New Age has often been described as a religion pertaining to women and studies has shown that women do indeed constitute the vast majority. A reversal of hierarchy between feminine and masculine attributes and values, common in a modern western society, has also been shown to occur. This study looks at how the feminine is visible in written text and pictures depicting people, more specifically in the periodical magazine Free that has a circulation of circa 25,000. The main bulk of the magazine is advertisements, and one reoccurring part is the article Frimodigt where several of the magazine’s advertisers take part in a short interview. Twelve of these interviews have been analyzed, along with depictions of 518 people from three issues. The theoretical framework that has been applied to the outcome of my analysis has been social constructivism, with particular emphasis on the paper Doing gender by the professors of sociology Candace West and Don Zimmerman. My findings indicate that the feminine, indeed, is thought of as very positive and sometimes contrasted with the masculine. This is not, however, reflected in the visual depictions of people since there doesn’t seem to be any difference between how men and women are portrayed. What sets them apart is how often they are portrayed where women, on average, is depicted 70 % of the time. The invocation of feminine traits in Frimodigt shows that gender roles and norms can be used in marketing by attributing these positive traits to the product being marketed. Furthermore, this indicates that the very act of taking part in this material as a believer can be seen as a feminine act that can make women be more feminine, and men to come in contact with, and develop, their feminine side. Another consequence is that New Age might be seen as very attractive to women because of their appraisal of femininity and the fact that the religion seems to be dominated and ruled by women, in stark contrast to more patriarchal religions.

Mental health problems among young people, girls and young women in particular, are a serious public health problem. Gendered patterns of mental illness are seen in conjunction with stress-related problems such as anxiety, depression, and psychosomatic complaints. Intervention models tailored to the health care situation are therefore in need of development and evaluation. The overall aim of this thesis is to develop knowledge and understanding for young women’s mental health, stress-related, and bodily problems from a psychosomatic and gender theory perspective, and to evaluate a gender sensitive physiotherapeutic intervention model consisting of a stress management course for young women with stress-related problems. The thesis consists of four studies. The overall research design combines qualitative and quantitative methods in which questionnaires and interviews were used to explore participant experiences and symptoms linked to perceived stress before and after the intervention. Data consisted of a cumulative sample of 65 young women, 16 to 25 years of age, who attended the youth-friendly health center because of stress-related problems. In paper I, multiple symptom areas of mental health and somatic problems, self-image and aspects of body perception were measured before the course. Participants were 47 of the young women. The results were compared with published normative and clinical reference groups. In paper II, the young women’s experiences of living stressful femininity were analysed with a qualitative content analysis using gender theoretical and phenomenological perspectives as an interpretative frame. The study was based on interviews with 25 of the women. In paper III, follow-up interviews were done with 32 of the women after completion of the course. Data was using qualitative content analysis to illuminate experiences of participating in the course. In paper IV, the course was evaluated by measuring changes in multiple symptom areas using the Adult Self Report (ASR), Social Analysis of Social Behaviour (SASB), and Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ). Participants were 54 of the women who completed measurements finishing the course. Young women present complex symptomatology of stress-related problems. The total burden of symptoms plus the narrated experiences highlight how renegotiations of gender constructions and handling of normative and stressful femininity constrain access to bodily resources. After the stress management course, their measured and narrated experiences show positive changes and release of mental health and stress problems, including a more positive self-image and sense of enhanced confidence in their bodies. Experiences of the course as a safe and explorative space for gendered collective understanding and embodied empowerment indicate the need to develop gender-sensitive interventions. The thesis contributes to youth and gender theoretical perspectives with integration of psychosomatic and psychiatric physiotherapy. A broader awareness of how gender constructions and sociocultural aspects are significant in the understanding of psychosomatic expressions of mental ill health and young femininity is valuable in development of theory and interventions in physiotherapy, as well as into other fields.

This study examines how Swedish upper secondary school youth constructed femininity and masculinity in the period 1880–1930. The overall intention of the dissertation is to analyse the gender ideals that are found in texts written by girls and boys in a bourgeois school environment during a period characterised by transformative social changes in society. The source material consists of school magazines and student essays authored by youth in upper secondary boys’ schools, secondary girls’ schools, and co-educational schools.  The study analyses gender stereotypes from five different areas: youth, love life, body, parenting and working life. Boys are prone to use gender stereotypes that emphasise the subordination of women vis-a-vis men. The boys’ usage of stereotypes is thus prominent and is widely used in order to reinforce male dominance. They did not problematise or question their role in the society to any great extent. Girls were, to a significantly greater extent than the boys, keen to problematise women’s traditional role in society. This challenges the images of women as complicit in their own subordination. It seems that the girls have not only been aware of their subordination, but also have been more inclined to strive for their emancipation. The girls’ gender stereotypes are diverse and tolerant, and display progressiveness towards the emancipation movement. The young people’s ideal of moderation emerges as a recurring theme. Both the working class and the upper class are used as deterring examples of excess. The changes in society during this period seems to have had little influence on the ideal gender stereotypes, but in terms of emancipation, appears have made the boys more reactionary than the girls. The daughters of the bourgeois pressed forward; the sons of the bourgeois glanced backward.

Using feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial lenses, I explore how young Lebanese-Canadian women construct health, obesity, and the body within the context of the dominant obesity discourse, which over-emphasizes supposed links between inactivity, nutrition, obesity, and health. Participant-centered conversations were held with 20 young Lebanese-Canadian women between the ages of 18 and 25. The conversational texts were analyzed according to two consecutive methods: a thematic analysis which allowed us to focus on what the participants had to say about health, obesity, and the body followed by a poststructuralist discourse analysis which helped us to decipher how the participants spoke about these topics. The findings of this study attest that the young women construct health, obesity, and the body as matters of individual responsibility. They speak about achieving health and avoiding overweight/obesity through disciplinary practices such as rigorous physical activity and proper dietary restrictions. The participants also construct health in close linkage with the physical appearance of the body; moreover, they conflate the “healthy” and “ideal” female body, which they represent as thin. As such, the young women reject “fat” and portray obesity as a disease, a matter of lack of will, and an “abnormal” physical appearance. Finally, the young Lebanese-Canadian women report their involvement in various practices such as restriction of the quality and quantity of their nutritional intake, rare and non-organized forms of physical activity, and problematic practices such as the use of detoxes, dieting pills, and compulsive exercise, all in the name of health. Throughout this study, I highlight the participants’ multiple and shifting subjectivities: While the young Lebanese-Canadian women most often construct themselves as free neoliberal subjects re-citing elements of dominant neoliberal discourses (of self-authorship, self-responsibility for health, traditional femininity, and obesity), they at times construct themselves as “poststructuralist” subjects showing awareness of, and “micro-resistance” to such discourses. The impacts of the Lebanese and Lebanese-Canadian cultures on the participants’ constructions of health, obesity, and the body comprise an important part of this thesis. The participants accentuate the major importance of beauty and physical appearance—particularly not being fat—in the Lebanese and Lebanese-Canadian cultures. However, they also attempt to distance themselves from “Lebanese” ways of thinking about health, obesity, and the body, and in doing so they replicate homogeneous representations of Lebanese, Lebanese-Canadian, and Canadian women. I offer practical suggestions to inform health and obesity interventions that target Lebanese-Canadian women and women from ethnic minorities and I discuss future research possibilities that may stem from the present thesis.

This study examines the ideologies of gender, race, and class present in Martha Stewart's unprecedented popularity, beginning with the publication of Stewart's first magazine in 1990 and ending in September 2004, after Stewart's conviction for her involvement in the ImClone scandal. My approach is built on the intersection of American mass communication research, British cultural studies, and feminist theory, and utilizes Hall's Encoding/Decoding model to examine how social, cultural and political discourses circulate in and through a mediated text and how those meanings are interpreted by those who receive them. Drawing from textual and ideological analysis of over thirteen years of Martha Stewart Living magazine and twelve weeks of Stewart's four television programs, I investigate the ways in which the mode of address in Stewart's media texts positions her simultaneously as a close friend and respected teacher. As the model for "living" in her media texts, Stewart uses these modes of address as the foundation of her messages about women's roles, racial and ethnic traditions, and social mobility. To understand how readers and viewers make sense of these messages, I conducted focus group interviews with thirty-eight fans of Martha Stewart Living between October 2002 and July 2004. Two distinct types of fans emerged as my interviews progressed, and the participants, who have a range of different gender, race, sexuality and class identifications, expressed a variety of positions on the messages about gender roles, racial representations, and class aspiration they observed in Stewart's texts. I was uniquely positioned to examine how fans' feelings about Martha Stewart and Martha Stewart Living changed when Stewart was indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison because of her sale of ImClone stock; as a result of my observations, I argue that scholars should take a closer look at how fan practices and beliefs function in fans' lives and in the larger culture. In total, this examination of Martha Stewart's media texts and audience members offers a rich account of the ways in which discourses of gender, race, and class influenced American culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Increased participation rates and significant performances of girls and women in sport over the last three decades would have many believing that the barriers and discrimination experienced in the past have been overcome and that continued participation and success into the future is unproblematic. Feminist research has problematized what now seems like acceptance of women’s participation in sport in this postmodern era by considering the location of the female athlete at the intersecting of discourses of femininity, masculinist sport, heterosexuality and homophobia. Situated among these powerful regulating forces, female athletes become subjects attached to often contradictory identities. For instance, the paradox of femininity and athleticism can result in a troubling experience that requires complex negotiation and time-consuming management of gender boundaries and behaviour expectations. Although sport has been considered a liberatory space for women, that view fails to consider that sport continues to maintain the status quo through workings of power politics that sustain oppressive social structures and relations. In this study, the review of literature in Chapter Two illuminates that sport, as it currently exists, perpetuates gender inequality and builds and maintains socio-cultural boundaries of normative femininity and heterosexuality. Unpacking women’s sport experience, therefore, involves exploring the discursive force fields that structure their everyday lives. Immersed in the dynamics of power and resistance, women performing so-called “masculine” activities such as skilled sport performance create a contradictory and precarious location for themselves. This location could be perceived as transgressive and liberating or as one that must negotiate, and possibly resolve, the tension between discursive expectancies and non-normative performances. My study examined the sport experiences of eight female athletes. Each was interviewed three times using a semi-structured interview process. During the initial interview, the participants were asked to provide the history and priority of sport in their lives and speak about the repetitive act of “becoming” an athlete as they make the transitions from other subjectivities. Chapter Four summarizes this conversation with each of the participants. Through a photo-elicitation process, one of the interviews was dedicated to revealing each of the participants’ movements through the social spaces of their daily lives. Another of the interviews was supported by video footage of the athlete as she trained and/or competed in her sport(s). This data collection process allowed for the participants’ multiple subject positions or locations to be spoken by them throughout the conversations. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis. In order to critique the various discourses that dis/advantage female athletes, the theoretical framework provided by feminist poststructuralism was chosen for this project. Through this perspective, detailed in Chapter Three, an understanding of how social power is exercised over and experienced by women is helpful in knowledge production that supports women’s on-going efforts of contestation and change. For example, continued improvement and achievement in sport performance vi could be the result of new versions of femininity fostered by my critique of the privileged female identity that allows for less docile and more athletic female bodies. Discourse analysis, as described in Chapter Three, allowed for surveying the discursive terrain of the lives of the participants. This method also illuminated the ways of speaking, descriptions and specific images that the athletes used to speak about their sport experiences. The women spoke sport into their lives and created a positive space that featured personal achievement, escape or freedom from the “rest of life”; an activity that supported a healthy body and a positive body image; a place of family support; and a social, fun and accepting environment. In contrast to this, the participants’ sport space was troubled by the management and negotiation that was required by them to continue participation. Even though, as described in Chapter Five, they could speak sport into their lives in a positive way, they also spoke sport out of their lives (or at least further down the priority list) because of the effort that was required to juggle it or balance it within their multiple subjectivities. The sometimes simultaneous and always sequential contradictory gendered discursive force fields of motherhood, the ideal feminine body image, intimate relationships, compulsory heterosexuality, and physical activity required constant strategies of negotiation and management that are described in Chapter Six. A brief concluding chapter summarizes how the participants in this study found themselves frustrated by their “in-between-ness”. They are not athletes in the dominant heteronormative discursive space of male sport (they are “othered”), and they do not fit in the dominant discursive space of privileged femininity. The results of this study reveal that while sport presents itself as a site of empowerment for women, it also perpetuates and maintains traditional patriarchal values. The participants, however, creatively negotiated and renovated that patriarchal space to create a location in which they could evade the strength of dominant discourses and experience the benefits of sport engagement.

Increased participation rates and significant performances of girls and women in sport over the last three decades would have many believing that the barriers and discrimination experienced in the past have been overcome and that continued participation and success into the future is unproblematic. Feminist research has problematized what now seems like acceptance of women’s participation in sport in this postmodern era by considering the location of the female athlete at the intersecting of discourses of femininity, masculinist sport, heterosexuality and homophobia. Situated among these powerful regulating forces, female athletes become subjects attached to often contradictory identities. For instance, the paradox of femininity and athleticism can result in a troubling experience that requires complex negotiation and time-consuming management of gender boundaries and behaviour expectations. Although sport has been considered a liberatory space for women, that view fails to consider that sport continues to maintain the status quo through workings of power politics that sustain oppressive social structures and relations. In this study, the review of literature in Chapter Two illuminates that sport, as it currently exists, perpetuates gender inequality and builds and maintains socio-cultural boundaries of normative femininity and heterosexuality. Unpacking women’s sport experience, therefore, involves exploring the discursive force fields that structure their everyday lives. Immersed in the dynamics of power and resistance, women performing so-called “masculine” activities such as skilled sport performance create a contradictory and precarious location for themselves. This location could be perceived as transgressive and liberating or as one that must negotiate, and possibly resolve, the tension between discursive expectancies and non-normative performances. My study examined the sport experiences of eight female athletes. Each was interviewed three times using a semi-structured interview process. During the initial interview, the participants were asked to provide the history and priority of sport in their lives and speak about the repetitive act of “becoming” an athlete as they make the transitions from other subjectivities. Chapter Four summarizes this conversation with each of the participants. Through a photo-elicitation process, one of the interviews was dedicated to revealing each of the participants’ movements through the social spaces of their daily lives. Another of the interviews was supported by video footage of the athlete as she trained and/or competed in her sport(s). This data collection process allowed for the participants’ multiple subject positions or locations to be spoken by them throughout the conversations. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis. In order to critique the various discourses that dis/advantage female athletes, the theoretical framework provided by feminist poststructuralism was chosen for this project. Through this perspective, detailed in Chapter Three, an understanding of how social power is exercised over and experienced by women is helpful in knowledge production that supports women’s on-going efforts of contestation and change. For example, continued improvement and achievement in sport performance vi could be the result of new versions of femininity fostered by my critique of the privileged female identity that allows for less docile and more athletic female bodies. Discourse analysis, as described in Chapter Three, allowed for surveying the discursive terrain of the lives of the participants. This method also illuminated the ways of speaking, descriptions and specific images that the athletes used to speak about their sport experiences. The women spoke sport into their lives and created a positive space that featured personal achievement, escape or freedom from the “rest of life”; an activity that supported a healthy body and a positive body image; a place of family support; and a social, fun and accepting environment. In contrast to this, the participants’ sport space was troubled by the management and negotiation that was required by them to continue participation. Even though, as described in Chapter Five, they could speak sport into their lives in a positive way, they also spoke sport out of their lives (or at least further down the priority list) because of the effort that was required to juggle it or balance it within their multiple subjectivities. The sometimes simultaneous and always sequential contradictory gendered discursive force fields of motherhood, the ideal feminine body image, intimate relationships, compulsory heterosexuality, and physical activity required constant strategies of negotiation and management that are described in Chapter Six. A brief concluding chapter summarizes how the participants in this study found themselves frustrated by their “in-between-ness”. They are not athletes in the dominant heteronormative discursive space of male sport (they are “othered”), and they do not fit in the dominant discursive space of privileged femininity. The results of this study reveal that while sport presents itself as a site of empowerment for women, it also perpetuates and maintains traditional patriarchal values. The participants, however, creatively negotiated and renovated that patriarchal space to create a location in which they could evade the strength of dominant discourses and experience the benefits of sport engagement.

Zugl.: Wien, Univ., Diss., 2004

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Stockholm, 1985. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-166).

Kroppen, i termer av kroppsliga vardagserfarenheter och unga tjejers kroppsliga gestaltning av lik- eller olikartade erfarenheter, som uppvisas inom en nätkultur på bloggar om hälsa och träning har använts som empirisk och analytisk grund. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur heteronormativ femininitet iscensätts, förhandlas och görs normerande i populära bloggar inom träning och hälsa samt varför de konsumeras av unga tjejer. Inledningsvis redogörs för en beskrivande bakgrund av moderna västerländska konsumtionssamhället och vad det kan innebära för individers identitetsarbete. Tidigare forskning inom området berör ungas förhållningssätt till kroppen, ideal och femininitet, kulturella framställningar av normer samt medier som verktyg för identitetsskapande. En netnografisk undersökning med text- och bildanalys har genomförts av tre stycken bloggar för både publicerat material och interaktiva delar, det vill säga bloggarens inlägg och läsarnas frågor och kommentarer. Tre grundläggande teman var specifikt framträdande i den funna empirin; tämjandet av kroppen, iscensättningen av heteronormativ femininitet samt konsumtion och klasskillnader. Vidare har analyser utgått ifrån grundläggande genusteorier som berör performativitet, klass, queerteorin, normalisering och makt och stereotyper och sociomentala relationer. Resultaten visar att tjejernas föreställningar om och iscensättningen av femininitet inom nätkulturen strukturerar såväl tankar som handlingar. Deras kroppar är eller strävar efter att vara bärare av viss slags ideal heteronormativ femininitet och kroppen fungerar som medium varigenom denna kan verka. Konsumtion och markörer visar sig vara medel som möjliggör iscensättningen och den ideala livsstilen. Relationen mellan skribenten och läsarna diskuteras i termer av makt, klass och expertkunskap. Diskussioner har även förts kring vilken betydelse och mening bloggarnas diskurser om femininitet och kroppsnormer kan ha för unga tjejers föreställningar om vad som krävs för att vara kvinna ”på rätt sätt” i dagens samhälle. / The human body, in terms of everyday experiences and young women’s body staging of similar or unequal experiences that is exposed among an Internet culture on lifestyle blogs about health and fitness has based the empiric analyses. The study aims to examine how young women practice and negotiate hetero normative femininity on popular blogs about health and fitness and what conveys girls’ interest to read and interact in these type of online communities. The main questions of the study concern what type of feminine body standards are negotiated and orchestrated in blogs consumed by young women, what messages and ideals about health are conveyed and communicated through text and images, what kind of femininity do the girls strive to achieve by active consumption of and communication in blogs and why is it desirable, what enables the staging and what legitimizes the writers position as a role model and how can young girl’s health as a discursive practice be analysed and related to a broader social perspective concerning norms and ideals. The theoretical framework of the study is based on gender theories such as performativity, class, queer theory, normativity, power and social control, stereotypes and sociomental relationships. The methodology for the study is a netnographic observation of three blogs with further text- and image analysis both for published material and interactive fragments - blog posts and readers’ comments and questions. The three main themes that were specifically disclosed in the results are modifying of the body, the implementation of hetero normative femininity according to ideal images and consumption and class disparities. The results are illustrating the girls’ notions and staging of a specific heteronormative femininity among the Internet culture. The ideas about the ideal female body and lifestyle can structure thoughts as well as actions. Consumption and various types of labels and markers are used as tools for enabling the staging of the ideal lifestyle. The relation between the writer and the readers has been discussed in aspects of power, class and expertise. Further analyses and discussions has been held in terms of the theoretical framework of the study.