Critical bodies : representations, identities, and practices of weight and body management

Her current research looks at the impact of size-discrimination on policy, research directions and on people's health and health-seeking behaviour.Maree Burns is the coordinator of the Eating Difficulties Education Network in Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests include examining discourses and representations of disordered eating, obesity and weight/body management, and their constitutive impacts on subjectivity and practice. She has published several articles on the social construction of bulimia, bulimic practices and issues of subjectivity/embodiment. Maree is currently co-editing a book with Helen Malson entitled Critical Feminist Perspectives on Eating Dis/Orders (Psychology Press, forthcoming). Using work produced from the critical and postmodern arena in social sciences, this book examines three key areas - representation, identities and practice - to explore and interrogate how body and weight management, subjectivities, experiences and practices are constituted within and by the normative discourses of contemporary western culture. This book showcases a selection of current work and debates on we ight and body management practices that are being produced from the vibrant arena of critical and postmodern approaches in the social sciences. Understanding weight issues in the developed world now occurs against a backdrop in which westernised cultural ideals about the body constitute the slim body as healthy, good, moral, attractive and 'normal'. Simultaneously the World Health Organisation has declared that the western world is in the grip of an 'obesity epidemic' despite the fact that so-called eating disorders and extreme dieting and body management practices are shown to be increasing. This timely book uses the three key areas of representation, identities and practice to contextualise weight and body management practices providing readers with innovative examples of how to explore and interrogate the way our understandings of health, identity and weight are constituted within and by normative discourses of contemporary western culture Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introducing Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management....Pages 1-22 Front Matter....Pages 23-26 Deconstructing Un/Healthy Body-weight and Weight Management....Pages 27-42 ‘I Feel Ridiculous about Having Had It’ — Critical Readings of Lived and Mediated Stories on Eating Disorders....Pages 43-59 Learning to Be Healthy, Dying to Be Thin: The Representation of Weight via Body Perfection Codes in Schools....Pages 60-76 Front Matter....Pages 77-80 Starving in Cyberspace: The Construction of Identity on ‘Pro-eating-disorder’ Websites....Pages 81-100 Body Talk: Negotiating Body Image and Masculinity....Pages 101-116 Feminist Object Relations Theory and Eating ‘Disorders’....Pages 117-133 Front Matter....Pages 135-138 Dis/Orders of Weight Control: Bulimic and/or ‘Healthy Weight’ Practices....Pages 139-154 Sustaining Imbalance — Evidence of Neglect in the Pursuit of Nutritional Health....Pages 155-174 Older and Younger Women’s Experiences of Commercial Weight Loss....Pages 175-192 Critical Bodies: Discourses of Health, Gender and Consumption....Pages 193-203 Back Matter....Pages 204-206

This book showcases a selection of current work and debates on weight and body management practices that are being produced from the vibrant arena of critical and postmodern approaches in the social sciences. Weight issues have become central to Western understandings of health and identity, but analyses of weight and body management have often failed to contextualise weight related issues. This timely book addresses this gap by examining three key areas, namely, representation, identities, and practice, to explore and interrogate how body and weight management, subjectivities, experiences, and practices are constituted within and by the normative discourses of contemporary western culture.