‘She’s very slim’: talking about body-size in all-female interactions

Abstract

A feminist issue that still attracts a great deal of both academic and public debate is the topic of body-image, particularly in relation to women’s physical and emotional health. In today’s media-saturated world, women are constantly surrounded by images of young successful media presenters, actresses, and music-stars, who are presented as role models of women’s ‘post-feminist’ achievements, yet these ‘independent’ icons all represent a similar, media-generated, ‘idealized’ perspective of physical beauty. This paper examines extracts taken from interactions involving a group of British teenage girls and a group of British professional women. The aim of the research was to explore whether the need to aspire to a socially ‘acceptable’ body-size is evident in conversational topics relating to diet and exercise. The analysis of conversational moves considers the question of whether the women discursively orient to, or, resist, the socially sanctioned ideal of the ‘thin woman’ (Wetherell, 1992). Examples from the data suggest that, in discussions of body-size, an admission of the need to lose weight may expose a speaker to an interactionally situated face threat (Brown and Levinson, 1987). Further, the examples examined here show that discourse practices relating to body-size raise the issue of peer competition amongst women.