The Role of the Healthy and Atractive Body in the Culture of Individualism. Body Work and the Lifestyle of the ‘New Middle Class’

Within the change in the organization of social life and the decline in the importance of its collective regulators, issues concerning the body have been privatized and the body began to be seen as a reflexive project. The increasing interest in the body, ith health and image, should be situated in the context of changes in the rules that integrate the social system, which resulted in the individualism becoming basic form of sociality in Western societies. Analysis of strategies of body work shows that they are embedded in the lifestyle of the new middle class. The bodily practices characteristic for the ethos of the middle class emerged as a hegemonic ones, while obesity and negligence are presented in popculture as sins of the working class, which serves as the legitimisation of existing inequalities.