insights into the sequential management of body-talk; it shows that the discourse practices and versions of ‘self’ discussed in Wetherell’s study (1996) are also salient for these women. Discourses of pathological confession, revealing weakness in controlling appetite, were shown to open a speaker to the threat of potential loss of face; and the specter of the thin woman emerges from these conversations as the social ideal for both younger and older women alike. As the analysis shows, issues of individual acceptability versus social acceptability may conflict. The women’s resistance through verbal play and bitching reflects a desire to enact a theme of ‘individualism’ in that these strategies appear to be conversational moves that rebel against social pressure. However, the ways in which the women enact their individualism involves critical evaluation of other women. Although on the one hand the women’s verbal resistance can be seen as a positive factor, it also raises questions about women’s role in terms of active agency in their own ‘self-feminization’.
Nearly 30 years ago Berger noted that a woman’s appearance was a crucial factor in her presentation of identity. His comments still ring true today:
a woman… is continually accompanied by her own image of herself … she has to survey everything she is and everything she does because of how she appears to others
Whether or not we accept the notion of a ‘post-feminist’ world of equality, physical appearance is still arguably the focal characteristic by which women are evaluated, and the media plays a powerful role in recycling and reproducing idealized physical images of women that are often ‘unattainable’. As Coates (2000) notes, a salient social role model for today’s liberated girl-power generation is that of the television presenter, a young, predominantly blonde, very slim woman. The amount of exposure, via digital and satellite television, that media celebrities are being given has resulted in their rapidly becoming the global icons of ‘acceptable’ body-shape. Given such widespread media influence, it is difficult for women to resist these constrictive images. After all, as the media would have women believe, achieving the perfect body that appears daily on magazine pages and television screens, is simply a matter of controlling their appetite, working-out and if all else fails, opting for surgical styling. It is ironic that in controlling their own bodies, women are in turn being constrained and controlled by socially sanctioned media-led images. Journalist Deirdre Sanders, commenting on the rise in demand for cosmetic surgery by teen-age girls in Britain, asks whether
we are in danger of developing a Barbie Doll culture… where girls whose bodies haven’t even finished developing are turning to the surgeon’s knife… just to fit some magazine-model fantasy’.
Women, it would seem, are still far from being truly free to be themselves in our society. On the contrary, in controlling their own bodies and appetites they are being controlled both by society and their own self-actualizing discourse practices. Women gain social capital in a social ‘marketplace’ that offers admiration and ‘self’-validation on the basis of their physical appearance rather than of their actual achievements; but women also reproduce these social ideals through their own competitive discourse practices that place ‘other’ women as their rivals in the body-stakes.
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