Abstract
In this article, we explore lay men's understanding of the relationship between other's bodily appearance and health-'the Lay Gaze'. We applied the theoretical concepts of biopower, medical gaze, bodyism and healthism-the ideology where one feature is that a slim body is equivalent to a healthy body-and interviewed 18 adult and elderly men in rural Norway, representing a heterogeneous group regarding age, ethnicity and education. To explore the interviewees' subjective perception or 'gaze', the interviewees were presented with eight pictures of different people. Our main findings were, first, that the sample of a relatively heterogeneous group of adult and elderly lay men in rural Norway talk similarly about body appearance and health and follow the healthism discourse with an embedded association between body appearance and health assessment. Second, we found some variation regarding how interviewees define other standards for the elderly and black people.
Highlights
Lay people relate appearance to their own health (Hervik, 2016; Hervik & Fasting, 2016; Robertson, 2007)
We applied the theoretical concepts of biopower, medical gaze, bodyism and healthism—the ideology where one feature is that a slim body is equivalent to a healthy body—and interviewed 18 adult and elderly men in rural Norway, representing a heterogeneous group regarding age, ethnicity and education
As a consequence of this, ‘individuals are produced in power relations based on what knowledge is produced about them’ (Markula & Pringle, 2006: 86). We suggest that this might be true in regard to health-promoting practices, that is practices that are not preventive, directed towards aberrations but designed to improve that which is already ‘functional’ and ‘good’—which implies a view on functionality, wellbeing and ‘good health’ that is permeated by normative ideas
Summary
Lay people relate appearance to their own health (Hervik, 2016; Hervik & Fasting, 2016; Robertson, 2007). Nordenfelt (2006) argues that there are two principal rival understandings of health—the biostatical theory of health and illness (as outlined by Boorse (1997)) in which absence of disease is the key aspect of good health—a nd holistic theories of health where the individual's wellbeing is part of the health understanding Neither of these two approaches to defining health, nor other well- known definitions such as the WHO definition from 1948 and 1984 (which respectively treated health as total wellbeing and health as a process and resource for everyday life; World Health Organization, 1948, 1984), seem to explicitly acknowledge ‘the distinction between what health is and what health appears to be; that is, neither allows for the extent to which the lay and the professional incorporate appearance in their assessments of health’ (Jutel & Buetow, 2007: 422). We aim at understanding a ‘lay men gaze’ of the relationship between body and health, when we scrutinize lay men's assessment of health of the depicted persons
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