- "Body image is a person's thoughts, feelings and perception of the aesthetics or sexual attractiveness of their own body."
An exploration of the ways in which society and media shape ideas about beauty and worth, and the impact that this has on individuals' relationships with their bodies.
Patriarchy: Patriarchy refers to a social system in which men hold primary power and women are largely excluded from it. The term is often used to describe women's subordination to men in various aspects of society.
Intersectionality: Intersectionality highlights how different forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism, and classism, intersect to create unique experiences of oppression for individuals who are marginalized in multiple ways.
Gender: Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, and expectations associated with being male or female.
Sexuality: Sexuality refers to a person's sexual orientation, the ways they express their desires and emotions, and their attitudes towards sex and relationships.
Reproductive Rights: Reproductive rights are the legal and ethical rights that individuals have to make decisions regarding their reproductive health, including the right to access contraception, abortion, and fertility treatments.
Body Image: Body image is a person's subjective perception of their own physical appearance, which can be influenced by cultural ideals and media representations of beauty.
Violence against Women: Violence against women includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as structural violence that perpetuates inequality and discrimination against women.
Toxic Masculinity: Toxic masculinity is a cultural construct that promotes harmful and oppressive attitudes and behaviors associated with traditional masculine gender roles.
Feminist Movement: The feminist movement is a social and political movement that seeks to achieve gender equality, often through advocacy for women's rights and female representation.
Women's Health: Women's health focuses on concerns specific to female anatomy, including reproductive health, maternal health, and issues related to hormonal and other physiological differences between men and women.
Body Politics: Body politics refers to the ways in which power and control are exerted over individuals' bodies, particularly marginalized individuals.
Beauty Standards: Beauty standards are ideals of physical appearance that are often based on Eurocentric and oppressive norms, and that can have negative consequences for individuals who do not conform to these standards.
Rape Culture: Rape culture refers to a set of cultural attitudes and beliefs that normalize and trivialize sexual violence, and that limit the ability of victims to seek justice and gain support.
Women's Work: Women's work encompasses unpaid domestic and care work, as well as paid work that is disproportionately performed by women, such as healthcare and education.
Institutional Discrimination: Institutional discrimination refers to policies and practices that perpetuate discrimination against individuals based on their race, gender, sexuality, or other characteristics, within institutions such as schools, workplaces or government entities.
Embodiment: This type of feminist Body Politics is concerned with showing how the body is not just a passive biological entity but also an active and expressive element of human experience. Through embodiment, feminists seek to investigate how bodily experiences shape one's identity and experiences within social contexts.
Intersectionality: Intersectional feminist Body Politics focuses on how different aspects of identity intersect, including race, class, gender, and sexuality, and affect the way women experience and negotiate their bodies in society.
Discursive: This type of feminist Body Politics focuses on the social construction of the body through discourse, language, and power. Discursive feminists aim to unpack how language and discourse shape the ways in which bodies are represented, understood and experienced.
Medicalization: This feminist Body Politics examines how the medical industry medicalizes women's bodies and their experiences, leading to the perpetuation of oppressive norms and values. Medicalization theory is also used to explain how the medical industry burdens marginalized communities with illness and disease.
Colonialism: The colonial feminist Body Politics theoretically addresses how the way Western society has historically conceptualized and mapped bodies around the world. Colonialism presents some regions of the globe inferior and the white western culture superior.
Performance: Performance-based feminist Body Politics examine how the body is often used as a tool for self-expression, communication, and resistance. It seeks to develop an understanding of the ways in which the body is performed and constructed in particular cultural contexts.
Sexual Violence: Scholars concerned with feminist Body Politics have analyzed how violence in the form of sexual assault, harassment, and intimate partner violence is used to enforce gender-based power imbalances.
Reproduction: The feminist theory of reproductive rights advocates against the constraints placed on women's reproductive decisions such as access to abortion, contraception, and medical care during pregnancy.
Disability: Disabled feminist Body Politics seeks to explore how norms of able-bodiedness affect marginalized individuals' experiences, often leading to isolation, exclusion, and ableist policies and practices.
Fatness and Sizeism: Feminists who focus on Body Politics of sizeism and fatness take on the negative stereotyping of individuals who are considered overweight, thus seeking to unpack how moral judgments about body size are performed and reinforced by society.
Transgender Body Politics: This type of Body Politics focuses on the social and political policies and practices that enforce transphobia and discrimination against transgender individuals based on their body.
Aging: Aging feminist Body Politics seeks to expose and challenge ageism, looking at how power structures and culture relate to women's experiences of aging.
Post-humanist Feminist Body Politics is an interdisciplinary field seeking to explore what it means to be human beyond the limits of the body to address possibilities of human-machine interface, including robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and other emerging technologies.: Post-humanist Feminist Body Politics is an interdisciplinary field that examines the ways in which emerging technologies challenge traditional conceptions of the human body and opens up possibilities for human-machine interface in terms of gender and sexuality.
- "The concept of body image is used in a number of disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural and feminist studies."
- "Across these disciplines, there is no single consensus definition."
- "Body image consists of the ways people view themselves; their memories, experiences, assumptions, and comparisons about their own appearances; and their overall attitudes towards their own respective heights, shapes, and weights—all of which are shaped by prevalent social and cultural ideals."
- "Body image can be negative ('body negativity') or positive ('body positivity')."
- "In a time where social media holds a very important place and is used frequently in our daily lives, people of different ages are affected emotionally and mentally by the appearance and body size/shape ideals set by the society they live in."
- "These standards created and changed by society created a world filled with body shaming; the act of humiliating an individual by mocking or making critical comments about a person's physiological appearance."
- "Such behavior creates body dissatisfaction and higher risks of eating disorders, isolation, and mental illnesses in the long term."
- "In eating disorders, a negative body image may also lead to body image disturbance, an altered perception of the whole one's body."
- "Body dissatisfaction also characterizes body dysmorphic disorder, an obsessive-compulsive disorder defined by concerns about some specific aspect of one's body which is severely flawed and warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix."
- "Often, people who have a low body image will try to alter their bodies in some way, such as by dieting or by undergoing cosmetic surgery."
- "Many factors contribute to a person's body image, including family dynamics, mental illness, biological predispositions and environmental causes for obesity or malnutrition, and cultural expectations (e.g., media and politics)."
- "People who are either underweight or overweight can have poor body image."
- "those who are normal or overweight on the BMI scale have higher risks of poor body image."
- "A 2007 report by the American Psychological Association found that a culture-wide sexualization of girls and women was contributing to increased female anxiety associated with body image."
- "An Australian government Senate Standing Committee report on the sexualization of children in the media reported similar findings associated with body image."
- "However, other scholars have expressed concern that these claims are not based on solid data."
- "All of which are shaped by prevalent social and cultural ideals."
- "A person with a negative body image may feel self-conscious or ashamed, and may feel that others are more attractive."
- "On the other hand, positive body image consists of perceiving one's figure clearly and correctly, celebrating and appreciating one's body, and understanding that one's appearance does not reflect one's character or worth."