The means of correct training: embodied regulation in training for body work among mothers

Abstract

In the main, the literature on body work has focused on the workplace, overlooking the spaces and places of training for work. Drawing on tutors' understandings of teaching and mothers' varied experiences of training for body work in areas of health, beauty and social care, this paper explores the learning environment as a liminal space. For many mothers, it is a space that sits at the nexus of home, work and leisure and is where the individual moves from student to practitioner/worker. These transitions require gender and maternal identities, among others, to be negotiated and regulated. By conceptualising body work as the interaction between bodies and the (self)disciplining of one's own body, this paper discusses various regulatory processes of learning, from embedding and embodying of 'professional' knowledge and identities to the repressing of cultural norms and behaviour. In so doing, the paper also considers how students struggle with, and occasionally resist and subvert, regulatory norms, imbuing the learning environment with their own meaning and sense of self. With this focus, we highlight the resonance of the body work concept for drawing together a wide range of subject areas, and suggest the closer the work with the body the more urgent the need for regulation of one's own body and the more fine-tuned the embodied discipline.