This study aims to understand how beauty ideals that are formed in the Swedish society and implemented in clothing stores in the form of exclusionary fashion, affect and shape women's thinking about their appearance and life as well as how they approach and apply this to their social and private life. The target group of this study are women who are affected by the exclusionary fashion where there is a lack of diversity and inclusion for different sizes and culturally coded clothes, like hijabs in clothing stores. This study has thus had the following three questions: How do women who do not fit into the beauty ideal and the norm in terms of their body size and culturally coded clothes relate to clothing stores' exclusionary fashion? What internalized self-image and self-esteem do those who are excluded because of their appearance have, and in what way do they deal with it? How does it affect women's sense of belonging to society? This study has been conducted with qualitative interviews supported by theories concerning stigma, the ideal, internalization of the ideal female body and habitus. The conclusions of this study have revealed that the beauty ideal not only affects the interviewed women physically but also mentally. It also affects both their social life with family and friends and their private life and how they view themselves and their weight in connection to it. This concludes to the beauty ideal having a strong and prominent presence in the interviewees' lives and their sense of belonging into society. Furthermore, the study concluded that the beauty ideal affected both the self-image and self-esteem of the women in this study and to be able to handle this the women had developed different strategies that they used to be able to live with the strain they felt from the impact of the beauty ideal. These strategies were viewed by the interviewees as a positive impact and was a sign of liberation for them. Despite having some form of positivity, the overall agreement for the interviewees was that their bodily and clothing differences from the norm society led to a feeling of being unwanted and to them alienating themselves from society because of it. This study shows that, for some women, a difference in appearance from the majority means a loss of integration and self-confidence in their everyday lives.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-129165 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Nahimana, Ancilla |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för samhällsstudier (SS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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