Body Panic Dworkin, Shari; Wachs, Faye
02/2009
eBook
Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal - not just thin but toned, not just ...muscular but cut - that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be "fit"? And how is it that having an unfit, or "bad," body gets conflated with being an unfit, or "bad," citizen?Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men's and women's health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are "made" in today's culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women's and men's bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.
Trapped in a Chronically Online World Wachs, Faye Linda
Journal committed to social change on race and ethnicity,
12/2023, Volume:
9, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Using a mixed methods approach, this paper explores MillenigenZ’s relationship with social media and its potential for creating an activist and productive third space. The sample highlights the views ...of Latino/a/e, Asian American, and immigrant members of this cohort. Combining content and textual analysis, surveys, and interviews with MillenigenZ, I find that in contrast to stereotypes, they crave in-person interaction and prefer to discuss contentious issues “in the real.” While they distrust official news sources, interpersonal relationships and alternate viewpoints are appreciated and valued. It remains to be seen if online spaces can create impactful third spaces that result in meaningful actions and policies. Many participants wanted to be engaged active members of their community and craved meaningful opportunities, which they found lacking. Mobilizing this group is essential for future elections and activism.
Two studies examined social determinants of adolescents' math anxiety including parents' own math anxiety and children's endorsement of math-gender stereotypes. In Study 1, parent-child dyads were ...surveyed and the interaction between parent and child math anxiety was examined, with an eye to same- and other-gender dyads. Results indicate that parent's math anxiety interacts with daughters' and sons' anxiety to predict math self-efficacy, GPA, behavioral intentions, math attitudes, and math devaluing. Parents with lower math anxiety showed a positive relationship to children's math outcomes when children also had lower anxiety. The strongest relationships were found with same-gender dyads, particularly Mother-Daughter dyads. Study 2 showed that endorsement of math-gender stereotypes predicts math anxiety (and not vice versa) for performance beliefs and outcomes (self-efficacy and GPA). Further, math anxiety fully mediated the relationship between gender stereotypes and math self-efficacy for girls and boys, and for boys with GPA. These findings address gaps in the literature on the role of parents' math anxiety in the effects of children's math anxiety and math anxiety as a mechanism affecting performance. Results have implications for interventions on parents' math anxiety and dispelling gender stereotypes in math classrooms.
No Slam Dunk Cooky, Cheryl
2018, 20180530, 2018-05-30
eBook
In just a few decades, sport has undergone a radical gender transformation. However, Cheryl Cooky and Michael A. Messner suggest that the progress toward gender equity in sports is far from complete. ...The continuing barriers to full and equal participation for young people, the far lower pay for most elite-level women athletes, and the continuing dearth of fair and equal media coverage all underline how much still has yet to change before we see gender equality in sports.The chapters inNo Slam Dunkshow that is this not simply a story of an "unfinished revolution." Rather, they contend, it is simplistic optimism to assume that we are currently nearing the conclusion of a story of linear progress that ends with a certain future of equality and justice. This book provides important theoretical and empirical insights into the contemporary world of sports to help explain the unevenness of social change and how, despite significant progress, gender equality in sports has been "No Slam Dunk."
Latine and Asian American MillenniGenZ Wachs, Faye Linda; Danico, Mary Kunmi Yu
Journal committed to social change on race and ethnicity,
12/2023, Volume:
9, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This special journal issue on Latine¹ and Asian American² MillenniGenZ highlights the complex nuanced stories of this generation as they navigate advancing technologies, rethink what it means to have ...human interaction, and consider ways to live in a world that does not have a direct path moving forward. The issues also bring forth social institutions, issues, and identity politics that can get in the way of our BIPOC MillenniGenZ educational experiences.
This paper explains the failure of an obesity intervention funded by a Carol M. White U.S. Department of Education grant which created a three way partnership between middle schools in a poor largely ...Latino school district, the local University, and local after-school care providers. This paper assesses the project and situates it theoretically using Foucault’s microphysics of power and Bourdieu’s concepts of capital to analyze the refusal of most students and teachers to engage in the program and the standardized testing required by the state. We further articulate a new form of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence based on position in the consumer hierarchy. We conclude with a critique of grant mechanisms as a means of addressing health issues, and situate the obesity epidemic as a social construction that perpetuates inequality and discourses of power.
This investigation explores how contemporary (corporeal) motherhood is constituted in postindustrial consumer culture through a content and textual analysis of Shape Fit Pregnancy. Using all ...available issues of the magazine from its inception in 1997 to 2003, the authors first underscore a key tension surrounding pregnant women's bodies within health and fitness discourse: That the pregnant form is presented as maternally successful yet aesthetically problematic. Second, the authors reveal how contemporary mothers are defined as newly responsible for a second shift of household labor and child care and a new third shift of bodily labor and fitness practices. The analysis examines the way in which the second and third shift are constituted as mutually dependent and reinforcing. Last, the discussion analyzes how this particular fitness text draws on empowerment discourse derived from feminist gains of access to the public sphere while paradoxically (re)inscribing women to the privatized realm of bodily practices, domesticity, and family values.
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There is a pervasive belief that meaningful gender differences structure the abilities and desires of bodies. These gender differences are presented as categorical imperatives, despite the prevalence ...of a range of abilities and desires across genders. How are beliefs about gender differences maintained in light of increasing challenges? Adult recreational sports provide an interesting subworld in which to investigate this question. Through an ethnography of coed softball, reactions to women's demonstrations of excellence is examined to reveal a complicated situation in which belief systems surrounding ideologies of gender difference are often simultaneously challenged and reinvigorated. The work problematizes understandings of difference as perpetuating systems of inequality. The article closes with a discussion of challenges to conceptions of difference and offers a way to move beyond “boundaries of difference.”
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Shock jock radio by its very nature involves the creation of spectacle through outrageous utterances that simultaneously reinforce and resist dominant norms (Nylund, 2007). Self-proclaimed media "bad ...boy" Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University Scarlett Knights, National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) women's basketball championship runner-ups as "nappy headed hos" during an April 4, 2007, broadcast of his "Imus in the Morning" radio show, simulcast on MSNBC. Applying Foucault's concepts of sin and redemption to this media event, we explore dominant media frames of the Don Imus incident. We ask, "what do dominant media frames reveal about agendas of privilege and oppression in media discourse?" Textual and content analysis of national and regional U.S. newspapers explicates dominant media framings of the narratives of Imus's apology and his subsequent dismissal from radio and television. We discuss what these narratives reveal about media frames of the displacement of blame, sin, and redemption. We conclude that the Imus event and the subsequent assignation of blame operate to maintain "sincere fictions" that minimize racism in the larger culture, while amounting to what we call "frenetic inaction" around structural sources of social inequalities.
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10.
Leveling the Playing Field Wachs, Faye Linda
Journal of sport and social issues,
08/2002, Volume:
26, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
At the turn of the millennium, gender relations are in a state of flux. Increasingly, separate gendered spheres and roles are being challenged and negotiated in many areas of social life. At the same ...time, many gendered ideologies are also reproduced, continuing longstanding inequities. Recreational sporting subworlds provide a context to explore how gendered rule structures contribute to and redress such inequities. Coed softball provides an example of a sport in which equal participation by gender is a legislated goal. However, such rules must be critically evaluated. Given the history of gender inequity in sports, one must ask how, through the rules and their enforcement, is gender equality conceptualized by participants, umpires, and rule makers? Through participant observation and analysis of the text of the rules, this article explores the providing of equality by defining and legislating difference that simultaneously challenges and reifies gender difference and ultimately gender inequity.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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