From Cultivation to Neglect: Women's Bodies in the Social Reproduction of Health

Abstract

In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo (1993) integrated Mary Douglas's theoretical ideas about the body with Michele Foucault's ideas about power to explore how the female form is constructed within United States (US) society. She analyzed media representations and extreme attempts at body modification to understand US cultural fantasies and anxieties about women's bodies. Building on this work and using John Janzen's (1992) theory of the social reproduction of health, a theory that looks at how classes attempt to maintain the social structures and patterns that give them advantage across generations, this dissertation considers beliefs about body construction among fifty-five women of varying social position in Kansas City from February 2008 to February 2009. Among these fifty-five women, those with the greatest access to resources engaged in strategies attempting to obtain the ideal body, while women with the least access had bodies that deteriorated to a point where they had several chronic, often disabling health conditions. Based on these fifty-five women, four composite categories or ideal types were identified. Women's attempts to obtain the ideal body related to a desire to control and regulate their lives. Once women lost the ability to actively improve their bodies, they sometimes purposefully engaged in unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to exert agency.