Comparativa de los resultados obtenidos en cada centro por categorías

of their appropriate boundaries. Large women have become a caricature of the feminine, abnormal, unhealthy, abhorrent and immoral, tarnishing the visual landscape and appropriating the proximal physical space and entitlements of others. “Unsurprisingly,” says Braziel (2001a, p.243) “[…] one of the most pervasive representations of fat in contemporary culture is as ‘diseased’ material – bilious, humorous, gelatinous, lethargic, insalubriously salacious, markedly asexual, if not utterly revolting.” The public display of the polluting body is transgressive both in the body and in its display, signalling the inappropriate crossing of a cultural boundary (Douglas, 1966), enfreaking a corporeal extreme (Shildrick, 2000). Hegemonic discourses crowd out alternative understandings of weight and health.

In Purity and Danger, Douglas (1966) extended the possibilities for understanding the wider social systems by studying its effects within the individual:

We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body […] (Douglas, p.115).

In extension, social control is evidenced in physically restrained bodies visually apparent, the inner/outer eye of the body-look. The thinned individual may pass as fitting, disciplined, normal, and within bounds. Shoveller and Johnson (2006) have pointed to the way in which ‘youth’ is a complex term that has been used without specificity. So too has weight in general and overweight in particular suffered from its incorporation in the encultured proliferation of weighty bodies’ discourses. Certain forms of talk are sanctioned in public discourse, silencing or excluding others (Foucault, 1983/1985; Shoveller & Johnson).

As norms of acceptability around size and shape have decreased, large women have faced increasing physical and psychological strictures within society as they move about their lives, often as visible outcasts. The obsession with thinned-female bodies may be

described as the anorexic aesthetic of modern culture (Heywood, 1996). Nevertheless the thinned body is viewed as the disciplined body, lauded in public and in private. Appearance appears to count over skills or abilities (Manore, 1996). MacKinnon (1987, p.122) wrote that the good, strong, female body displayed an unbecoming physical strength “[…] threatening to one’s takeability, one’s rapeability, one’s femininity.” The social response to weightfull bodies has been one of marginalisation in which femininity may be questioned, morality and sanity attacked (Bovey, 1989). Bartky (1988) emphasised the gendering of differential effects that urge women to constantly self-surveil and discipline their bodies; Seid (1989, p.9) deplored appearance norms which insisted that women be “painfully thin, but muscular and buxom – qualities that can occur together only if women spend vast amounts of time on exercise, money on cosmetic surgery and emotional energy on diet.”

When a woman loses weight, approbation is pronounced and some women describe being viewed differently. For instance, Piercy (1988) decried the adulation accorded the loss of 20lbs by a female dinner guest, while her current exhibition of paintings and Piercy’s own recently completed novel were ignored. Kean (2005) wrote of being treated differently following her significant weight loss. Different treatment enters medical arenas: A nurse-participant spoke of treating a large woman with advanced multiple sclerosis less gently than a slimmer patient because “heavy seemed to mean lumpy, sack of spuds, no need to take care, solid” (Carryer, 1997, p.127). When losing weight is equated with having become a better person, losing weight becomes the moral condition of acceptance. In Western culture, people are larger but thinness especially for women is prized. Seid (1989, p.83) has suggested that this was largely the result of an ideology of efficiency in which technology and economics have worked “[…] to reinforce the slenderised ideal.” In this context, being overweight or obese attracts stigma and discrimination (Tustin & Zimmerman, 2001) while a lower body weight than average is accepted as normal and may well be prized. Even being as far from average as a thinner person, a larger person attracts a marginalisation and discrimination not meted out to the thinner person (Sobal, 1999).

In relation to the very enduring discrimination and self-condemnation that exists within society for being weightfull and female, there appears to have been little if any

replaced godliness as “[…] the yardstick of accomplishment and proper living. And, as with any religion, sinners can expect to be punished.”

This punishment in modern terms according to Foucault (1979) rests within the proliferation of disciplinary power to the edges of society, operating within and between individuals. Slim appearance and the disciplines of slimming are lauded and applauded. Changing lives in ways that give the appearance of the healthy mind/body claims a moral high ground that further condemns the weightfull body as transgressive. In stepping out-of-line, the weightfull woman remains always in the line of sight, separated out from her slim peers. These constitute types of dividing practices, a subset of practices that lie at the centre of social exclusion activities (Foucault, 1983/1985).

As the norms of any correct behaviour, such as being of normal weight, are spread and established, behaviours that do not reach that standard are subjected to a variety of punishments exemplified in La Salle’s construction of punishment:

Everything that is capable of making children feel the offence they have committed, everything that is capable of humiliating them, of confusing them: a certain coldness, a certain indifference, a question of humiliation, a removal from the office (Foucault, 1977, p.178).

The threat of being designated an outsider is of immense social significance. Individuals yearn to belong and to participate fully in the material and emotional benefits of society. Emotional dimensions of being shunned consist of “anger, anxiety, frustration, hatred, rage, fear […] (alongside) the conflicting emotions and feelings, such as fascination, excitement and desire” (Lupton, 1999, p.45). Indeed, as this present research will show, participant narratives were peppered with low affect, self- recrimination, inability to participate, and punishment alongside stories of hope and possibilities for living an improved/approved life. When being weightfull is considered an avoidable choice, it is accompanied by appropriate disincentives. For instance, women may be denied access to adoption (Hinde, 2007), have limited access to reproductive technologies (Gillett, Putt & Farquar, 2006), or be described as poor mothers (Owen, 2007).

Within Western cultural contexts, women’s bodies have been subjected to more intense medical surveillance and intervention than men’s bodies since the 19th century: “Having babies and trying not to have babies makes women sicker than men in terms of use of hospital and other medical services" (Oakley, 1993, p.12). The medicalisation of women’s experiences is significant. While women have actively sought access to the

benefits of medicine (Bartky, 1988) this has been with somewhat mixed effects (Riessman, 1998). For instance, a male-dominated medical community gradually assumed control of pregnancy and birth by portraying their methods as scientific, painless and safer than midwifery (Mitchinson, 1993). In her 1980’s analysis, Leavitt’s portrayal of women as agentic minimises the significance of the social context in which women came to choose painless childbirth. In their visibility through pregnancy and childbirth, women as the potential mothers of the nation were poked, prodded, and explored, and repetitive internal examinations became the norm. The habits of women through the period of gestation were open to surveillance through “[…] the ritual laying-on of hands by a succession of different doctors, none of them especially trained in the art of talking to the face beyond abdomens” (Oakley, p.13). Weighing and measuring as examination led through to judgement and intervention, with the regularity and medicalisation of childbirth ensuring medical oversight for women in New Zealand choosing to bear children. Indeed, women accessed more medical interventions than men even when the effect of chronic conditions was allowed for and pregnancy and births were excluded (Statistics Canada, 2007). In a study by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), (2001), women were 33 percent more likely than men to visit a doctor; attendance for annual examinations and preventive services was 100 percent higher for women than for men; women were dramatically more likely to have an antidepressant prescribed or receive hormone treatment.

In the contingency that has continued to attend women’s position within society, women are continually caught within the cultural paradoxes that define the good life and the good person. The embodiment of preferred femininity lies in the outward sign as inward grace, disciplined and penitent. Foucault did not write a history of women's bodies, though he had intended to include a volume within the History of Sexuality

called Woman, Mother and Hysteric (Sawicki, 1991), locating the control of women's bodies within the various discourses and practices of biopower. In Foucauldian terms, power is evidenced in the way the soul may be viewed through its representation in the body (Grosz, 1994). Within the contexts of health, the medical professional’s lens has moved from women’s mindlessness to their sightliness: A good-woman body demonstrates inner cleanliness and discipline through her beauty in the eye of the