Postfeminism and Health : Critical Psychology and Media Perspectives
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19309931
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138123786
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 95,000-word monograph published by Routledge provides new insights into women’s health in the Twenty-first Century. It does so by bringing together critical concepts of healthism and postfeminism for the first time as a ‘postfeminist healthism’. Using this notion, it addresses key health concerns related to weight, technology, sex, pregnancy, care responsibilities, and anorexia.
The methodology draws on poststructuralist theory (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari) and a feminist approach of ‘getting lost’ (Lather) to propose an ‘affirmative poststructuralism’ “to undermine accounts that draw on women’s apparently inherent pathology, their implied failures or their faulty bodies” (p.166). It draws on and develops thinking on women’s health across the humanities and social sciences.
Ideas developed in the book include a critical analysis of the tightening relationships between health, appearance and emotion, where looking and feeling ‘good’ become amalgamated with health. We also identify a ‘postfeminist perfection’ throughout our analysis, where normative expectations are also those that are impossible to achieve and bound up in existing inequalities.
The research has been adopted by those in body image (Rich et al. 2020), food studies (Lupton & Feldman, 2020) and critical health (del Rio Carral & Lyons, 2020). A review in Feminism and Psychology suggests the book “liberate[s] the reader from the common sense of normative discourses… becoming (perhaps ironically) a kind of a self-help book that helped me in working more on myself to achieve the goal of working less on myself!”.
The research has been presented at several conferences, including Evans’ invited talk at Everyday Bioethics and Ethics of Science, University of Florence, Italy, and subsequent invited article published in Jura Gentium that builds on the authors’ analysis of pregnancy. The authors disseminated the work as a blog post for The Conversation, Wanting to live a ‘normal-perfect’ life is making women unhealthy.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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