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This book offers an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to one of the most significant health and wellbeing challenges for contemporary youth: body image. The social and cultural dimensions shaping body ideals and young people's body image concerns have not been adequately explored in the current landscape of social media and youth body cultures. The author provides a sociological reframing of body image, foregrounding the social and cultural dimensions which are critical in shaping young people's everyday bodily experiences. Chapters explore the significance of 'gender' and 'wellbeing' norms and the ways that circumstances of hardship and inequality are significant in mediating body concerns. In this, the book complicates simplistic understandings of body image, instead showing the complex processes by which body concerns are formed through the circumstances of embodied experience. The book advocates for the non-individual dimensions of body concerns-the social and cultural conditions of young people's lives-to be foregrounded in strategies aimed at addressing this complex youth wellbeing issue.
This text will be of interest to scholars in gender studies, youth studies, and feminist sociology.
List of contents
1. Reframing youth body image as 'everyday embodiment'.- 2. Embodied methodologies: photo-voice, affect, and the body.- 3. Work, study and stress: The material conditions of youth wellbeing.- 4. Ugly feelings: gender and the qualities of feeling of body concerns.- 5. Assembling gender: heterosexual femininities, socialities, and body concerns.- 6. Value beyond the aesthetic: masculinities and non-binary gender identities.- 7: Materialising gendered body concerns and unsettling sexual difference.
About the author
Julia Coffey is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She teaches a range of sociology subjects on themes of youth, health, and qualitative methodologies.
