Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s–1930s Britain

Observing the divergent tracks taken by historians of the ‘modern self’ and those of the ‘modern body’ the article focuses on health and fitness movements in Britain, c.1920s–1930s. Asking whether there is a place for the body in the history of women performing ‘the self’ in this context, the article suggests a way in which contemporaries found a way to have a ‘self’ in the body. Contemporary notions of the body emphasised its interdependence with ‘the mind’, health and happiness being functions of each other. In the language of health and beauty was a language of inner vitality and outer radiance, a modern formulation of the individual as a ‘self’ equipped to embrace the exciting but uncertain possibilities of the ‘modern world’. Popular print culture on ‘healthy living’, reports by the BMA and the National Fitness Council are considered along with more extensive discussion of the Women's League for Health and Beauty founded in 1930 by Mollie Bagot Stack and inherited by her daughter, Prunella, ‘Britain's Perfect Girl’, in 1935.     

The making of a modern female body: beauty, health and fitness in interwar Britain

In interwar Britain female athleticism, keep-fit classes and physical culture were celebrated as emblems of modernity, and women who cultivated their bodies in the pursuit of beauty, health and fitness represented civic virtue. This article argues that a modern, actively managed female body was part of women's liberation during this period. A modern female body required sex reform and birth control. Fitness culture was circumscribed by traditional notions of femininity. Women's competitive sport remained controversial and slimming in pursuit of fashion was widely condemned. Women from across the social spectrum embraced sport and joined fitness organizations. The rise of a modern female body contributed towards greater equality between the sexes. However, the gender order did not change fundamentally and the ideal woman of the interwar years was represented as a modern, emancipated race mother.     

From dogs' testicles to mares' urine: the origins and contemporary use of hormonal therapy for the menopause

Beauty therapy is part of a vast multi-national, multi-million pound beauty industry. The beauty salon lies at the heart of a complex set of discourses and practices. Research conducted in the salon sheds light upon a number of key sociological debates including; issues of health and well-being; gendered employment practices; the construction and maintenance of gender identity and sexuality; body practices; and leisure activities. In this sense the salon may be used as a microcosm in which to investigate wider sociological concerns. In this paper, I will draw upon the testimonies of beauty salon clients, and beauty therapists. I describe four areas of treatment: pampering; routine grooming; health treatments; and corrective treatments. These areas are investigated in depth and related to different spheres in the woman's life. In particular, I show how the beauty salon is drawn upon in helping to negotiate the balance between these competing arenas. The ambivalences of achieving an ‘appropriate’ appearance in these differing spheres is investigated. Their implication in the self-surveillance of the client is also discussed.     

Shaping the online fat acceptance movement: talking about body image and beauty standards

Over the past decade, in Canada and the United States, blogs have become a popular and important space for fat women and their allies to create and further develop discursive strategies to contest the gendered anti-fat discourses perpetuated by the media, governments and the field of medicine and institutions of public health (e.g., Elliot, C. (2007). Journal of Canadian Studies, 41, 134–149. Gimlin, D. (2002). Body work: Beauty and self-image in American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press; Herdon, A. M. (2006). Social Semiotics, 15, 127–141. Rice, C. (2007). Women's Studies International Forum, 30, 158–174. Currently, popular discourses pertaining to fat people, particularly women, tend to range from larger bodies implicating a ‘moral deficit’ to a ‘risky behaviour’ to ‘political discrimination’ where elements from each discourse shape how fat women's bodies are read within the broader culture (Fikkan, J. L., & Rothblum, E. D. (2011). Sex Roles, 66, 575–592. Kwan, S. (2009). Sociological Inquiry, 79, 25–50. These messages in positioning the thin body as the ideal body are embedded in neoliberal discourses around citizenship that, in emphasizing personal responsibility, encourage (sometimes) punishing regimens of strict diets and exercise, and perpetuate an image of responsible citizenship as an extension of modern interpretations (Herdon, 2006). Using content and thematic analysis, we systematically analyze how four female self-identified fat acceptance (FA) bloggers discuss beauty standards and body image as a means to challenge these discourses. Findings suggest bloggers import elements from LBGTQ movements to extend dominant discursive strategies, model alternative forms of fat embodiment, and address the economic marginalization of fat women in industry. Moreover, through discussions on beauty and body image, bloggers use online spaces to contest anti-fat discourses and to develop discursive strategies that move beyond the binary of fat as a lifestyle choice, and body size as biologically or genetically determined that dominate the fat acceptance movement.     

‘The modern way to loveliness’: middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain

In May 1935, the British manufacturer Boots launched ‘Number Seven’, a premium range of skin-care products sold via its nationwide network of chain-store chemists. Using material from the Boots Archive, this paper traces the early history of Number Seven to explore the changing meanings of middle-class cosmetics across the mid-twentieth century. Number Seven offered provincial and suburban women an explicitly modern form of facial beauty that married the logics of mass production to traditional moral aesthetics. Through the discourse of ‘loveliness’ and the careful management of in-store experience, it negotiated the prerogative connotations of colour cosmetics and the problematic influence of cinematic glamour. Yet by the mid-1950s, this construction had been superseded by a more situational understanding of beauty that was dependent on context and the appreciation of others. This fundamental shift in the normative aesthetics of public femininity had important implications for women on both sides of Boots’ toilet counters.     

“I made myself small like a cat and ran away”: workplace sexual harassment,precarious immigration status and legal violence

This article examines the intersection between workplace sexual harassment, immigration status, and insecure employment status (‘precarious work’). Although a rich body of literature explores how gender impacts all three fields independently, less is known about how they interact. Drawing on narratives from migrant women with precarious immigration status in Toronto, Canada, I propose that experiences of sexual harassment illuminate the workings of migrant illegalization through ‘legal violence’. Furthermore, findings demonstrate that precarious status migrant women do not experience sexual harassment in isolation; other axes of oppression interlock to exacerbate it. Despite this, precarious status migrant women negotiate their experiences, sometimes enduring sexual harassment; referred to here as aguantar, and sometimes resisting it explicitly.     

Articulating the threatened suffragette body: suffragette embroidered cloths worked in Holloway Prison, 1911–1912

ABSTRACT

In public archives there are a number of hand-embroidered cloths worked by suffragettes incarcerated in Holloway Prison between 1911 and 1912. Denied political status, some of the embroiderers used the hunger strike as a political tool and were forcibly fed. In this paper the embroideries are reframed as material and discursive evidence of suffragette prison experiences. The material narratives of the embroidered cloths are traced, drawing on a dialogue between critical theory, material object enquiry, practice as research and the work of contemporary textile practitioners. Embroidering by suffragettes is explored as an embodied and situated ‘thread act’ that materialised the making of networks, the need for protection of the body and mind, the powers and dangers of boundary crossing, and proto-political thinking.     

Predictors of Physical Competence in Adolescent Girls

Physical competence, comprising athletic competence and physical appearance competence, is positively related to feelings of self-worth in adolescent girls. This study compared the relationships of psychological, physiological, and maturational constructs with perceived physical competence in adolescent girls. Perceived physical appearance and perceived athletic competence, peer acceptance, body weight, body mass index (BMI), aerobic fitness (VO₂max), physical activity level, and menarcheal status were assessed. Global self-worth was highly correlated with peer acceptance, perceived physical appearance, and perceived athletic competence in this sample. Regression analyses indicated that peer acceptance was the best predictor of perceived physical competence. Additional predictors of perceived physical appearance and athletic competence are discussed. Results suggest that postmenarcheal and larger girls may be at risk for low perceptions of physical competence. Enhancing competence feelings among adolescent girls may be accomplished by emphasizing friendship and social interaction within physical activity.     

class and feminine excess: the strange case of Anna Nicole Smith

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.     

the Trauma Risk Management approach to post-traumatic stress disorder in the British military: masculinity,biopolitics and depoliticisation

This paper discusses the political implications of the British military’s Trauma Risk Management (TRiM) approach to personnel suffering from combat-related mental debilities such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Drawing on narratives that emerged from qualitative interviews with trained TRiM practitioners and military welfare workers, I tease out some of the assumptions and beliefs about mental health and mental illness that underpin this mental health intervention programme. I explore TRiM as a biopolitical strategy targeted towards the construction of a particular conceptualisation of mental wellness and militarised masculine personhood. As a biopolitical strategy, I argue that TRiM plays an important role in the construction of ideas around mental well-being and mental frailty that best enable the operation of military power in the contemporary British context. I discuss the narrative of transformation in militarised models of masculinity that emerge from discussions of TRiM, and highlight the important political function that this plays in enabling and legitimating militarism. Finally, I draw attention to the ways in which the focus on individual and cultural factors, rather than war as the primary cause of difficulties for servicemen experiencing psychological distress, functions to neutralise the potential trouble that could be instigated for the British military by the bodies of servicemen psychologically damaged by their experiences of conflict.     

Narratives of race and nation in china: Women's suffrage in the early twentieth century

This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women's suffrage movement used racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between narratives of race and women's suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA to explore how “race” was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period. The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised on a racialized notion of national identity—that is “modernization as Han chauvinism.” Second, this article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women's suffrage from primary reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of “race” makes it an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by “gendered” divisions.     

Weird Lullaby Jane Campion's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Piano</Emphasis>

This article examines the construction of woman's voice, gaze and desire in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film The Piano, 1993, with particular reference to the film's central character, Ada, and to the traditional female figures which her character suggests - siren, mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife. It investigates the ways in which The Piano interrogates and disturbs traditional patriarchal narratives, ways of speaking and seeing, and patriarchal constructions of bodily pleasure and desire; revealing these as partial, hard of hearing, short sighted and incapable of pleasure. It argues that while the film succeeds in this interrogation, it goes further in its attempt to envisage forms of speech, sight and pleasure which do not conform to traditional models based on the notion of rigid oppositions between self and other, masculine and feminine, active and passive. Instead, by focusing on mutual pleasure, sensuality, communication and the ability to be moved, it sets in motion ‘other’ ways of experiencing and understanding women's voices, looks, desires.It concludes that The Piano articulates a demand for an encounter with men, in which women are neither marginalized as ‘the feminine’ nor re-incorporated into a patriarchal order; and imagines the possibility of both autonomy and connection, power and pleasure.     

The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement

In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Cohn was a prolific writer and political activist and left a rich body of labour literature, but never wrote an autobiography or a diary or journal. It is in her letters to her comrades and friends in the labour movement that short autobiographical stories erupt and it is on such stories across her correspondence that this article focuses. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt's theorization of narratives in their interrelation with politics and history. Drawing on a rich body of feminist literature around the relational self, what I argue is that an Arendtian reading of epistolary narratives is a useful analytical tool in understanding gendered politics in the diverse histories of the labour movement.     

Religion for the Modern Girl: Maude Royden in Australia, 1928

When the feminist preacher Maude Royden (1876–1956) toured Australia in 1928, she promoted modern religion for modern women. This article examines the Australian press coverage of Royden’s visit to shed light on the complex relationships between religion, modernity and the female body as they were constituted in Australia in the 1920s. In doing so, this article contributes to growing historiographic debate concerning the intersections of modernity and religion and serves to disrupt further those narratives which have presumed processes of modernisation and secularisation to be running in parallel. Australian newspapers eagerly spread the news of Royden assuming the previously masculine space of the pulpit and they promoted her new form of Christianity as scientifically credible and suited to modern Australia women’s lives. In advancing my analysis, I also compare Royden’s press reception in Australia to that of her contemporary, Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944). McPherson likewise also offered a religious response to modernity and a new religious femininity, but the Australian media showed comparatively little interest in her visit. I argue that although religious femininities were being recrafted for modernity in the pages of Australian newspapers, only certain expressions of religiosity and modern femininity were considered compatible.     

gendering creolisation: creolising affect

Drawing on (auto)ethnographic research—on the process of becoming a marathon swimmer, this paper argues that conventional characterisations of marathon swimming as being ‘80 per cent mental and 20 per cent physical’ reprise a mind–body split that at worst excludes women and at best holds them to a masculine standard. This in turn draws the focus towards sensory deprivation, bodily suffering and overcoming, to the exclusion of the pleasures of swimming, beyond the expected ones such as the challenge of swim completion. By exploring instead the ‘shifted sensorium’ of marathon swimming, and examples of the autotelic pleasures of swimming, this paper argues that training changes the way swimming body feels, and that it is these changes that enable a swimmer to feel ‘at home’ in an environment to which it does not naturally belong. This focus on the sensory aspects of swimming, and its unexpected pleasures, both highlights the ways in which those pleasures do not flow unproblematically to women, and brings to light alternative and politically provocative ways of experiencing the gendered sporting body. This highlights the contingency, however constrained, of even the most entrenched ways of thinking about bodies, both within and outside sport.     

Carnal teachings: raunch aesthetics as queer feminist pedagogies in Yo! Majesty's hip hop practice

This essay puts forward a notion of “raunch aesthetics,” theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.     

Human Trafficking on Trial: Dissecting the Adjudication of Sex Trafficking Cases in Cyprus

The last decade or so the concept of female trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation has lent itself to rigorous analysis and exploration. A plethora of domestic and transnational studies and reports have attempted to address the aetiology of human trafficking, as well as its epidemiology, often drawing from sources such as statistics, narratives, documents, and observations. While the great majority of such studies are engaged, if not preoccupied, in ‘unmasking’ the particularities of sex trafficking by taking into account the detection, identification, rehabilitation, and repatriation of trafficked women, the prosecution and adjudication of sex trafficking cases are often left unexamined. With this in mind, this article sets out to explore the various forces that often come into play while sex trafficking cases in Cyprus are being processed by the domestic justice system. To this end, this article considers two dimensions, the trafficked women and the judiciary.     

Body Dissatisfaction Among Adolescent Boys and Girls: The Effects of Body Mass,Peer Appearance Culture and Internalization of Appearance Ideals

Body image dissatisfaction is a significant risk factor in the onset of eating pathology and depression. Therefore, understanding predictors of negative body image is an important focus of investigation. This research sought to examine the contributions of body mass, appearance conversations with friends, peer appearance criticism and internalization of appearance ideals to body dissatisfaction among adolescents. The sample was comprised of 239 (54% female) adolescents, with a mean age of 16 years. Self-report questionnaires were completed on body dissatisfaction, peer appearance conversations and criticism, internalization of appearance ideals, height and weight. For girls and boys, body mass, appearance conversations with friends, peer appearance criticism and internalized appearance ideals emerged as significant predictors of body dissatisfaction. Gender moderated the effect of body mass on body dissatisfaction. Internalization mediated the relationship between peer appearance conversations and criticism, and body dissatisfaction. These findings suggest that while body mass exerts a differential risk for body dissatisfaction among boys and girls, internalisation may represent a key psychological process that underpins body dissatisfaction among both boys and girls.     

Verbal giftedness and sociopolitical intelligence: Terman revisited

This paper reports on a three-year study of sociopolitical intelligence-defined as the ability to formulate viable solutions to moral, social, and political problems—in adolescence. From an initial sample of 659 intellectually gifted 12- and 13-year-olds, 58 students with the highest SAT-V scores were selected for study. From a later sample of 506 equally gifted 13- and 14-year-olds, 120 students were selected using measures of verbal intelligence (DAT), social insight, and creative potential, as well as academic and nonacademic achievement. On the basis of a variety of personality and cognitive measures the students in both samples were found to be unusually mature and well adjusted but to vary considerably in sociopolitical intelligence. These results suggest in partial agreement with Terman's earlier findings concerning the gifted, that above a certain level of tested intelligence the critical determinants of effective, practical performance may be personality and biographical variables.This research was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation to the first author.Received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Berkely. Major interests are personality theory and moral developmentReceived her Ph.D. in psychology from The Johns Hopkins University. Major interests are personality theory and medical psychology.Received his Ph.D. in psychology from The Johns Hopkins University. Major interests are education and developmental psychology.Graduate student in psychology, The Johns Hopkins University. B. A. University of Oregon, 1973. Major research interest is personality correlates of high-level achievement.Main research interest is the development of sociopolitical achievement.