Body & Society 2005 Frost 63 85

Body & Society
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Theorizing the Young Woman in the Body

Liz Frost
Body & Society 2005 11: 63
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05049851
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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 women’s 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 dimen-
sion.
Initially the article gives some consideration to the imperative of personal
display for all subjects of late consumer capitalism, drawing primarily on inter-
actionist 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 stratifications and finally interactionist work is drawn
Body & Society © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 11(1): 63–85
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05049851
www.sagepublications.com
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 64
64 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1
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 14–18-year-old girls than other social
groups (Fombonne, 1995; Ransley, 1999). Body dysmorphic disorder dispropor-
tionately affects this age group, and self-harming behaviour similarly has a
predominantly young and female profile (Favazza, 1998; House et al., 1999;
Phillips, 1996). As well as diagnosed mental health problems, more nebulous
difficulties 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 government’s ‘Body Summit’ in 2000 publicly
recognized that the unhealthy state of young women’s bodies is now an official
concern.
The impact of women’s 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 field with the theoretical tools predominantly available at
the time. For example, in the early 1970s and into the 1980s, work relating to
women’s 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 women’s 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 fields
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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Theorizing the Young Woman 65
boundaries facilitated by the somewhat generalized notion of social construc-

tionism, 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 scarification 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 author’s research with young women, some references to which arise in
the text, may be informative. In 1998 the author undertook a small-scale quali-
tative 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 appear-
ance. 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
fine 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 first 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 surface-
located 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 affiliation, 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. Goffman’s 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 phenom-
enon.
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 profit
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 Goffman’s 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 produc-
tion, 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 Goffman’s 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 acknowl-
edging 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 reflexivity 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 significant than

fashions, such as looking youthful, and not just media commodification-
produced. ‘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-reflexive 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 specific to this point in
time. Within this self-reflexive 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,
fit and physically attractive body are all consciously ‘worked at’.
‘Self’ becomes a projection grounded in self-orientation and, most import-
antly, 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, self-
determining, individualized – almost ‘making it up as they go along’, from avail-
able information. That this kind of identity is prone to producing such
‘conditions’ as eating disorders is quite specifically 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 distinc-
tive 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 Goffman’s 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
reflexive self-creation, in which ‘perfection’ is the goal. Insecurity and self-
criticism 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 specifically 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 self-
construction (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
reflexive self-construction, it seems they are not able to incorporate this comfort-
ably 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 differen-
tial 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
‘beautification’ is an identity imperative, failure to achieve this would be experi-
enced 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
identificatory processes. The most glaring, pointed out by May and Cooper
above, is that of differential, or limited, resources to construct self and lifestyle
to one’s 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 fit, 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 chal-
lenge 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 reflexively reconstruct their identi-
ties – the advice columns and self-help books, the television and film represen-
tations 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 fictions.
These criticisms suggest some limits to the version of self-reflexive 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 body’s 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 person’s everyday life. Even leaving the question of resources aside
for a moment, is it possible to have a ‘good’ relationship, a fulfilled mind, a great
job, ‘well-adjusted’ children, and a worked, lean and fit body? People may
identify with delusions, against which any achievement induces a sense of
disappointment. A young woman who tries to reflexively 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 influenced by group pressures and the
visibility of role-models, as well as by socio-economic circumstances’ (1991: 82)
– but not the ‘influence’ 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 theor-
etically coherent, but veers towards the (optimistically) voluntaristic. Feather-
stone’s more structurally grounded work, briefly drawn on above, is helpful in
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raising both additional and critical dimensions within the whole issue of appear-
ance, particularly in discussing the hegemonic and stratified nature of body
experience under the imperatives of consumer capitalism. Similarly, Bourdieu’s
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 Women’s 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 gender-
specific. 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 insufficient 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, Foucault’s 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).
Foucault’s engagement with questions of identity and how it is both consti-
tuted 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 specific circumstances, ubiquitous relations of power impact
on the subjectivities around and through whom power circulates. This may be
important for understanding young women’s troubled relationships with their
bodies now.
Grounded in an historical analysis of the development of forms of power,
Foucault identifies 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, self-
surveillance. (Wolff, 1990: 125)
In relation specifically to the body, Foucault argues, historically such insti-

tutions 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 observer’s gaze.
How they ‘should’ behave, or perform, is not subject to individual interpre-
tation 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 women’s particular
relationship with their appearance. Bartky, for example, synthesizes this
Foucauldian approach with a more Marxist stance, linking the notions of surveil-
lance 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. Women’s 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 body’s 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 one’s 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 Bartky’s 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 Foucault’s work itself as well as that of later Foucauldians, nonethe-
less some feminist writers concerned with appearance have managed to find
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.
Davis’s 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 demon-
strative of contemporary gendered power regimes (Davis, 1995). Varied subjec-
tive 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 define the female body
as deficient and in need of constant transformation’ (Davis, 1995: 49).
Women are neither victims nor dupes collaborating in their own worst inter-
ests but nonetheless ‘are caught up with processes of normalisation and
homogenisation’ (Lovell, 2000: 341). And these processes specifically define the
female body as inadequate and in need of constant remodification.
Introducing some feminist post-structural analysis of the bodies of women as
embodied and experienced ‘sites’, as well as ‘sights’, then, seems productive in
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 74
understanding the central problematic of why it seems to be specifically women

who demonstrate both extreme and everyday experiences of body self-hatred.
However, there still remains the question of why it is specifically 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 significance. However, the literature
concerning specifically 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 women’s
experiences, for example, Budgeon’s 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 significance of age or ‘life stage’ (Budgeon, 2003).
Of course the sociology of youth, and youth studies more generally, exists as
an established academic field in its own right, engaging with the application of
major epistemological groupings to the life-world of the (usually) under 18-year-
old.
Certainly there is a now a substantial body of work on young women’s lives.
Feminist academics such Griffin (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’ maga-
zines to appearance issues has grown since the early 1980s, but importantly that
girls actively engage with the pleasures and pains of visual identity (1991).
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 75
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 field is complex, then, and evolving. Productive mutual
engagement with the increasingly social constructionist led sociology of child-
hood 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 defined 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 people’s identificatory processes involving group member-
ship. 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 affiliations (Griffin, 1985; Langman, 1992;
Stewart, 1992). That the context of consumer capitalism itself may render group
membership and identification problematic has been the subject of some recent
studies and may be useful to reflect on (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Langman,
1992; Miles, 2000). Identification, appearance, consumerism and the group are
theorized as symbiotically connected, and recent empirical research is also begin-
ning to support the notion that group acceptance and identification may be
dependent on what kind of image, including body image, a young person can
construct (Frosh et al., 2002; Frost, 2001).
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 76
That the adorned and presented body – (good) ‘looks’ – can usefully be under-
stood 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 ‘contra-
dictions 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 Bourdieu’s 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: 131–2)
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 stratification 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 (contradic-
tory) pleasure for women (Nava, 1992), the author’s 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 dissatisfied 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 author’s interviews with specifically young women, poverty and class
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 77
connected directly to pecking orders, popularity and unpopularity and in-group

membership or exclusion, which may reflect the kind of group identificatory
processes and the more subtle and fluid hierarchies associated with being young.
Skeggs (1997), whose ethnographic research with a slightly older group of
working-class women is also grounded in Bourdieu’s theorization of social capital,
recognizes Bourdieu’s 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 women’s
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 she’s clueless. I wouldn’t be seen dead out with her . . . (Skeggs,
1997: 104)
Appearance may determine who will mix with whom, and who is excluded.
And Skeggs’s 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 specific 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 self-
appraisal 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 prescrip-
tions 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 specific focus is now given to how young women’s subjective
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 78
understanding of inhabiting their ‘looks’ can be understood. Though much of the

work above implies that this may be problematic, specifically 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.
Goffman’s 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, Goffman’s
central concern was the issue of how social identity is produced and maintained
(Goffman, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1971, 1976). Within this context, he identifies the
process of stigmatization, defined 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 every-
where 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.
Goffman’s 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 women’s subjectivity.
Initially the first 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 present-
ing a woman’s face and body be stigmatizing?
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 79
Tseelon’s sustained application of Goffman’s 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).
Goffman’s work, she argues, offers a framework in which women’s attrac-
tiveness (by whatever measure) can be seen as stigma because of both women’s
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 defining 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 fleeting moment boundaried by insecurity, leads her
to conclude, using Goffman’s 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 Goffman’s
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 Kaw’s research on Asian-American
women and cosmetic surgery leads her to argue: ‘Racial minorities may internal-
ize a body image produced by the dominant culture’s 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 difficulties.
The distress expressed by women who are seriously overweight connects to
their self-perceived failure to fit 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 briefly. 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
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 80
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 photo-
images and film 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 diminish-
ing 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 45–55 kilos, a flawless 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 stig-
matizing – a notion which brings us nearer to Tseelon’s argument above – may be
an important conceptual area not yet sufficiently 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 superficial 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: 17–18)
And because that sense of inadequacy is not momentary within a specific social
interaction, but is internalized within the individual’s own meaning system,
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 81
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. Martin’s 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). Lee’s work found
that the onset of menstruation made young women feel ‘dirty and unclean,
ashamed and fearful’, findings which are reiterated in Oinas’s 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).
Young’s seminal piece on the adaptation of girls to mature feminine body
deportment perceives girls as becoming unconfident 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 specifically 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 Hollway’s study remarks: ‘there’s 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 flawed 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 author’s 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.
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 82
Conclusion
The primary concern of this article has been to present and examine a theoreti-
cal framework for understanding the complex relationship between contem-
porary western young women and their appearance. For the author’s purposes
(underpinning and symbiotically informing research) such a model had to be
sufficiently flexible 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 unad-
dressed. 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 Goffman’s 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 particu-
lar cultural mores and social norms, subjects must actively construct and recon-
struct 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 reflexive
identity production. Consumer capitalism instils dreams and desires of perfect
bodies and perfect ‘beauty’, to fulfil 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 objectification, dislocation, a
sense of continual disappointment in relation to how we may perceive our looks.
The article then considers the gender dimension. Bartky’s post-structuralist
consideration of women’s 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 femi-
ninity. 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 find 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)
03 frost (ds) 24/1/05 3:16 pm Page 83
capital permitting or denying access to hierarchically structured groups and sub-

groups 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 Goffman’s sense) and conse-
quently experience shame and alienation from her body and its appearance is
finally propounded.
Overall then, via this framework, the young woman in the body in consumer
capitalism has been located and identified, 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 inade-
quate. It may be worth noting too that the findings of the empirical research with
young women referred to in the article mainly serve to both reinforce and build
on this model.
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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): 295–309.
Tseelon, E. (1995) The Masque of Femininity. London: Sage.
Walkerdine, V. (1997) Daddy’s 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): 1–24.
Wolf, N. ( 1990) The Beauty Myth. London: Vintage.
Wolff, J. (1990) Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Liz Frost lectures primarily in psychosocial studies and mental health, and has past experience in inter-
disciplinary women’s studies. An involvement in community adolescent mental health led to an
interest in young women’s 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.

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Body & Society

Theorizing the Young Woman in the Body

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Theorizing the Young Woman in the

64 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

on to explore how unhappy embodiment may be subjectively experienced. by

Theorizing the Young Woman 65

boundaries facilitated by the somewhat generalized notion of social construc-

Social Identity and Appearance

66 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

Although the extent of self-determination the actor exercises is somewhat

Theorizing the Young Woman 67

The Appearance-oriented Subject of Consumer Capitalism

68 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

For Giddens, the importance of bodily appearance is more significant than

Theorizing the Young Woman 69

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Theorizing the Young Woman 71

Feminism and Women’s Appearance Construction

In relation to ‘stories of the body’ and embodied appearance, it is his stories

72 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

In relation specifically to the body, Foucault argues, historically such insti-

Theorizing the Young Woman 73

By using a Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power, Bartky draws very

In other words feminist appropriations of Foucault can theorize a gendered

74 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

understanding the central problematic of why it seems to be specifically women

Young Women ‘Doing Looks’

Theorizing the Young Woman 75

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connected directly to pecking orders, popularity and unpopularity and in-group

Thinking about Young Women and Appearance: Stigma and Shame

78 Body and Society Vol. 11 No. 1

understanding of inhabiting their ‘looks’ can be understood. Though much of the

Theorizing the Young Woman 79

Tseelon’s sustained application of Goffman’s work is concerned to address this

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Theorizing the Young Woman 81

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capital permitting or denying access to hierarchically structured groups and sub-

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Theorizing the Young Woman 85

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Body & Society 2005 Frost 63 85

Body & Society 2005 Frost 63 85