Theorizing the Young Woman in the Body

LIZ FROST

In the last decade attention has been given in the media and in medical and psychological texts to young womens unhappy and unhealthy relationships with their bodies. In 1999 the author undertook qualitative research on contemporary western young women, with identity and appearance issues as its major focus (Frost, 2001). However, the concern of this article is not with the empirical research per se (this is discussed elsewhere, e.g. Frost, 2004) but with the examination of the theoretical model which informed the research. It argues that by utilizing interactionist, structural and post-structural theory a framework of understanding was established against which the complex and ambivalent experiences of young women inhabiting their appearances could be understood, and to which the empirical research contributed a further dimension. Initially the article gives some consideration to the imperative of personal display for all subjects of late consumer capitalism, drawing primarily on interactionist theories of the body as a site of visual presentation. To interrogate the gendered nature of body experience it then harnesses Foucauldian feminist approaches. A structuralist frame of reference is deployed to understand the category youth and its stratications and nally interactionist work is drawn
Body & Society 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 11(1): 6385 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05049851

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on to explore how unhappy embodiment may be subjectively experienced. by contemporary young women. Bodies of Concern It is established that the range of clinical and sub-clinical appearance-based disorders are currently more prevalent in 1418-year-old girls than other social groups (Fombonne, 1995; Ransley, 1999). Body dysmorphic disorder disproportionately affects this age group, and self-harming behaviour similarly has a predominantly young and female prole (Favazza, 1998; House et al., 1999; Phillips, 1996). As well as diagnosed mental health problems, more nebulous difculties of poor self-esteem emanating from appearance concerns, including body-hatred, have been ascribed to young women (Grogan, 1999). Studies on dieting behaviours in young women have suggested that girls are making strenuous attempts to be thinner, which may have an impact on their well-being (British Youth Council, 1999; Hill et al., 1992). A careful reading of the research suggests that looks-related activity is increasing, with shopping and experimenting with new styles a favourite pastime (McRobbie, 1991). But although looking good is valued by girls, expressing dislike of their bodies is common (Frost, 2001). The British governments Body Summit in 2000 publicly recognized that the unhealthy state of young womens bodies is now an ofcial concern. The impact of womens body dissatisfaction and consequent body alteration behaviours on their mental well-being has been subject to considerable scrutiny within academic sociology and popular feminism since the late 1970s (Bordo, 1993; MacSweeney, 1993; Wolf, 1990). Inevitably, the academy has sought to explicate the subject eld with the theoretical tools predominantly available at the time. For example, in the early 1970s and into the 1980s, work relating to womens bodies drew on feminist practice and, when developed within feminist academia, tended to utilize structural traditions in sociology (mainly Marxist in the UK) to analyse womens lived experiences of embodiment (Lovell, 2000). To simplify the appearance issue, this can be characterized as starting from the assumption that women doing looks is paradigmatically illustrative of their position as the victims of oppressive white patriarchal capitalism (Chapkis, 1986). From the middle of the 1980s, the feminist academy, particularly in the elds of sociology and philosophy, began to draw on a wider range of epistemologies, including phenomenological accounts and the post-structuralist work of writers such as Foucault (Bartky, 1990; Singer, 1989). Later still psychology, cultural studies and sociology harnessed the productive blurring of disciplinary

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boundaries facilitated by the somewhat generalized notion of social constructionism, further enriching the women and the body problematic (Bordo, 1993; Malson, 1998). The area of work that may be designated corporeal feminism is now immense, spanning issues as diverse as sexualities and cyborgs, reproductive technologies and scarication rituals. The particular concern of this article is issues of the body as an inhabited and presented visual space: the appearance of the girl in the body. However, before moving to the primary concern of the article, a brief outline of the authors research with young women, some references to which arise in the text, may be informative. In 1998 the author undertook a small-scale qualitative piece of research drawing on creative and psychosocial methodologies in group and individual contexts. The subjects were a group of sixth-form girls at a rural comprehensive school, and a group of similar age girls in a psychiatric facility, engaged in a group art project and a health project (respectively), focusing on the issues of appearance, self-image and identity. From these practical and discursive group sessions, self-selecting volunteers (10 in all) participated in case-study interviews exploring their relationships with their bodies and appearance. These were subject to both a content and a psychosocial process analysis. Social Identity and Appearance This section will consider how the generalized subject of embodied identity in contemporary western societies can best be understood. The relationship between the visual representation of self, and the society in which self is visually represented, received and reinforced, was classically put on the sociological map by Goffman (1959, 1961, 1963, 1976), from the late 1950s onwards. Unlike much sociology of the body, his work focused not on the body as the intersection between self and society, but on the interactively produced social self as a presentation or performance. Goffman is concerned with gender displays, with depictions and presentations of gendered identity. His metaphors draw on ne art and the ways in which gender is illustrated are fundamental to his enquiry:
What the human nature of males and females really consists of, then, is a capacity to learn to provide and to read depictions of masculinity and femininity and a willingness to adhere to a schedule for presenting these pictures. (Goffman, 1976: 8)

These pictures can perhaps also be understood as meanings humans are able to construct and interpret meanings and to incorporate these meanings into their gendered presentation. Two things can be abstracted from this as of relevance here. The rst is that Goffman places individuals in a continuous interactive process with their surroundings. As Layder comments:

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Goffman cannot be viewed as a theorist whose work is based on . . . the idea that the social order rests on individuals and their motivations. Goffman himself is as clear as crystal about this: the self is a social product and can only be understood in relation to its social context. (1994: 178)

The second is the constitutive value placed on the notion of presentation and depiction; in other words selfhood is not an intrinsic, individually located, essence, controlling its relationship with a surrounding society, but a surfacelocated interactive, in-process personhood. The self and the presentation of self become blended, constituting and reconstituting an ongoing personality. This renders the notion of depiction and construction of identity as inseparable. Gender and other aspects of identity are not just read-off at the surface, by way of demeanour, clothes and badges of afliation, but are constituted there. Appearance constitutes gendered subjectivity. Women and girls, and indeed men and boys, are all engaged in the continuous production of gendered identity via visual display. Importantly, appearance production is not an optional activity that women are somehow being forced into and, by implication, damaged by, but is constitutive of subjectivity. They cannot choose not to produce gendered social identities that include visual aspects. However, in this analysis people are social actors, not victims of systems nor its agents. Goffmans analysis of society and the individual suggests that women are both the products and the producers of social meanings. They engage in this construction and interpretation of a visual self at the interactive, externalized level, though this may be experienced as an isolated and self-directed phenomenon. For example, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman uses an extended theatrical metaphor: of identity as performance, of role-playing, scripts and audiences. However, even within this seemingly self-determining analogy, he emphasizes the need to locate self at the juxtaposition of the person and the social:
In analysing the self, then, we are drawn from its possessor, from the person who will prot or lose most by it, for he and his body merely provide the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung from time to time. And the means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg; in fact these means are often bolted down in social establishments. (Goffman, 1959: 245)

Although the extent of self-determination the actor exercises is somewhat inconsistently evaluated in Goffmans work, the above can elucidate, for example, that a set of meanings small, passive, fragile which a young girl might see as grounded in her identity and attached to her body, are not generated from within herself but hung on that self-peg via interactive, social processes. She is neither

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the victim of, for example, consumer capitalism and/or patriarchy and/or media pressure, nor the wilful perpetrator or own worst enemy within the beauty system, but engaged in an interactive social process essential to identity formation, which she must engage with. The above, then, offers a way of understanding the visual aspects of self, doing looks in other words, as integral to the production of gendered social identity, and as an interactive process in which binaries such as agent/victim are avoided. However, if the construction of appearance is intrinsic to all identity production, why this might then generate discontent becomes problematic. Looking at differing societal contexts may be enlightening. The article now considers the particular problems that late consumer capitalism in the West may bring to gendered appearance construction. The Appearance-oriented Subject of Consumer Capitalism Over the decades since Goffmans work on presentation of self, issues to do with both the body and appearance/image construction have come under far greater academic scrutiny, as we have moved into a social era which, it has been argued, is characterized by spectacles of self-presentation (Langman, 1992: 40), and by an obsession with representation which is valorised in a society concerned primarily with the attractiveness of commodities (Frosh, 1991: 65). Appearance-obsessed, image-obsessed and self-obsessed, the socially produced subject of late consumer capitalism attempts to exercise control over existence in the context of large, rapidly moving unknowable forces of, for example, globalization, by an over-emphasis on control in the personal sphere (Lasch, 1979). Concerns with the self, the well-being of the self, the actualization of the self, including the body and appearance, have developed in relation to the needs of consumer capitalism to produce individualized consumers with a whole range of personal wants and needs. The teenage girls this article is concerned with are part of a generation even a second generation of narcissists, it can be argued; they are likely to be self-oriented, self-critical and highly concerned with their looks. In exploring body and self-identity in late modernity Giddens, for example, foregrounds bodily appearance as having special relevance. While acknowledging that dress and adornment have always, and still remain a signalling device of gender, class position and occupational status, he also argues that:
. . . neither appearance nor demeanour can be organised as given; the body participates in a very direct way in the principle that the self has to be constructed. Bodily regimes . . . are the prime

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means whereby the institutional reexivity of modern social life is focused on the cultivation almost, one might say, the creation of the body. (Giddens, 1991: 100)

For Giddens, the importance of bodily appearance is more signicant than fashions, such as looking youthful, and not just media commodicationproduced. We become responsible for the design of our own bodies, and . . . are forced to do so the more post-traditional the social contexts in which we move (1991: 102). Giddens notion of self-reexive identity construction which includes both lifestyle and the body partially elucidates why high levels of anxiety about personal weight, ageing, or any other aspect of looks are specic to this point in time. Within this self-reexive project, people remake themselves in relation to available versions: perfection, or the best version is pursued. So, having a better relationship, a better family life, new career possibilities and a healthy, t and physically attractive body are all consciously worked at. Self becomes a projection grounded in self-orientation and, most importantly, self-control, precisely the mindsets so often commented on as the key to understanding anorexia and the anorexic personality. Giddens comments: The tightly controlled body is an emblem of a safe existence in an open social environment (1991: 107). In this high-risk society, as Giddens characterizes it, self-control, in literal and less tangible ways, becomes a crucial feature of coping. It offers some relief from the ontological insecurity which, for him, is the Zeitgeist of late consumer capitalism. He theorizes a different kind of subjectivity insecure, selfdetermining, individualized almost making it up as they go along, from available information. That this kind of identity is prone to producing such conditions as eating disorders is quite specically argued:
. . . anorexia and its apparent opposite, compulsive overeating, should be understood as casualties of the need and responsibility of the individual to create and maintain a distinctive self-identity. They are extreme versions of control of bodily regimes which has now become generic to the circumstances of day-to-day life. (1991: 105)

As with Goffmans position, appearance and identity are tightly bound together: appearance production is not an optional or externally imposed activity; the relationship with the body positions it as both self and the object/project of self. However, Giddens also suggests that identity is engaged in a process of ongoing reexive self-creation, in which perfection is the goal. Insecurity and selfcriticism are the by-products of such self-control and self-determination. This is a useful theoretical framework for considering anxiety and insecurity in relation to appearance for all subjects of western capitalism. However, in

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relation to how specically young women experience their own bodies, there are limitations in Giddens version. For example, although it is comforting to believe that only at the extreme end of the scale are there casualties of ongoing selfconstruction (anorexia, for example), in reality there seem to be substantial numbers of young women who show dissatisfaction with and/or disassociation from their appearance (Hill et al., 1992; Lovegrove, 2002). If they are engaged in reexive self-construction, it seems they are not able to incorporate this comfortably or successfully into their sense of self. That young women do invest time and resources in appearance construction is visible, but it is equally clear that this is not always a source of ontological security or satisfaction. One aspect which Giddens only partially develops is an analysis of differential access to the possibilities of self-construction, of which groups of people have the available tools including knowledge for continually making themselves up. He also gives little consideration to how, in a situation where maximum beautication is an identity imperative, failure to achieve this would be experienced at an individual, highly personal and identity-damaging level. As May and Cooper point out in relation to Giddens perspective on late modern identities: the constraints that are placed on the capacity of individuals to construct new identities are profoundly underestimated (1995: 76). Although Giddens recognizes that the ongoing reconstitution of selfhood is by no means a straightforward or unproblematic operation, May and Cooper argue that he also suggests that autonomous individuals choose to construct their identity from a range of options (1995: 76). Clearly this fails to seriously recognize three important aspects of modern identicatory processes. The most glaring, pointed out by May and Cooper above, is that of differential, or limited, resources to construct self and lifestyle to ones own requirements. Secondly, the hegemony of versions of lifestyle and identity available to emulate is not recognized. Although Giddens puts forward a plurality of lifestyle options in multiple milieux, there are counter-arguments. The production of self as a visual display, as a t, slim, young-looking and fashionably adorned body, does not represent a range of choices but a single imperative of the consumer capitalist context of contemporary existence. Theorists such as Featherstone challenge the notion of choice in Giddens work. Although people may have some choice over details of appearance construction, to deviate from the pervasive pressure of consumer culture body imagery would incur high costs.

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Individuals may of course choose to ignore or neglect their appearance . . . yet if they do so they must be prepared to face the implications of their choice within social encounters. (Featherstone, 1991: 192)

As this article considers later, the consequences may be shame, stigma and social exclusion. Thirdly, Giddens argument ignores the possibility that the knowledge and images of various kinds, with which people reexively reconstruct their identities the advice columns and self-help books, the television and lm representations of perfect family life and perfect good health may in fact be distorting what it is possible to be. The glossy, perfect people shown and the glossy perfect psychologies suggested are not achievable identities but ctions. These criticisms suggest some limits to the version of self-reexive personal reconstruction that Giddens is proposing. This is not particularly suggesting that there are essential limitations on body and identity although, for example, the issue of ageing and the bodys decline may constitute this (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991; Featherstone and Wernick, 1995) but that the demands of a range of imperatives for perfection cannot be reconciled within the various kinds of limits of a persons everyday life. Even leaving the question of resources aside for a moment, is it possible to have a good relationship, a fullled mind, a great job, well-adjusted children, and a worked, lean and t body? People may identify with delusions, against which any achievement induces a sense of disappointment. A young woman who tries to reexively constitute her physical self to resemble a heavily touched-up studio portrait of a pre-pubescent model may believe that she is responsible for failing to match up, when in reality she has little chance of making herself resemble what is in fact a photographic illusion. Giddens acknowledges there will be pressures in how lifestyles are chosen the selection and creation of life-styles is inuenced by group pressures and the visibility of role-models, as well as by socio-economic circumstances (1991: 82) but not the inuence of fantasy and impossible perfection, or the idea that the multiplicity of life-styles between which people choose masks a conservative consumerist hegemony, or, in other words, are also illusory. May and Cooper make the additional criticism that this multiplicity of images and possibilities is increasingly visible. But this need not mean that it is increasingly available (1995: 78). In relation to understanding young women in the body, then, Giddens formulation of the displaying and appearing identity of late modernity is theoretically coherent, but veers towards the (optimistically) voluntaristic. Featherstones more structurally grounded work, briey drawn on above, is helpful in

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raising both additional and critical dimensions within the whole issue of appearance, particularly in discussing the hegemonic and stratied nature of body experience under the imperatives of consumer capitalism. Similarly, Bourdieus structuralist account, also focusing on the body as a container and expression of social and cultural mores and prescriptions, offers a generative contrast that this article will consider later in relation to theorizing youth. Feminism and Womens Appearance Construction The work of both Goffman and Giddens is useful in theorizing the nature of the subject in late consumer capitalism as fundamentally and increasingly tied into appearance construction, which potentially renders them unstable and insecure within this process. Having recognized, though, that: Women are of course the most clearly trapped in the narcissistic, self-surveillance world of images (Featherstone, 1991: 179), it may be that there is a tendency to theoretically underestimate the extent to which relations between body and self are genderspecic. As Witz discusses:
The new sociology of the body . . . is forging new ways of thinking sociologically about the body and making great strides in recuperating the body within sociology . . . [but] I am concerned that his new stories of the body in society pay insufcient attention to the ways in which his old stories of disembodied sociality contained a hidden history of . . . gendered bodies. (2000: 1)

In relation to stories of the body and embodied appearance, it is his stories the generalized masculine academic voice which have frequently been creatively plundered, adapted and re-narrated for the re-telling of hers. This article now goes on to consider another such reworking. Inheriting some Marxist concerns with power, Foucaults post-structural work has been widely utilized over the last two decades by feminist and malestream sociologists and cultural critics to theorize a different kind of politics of the body (Gatens, 1996; Shilling, 1993; Singer, 1989). Foucaults engagement with questions of identity and how it is both constituted and limited within discourse, and in questions of the power relations which act via discourse to constitute and limit it, is useful here. So is his emphasis on how, in historically specic circumstances, ubiquitous relations of power impact on the subjectivities around and through whom power circulates. This may be important for understanding young womens troubled relationships with their bodies now. Grounded in an historical analysis of the development of forms of power, Foucault identies one form of contemporary power relations as disciplinary

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power. This is exercised by surveillance rather than force and leads people to behave as if they are constantly being watched; a sense which, when internalized, leads to a state of permanent self-policing:
. . . with the disappearance of older forms of bodily control such as torture, public spectacle and so on, control operates through internalisation, and becomes, to a large extent, selfsurveillance. (Wolff, 1990: 125)

In relation specically to the body, Foucault argues, historically such institutions as the military and the school exercised control over every minute detail of deportment, demeanour, etc., leading to physical conformity or docility: A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved (Foucault, 1977: 180). It is rendered so in relation to the impossibility of avoiding the observers gaze. How they should behave, or perform, is not subject to individual interpretation but is determined by mass standards. For example, how soldiers march must be identical from soldier to soldier, and how a women should walk or sit, may carry the same kind of prescriptions. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze (Foucault, 1977, quoted in Bordo, 1993: 27). A normalizing gaze is internalized, prescribing what is and is not acceptable to do or to be. This has been a productive analysis for understanding womens particular relationship with their appearance. Bartky, for example, synthesizes this Foucauldian approach with a more Marxist stance, linking the notions of surveillance and self-policing to the image-obsessed individuality of late modernity considered above:
In the perpetual self-surveillance of the inmate lies the genesis of the celebrated individualism and heightened self-consciousness which are hallmarks of modern times. (Bartky, 1990: 65)

She then goes on to link this particularly to the disciplinary practices which constitute the docile bodies of women and the effect this has on, for example, size and shape, deportment and gesture and the adornment of the body: the effects of the imposition of such discipline on female identity and subjectivity (1990: 65). Subjects, then, are constituted in relation to powerful meanings prescribing what it is to be a woman, which are thoroughly internalized and constantly applied, though subject to some variation over time. One example of this is in relation to slimness. Today massiveness, power or abundance in a woman is met with distaste (Bartky, 1990: 66). Distaste and humiliation are the sanctions that guarantee outcomes. Womens magazines and other cultural texts in circulation either

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blatantly or subtly insist that all women should be slim women. Dieting and exercise are extolled as routes for achieving this, and the imperative to operate strict controls over the self is internalized:
Dieting disciplines the bodys hungers: appetite must be monitored at all times and governed by an iron will. Since the innocent need of the organism for food will not be denied, the body becomes ones enemy, an alien being intent on thwarting the disciplinary project. (Bartky, 1990: 66)

By using a Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power, Bartky draws very direct links between the internalization of contemporary views of what a woman must look like and an intense, individualized experience of self-hatred, a point which will be developed later. What is less apparent in Bartkys deployment of Foucault, however, is an engagement with power as constitutive, particularly in relation to issues such as pleasure and desire. Allowing that this may be a valid criticism of Foucaults work itself as well as that of later Foucauldians, nonetheless some feminist writers concerned with appearance have managed to nd Foucault useful in relation to his theorization of the constitutive, rather than the repressive, aspects of power (Bordo, 1993; Davis, 1995).
Particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power, for example of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate rather than repress desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance. (Bordo, 1993: 167)

In other words feminist appropriations of Foucault can theorize a gendered subject constituted within regimes of appearance and body regulation, but who owns and operates these regimes with some sense that they are of and for themself. Daviss work on cosmetic breast surgery graphically illustrates the lived contradictions not just humiliations experienced by women actively seeking to reshape their bodies by drawing on the discourses and technologies demonstrative of contemporary gendered power regimes (Davis, 1995). Varied subjective experiences, for example, of exhilaration, relief and pleasure are expressed by women in the research, having partaken of a practice which belongs to a broad regime of technologies, practices and discourses, which dene the female body as decient and in need of constant transformation (Davis, 1995: 49). Women are neither victims nor dupes collaborating in their own worst interests but nonetheless are caught up with processes of normalisation and homogenisation (Lovell, 2000: 341). And these processes specically dene the female body as inadequate and in need of constant remodication. Introducing some feminist post-structural analysis of the bodies of women as embodied and experienced sites, as well as sights, then, seems productive in

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understanding the central problematic of why it seems to be specically women who demonstrate both extreme and everyday experiences of body self-hatred. However, there still remains the question of why it is specically young women who become the psychiatric populations with eating disorders and the dominant voices in the female chorus of corporeal self-criticism, and it is this aspect that will now be considered. Young Women Doing Looks As evidenced above, it is between 14 and 18 years that most, and the most extreme, forms of body-hatred are manifest, and mainly in girls, which indicates that the dimension youth may have signicance. However, the literature concerning specically young women and appearance issues is still relatively small, and there is even less on young women and appearance with a racial and/or class dimension. Even where work is directly concerned with young womens experiences, for example, Budgeons recent piece on young women, identity and the body, it is gender and gender relations that tend to be the major focus, rather than any particular signicance of age or life stage (Budgeon, 2003). Of course the sociology of youth, and youth studies more generally, exists as an established academic eld in its own right, engaging with the application of major epistemological groupings to the life-world of the (usually) under 18-yearold. Certainly there is a now a substantial body of work on young womens lives. Feminist academics such Grifn (1985, 1993) and Lees (1986, 1989) draw on structuralist and more recently, in the case of the former, post-structural theory to explore the class differentiated life-worlds of young women. Although not directly concerned with body and appearance, key issues such as the inculcation and policing of feminine identities are problematized. Skeggs (1997) shares much with these two sociologists, particularly in relation to a structural analysis, and her attention to appearance issues leads to her work being considered in more depth below. Additionally, in the 1990s, McRobbie (1993) and Walkerdine (1997) for example, who are more grounded in cultural studies and postmodern theory, explored the sociocultural contexts and environments of meanings inhabited by contemporary young women. Some of this work directly addresses the issue of the circulation of ideas which foreground doing looks as fundamental to female identity. A study by McRobbie demonstrates that the space given in girls magazines to appearance issues has grown since the early 1980s, but importantly that girls actively engage with the pleasures and pains of visual identity (1991).

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A third recent strand of work on young women has emanated from social psychology, where issues such as body image and adolescent self-esteem have been explored (Grogan, 1999; Martin, 1996). The theoretical eld is complex, then, and evolving. Productive mutual engagement with the increasingly social constructionist led sociology of childhood may be changing how youth is conceptualized (James and Prout, 1997; Jenks, 1996). Examining the various groupings of discourses which construct the notion of young person, and taking into account the power relations implicated in the production and circulation of these, it is revealing that the girl is frequently positioned as synonymous with her body and appearance, in ways that may be problematic for her. For example, as the teenage consumer dened by post-war capitalism as in need of fashion and physical enhancement separate from women or children, shopping and style have come to be seen as an intrinsic part of being a girl (Johnson, 1993). Similarly the 20th-century psycho-medical discourse of the adolescent, permeated with notions of storm and stress, emotional instability and hormonal imbalances, has particular implications for young women and their bodies. The physical manifestations of womanhood, such as menstruation, are pathologized, and seen as producing psychological instability and girls attempts to exercise control over their bodies, for example by limiting food intake, have been medicalized as the mental illnesses of anorexia and bulimia. In such discourses girls bodies are positioned as needing endless re-clothing, re-styling and market-based improvement, and may also be understood as liable to render them unstable, unwell or even mad (Frost, 2001). As well as this, generally speaking, social constructionist approach, what seems of particular analytical strength from the sociology of youth is its ease with the notion of young peoples identicatory processes involving group membership. Subcultures and mates, friendships and gangs: much analysis takes into account that identity is not simply a matter of the individual and society, but is mediated within and through group afliations (Grifn, 1985; Langman, 1992; Stewart, 1992). That the context of consumer capitalism itself may render group membership and identication problematic has been the subject of some recent studies and may be useful to reect on (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Langman, 1992; Miles, 2000). Identication, appearance, consumerism and the group are theorized as symbiotically connected, and recent empirical research is also beginning to support the notion that group acceptance and identication may be dependent on what kind of image, including body image, a young person can construct (Frosh et al., 2002; Frost, 2001).

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That the adorned and presented body (good) looks can usefully be understood as a form of cultural capital for young people, especially girls, may be illuminating to consider. Structuralists such as Bourdieu are clearly key to such an understanding of how practices of appearance via consumption can be socially divided, divisive and damaging. Edwards, for example, addressing the contradictions of consumption draws on Bourdieu to consider how taste within consumption is socially patterned and economically determined, and how this may impact on social relations.
What Bourdieus work still demonstrates is that, without necessarily descending into economic determinism, consumption is still too socially ordered and divisive. Moreover, it forms part of the wider processes of symbolic violence whereby cultural capital becomes precisely a weapon of exclusion. (Edwards, 2000: 1312)

Connected to but not entirely coterminous with class, the all-important group memberships of young people may increasingly be understood as predicated on the cultural capital and potential weapons of exclusion that doing looks can encompass. Frosh, for example, studying boys in London schools found that a sizeable number of boys admitted to forming opinions of other boys based on the brand names of their clothes (Frosh et al., 2002). A recent Norwegian study quoted by Frosh found that membership of groups was not to do with young people making choices between different but equal sub-groupings, but with the operations of hierarchical stratication based on power and exclusion. Whether you were considered a nerd, a normal or cool was based on appearance (Storm-Mathison, in Frosh et al., 2002). The girls interviews undertaken by the author in 1999 reinforced this view. They also, for example, explained that there were cool groups, full of pretty people in the right clothes and sad groups, for those whose cultural capital did not entitle them to a place in the sun. Although consumerism has been theorized as a site of potential (contradictory) pleasure for women (Nava, 1992), the authors research discovered that hierarchies of cool, usually involving knowledgeable deployment of expensive consumer items, can have a brutal impact on the lived experience of many young people. And, as Bourdieu would lead one to expect, class position itself relates strongly to body dissatisfaction in women:
. . . the proportion of women who consider themselves below average in beauty falls very rapidly as one moves up the social hierarchy. It is not surprising that petit bourgeois women, who are almost as dissatised with their bodies as working-class women (they are the ones who most often wish they looked different and who are most discontented with various bits of their bodies) . . . devote such great investments and self-denial and especially time to improve their appearance. (Bourdieu, 1984: 206)

In the authors interviews with specically young women, poverty and class

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connected directly to pecking orders, popularity and unpopularity and in-group membership or exclusion, which may reect the kind of group identicatory processes and the more subtle and uid hierarchies associated with being young. Skeggs (1997), whose ethnographic research with a slightly older group of working-class women is also grounded in Bourdieus theorization of social capital, recognizes Bourdieus argument that attractiveness functions as a form of capital corporeal capital which is both delimited by class position and functions as a form of distinction within social classes. Like the present author, Skeggs found that as well as being able to absorb and reproduce the versions of femininity circulated by media images, there was another set of standards and rules in action which impact on entry to sub-groups. For Skeggs this is a question of local knowledge.
Looking good . . . is validated and made a site of anxiety through the multitude of womens magazines and adverts which play on the fears of not looking good. This is where the local became an important site for challenging the representations which were produced at national/global levels. . . . However local interpretation could also invoke hierarchies of corporeal and cultural capital, as the following conversation demonstrates between Rose and Jean (1986): Rose: Now look at Sandra shes clueless. I wouldnt be seen dead out with her . . . (Skeggs, 1997: 104)

Appearance may determine who will mix with whom, and who is excluded. And Skeggss sample acknowledge that this was even more important when they were younger (1997). For youth then, the vital importance of looks for social acceptance is demonstrable. As one young woman interviewed by the author in 1999 commented: Society is able to reject you on the basis of your appearance and everyone, especially young people, wants or needs to be accepted. The ability or inability to produce a visual identity which conforms to the mass images circulated within consumer capitalist society and the specic demands of sub-groups and localities is dependent on cultural capital. Young women may experience their own appearance as a vital tool for establishing social acceptance. They must adopt towards themselves an attitude of continual anxious selfappraisal as they strive to be attractive enough to be accepted. That self-worth (and group value) is purchased over the counter, or dependent only on visual image, may reinforce the already existing set of internalized normative prescriptions about women and appearance advanced by Bartky in the previous section. Thinking about Young Women and Appearance: Stigma and Shame Finally, then, having given some thought to how doing appearance can be understood through mainly interactionist, structuralist and post-structural frameworks, a specic focus is now given to how young womens subjective

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understanding of inhabiting their looks can be understood. Though much of the work above implies that this may be problematic, specically foregrounding the subjects themselves within their social world seems a necessary dimension to this multi-stranded enquiry. Returning to Goffman (and his feminist appropriators) represents one possible way forward. Goffmans concern with interactive processes, for example of an appraising system and an appraised subject, in his work on stigma, suggests a way of conceptualizing how physical appearance, or other attributes, can generate identity damage. Working within a social interactionist tradition, as discussed above, Goffmans central concern was the issue of how social identity is produced and maintained (Goffman, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1971, 1976). Within this context, he identies the process of stigmatization, dened by him as: a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity from which [the person] is reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discredited one (Goffman, 1963: 12). Within a dynamic relational context, not just as the passive product of a feature owned by a person, the normative expectations of one person or one group of people of the initially presented social identity of another are not met. Expectations of normal presentation of self are not universal, of course, though Goffman suggests that there are important attributes that almost everywhere in our society are discrediting (1963: 14). Goffman also makes the point, perhaps even more universally accepted now than in the 1960s, that the actual standards of what a normal social identity is, especially the physical appearance aspect, are becoming far more hegemonic (1963: 17). Goffman, though, was concerned to connect this external appraisal of normal with the internal experience of being appraised. He uses self-hatred as the subjectively experienced dimension of being stigmatized, an interpretation similar to some feminist work, for example Bartky, above, who hypothesizes shame in women and girls who have internalized dislike of their physical selves. Goffmans work can be drawn on to explicate the complex set of dynamic relationships between physical appearance and the internalized experience of discontent emanating from this, and the impact this has on overall identity. Some feminist writers have, however, drawn on the notions of stigma and shame to consider both the general experience of women in relation to their appearance and the differential impact on various groups of women whose physicality means they are seen as especially unacceptable, and the damage that both these parts of this patriarchal system of values do to womens subjectivity. Initially the rst of these may seem a surprising usage; after all, more-or-less half the world is female, so how can the general experience of having and presenting a womans face and body be stigmatizing?

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Tseelons sustained application of Goffmans work is concerned to address this point. For her the issue is not only the most obvious use of the concept: that in a world where beauty is valued, lacking beauty is stigmatizing but also that women are stigmatised by the very expectation to be beautiful . . . [even though] the experience of being or becoming beautiful can be very rewarding (Tseelon, 1995: 88, her emphasis). Goffmans work, she argues, offers a framework in which womens attractiveness (by whatever measure) can be seen as stigma because of both womens constant visibility the notion of femininity as a constant and ongoing public performance in which self-conscious presentation is a necessary part and the fact that uncertainty is built into the construction of beauty as dening social and self-worth, followed by permanent insecurity of becoming ugly unless rigorous discipline is exercised (Tseelon, 1992: 301). The knowledge that attractiveness must be publicly performed but can only ever be a temporary state, a eeting moment boundaried by insecurity, leads her to conclude, using Goffmans designations, that beauty for women . . . would be more appropriately considered a stigma symbol than a prestige symbol (Tseelon, 1992: 301). This is useful. Tseelon suggests that a common experience for women is that of being permanently on show and constantly performing beauty; in Goffmans terminology their appearance is their master status. However, it may also be useful to conceptualize that there are divisions and differences within this homogenized gender system, youth being but one of them. For example, black women express a clear view that black skin and black features are stigmatized in women, because white skin and European ethnic features are the norm or standard. As Kaws research on Asian-American women and cosmetic surgery leads her to argue: Racial minorities may internalize a body image produced by the dominant cultures racial ideology and because of it, begin to loathe, mutilate and revise parts of their bodies (Kaw, 1998: 168). They come to see themselves as different and inferior: the essence of stigma. Black young women, then, may experience acute difculties. The distress expressed by women who are seriously overweight connects to their self-perceived failure to t into an expected female norm of slimness. They also are seen as, and see themselves as, deviant (Bartky, 1990). This would also seem to be true of young women (Frost, 2001). Though of course there are white, slim women. There has to be a standard of normal in operation to understand stigma and some women will more nearly approximate it, even if only briey. Thinking through the notion of normal and stigmatizing as Goffman outlines, in relation to young women, it may be that the perception of normal and/or the possibility of this, is becoming painfully

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small. If, as this article considered earlier, young women are bombarded by the images of consumer capitalism, then their internalized standard of normal is actually based on illusory women (devised from carefully constructed photoimages and lm angles) against whom they may all feel more or less inadequate. The growth of global communications and visual media means that virtually all young women have blonde, thin American/European models and actresses as icons and role models. The growth of world markets for cosmetics and other products for physical enhancement has also shrunk the category of normal. Featherstone makes the point, for example, that Advertising thus helped create a world in which individuals are made to feel emotionally vulnerable, constantly monitoring themselves for bodily imperfections which could no longer be regarded as natural (Featherstone, 1991: 175). Any imperfection may be seen as unnatural. Normal may well be a diminishing category with many different new forms of deviant created as an effect of this. One might reasonably speculate that for teenage girls only a height 5 ft 7 to 5 ft 9 inches, a weight of 4555 kilos, a awless skin and long straight fair hair, are taken as normal. Anything else can be subject to the process of stigmatization. That the normal is becoming a fantasy against which everything real is experienced as stigmatizing a notion which brings us nearer to Tseelons argument above may be an important conceptual area not yet sufciently explored. Importantly for this examination of the impact on teenage girls of not measuring up, Goffman also theorized that there is an emotional dimension in failing to live up to expectations. The experience of the individual who cannot produce the normal social identity required, and is aware that they do not come up to standard, is that of being discredited; of a personal failure to pass. Because the opinion formed by those making the judgements does not stop at immediate presentation, but inevitably imputes certain characteristics and personality features on the basis of initial presentation, the discrediting of the person is not limited to the supercial but takes in the whole identity. The stigmatized individual experiences their whole self as not good enough. In the shared, increasingly hegemonic belief system inhabited by all participants of this interaction, then:
The stigmatised individual tends to share the same beliefs about identity that we do . . . The standards he has incorporated from the wider society equip him to be intimately alive to what others see as his failing, inevitably causing him, if only for moments, to agree that he does fall short of what he really ought to be. . . . Shame becomes a central possibility . . . (Goffman, 1963: 1718)

And because that sense of inadequacy is not momentary within a specic social interaction, but is internalized within the individuals own meaning system,

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shame can also become an identity issue, experienced privately and personally: self-hatred and self-derogation can also occur when only he and a mirror are about (Goffman, 1963: 18). Shame, as the internalized concomitant to stigma, seems to have a particular resonance in work on teenage girls and the body. The social interpretation of the biological and appearance changes of puberty, resulting in changed perceptions and new imperatives to police their bodies, are frequently linked to dimensions of this painful emotion. Martins research with adolescent girls in the 1990s for example leads her to assert that Girls still feel shame about their adult bodies, particularly breast development and menstruation (1996: 2). Lees work found that the onset of menstruation made young women feel dirty and unclean, ashamed and fearful, ndings which are reiterated in Oinass work on the onset of puberty. Learning to interpret her body as shameful and potentially shaming, then, may be part of the experience of becoming a woman (Lee, 1998; Oinas, 1998). Youngs seminal piece on the adaptation of girls to mature feminine body deportment perceives girls as becoming uncondent in their bodies, timid and inhibited: limited, in other words, and held in check (Young, 1990). Girls bodies in themselves may be experienced as sources of humiliation and limitation, stigma and shame. And specically in relation to doing looks, the growth of breasts and an adult shape (in a world where, perhaps, cat-walk imagery suggests pre-pubescence is the desirable shape) further alienates young women from their visual identities. As Tseelon suggests above, all women must do attractive. And, as one teenage girl in Hollways study remarks: theres a hell of a lot of hurt around not being attractive enough (Hollway, 1984: 240). For all women stigma may form part of the beauty system. But for young women the way in which the onset of puberty has come to be viewed, the physical development of a womanly body, and the self-appraisal against fantasy norms and the inevitable internalization of a sense of inadequacy this produces equates with shame and body-hatred. Stigma, or the interactive experience of both being seen to be awed and the subjective experience of inferiority, may offer a useful exploratory framework for understanding how doing looks can adversely impact on girls experiences of themselves and their bodies. As a 17-year-old in the authors research painfully but eloquently expressed:
I feel like it is something I worry about, that people can hurt me with. . . . I think if you have an experience like that [of being called ugly], it is something you will never forget, and it is always there, that somebody is going to say something like that to you, and it is, it is just so humiliating.

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Conclusion The primary concern of this article has been to present and examine a theoretical framework for understanding the complex relationship between contemporary western young women and their appearance. For the authors purposes (underpinning and symbiotically informing research) such a model had to be sufciently exible and robust to generate understanding across the range of dimensions implicit in such an enquiry, from the impact of global economies to the lived, emotional experience. Inevitably this has been a partial account, and important issues remain unaddressed. For example, the question of whether the work on youth and the body equally applies to boys is not discussed here, but has been considered by the author elsewhere (Frost, 2003). To summarize: the article begins with Goffmans universalistic inter-actionist work on the inevitability of the performance, including visual display, of self. This serves to carefully free doing looks from the often implicitly moralistic dualism of enforced versus freely chosen activity. Within the context of particular cultural mores and social norms, subjects must actively construct and reconstruct an appropriate appearance. How they do this allows some sense of a (prescribed) agency; that they do it is determined. Following from Goffman, Giddens and, as importantly, his more structurally orientated critics, help to locate the appearance of the body in contemporary western consumer culture. Doing appearance is an inevitable part of reexive identity production. Consumer capitalism instils dreams and desires of perfect bodies and perfect beauty, to full via the market place. It necessarily fails to assuage such desires, or why would subjects continue to buy? This idea of constant striving for the impossible, opens up the discussion to some notion of capitalist damage experienced individually as objectication, dislocation, a sense of continual disappointment in relation to how we may perceive our looks. The article then considers the gender dimension. Bartkys post-structuralist consideration of womens situation within contemporary capitalist societies opens up the issue of the gendered nature of the experience of bodily alienation, as capitalist imperatives build on already existing prescriptions of visual femininity. Women are subject to these normative meanings. They become part of a system of self-surveillance, and are deployed by women to constantly police themselves and nd themselves wanting. How best the issue of young women and appearance can be understood is then examined. Drawing primarily on Bourdieu and his feminist appropriators such as Skeggs, the notion of appearance as a form of cultural (or corporeal)

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capital permitting or denying access to hierarchically structured groups and subgroups is discussed. The group context of youth identities, it is suggested, may render the activity of doing appearance a source of anxiety and insecurity because of its status in social acceptance. That the girl in the body (the physically changing, adolescent body) may be stigmatized (in Goffmans sense) and consequently experience shame and alienation from her body and its appearance is nally propounded. Overall then, via this framework, the young woman in the body in consumer capitalism has been located and identied, and overall found to be increasingly engaged in constituting a visual self which, despite offering some opportunities for pleasure and play, may also be experienced as insecure, alienating and inadequate. It may be worth noting too that the ndings of the empirical research with young women referred to in the article mainly serve to both reinforce and build on this model. References
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McRobbie, A. (1991) Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. London: Macmillan. McRobbie, A. (1993) Shut up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity, Cultural Studies 7: 40626. MacSweeney, M. (1993) Anorexic Bodies: A Feminist and Sociological Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa. London: Routledge. Malson, H. (1998) The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-structuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa. London: Routledge. Martin, K.A. (1996) Puberty, Sexuality and the Self: Girls and Boys at Adolescence. New York: Routledge. May, C. and A. Cooper (1995) Personal Identity and Social Change: Some Theoretical Considerations, Acta Sociologica 38: 7585. Miles, S. (2000) Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Buckingham: Open University Press. Nava, M. (1992) Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism. London: Sage. Oinas, A. (1998) Medicalisation by Whom? Accounts of Menstruation Conveyed by Young Women and Medical Experts in Medical Advisory Columns, Sociology of Health and Illness 20(1): 5270. Phillips, K. (1996) The Broken Mirror: Understanding and Treating Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ransley, J.K. (1999) Eating Disorders and Adolescents: What Are the Issues for Secondary Schools?, Health Education 99(1). Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Singer, L. (1989) Bodies Pleasures Powers, Differences 1: 4565. Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Stewart, F. (1992) The Adolescent as Consumer, in J.C. Coleman and C. Warren-Adamson (eds) Youth Policy in the 1990s: The Way Forward. London: Routledge. Tseelon, E. (1992) What is Beautiful is Bad: Physical Attractiveness as Stigma, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 22(3): 295309. Tseelon, E. (1995) The Masque of Femininity. London: Sage. Walkerdine, V. (1997) Daddys Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Witz, A. (2000) Whose Body Matters? Feminist Sociology and the Corporeal Turn in Sociology and Feminism, Body & Society 6(2): 124. Wolf, N. ( 1990) The Beauty Myth. London: Vintage. Wolff, J. (1990) Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Young, I.M. (1990) Throwing Like a Girl, and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Liz Frost lectures primarily in psychosocial studies and mental health, and has past experience in interdisciplinary womens studies. An involvement in community adolescent mental health led to an interest in young womens often unhappy relationship with their bodies, an unhappy relationship which undertaking a small pilot study revealed was mirrored in normal school girls. This research project formed part of what is primarily a theoretical discussion of young women and the body, published in book form in 2001 (Young Women and the Body: A Feminist Sociology, Palgrave/Macmillan). The author has also produced work on the subject of the relationship between appearance, identity and mental well-being as conference papers, book chapters and journal articles.