Bodies, body work and gender: Exploring a Deleuzian approach

Abstract

This article is concerned with the relationships between the body, gender, and society. Body work, which involves a range of practices to maintain or modify the body's appearance, is central to the way the body is experienced in a Western, industrialized, and consumerist society such as Australia. Through body work practices, gender is continually reasserted and reconstructed. Examining body work is a way of exploring the ways that gender is embodied and lived. Body work must be understood as embodied processes which move beyond binarized analyses of the body in society. In this regard, embodiment and Deleuzian frameworks which focus on ‘becomings’ provide important analytic insights. Drawing on 22 qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in 2010 with men and women aged 18–35 in Melbourne, Australia, this article explores the ways that body work and gender can be understood as relations through which bodies ‘become’. There were contrasts and similarities between the male and female participants' experiences of feeling pressure to change their bodies. Most women recognized the social pressure guiding expectations of their bodies, and although many felt that this was inappropriate, this did not lessen the pressure they experienced to ‘work on’ their bodies. A number of men too described feeling pressure to attain, or maintain, the ideal body but were less critical of this pressure. Body work must be understood as embodied processes which move beyond binarized analyses of the body. In this regard Deleuzian frameworks that focus on ‘becomings’ provide important conceptual developments.