Bodily Identity Research Articles

Recognizing the beauty in diversity: Exposure to body-positive content on social media broadens women's concept of ideal body weight.

By depicting an unrealistic share of skinny or toned body types, modern mass media have been found to shift users' perception of an ideal body toward narrow and often unattainable standards. In response to this, the "#bodypositivity" (BoPo) movement on social media has set out to challenge restrictive body ideals, advocating for more open-minded views toward the human physique. Matching BoPo's emphasis on diversity, we hypothesized that viewing body-positive online content alters women's concept of an ideal body to encompass a broader range of body shapes (on a spectrum from skinny to obese). The results of two pre-registered experiments (N₁ = 191; N₂ = 266) support our assumption, connecting BoPo not only to a larger mean ideal body shape but also to a diversification of weight-related standards. We discuss our work as a crucial extension of prior research, noting that the range found in people's bodily ideals may be (at least) as relevant as their central tendency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Sensory thresholds and the sense of bodily identity in schizophrenia

Aim of the studyThe aim of the study was to investigate: 1) whether schizophrenia is associated with disturbances in bodily identity (BI) and in sensation thresholds (STs) assessed by a questionnaire and experimental methods (pain and proprioception thresholds); 2) whether disturbances in STs are related to BI in the schizophrenia group.Subject or material and methodsFifty-four outpatients with schizophrenia in remission and 54 controls completed: Bodily Identity Scale, Heightened Thresholds Scale, and Lowered Thresholds Scale. Their pain and proprioception thresholds were estimated using the TempTest Apparatus and the Discrimination Weights Test, respectively.ResultsCompared to the control group, patients with schizophrenia: reported more disturbances in BI and in the STs examined by questionnaire, displayed increased proprioception, but a lower pain threshold. In the schizophrenia group disturbances in BI were only associated with distortions in STs examined by questionnaires.DiscussionDisturbances in stimulus processing in the experimental setting did not explain disruptions in BI in schizophrenia, which may be due to the study's methodology and the weak (pain threshold) or moderate (proprioception threshold) manifestation of STs disturbances in the experimental setting in the clinical group.ConclusionsIn schizophrenia remission no coherent pattern of sensitivity to experimental stimuli is observed. The increased sensitivity to experimental pain in patients in remission is consistent with the results of previous studies, and undermines the popular thesis of pain indifference in schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia struggle throughout their lives with disturbances of bodily identity and states of both over- and under-sensitivity to environmental stimuli.

The Pelvic Golden Ratio in the Nude Portraits of Roman Emperors

AbstractIn contrast to the bodily shame that Romans inherited from the Etruscans, the emperors displayed naked in sculptures to enshrine their divine status. What factors determined that, for four centuries, this paradigm prevailed in the life of ancient Rome despite the transgression of morals? The theomorphic nude fulfilled functions of a divine „costume” which the emperor wore before his people to win their trust and loyalty. The supreme nude portrait was clothed in conventional meanings, which belong to a visual language specific to the Greco-Roman world.Anthropometric measurements confirm the conjunction of two complementary visual concerns: that of the Romans for facial identity and that of the Greeks for bodily identity. In this long and imperfect process,faciesandhabitusunited in a fundamental theomorphism of Greco-Roman culture, with an anthropometric constant translated plastically remarkably rigorous –the pelvic golden section.While the idealization of the face had to be achieved within the limits of the emperor’s real features in order to make him recognizable, the perfection of the genital portrait was already canonized by the Greek masters. The measurements in this study show that thepelvic golden sectionmay be an explanation for this recurrent plastic transliteration.

Sex, Gender, and Devotional Desire: Refiguring Bodily Identities in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Discourse

Many of the debates among theorists of the body in feminist and gender studies center on the gendered body and its relation to the sexed body, with the validity of the sex/gender distinction itself a topic of contention. On the one hand, feminist advocates of social constructionism tend to distinguish between sex and gender, in which sex (male or female) is identified with the biological body as a “natural” datum and gender (masculine or feminine) is a second-order sociocultural construction that is superimposed as an ideological superstructure on this “natural” base. On the other hand, feminist advocates of sexual difference such as Judith Butler call into question the sex/gender distinction and insist that the sexed body, like gender, is socially constructed. This article brings these contemporary feminist interlocutors into conversation with sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authorities who developed a distinctive discourse of embodiment in which they frame the categories of sex and gender in relation to devotional desire in their ontological theories of bodily identities. The Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment explodes notions of the relationship between embodiment, personhood, materiality, and gender on both the human and divine planes and challenges prevailing body theories by positing bodies beyond matter, personhood beyond matter, and gender beyond sex.

Schulz and Mourning. About the Writer’s Second Body

The paper addresses the problem of the mourning cult of Bruno Schulz. The presented approach is critical of its excess in the Schulzean biographical discourses as well as literary and artistic references to his life and work, but it is by no means provocative like that of Janusz Rudnicki, who in the 1990s mocked the “hagiographic” idiom of Jerzy Ficowski. Analyzing archive records and testimonies, the author attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of Schulz’s death in possibly the minutest details. Comparing contradictory pieces of information with the official version made popular by Ficowski, he shows how profoundly it has been marked by the unperformed work of mourning over Schulz and the Holocaust – both the failed work of Ficowski himself and of his postwar correspond- ents whose letters determined the form of The Regions of Great Heresy. Using the idiom of thanatology and taking the role of a necrographer rather than that of a Schulz specialist, the author supposes that the dynamic of loss in the case of Schulz reaches far beyond the act of the writer’s execution on the street to include also the posthumous annihilation of his corpse and grave. This particular kind of necroviolence, perhaps the most hateful from the vantage point of the Jewish tradition and the heritage of Western culture in general, which consists in removing the material remains of the deceased has been called by Holocaust scholars “necrocide.” The absence of material traces and the “mourning objects” that usually help to cure the semiotic crisis which is death makes writers and artists commemorate Schulz with lyrical and artistic epitaphs. Their function is to restore the bodily identity of the dead person by creating his other body, told about and imagined in effigie, existing not beside but instead of the missing “mourning object.” However, the expansion of those elegiac narratives, particularly those produced outside Poland, often results in unintended reductionism. As a human being, writer, and artist, Schulz has been reduced in them to an emblem of the Holocaust, while such obituaries ignore the history of his archive. The other, historical and material body of the writer consists of his manuscripts, drawings, graphic works, and official documents. It exists, drawn and quartered, in archives, to be put up for auction for tens of thousands of dollars, exposed in museums and art galleries, and hoarded by collectors as precious relics.

Roots of the Western Self: Dualist and Monist Philosophies of Personal Identity

Personal identity has recently appeared in the agenda of social sciences and humanities in a variety of ways. There is a huge and expanding body of literature on identity, and "identity studies" has gained significant importance in the social sciences and humanities across the globe. This article aims to trace back the history of theories on Western personal identity from an interdisciplinary angle. Defining identity raises many questions and invites different disciplines ranging from hermeneutics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, and many more. Answering questions about the nature of the self and the relationship between a person and her body led this article to trace back two lines of thought: a dualist view that sees identity in terms of soul and body dichotomy, and a monist view that focuses on the body as a defining element of identity. The enormous philosophical interest in the idea of personal identity is due to concerns with the nature of personal identity throughout time and the relationship, if any, between personal identity and bodily identity.

Bodies, bruises, and blisters, and the struggle for/of the feminine/muscular body: the ways in which women CrossFitters transgress gendered boundaries

Gender is a fundamental element of social life but is premised on the notions of socially and culturally constructed differences which are almost always hierarchical in nature, imbued with power(lessness), and reinforced by binary thinking. Sport is one domain where gendered hierarchies, power struggles, and binaries have been most notable. CrossFit is a relatively new sport which is said to offer women a space for alternative gender performances. This article draws on autophotographical and photo-elicitation interview data generated with 13 women CrossFitters. Informed by feminist poststructuralism and using reflexive thematic analysis, the researchers generated two paradoxical themes which illustrate the ways in which women CrossFitters can transgress but also inadvertently reinforce gendered boundaries. We present and interrogate the themes of bodies, bruises, and blisters, and the struggle for/of the feminine/muscular body as paradoxical processes for women CrossFitters. These paradoxical processes permit women CrossFitters to experiment with performances of both femininity and masculinity that could be transformational and non-gendered and allow these women to transgress normative bodily ideals and gendered norms.

The 45-rpm dress revolution: Competing temporalities in 1960s fashion

Perhaps no artefact is as evocative of temporality (i.e. the lived experience of time), as fashion and, arguably, no other period in history represents such a marked change in our notions about the relationship between the two as the 1960s did. In contrast to the Platonic-Apollonian fashion ideals of the 1950s, as exemplified by Dior’s New Look, the mod and the hippy came to represent competing bodily ideals. Their Dionysian fashions aestheticized time in three complementary ways: first, the celebration of the now, with its emphasis on the ephemeral, the physically pleasurable and the situated body in motion; second, the re-appropriation of the past, which involved the postmodern rejection or subversion of grand historical narratives that privileged certain iterations of race, class and gender and touted imperialism and cultural hegemony; and third, a utopian optimism about the future based on a belief in the increased possibilities of individual human potential as well as the prospect of societal transformation into a post-bellum, post-racial, post-classist, post-gender ‘Age of Aquarius’. These aesthetic values had political implications. Although the most radical of street fashions was worn by comparatively few 1960s youth, the deeper reasons why they came to be viewed with suspicion and outright anger were not so much due to particular styles, but rather what they revealed about our changing relationships to temporality and the postmodern fracturing of metanarratives concerning the proper existential comportment towards tradition and change, while laying the symbolic groundwork for what would later be referred to as the ‘culture wars’ in popular media.

Fit for Motherhood: The Glocalization of Maternal Physical Activity in Mother and Baby Magazine

Fit for Motherhood: The Glocalization of Maternal Physical Activity in <i>Mother and Baby</i> Magazine

Cultural Dynamics of Beauty: Deconstructing Perceptions of Feminine Bodily Ideals in Contemporary Nigeria

Cultural Dynamics of Beauty: Deconstructing Perceptions of Feminine Bodily Ideals in Contemporary Nigeria

THE ROLE OF THE BODY AND EXTENDED MEMORY SYSTEMS IN WORKING WITH TRAUMATIC MEMORIES

In this article I present psychodrama therapy as a practical example of the combination of mental time trave theory form philosophy of memory and cognitive science and the extended mind from philosophy of mind. Theories of extended mind and distributed consciousness entail the idea of an extended identity. Following this positions the boundaries of the self are fluid, located somewhere around the body, the brain, the surrounding tools and artefacts the individual is using and the sociocultural structures in which he is situated. In this article I use neo-Lockean theories about personal identity which qualify memory and psychological connectedness as criteria for identity. The concept of extended personal identity is presented on two levels, on one hand as extended bodily identity, and on the other hand as extended memory and personal narrative. Extending memories (including repressed memories) through psychodrama method can affect the subjective perception of one’s own personality and self in a specific way. It can be really useful in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the results could be difficult to achieve by remembering alone through non-externally mediated recall. My view is that the psychodramatic stage is extended simulation in the process of remembering. I present examples of repressed childhood memories that are reconstructed on a psychodramatic stage due to the method's ability to work with kinesthetic memory. Consequently, I argue that the psychodramatic stage is extended and distributed memory simulation with the purpose to reconstruct repressed memories and reprocess them.

The Ethics of Supernumerary Robotic Limbs. An Enactivist Approach

Supernumerary robotic limbs are innovative devices in the field of wearable robotics which can provide humans with unprecedented sensorimotor abilities. However, scholars have raised awareness of the ethical issues that would arise from the large adoption of technologies for human augmentation in society. Most negative attitudes towards such technologies seem to rely on an allegedly clear distinction between therapy and enhancement in the use of technological devices. Based on such distinction, people tend to accept technologies when used for therapeutic purposes (e.g., prostheses), but tend to raise issues when similar devices are used for upgrading a physical or cognitive ability (e.g., supernumerary robotics limbs). However, as many scholars have pointed out, the distinction between therapy and enhancement might be theoretically flawed. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to the ethics of supernumerary limbs which is based on two related claims. First, we propose to conceive supernumerary limbs as tools that necessarily modify our psychological and bodily identity. At the same time, we stress that such a modification is not ethically bad in itself; on the contrary, it drives human interaction with the environment. Second, by comparing our view with the extended mind thesis, we claim that the mediation through tools is crucial for the formation of novel meanings and skills that constitute human interaction with the world. We will relate the latter claim to enactivism as a helpful theoretical perspective to frame issues related to artificial limbs and, more in general, to technologies for augmentation. Based on this approach, we finally sketch some suggestions for future directions in the ethics of supernumerary limbs.

Facing the uncertainties of being a person: On the role of existential vulnerability in personal identity

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of existential vulnerability in the experience of personal identity and how identity is found and created. Existential vulnerabilities mark a boundary between what humans can bring about willfully or manipulate to their advantage and what is resistant to such actions. These vulnerabilities have their origin, on an ontological level, in fundamental conditions of human existence. At the same time, they have implications on a psychological level when it comes to self-experience and identity formation. Narrative and value-based identity depend on how a person relates to finitude and the ambiguous side of lived experience. Relational identity depends on how a person relates to existential aloneness and the fact that the meaning and value of our actions are partly out of our control; they are always also dependent on other people’s responses to us. Bodily identity makes us feel continuous and real, but at the same time vulnerable to death and the gaze and actions of others. Being ‘thrown’ into an arbitrary life context is also a form of existential vulnerability. Authentic psychological identities can develop by giving meaning to these circumstances and balancing acceptance of existential vulnerability with the courage to make choices and act.

The Reflected Face as a Mask of the Self: An Appraisal of the Psychological and Neuroscientific Research About Self-face Recognition

This study reviews research about the recognition of one’s own face and discusses scientific techniques (especially the instrument of the mirror) to investigate differences in brain activation when looking at familiar faces compared to unfamiliar ones. Our analysis highlights how people do not possess a perception of their own face that corresponds precisely to reality, and how the awareness of one’s face can also be modulated by means of the enfacement illusion. This illusion allows one to maintain a sense of self at the expense of a precise discrimination of self-face. The internal dynamics of different brain processes, associated with the construction of bodily identity and the sense of self and capable of integrating signals from different sensory channels, particularly visual and tactile, create a mirror-mask effect. According to this effect, the self-face reflected by a mirror becomes a mask for the self, which has the features of the subject’s face, but nonetheless does not correspond perfectly to its characteristics. This poses interesting questions about the nature and construction of one’s self, as self-face reflections allow the mind to mediate between analogue and virtual reality, between past and future events, between memories and plans of action and, most importantly, between beliefs about our identities.

یک قرن و دو خیزش به سوی جنبش آزادی زنان

Since the time of the constitution, the Iranian women’s movement has joined the battlefield with three demands: the right to vote, the right to education, and the right to form an organization. This movement is known as the “Women’s Rights Movement” in reference to its demands and historical context. This movement might be regarded the initial phase of the Iranian women’s movement. Despite women’s success in accepting their legal and true identity to society over the past century, discriminatory laws at every historical juncture, from the constitutional era to the era of the National Oil Movement, and from the reform era known as the first Pahlavi White Revolution to the Islamic Revolution, targeted a portion of their identity. Despite being the target of consecutive arrows of various forms of discrimination, women not only insisted on the identification of their legal movement, but at the end of the 20th century, by highlighting their bodily identity, they stood up to regain their bodies confiscated by government discrimination. This period, the seeds of which were sown in women’s daily struggles from the mid-sixties to Homa Darabi’s self-immolation in the seventies, with women’s movements to enter the stadium, Sahar Khodayari’s self-immolation in the nineties, the phenomenon of the girls of the Revolution Street and White Wednesdays in the late nineties and In the last year of the twenty-first century, the emergence of the Iranian MeToo movement: Narr These movements in the first half of the twenty-first century, along with the secular and religious women’s opposition to the ban on screening, the ban on pregnancy prevention, and the plan to increase the population, have propelled the women’s movement into the physical stage or the women’s liberation movement. This article discusses the role of “non-movements” who prepared the women’s rights movement to enter the phase of the women’s liberation movement from a positive and cause-and-effect perspective, while enumerating the characteristics of this two-stage process. Referencing the scientific definitions of the two phases of the legal movement and the women’s freedom movement, this essay examines the impact of individual and collective activities on the growth of the women’s freedom movement. For instance, from the first movement of Taherah Qara Al-Ain to remove the hijab to the phenomenon of the girls of the revolution, from the singing of Qamar al-Maluk Waziri to singers and dancers on the streets today, and from the confiscation of concubines to the rise in popularity of white marriage. From unmarried women’s pregnancies to sperm donation banks to denying pregnancies imposed by the government and males at home, the women’s rights movement has definitely shifted towards the women’s liberation movement since the turn of the century.

Evaluations of Black and White Female Genitalia by Labiaplasty Status: A Pre-Registered Contextualization, Replication, and Extension of Findings on Labial Perceptions

ABSTRACT Labiaplasty is an increasingly common form of cosmetic surgery involving the removal of portions of the labia minora to achieve a smaller, more symmetrical labial appearance. Labiaplasty is inextricably linked to the colonial medicalization of Black women’s labia, necessitating examination of labiaplasty and race in concert. Participants (N = 4351, M age = 26.58; SD age = 8.89) were shown 12 randomized images of White and Black female genitalia – unaware that they were “before and after” images of labiaplasty procedures – and evaluated them on their alignment with societal ideals, personal ideals, perceived normalcy, and disgustingness. As hypothesized, postoperative labia were rated as more normal, more societally ideal, and more personally ideal than their preoperative counterparts; preoperative labia were rated as more disgusting than postoperative labia. Preoperative Black labia were perceived as more normal, more societally ideal, and more personally ideal, as well as less disgusting, than preoperative White labia. Postoperative White labia were perceived as more normal, more societally and personally ideal, and less disgusting than postoperative Black labia. Gender trends were inconclusive. Our findings point to the need for greater examination of how White bodily ideals shape evaluations of bodies, and for greater historical contextualization in research on labiaplasty.

Narrative and Bodily Identity in Eating Disorders: Toward an Integrated Theoretical-Clinical Approach.

Eating disorders (EDs) can be viewed as “embodied acts” that help to cope with internal and external demands that are perceived as overwhelming. The maintenance of EDs affects the entire identity of the person; the lack of a defined; or valid sense of self is expressed in terms of both physical body and personal identity. According to attachment theory, primary relationships characterized by insecurity, traumatic experiences, poor mirroring, and emotional attunement lead to the development of dysfunctional regulatory strategies. Although the literature shows an association between attachment style or states of mind, trauma, behavioral strategies, and various EDs, the debate is still ongoing and the results are still conflicting. Therefore, we believe it is important to examine and treat EDs by understanding which narrative trajectory intercepts distress in relation to narrative and embodied self-concept. Drawing on clinical observation and a narrative review of the literature, we focus on the construction and organization of bodily and narrative identity. Because bodily representations are the primary tools for generating meaning, organizing experience, and shaping social identity from the earliest stages of life, we focus on the role that bodily interactions and sensorimotor and proprioceptive patterns have played in the development of EDs. We consider the role that lack of attunement, insecure attachment, and relational trauma play in mentalizing, affecting self-representation and emotion regulation strategies. The paper also considers a semantic mode of trauma in EDs that involves a top-down pathway through beliefs and narratives about oneself based on lack of amiability, on devaluation, and on humiliation memories. Finally, we would like to highlight the proposal of an integrated model with multiple access model to psychotherapy that takes into account the complexity of ED patients in whom aspects related to dysregulation, body image disintegration, and post-traumatic symptoms are associated with a suffering sense of self and a retraumatizing narrative.

Trapped in the Wrong Body? Transgender Identity Claims, Body-Self Dualism, and the False Promise of Gender Reassignment Therapy.

In this article, I explore difficult and sensitive questions regarding the nature of transgender identity claims and the appropriate medical treatment for those suffering from gender dysphoria. I first analyze conceptions of transgender identity, highlighting the prominence of the wrong-body narrative and its dualist presuppositions. I then briefly argue that dualism is false because our bodily identity (including our body's biological organization for sexual reproduction as male or female) is essential and intrinsic to our overall personal identity and explain why a sound, nondualist anthropology implies that gender identity cannot be entirely divorced from sexual identity. Finally, I make the case that arguments in favor of hormonal and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria rest on this mistaken dualist anthropology, and that these treatments therefore give false hope to those suffering from gender dysphoria, while causing irreversible bodily harm and diverting attention from underlying psychological problems that often need to be addressed. I also briefly discuss how these philosophical claims relate to empirical studies on the outcomes of hormonal and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria and to testimonies of transgender individuals who regret having undergone these treatments.

Deconstructing Contemporary Dance Discourses by Acknowledging Elderly Female Bodies

Abstract This article uses a choreographic project to discuss the relationship between elderly women and contemporary dance. It focuses on how participating in the project is of artistic value to these women and what happens in the meeting between me as a master’s student and researcher, the project itself and the women. The article is based on a master’s project in dance pedagogy aimed at using action to change normative ideas about a dancer’s body. The artistic practice is based on the women’s lived experiences. Through improvisation and with a somatic approach as a choreographic performative practice, collaborative transformative learning emerged from the participants. By articulating and visualising the experiences of elderly women as a marginalised group, the meaning of the concepts of dance, body, and age was deconstructed and new insights were gained to challenge and broaden normative ideas about dance and the dancer’s body. The discoveries presented in this article show that elderly women have the capacity to change through dance. By using a decolonising methodology, I argue that deconstruction can be achieved in interactions with others and experienced as artistry. In conclusion, I claim that age norms and bodily ideals in contemporary dance discourses can be challenged by taking the advantage of the resources of older women and by giving them access to contemporary dance.

Mock meat, masculinity, and redemption narratives: vegan men’s negotiations and performances of gender and eating

ABSTRACT Veganism’s visibility has soared in recent years. Contemporary veganism has built a trident approach of outreach that emphasises health benefits, ethical concerns about animals, and environmentally sustainable consumption. With this growth, there have been opportunities for influencer-activists to profit from positioning themselves as movement leaders. This is often connected with thin, white, wealthy women and the wellness industry, but there is also a changing ‘meatless masculinity’ within vegan influencer-activist spaces. Hegemonic ideals of masculinity around physical strength and virility are being hyper-individualised to ‘sell’ veganism through embodied and cultural performances of ‘redemption narratives’ by vegan influencer-activist men. However, in interviews with vegan men in Britain, their relation to these meatless masculinities was found to be in tension with hegemonic masculinity. Interviewees instead related their veganism to an ungoverning of masculine bodily ideals. Veganism was revealed in the interviews as entangled with men representing themselves as part of a progressive masculinity that engages with feminist ideas, even if they are sometimes misunderstood. In this paper, I explore the prevalence and purpose of these masculinity narratives online through social media examples, before exploring a contradictory growth in the re-thinking and rejection of hegemonic masculinity within the vegan constituency through interviews. I conclude that while vegan masculinities offer the potential for men to be a little less governed by gendered norms there remains a need for vegans to more fully embrace a feminist and intersectional veganism that is not dominated by whiteness and masculinist ideals.