Learning a critical gaze: producing gendered bodies in skin and spa therapy education and training

Abstract

This study scrutinises the production of bodies in skin and spa therapy education and training. More specifically, it focuses on how bodies are produced when participants are positioned and position themselves in classroom interaction and interviews. Drawing on a post-structural approach, inspired by Butler, regularities of description and self-description were analysed. This approach provided analytical tools for analysing how people engage with discourse in this micro-context of education and training, and enabled an understanding of how these processes are gendered. The results show how these educational arrangements enact a process where the students learn to adapt a critical gaze towards bodies, wherein they position themselves as self-aware and responsible through femininity. These self-governing processes produce particular relations to the bodies of others, disciplining others through disciplining oneself. Bodies are produced as biological entities that are unruly and – if left without discipline and correction – imperfect. At the same time, the imperfect body is produced through and produces normativity, offering alternative ways of producing normative femininity, alongside naturalising skin and spa therapy consumption and activity.