Paper short abstract:

This paper builds on anthropological work on enskilled senses to critique dominant explanations of bodily unhappiness among teenage girls. Drawing from fieldwork in a London school, I offer an account that starts from embodied learning in daily life, rather than the assumed primacy of media images.

Paper long abstract:

In conventional research on bodily dissatisfaction and negative body image among teenage girls, a mind-orientated, representionalist understanding of subjective formation prevails. Bodily experience is viewed as fundamentally structured by the internalization of external images. Girls consume media images of thin models and celebrities and their subjectivity is negatively formed by this unhealthy diet of images. Vision is taken for granted as both objective and objectifying. In contrast, starting from ethnography of girls' everyday lives, I focus on the enskilment of vision (Grasseni 2004) through which girls learn to see their own and others bodies in particular ways. As I illustrate, this is in relation to global body and beauty ideals and their attendant politics of value, but also local hierarchies of status. 'Looking good' and 'good looking' can be seen as two aspects of the same processes of peer evaluation that pervade school life. From this perspective, girls are not reduced to pathological consumers, but are encountered as active and skilled participants engaged in the intense sociality of daily school life.