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The inclusion of the study of the human 'body' in sociology ruined the view that 'nature' constitutes the absolute premise that explains human interactions and social phenomena. The sociological perspective offered a new project of conceptualising the body, which enabled its reshaping and modification. In the new context of understanding the body, "the life of the body" was transformed from a technical and reproductive mechanism into a way of living and identity. This paper "The body as a social construct: the Kosovan context on 'beauty' and 'look' from the perspective of women and girls in Kosovo" aims to address the main theoretical approaches to the study of the body, which at the same time reveal the context of the social realities that built the epistemology of the sociological and gender studies in the research of issues related to the body. The paper introduces the results of an empirical research carried out with women and girls in Kosovo regarding the understanding and appreciation of the body; their position about the body image that will help deconstruct the standard of the idolised body of women and girls in Kosovo. Therefore, this research carried out with women and girls in Kosovo aims to highlight their attention and sensitivity towards the 'beauty' predefined by the social, cultural, and economic context. The body image and its appreciation are ever-changing concepts and have a profound effect on everyday life and the way of living in general. The body issues, the discipline and control of the body, reconstruction of the body through modification, and portrayal of the bodies in the mass communication culture compose the four central aspects that will be addressed to find out the views of the Kosovan women and girls regarding the understanding of the body and of the social construct of the 'ideal body'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to analyse Namita Gokhale's seventh and latest novel Things to Leave Behind (2016) from a feminist perspective even though the novel is being hailed as a historical novel. The paper begins with a brief analysis of feminism as a transformational process to change the society's as well as women's own perception of themselves as weak, docile and passive bodies. Dwelling on the patriarchal manipulation of the linkage between the female body and socio-cultural practices, the paper intends to draw attention to the dominantly prevalent and inextricably interlinked images (like womanhood, wifehood and motherhood) to control female bodies and lives. Then the analysis proceeds to link chief objectives of feminism and Gokhale's feminist point of view with her creative attempt to re-write 'body' through the narrative of three generations of women -- Durga Devi, Tilottama and Deoki -- and other supporting women characters like Kaumodi and Mary Jane Boden. The focus of the paper is on the spirited desire and efforts of these women to interrogate patriarchal structures and fixed gender images, rules and roles, a significant aspect of all feminisms and women writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although listing a child for sale in the local paper's classified section is unthinkable, and it is illegal to sell organs in the United States, there is a proliferation of advertisements recruiting young women and men to sell eggs and sperm. These advertisements are placed by organized donation programs whose paying clients use reproductive technologies to conceive children, thereby creating a 21st century medical market in genetic material. Eggs and sperm are symmetrical bodily goods, each constituting one half of the reproductive material needed to create life, which allows for a comparative analysis of the structure and experience of egg and sperm donation. This paper draws on interviews conducted with staff and donors at four programs in California to analyze gendered bodily commodification in egg and sperm donation. I argue that if a reproductive cell's origin in a woman's body or a man's body determines its status as thing or person, product or service, commodity exchange or gift exchange, then these distinctions will shape the experiences of the women and men selling genetic material. This paper contributes to debates in the sociology of gender about the relationship between biological differences among women and men and the gendered norms attributed to these differences and debates in economic sociology about how social factors affect the expansion of the market. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will map a component of lived Fordist spaces in a global context through the notion of Everyday life. The everyday life within a city based in the steel industry, in essence an old industrial city, has been transforming. This paper questions the extent of this transformation in the lives and bodies of the city residents in relation to the discourse on the post-industrial subject. Much of the discourse on Post-Fordism among urban planners and their associated academics artificially create a post-industrial political subject. The application of this discourse to old industrial cities creates a contradictory moment where the Fordist political subject is expected to be disembedded from the economic infrastructure and social institutions of the historically industrial city. This paper will argue that the concept of the post-industrial subject ignores the continued dominance of Fordist historical, social, and spatial relations within the industrial urban subject and body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines those etiological theories which have proposed that certain psychosocial factors, more commonly called stress factors, compose the key cause to coronary heart disease.The aim is to examine the tendency to look within individuals for explanations for their behavior and for CHD. The paper shows that there are three phases in this discussion: 1) the medical literature in the 1950s and 1960s that medicalized men?s cultural repertoire of violent behavior and linked aggression to CHD, 2) the research in the 1970s and 1980s that presented men?s emotional inexpressivity as a health risk, 3) during the past decade research has tended to naturalize aggression and to interpret it as the sign of the ?body?s own wisdom? when threatened by external environmental stressors. The body has been unmarked by gender in this medical or sociobiological discussion, although at issue has been the bodies of white middle-class men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with a contentious claim, namely, that an adequate sociology of the body must not simply engage with but fully incorporate the biological into its theorizing in a non-reductionist, non-determinist fashion. Questions as to why and how we should do so, and where we might look for profitable leads and exemplars are then addressed in the main part of the paper, with particular reference to medical sociology. The paper concludes with a recapitulation of these arguments and the (future) agendas they raise, in medical sociology and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a conceptual framework for understanding differences among women in their commitment to their appearance. Based on life history interviews with 50 women between the ages of 18 and 35 years, this paper delineates a multi-faceted conception of appearance commitment that includes two broad dimensions: practices and ?emotion work.? In the sample of women interviewed, variation was found in both bodily practices (diet, exercise, makeup, apparel choices, etc.) and emotional preoccupation with appearance issues. Emotional preoccupation was found to consist of four key facets, including: comparisons with other women; awareness of others? appearance expectations; body-image; and the development of strategies for managing appearance itself and bodily concerns. Respondents spoke about these elements in ways that suggested they are aspects of an ?inner dialogue.? While social pressures are a key element of emotional preoccupation with appearance, such dialogues suggest that women critically reflect on pressures and consciously construct strategies for both bodily and emotion management. Such strategies are important examples of agency. Three categories of commitment to appearance (derived from the intersection of practices and emotional preoccupation) were found among women interviewed: minimalist, moderate, and enthusiast. This work may contribute to the existing body literature by describing the variation that exists among women in the salience of appearance to their identities. Moreover, the concept of appearance commitment that is developed here may also strengthen existing understandings of women?s body-image and participation in beauty practices by taking into account both actions and their cognitive/emotional underpinnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the path of gender transition, the body may assume a very important role. Through gender transition it is possible to undertake hormonal treatments, surgical operations in order to modify the primary or secondary sexual characteristics, but also other practices of body change and care not bounded to the medical context. These possible interventions or actions may imply different processes of change, meanings and needs, sometimes with doubts and difficulties, for the person in transition who is engaged in giving them directions and sense and in the construction of the own identity. In this paper we describe some of the major representations of body emerging in gender transition paths, starting from narrative interviews with 25 people in transition (between 18 and 60 years old) in the city of Milan in Italy. The interviews have been analyzed through the method of discourse analysis, through which we have highlighted the ways of interpreting the body and changes during the different phases of gender transition. The results and the reflections developed in this work can be useful also in the clinical psychology field, because they allow contribute to the comprehension of experiences of gender variance and create operative models and tools in order to understand and help people to integrate the representations, needs and resources and to follow the person during the whole path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constant monitoring of patients without disturbing their daily activities can be achieved through mobile networks. Sensor nodes distributed in a home environment to provide home assistance gives concept of Wireless Wearable Body Area Networks. Gathering useful information and its transmission to the required destination may face several problems. In this paper we figure out different issues and discuss their possible solutions in order to obtain an optimized infrastructure for the care of elderly people. Different channel models along with their characteristics, noise filtering in different equalization techniques, energy consumption and effect of different impairments have been discussed in our paper. The novelty of this work is that we highlighted multiple issues along with their possible solutions that a BAN infrastructure is still facing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols developed for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In WBANs, small battery operated on-body or implanted biomedical sensor nodes are used to monitor physiological signs such as temperature, blood pressure, ElectroCardioGram (ECG), ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) etc. We discuss design requirements for WBANs with major sources of energy dissipation. Then, we further investigate the existing designed protocols for WBANs with focus on their strengths and weaknesses. Paper ends up with concluding remarks and open research issues for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the differences that younger, middle-aged, and older women with breast cancer experience, particularly in relation to their bodies. Given that aging bodies are paid little attention in our youth oriented society and even in sociological literature on the body, and given that the number of older women with breast cancer is on a significant rise, it is important to explore these experiences in order to legitimate and best treat older women. Data for this paper come from a qualitative study in which forty-two women, aged 30-88 with similar disease profiles, were intensively interviewed. Narrative data were then combed for common, emergent themes. This paper discusses the differences in the ways older and younger women discuss and value breasts, claim or objectify their bodies, and choose treatment for breast cancer. These findings indicate that more research on aged bodies is needed and have implications for health care providers in the treatment of older women. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to answer the question "what is beauty?" The author argues that nothing natural or man-made has beauty inherent in itself. Humans' conceptions of beauty are defined by society. The main argument of this work is that beauty is primarily a product of the habitus, leaving existential free will to explain individual differences in perception of beauty. The second half of the paper deconstructs the Western beauty Ideal using the theoretical framework put forth in the first section of the paper. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When colonisers met colonised in early South African writing, their accounts were often far more complex than historians and cultural critics have allowed. This paper shows how classical literature and art shaped the ways in which the colonisers came to terms with the colonised – how they responded to their customs, bodies and actions. (While some uses of classical names for slaves might have been ironic or deliberately pre-Christian, this tradition is largely positive.) Early accounts used frames from classical literature to describe relationships between European men and African women. In describing the African male body, too, the descriptions turned to classical visual and political parallels. This tradition lasted through much of the nineteenth century but the rising tide of settler hostility, missionary influence and social Darwinism brought different, racialised, discourses prescribing how black bodies were to be described. In many ways, the seventeenth and eighteenth century descriptions provided a positive way of framing difference that is still being rediscovered. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger project that explores the idea that although we always visually perceive people as male or female, that split-second categorization has as much - if not more - to do with the social construction of our visual perceptions as the sensory stimuli provided by human bodies. Here, I draw on cognitive sociology, cognitive science and the sociology of knowledge, as well as eight interviews with transgender people, to present a preliminary conceptual foundation for my sociological analysis of the visual perception of sex. I also reflect on the productive questions raised by a view of sex as social for both the prevailing conceptual paradigm in gender scholarship, the sex/gender distinction, and for sociology more broadly, which still often takes the body as self-evident. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the ways in which the metaphor of failure has dominated biomedical literature on vulvodynia, or persistent vulvar pain, until very recently. Based on a content analysis of articles in medical journals, I identify several phases of this metaphor-making: the dominance of heteronormativity as a foundational category for discussion of vulvar pain, its eclipse by metaphors of failed psychosexual development, and most recently, the emergence of a new "de-metaphorized" understanding of vulvar pain as another type of chronic pain syndrome rather than an index of gendered psychological pathology. I argue that this recent shift is a positive and emancipatory development and take issue with many of the tenets of postmodern medical anthropology and sociology, which valorize the conceptualization of bodily conditions as ways of articulating social and cultural injustices and problems. I contextualize my work on vulvodynia within the burgeoning feminist literature on the uneasy relationship between women and biomedical knowledge. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews with women who were previously morbidly obese, who are now in normal weight ranges, this paper explores the life changes that accompany extreme weight loss. Corporal changes altered their presentation of self, magnified their feminine qualities and impacted some of their relationships. It also brought about feelings of euphoria and confusion as women rid themselves of a stigmatized large body and incorporated new experiences and feelings into their lives and identity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an inexplicable silence in the sociological literature concerning the multi-month period in a women's life connecting the events related to conception and those surrounding delivery. The research community seems utterly oblivious to or unconcerned with the myriad changes associated with living in a body which is undergoing dramatic transformations in appearance and function. Nor does the literature concern itself with the ways in which a pregnant women's social world perceives and responses to these changes or to the individual who is experiencing them. This paper examines the embodied experience of pregnancy in a Singaporean workplace context. It focuses, in particular, on the ways in which the presence of a pregnant body in this context challenges some fundamental societal ideas relating to gender, aesthetics, social roles and hierarchy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have long recognized that social problems do not solely derive from objective conditions but from a process of collective definition (Blumer 1971; Mauss 1977). At the core of social problems are competitions and, specifically, framing competitions - struggles over the production of ideas and meanings (Benford and Snow 2000). This paper examines how cultural meanings about overweight and obesity are developed and promulgated. Through frame analysis of organizational materials, I document three competing frames - the medical frame, social justice frame, and market choice frame - produced by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), activists at the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), and food industry representatives at the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), respectively. While each cultural producer uses different devices to disseminate their cultural message, there is notable and rather unexpected overlap between the signature elements of all three frames. All framers appeal to scientific research and sensible action, however uniquely defined. In turn, each frame has different outcomes for social equality and how society thinks of fat bodies. Using the "framing matrix" (Gamson and Lasch 1983; Gamson and Modigliani 1987), I explore each frame's key "signature elements" and discuss its social and cultural significance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce the concept of clinical life to capture a form of life produced in the pursuit of medical possibility. We describe clinical life as it is expressed by aged patients and their families in the wake of receiving life-saving cardiac procedures. Clinical life is made possible as people in the more affluent sectors of U.S. society infer specific promise about lengthened, restored life from possibility, and engage easily and naturally with what the clinic has to offer in the pursuit of the opportunities, desire, and growing obligation to extend life into ever-older ages. Our notion of clinical life embodies the changed experience of and expectations about one's body and future as the transformative and restorative potential of medical technologies becomes a significant point of reference for evaluating life and its worth. Clinical life is also existentially experienced in the wake of medical intervention as aging individuals subsequently manage, negotiate, and reflect upon the contours of an acceptable relationship with the world of the clinic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussion on the public sphere usually champions procedural norms derived from idealized models of conversation, excluding other forms of communication that are spectacular, violent, unruly, and physical. The focus on the body in pain leads us to reconsider the current discussion of the public sphere that is usually limited to the bonds of reason and words. Given that there are few famous subaltern speakers or memorable speeches, the body rhetoric of self-immolation in South Korea can throw light on how the subaltern can speak, where there is no space from which the subject can speak. Arguing that there are rhetorical and political dimensions of the body in pain, this paper complicates the issue of embodiment in the public sphere, providing a new form of self-suspension practiced by subaltern counterpublics distinguished from self-abstraction by the liberal subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the factors that influence or shape women?s body image? How does race and class affect girls? and women?s body image? In this paper I discuss the effects of race and class on women?s body image for African American and Chicana/Latina women. I explore how body image is affected by factors such as skin color, phenotype and socioeconomic status. I argue that as race is socially contructed, body image is gendered social construction of race. As a result, body image for women of color manifest differently than Whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under new service work regimes in China, women?s bodies and their labor are subject to a process of feminization and sexualization that reflect dramatic changes to China?s gender politics. Female service workers? bodies are at once the objects of managerial interventions and disciplinary strategies that aim to produce a particular kind of serving body as well as the subjects of new, feminized subjectivities rooted in a sexualized bodily consciousness. In this paper I use the term ?embodification? to describe a process that marks young female bodies as emblems productive capitalism while and at the same time mapping the inefficiencies and backwardness of state socialism onto the bodies of middle-aged women. At the same time, the new, normative embodiment of the productive woman service worker stands opposed to a deviant, potentially threatening variant: the aggressively sexual young woman who represents the underbelly of capitalism. The ?embodification? of service work in China allows some women to sup from the ?rice bowl of youth? while others, and middle-aged women in particular, increasingly find their rice bowls left empty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescence is a crucial period when problems of adolescent girls? obesity emerge or become more pronounced and, independently, is a time when girls? experience excessive body image concern, rendering them vulnerable to social pressures for thinness. This paper explores the relationships among school context, academic performance, and adolescent girls? risk of obesity and body image using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and the new high school transcript supplement to Add Health, the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement (AHAA) study. Taking advanced mathematics courses indicates academic status (as well as the social context of academic track placement) and is associated with a lower risk of obesity, even when prior risk of obesity is held constant. Additionally, girls with higher GPAs have better body images even after controlling on their weight. These results suggest that social contexts that are associated with the formal course taking structure of the school may shape students? relationships with their weight and body image. For ASA, we will continue to assess the influence school context and sub-context by exploring multi-level and cross-level effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yoga has increased in popularity in recent years and is highly visible in popular culture. This paper examines the reasons people in the U.S. practice yoga in and outside of yoga classes and how they envision the experience in relation to their physical and spiritual lives. Yoga is especially attractive to women as a search for meaning and salvation through body transformation and a search for value and voice in New Age spirituality. I attended yoga classes as a participant observer and surveyed other participants. My analysis explores the relationships between yoga, exercise, gender, and religion in the contemporary practice of yoga. Yoga is used for exercise and/or weight loss, the reduction of stress, improvement of mental functions, spirituality, and is associated with the New Age Movement. All of these contexts involve an investment in the process of transformation. The ethic of personal and social transformation, the communal nature of yoga classes, and the feminized presentations of yoga in popular media have contributed to yoga?s particular appeal for women. Also of interest in this discussion is the connection between yoga and religion and the pseudo-religious forms taken by exercise and weight-loss regimens in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

’Mixed-race’ bodies are a source of endless fascination in the popular imagination. They may encompass a range of racialised types but are determined by what they are not. Falling between the feared predatory ‘black’ body and the safe, unsexed ?white? body, the ‘exotic’ global body radiates subtle but powerful sexuality, it is the source of desire and unease, something to be admired and owned. How do those who are ‘mixed-race’ manage this discursive space which is constituted as a site of instability and uncertainty? For these people backgrounds it is a site of ambivalence, the source of strength and inauthenticity, a paradox which provides insights into the problematic nature of visible raciality. In this paper I use narrative and memory work to show how the revisioning of embodied experience operates as a form of recuperation of the indeteminability of the ‘mixed-race’ global body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between alcohol use and body image and related eating and dieting behaviors among adolescent boys and gilrs. The data reveal that race differences in alcohol use are significant and influenced by unhealthy body images and dieting practices. While the gender differences in alcohol use found in these data reflect past research, the inclusion of other factors, such as past abuse, body image, and race add to the current understanding of alcohol use among adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist sociologists have long challenged and expanded mainstream definitions of work. More recently, sociologists of the body have raised awareness of the body as a social field upon which power relations are acted out. Our paper unites these two trends in an attempt to make explicit and critically analyze the invisible work women often do with their own and others’ bodies on the job. Using in-depth interviews with women office workers at a heterosexual men’s pornographic magazine, we highlight the "body work" and "embodied work" they engage in on a daily basis. First, we examine the discursive strategies these workers use to turn images of women’s bodies into mere products as a way of distancing themselves from the nude models ("body work"). Then we explore how these same workers manage their own bodies, as they carefully negotiate a professional identity in a workplace replete with hyper-sexualized images of other women’s bodies ("embodied work"). We conclude by suggesting that our case, rather than being somehow unique because of the sexual content of the job, is merely an extreme example of two types of body work which are likely practiced in other, more ordinary locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist methodologies, especially in qualitative studies conducted by and about women, often emphasize the importance of participants? ?lived experiences.? A vital aspect of the lived experiences of women is the complex relationship between female identity and the body, which has been explicated by feminism. This paper argues that vital to feminist methodology is an analysis of how a focus on participants? lived body experiences affect the researcher?s own identity in relation to her body. Based on in-depth interviews with female exotic dancers, whose livelihood depends on how successfully they showcase a sexualized body, this study revolves around the women?s embodied, lived experiences. It is in the spirit of feminist methodologies to study the impact of this research on the researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conducts a two part analysis of tattoo removal. First, it employs a close textual analysis of the internet advertisements that encourage tattoo removal. These texts raise interesting rhetorical questions about the broader implications of tattoo removal in a contemporary American culture. The textual analysis of advertisements lead the paper to a puzzling finale in the tattoo removal process - a remnant of the original tattoo. Consequently, the second part of this essay suggests that fantasy plays a role in the audience's preference for a scar over an unwanted tattoo. The paper concludes by tentatively indicating the body's ability to simultaneously serve as a location of the real and as the structure for fantasy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyze McVeigh's execution as a communicative series of images that had certain consequences on individual survivors and potentially on future penal policy. After describing the context of the execution image—the Oklahoma City bombing, its community response, and the relationship between the survivors and the criminal justice system—the paper turns to an analysis of the execution itself as a communicative event. In comparing and contrasting the execution image to commemorative memorial photography and "evidence photographs," "officially taken" images of violent death, the paper argues that such photographic images that convey the actuality of the end enable awareness, thereby offering therapeutic potential to those desperate for finality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the relationships that hold between male bodies, masculinities, and ways of knowing. I focus in particular upon the eye, perhaps the least sexually differentiated part of the body, and ask after its role in producing the male, or the properly masculine body. After discussing the place of the body within contemporary theorizing on masculinities, with particular reference to R.W. Connell's work, I draw upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri's notion of the Body without Organs and place it into a productive correspondence with Jacques Derrida's figure of the blind man. In this way, I aim to question the opposition between the biological and the social that tends to underpin gender theory, and to consider what possibilities this may open up for rethinking male bodies in relation to masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Obesity is a major public health problem in our society. Weight changes associated with pregnancy are a risk factor for obesity. Much of what is known on the subject is from research that examined differences between Whites and African Americans. To date, no studies have investigated the extent to which childbearing is associated with obesity among Latinas. Methods: The analyses reported here are from the Hispanic HANES (1982-1984). Hispanic HANES is the largest and most comprehensive Latino health survey conducted in the United States. Results: There is a positive association between number of live births and Body Mass Index (BMI). That is, the higher the number of the live births the higher the BMI. These patterns are consistent across Latina groups. There is also a positive association between parity and overall weight gain, but only for Mexican American women. Parity is unrelated to overall weight gain for Puerto Rican and Cuban women. These noted relationships remained robust after adjusting for age, marital status, socioeconomic status, and cultural factors. Conclusions: Given the differences the higher fertility rate among Latinas compared to other women, this paper underscores the importance of understanding parity as a mechanism to greater body weight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some social theorists have argued that both gender and sexual identity are accomplished through on-going and routine bodily performances. These bodily performances of gender and sexuality constitute a form of ?identity work,? or a means by which people construct and negotiate personal identities. The practices that produce these performances include beauty labor, defined as the time, money, and mental and physical energy that individuals invest in their physical appearance. In this paper, our primary aim is to understand how women construct and negotiate personal identities through their beauty labor practices using qualitative data from 85 in-depth interviews with women in a medium-sized Southwestern city. Our data suggest that investments in beauty labor and bodily satisfaction produce a sense of identity for most women. Some women deliberately perform limited beauty labor. For these women, not engaging in beauty labor is often a deliberate form of identity work, with different implications depending on whether they are ultimately satisfied or dissatisfied with their appearances. In contrast, some women engage in substantial beauty labor as a strategy for constructing or projecting a unique identity. Some of these women actively employ beauty labor to generate a positive self-image, while others feel thwarted by their inability to live up to a desired aesthetic. The relationships between beauty labor, satisfaction, and identity work, and with race and sexual orientation, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While common-sense understandings depict chronic illness as a static condition, changing only when clearly degenerative, biographical osteoarthritis narratives are driven by images and metaphors of movement. This is especially important when considered in light of Hockey and James? argument concerning the relationship between ?movement metaphors? and the aged in Western culture. Narrative metaphors and images include the movement of pain across body regions, the limitations osteoarthritis places on movement across space and in time, the movement of the consequences of osteoarthritis outwards (to social relations) and inwards (to shape internal thoughts and dialogues), and movement as a moral mandate and evaluative standard. This paper suggests that these metaphors are used to sustain the practicalities of everyday life, social networks, and a moral order based on the necessity of movement and activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research presented in this paper examines the influences of race, gender, and sexual or physical abuse on unhealthy eating and dieting practices among Black and White adolescents. Specifically, the project considers the intersection of race and gender on actual body size and perceived body size. The impact of past sexual or physical abuse emerges as a significant predictor of unhealthy dieting and eating behaviors for Whites but not for Blacks. While girls are more likely to have distorted body images and to engage in disordered eating and dieting, these differences are further explained with race and past sexual or physical abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly the term ?epidemic? is being used to describe the current prevalence of fatness in the United States. Skyrocketing rates of obesity among all groups of Americans, particularly children, the poor, and minorities, have become a major public health concern. Indeed, it is difficult to open a newspaper or magazine without encountering a discussion of the ?expanding American waistline? and the health problems associated therewith. In this paper I use 751 New York Times articles on obesity to examine the media construction of the ?obesity epidemic?. I show that there is not one dominant discourse (i.e. medicine) constructing this epidemic, but that a layering of discourses becomes evident through an examination of the construction of the epidemic and the treatments recommended for its containment. Through a periodization and analysis of these articles, I examine the emergent and residual technologies of governance characterizing this epidemic. Through the identification and complication of three ?discursive pairings? arising from these articles, I suggest that undergirding these seemingly contradictory pairings and the technologies to which they give rise is a general location of the ?problem? of obesity within the individual. Obesity then is what I call a ?post-modern epidemic?, an epidemic in which unevenly medicalized phenomena lacking a clear pathological basis get cast in the language and moral panic of ?traditional? epidemics. I conclude with an analysis of how the construction of the ?obesity epidemic? relies on gendered and racialized expectations of women?s embodiment and role as mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's reproductive functions have attracted much attention from doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and pharmaceutical companies throughout the past century. This paper explores media images of women's reproductive functions in 32 print advertisements for menstrual, premenstrual and menopausal products collected between April 2001 and January 2003. The common theme among these advertisements is the power relations portrayed between women and their bodies. Women's bodies are portrayed as having power over women through messages of overt control, interference with daily activities and pain and suffering. The products advertised purportedly have the ability to overcome the power exerted by women's bodies. Therefore, women can control their bodies by using these products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show how a group of born males used coming out of denial stories to facilitate their transition to living as women. Central to these narratives were feelings of embodiment and cultural notions of gender. We show, for example, how stories about feeling awkward interacting as men and feeling unsatisfied when crossdressing for autoerotic activities were used to distance themselves from various masculinities. We also show how in their stories of having sex with men or women and stories about their changing bodies and desire for surgery, interviewees discursively used emotions to affiliate themselves with women. We conclude by discussing the relation between gender, the body, and emotion and the role of narrative in life course transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I speak of a type of monsters and monstrosities ? ones lurking beyond the safety of our contained bodies and our contained identities, at the interstices where our bodies meet the ?other.? How can the body, with its allegedly stable forms, structures, and functionings, be reconciled with notions of heterogeneity, discontinuity, reversions, incongruences, and dissonances? The question is critical for a study attempting to rethink the connection between eating practices and identity as it takes as its starting point the heterotopic nature of practice in general. For the body is that which is at the juncture of the two. For what I am interested in is to explore how constructionists, and more particularly those associated with poststructuralism, postmodernism, and feminism, those closer to articulating heterotopia, have developed ways of speaking, of understanding body and mind, that erase, if not the split between the two, at least the prioritization of one substance over the other and give the body as central a role as the mind in the constitution of consciousness, subjectivity, and identity. I am interested in seeing how these new visions of embodiment, visions that speak of an uncontainable body and an uncontainable subjectivity, give us the grounds for understanding embodiment itself as heterotopic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has indicated that idealized model images in the media can have negative effects on women¡¯s body esteem and self-esteem. This paper expands this line of research by introducing the theoretical concepts of social comparison, by taking the study into a different culture, rather than in the US culture where body image has special personal and social significance, by focusing also on male¡¯s response to idealized models, and by initiating research on cross-sex comparison. Data suggested Chinese male participants experienced an assimilation effect rather than a contrast effect and that place of origin and the different mentality toward body image also played a role in participants¡¯ perception. Results indicated that the detrimental effects of ideal models in the media might not replicate in other cultures where body image is less important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) postulates that the media's emphasis on bodies socializes people, especially women, to be concerned with how they appear to others. This tendency to self-objectify, in turn, predicts negative mental health outcomes, including sexual dysfunction. This paper tests the predictions that (a) exposure to sexually objectifying media predicts self-objectification, (b) self-objectification mediates the relationship between exposure to sexually objectifying media and sexual self-perceptions, and (c) these relationships are stronger for women than men. A cross-sectional survey of 356 undergraduates at a large, midwestern university was conducted. Exposure to sexually objectifying magazines, but not television, predicted self-objectification. Also, self-objectification mediated the relationship between exposure to sexually objectifying magazines and self-consciousness during physical intimacy and sexual interest. Surprisingly, there was no evidence that the results differed for men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an expanding literature drawing attention to the key part played by the body in various organizational phenomena, and to the way organizations shape the bodies that populate them, the constitution of organizations has, to this day, been limited to either discursive practices or to a variety of non-human artifacts. In this paper, we remind readers that the body is also an object - although a human one. Through the study of three vignettes drawn through various datacollection strategies, we show that the body participates in the constitution of organizations, in particular by attributing actions to the organization it thus constitutes. We then discuss the implication of a greater participation of the body in organization constitution for the study of organizational rituals, the study of materiality in organizations, and for the four flows theory. We conclude that the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) perspective is already well-equipped to extend its ontological generosity to the body - it must simply be willing to do so. This study therefore shows that a CCO framework can be used to study the body's participation to the constitution of organizations, without reducing it to its discursive dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a return to the issues connected with the body and corporeality. We follow from the assumption that our relations with the world are made on the background of our incarnation into the nature and the some sort of historical situatedness. The body is a living encapsulation of our activities and intentions, an intermediary of our life experiences, and not just a simple object in amongst other objects. It is through the body that the subject connects with the world; the body becomes an expression of its intimate connection with the objects around. On the other hand, the body always remains in the visual field of the subject; it is with it; it is always present as an integral part of the subject and its experience. The return to the body and corporeality is achieved through phenomenology of perception. Its essence is learning mediated by the body, which is placed into a particular perspective of the perceiving subject. Thus, the body becomes an intermediary between us and the world we are getting to know, and the world becomes a place of our existential creations, in which we become the creators of our own existence and we change the world with others - we create culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the technological developments and hence . growing - technological concern about body especially in reproduction technologies created its reflection in the social scientific research on the non-ethical use of living body and body parts. These developments cannot reduce the addiction to body, conversely they increase. Surrogate motherhood, being ovum or sperm donors, being a marrow provider donor are some popular examples of these applications which were subjected many scientific and ethical discussions and created different scopes of inequalities even if they were awarded or not. A social and responsible state is not available in order to make of a claim the human right of a person who sells a part of her body to survive. Special tests, operations and other applications are not made, covered and/or seriously controlled by the state and any one claims of a right at the end of a nonhuman application or even a non-human result of that application. Nevertheless this paper claims and criticizes that governments were neglecting non-human effects of biotechnology products/services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]