Rachel Colls

‘Looking alright, feeling alright’: emotions, sizing and the geographies of women's experiences of clothing consumption

Recent work within geographies of consumption has focused on the practices of consumption as a means to find out ‘what people do when they go shopping’. This paper argues that few of these accounts of consumption have considered the significance of emotions in understanding the intricacies of consumer experience. Drawing on material from research about womens experiences of clothes shopping this paper, therefore, utilizes recent work in the social sciences which understands emotions not as inherent or as induced by practices or commodities and instead emphasizes the intersubjective nature of emotions whereby emotions ‘are self‐reflective, involving active perception, identification and management on the part of individuals’ (Lupton 1998: 16). In short, this view posits that the consumer has the capacity to ‘manage’ or to experience and re‐experience emotions in particular consumption moments. Such an understanding offers a conceptualization which does not conceive of womens engagements with consumer culture within a victim/resistance dichotomy, instead uncovering geographies of consumption in which women may feel uncomfortable or depressed in a particular moment but then engage in practices through which they experience that moment differently. These emotional experiences are explored through considering the significance of the spatialities of the changing room, shop floor and the corporeal space of the ‘sized’ body, and the consumption practices of cheating, coping and connecting.

Outsize/Outside: Bodily bignesses and the emotional experiences of British women shopping for clothes

Whilst there has been substantial research in geography concerned with ‘the body’, little consideration has been given to the ‘sized’ body. This article aims to counter this by considering the concept of ‘bodily bignesses’ as a way of understanding the plurality of female emotional and embodied experience through empirical work concerned with British womens experiences of clothes shopping. This involves breaking big bodies out of those categories that act to define their corporeal form for what they ‘represent’ within medical, moral and political contexts. Emphasis is placed upon destabilising the category of ‘bigness’, through utilising the concept of ‘the monstrous’ that is based upon the idea of understanding morphological difference beyond a simple opposition to the ‘normative body’. This provides a way to consider bodily size as a number of differential emotional experiences. For example, empirical examples focus on what it feels like to shop for ‘big clothes’, how women evaluate the suitability of clothing for their (un)suitable bodies, and acknowledges the feelings of self-acceptance that women experience as they come to terms with their bodily size. If all categories are themselves unstable and the idea of rigid universalist divisions are untenable, then it is difficult to employ meaningfully, universal categories of good and bad, right and wrong. (Shildrick, 1997, p. 104) De talla grande y afuera: la gordería del cuerpo y las experiencias emocionales de mujeres ingleses en comprar ropa Mientras que habían investigaciones substanciales en geografía que enfoca en ‘el cuerpo’, no había mucha consideración al cuerpo ‘de talla’. Haciendo uso de investigaciones empíricos que se centran en las experiencias de comprar ropas de mujeres ingleses, éste artículo se propone refutarlo a través de una comprensión del concepto de ‘la gordería del cuerpo’ como una manera de entender la pluralidad de la experiencias emocionales y encarnadas de femeninos. Este involucra romper las categorías que definan la forma corporal de los cuerpos grandes en lo que se representan en los contextos médicos, morales, y políticos. Se da énfasis en de-estabilizar la categoría de ‘gordería’, a través de utilizar el concepto del ‘gigantesco’ que se basa en la idea de entender la diferencia morfológica más allá del ‘cuerpo normativo’. Este provee una manera para considera el tamaño del cuerpo como varias experiencias emocionales y diferenciales. Por ejemplo, los casos empíricos enfocan en como se siente comprar ‘ropas grandes’, como evalúan las mujeres si la ropa sea adecuado para sus cuerpos (no)adecuado, y además, los casos reconocen los sentimientos de autoaprobación que tienen las mujeres en el momento en que acepten el tamaño corporal.

Moving beyond walkability: on the potential of health geography.

In the context of the substantial volume of research focused in recent years on the walkability of the built environment, this report presents some initial thoughts on what the sub-discipline of health geography might be able to contribute, beyond what it currently does, to existing debates. It is posited that at one level this contribution could be critical yet constructive, focussing on the limitations of current epistemological and methodological approaches but offering ideas on how they and others might be developed. At another level, given the limited scope of existing walkability research, a further contribution could be to pay attention to different forms of embodiment, movement activities, their relationships to health, and the places, experiences, agency and cultures involved.

Change4Life for Your Kids: Embodied Collectives and Public Health Pedagogy.

Recent work in human geography has begun to explore the fluidity of bodily boundaries and to foreground the connectedness of bodies to other bodies/objects/places. Across multiple subdisciplinary areas, including health, childrens and feminist geographies, geographers have begun to challenge the notion of a singular, bounded body by highlighting the importance of, for example, relations of care and intergenerationality to everyday embodied experiences; remembered past/anticipated future bodies to self-perception and body image; affect/emotion to the production of embodied collectives; and connections to distant and proximate others to understandings of embodied rights and responsibility. In this paper we will review these areas of work in order to explore the ways in which this geographical work on embodied connections might contribute to recent debates concerning public health pedagogy and the production of embodied and emotional collectives in education. This will involve an analysis of the recent anti-obesity Change4Life campaign in the UK; used in this context as a way to explore how the campaign attempts to produce healthy bodies through a form of pedagogy which is centred upon notions of embodied connectivities and collectives.

The geographies of children's and young people's bodies

This special issue emerges out of presentations and conversations that took place at an international, interdisciplinary conference held at the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK, in July 2006. The conference, entitled ‘Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth’ was held over two days and brought together a range of academics, researchers, and practitioners all of whom had an interest in ‘the body’, embodiment and specifically the bodies of children and young people. The two main aims of the conference were firstly, to showcase the breadth of interdisciplinary work that is being done across the social sciences and arts and humanities on the bodies of children and young people; set within a wider theoretical and empirical ‘turn’ to ‘the body’, as experienced in Geography over the past 15 years (see Longhurst 2000). The second aim was to bring to light particular contestations that exist in relation to dominant ways that the bodies of children and young people have been positioned, constructed and deployed across a range of policy and popular contexts (see Prout 2000a); contexts which include that of ‘health and illness’, ‘education’, ‘mobility’, ‘consumption’, ‘the (ab)use of public space’ and ‘crime’. These contexts commonly position children’s bodies as unruly, in need of control and/or intervention, or conversely as absent whereby their voices and (embodied) experiences are rarely explored or taken seriously. Therefore, the conference provided an opportunity for critical engagement with these dominant positionings as well as the space to present work which provided new empirical and theoretical contexts with which to make sense of the bodies of children and young people. The conference also provided a space to showcase contemporary and cutting edge geographical research on the bodies of children and young people. Recent commentaries on current work in and future possibilities for Children’s Geographies by Horton and Kraftl (2005, 2006a, 2006b) and Horton et al. (2008) have suggested that we consider the difference that an attention to the body would make. They state that:

Making space for fat bodies? A critical account of ‘the obesogenic environment’

A key focus for geographical and policy work on obesity has involved interrogating the concept of an ‘obesogenic environment’ – an environment with particular physical, social and economic characteristics considered to contribute towards the propensity of bodies to be or to become obese/fat. Alongside this, Critical Geographies of Obesity/Fatness challenge the classification of fat bodies as diseased and in need of intervention by drawing attention to the politics surrounding the governance of fatness and the multiple experiences of body size. In this article, we place these strands of geographical work alongside each other in order to develop Critical Geographies of Obesogenic Environments. In so doing, we not only set out the main tenets of work in geography on obesity/fatness but also raise specific questions about how bodies, environments and body-environment interactions have been conceptualized and researched. We do so in order to develop and present three research trajectories for Critical Geographies of Obesogenic Environments which will allow geographical research to engage within obesity/fatness more carefully, reflexively and critically. Specifically, this involves: redefining obesogenic environments not as environments that make bodies fat, but as environments that make fat bodies problematic; engaging sensitively with the multiplicities of fat embodied experience; and considering alternative theoretical frameworks in order to avoid the pitfalls of environmental determinism.

Obesity discourse and fat politics: research, critique and interventions

Since the WHO (1998) lamented the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ over a decade ago, there has been much rhetoric and concern about fatness/weight/obesity across an increasing range of national contexts. Alarmist claims about an ‘obesity time-bomb’ are continually recycled in policy reports, reviews and white papers, each of which begin with the assumption that fatness is fundamentally unhealthy and damaging to national economies (UK examples include: AMRC 2013; Foresight 2007; HOC 2004). This rhetoric and the associated moral panic have been amplified by a dramatising mass media (Boero 2012; also, see Boero in this issue) and have in no way dissipated even though certain ‘sceptics’ maintain the ‘crisis’ is coming to an end (Gard 2011; for a critique, see Lupton 2013). Recent examples of what Saguy and Almeling (2005) call ‘fat panic’ are not difficult to find. In February 2013, shortly before we finalised this special issue, the AMRC (2013, 7) released a well-publicised report, Measuring Up, which reiterated the dominant view: fatness is ‘a problem of epidemic proportions’ that ‘must now be tackled urgently’. Similar to earlier manifestations of fat panic (see McPhail 2009, for example), these public health concerns intersect with broader political economic anxieties about poor national fitness, with the UK labelled as ‘the “fat man” (sic) of Europe’ (AMRC 2013, 3). This document, like others before it, legitimises calls for various interventions to tackle the ‘problem of obesity’ (e.g. intensified surveillance inside and outside of the clinic, including injunctions that healthcare professionals must attend to their own weight); interventions which aim to literally reduce the number of bodies of ‘size’ and the size of individuals’ bodies (Evans and Colls 2009). This dominant ‘obesity epidemic’ narrative and rhetoric – what John Evans et al. (2008) term ‘fat fabrications’ – not only emerges in policy reports but also in academic literature, including papers written by respected contributors to this journal. For example, Bagwell (2013) and De Vogli et al. (2013) are concerned respectively with public health efforts to ‘tackle’ and ‘control’ the ‘obesity epidemic’. Such studies, similar to sociological publications on obesity rates (Crossley 2004) and geographical work on so-called ‘obesogenic environments’ (Smith and Cummins 2008; for critiques see Colls and Evans forthcoming; Evans, Crookes and Coaffee 2012; Guthman 2011; Kirkland 2011), are useful insofar as they draw attention to the ways in which social, political and economic factors shape and constrain people’s life chances and consumptive practices. However, we disagree with the common research and policy emphasis on body size/weight/fatness as a proxy for health as well as the assumption that diet and/or physical activity unequivocally explain trends in obesity regardless of other possible contributors (e.g. endocrine disruptors, sleep debt, smoking cessation and side effects from medicines) (see Keith et al. 2006). Specifically, we question the assertion of a Critical Public Health, 2013 Vol. 23, No. 3, 249–262, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2013.814312

Placental surfaces and the geographies of bodily interiors

Within geographical research on ‘the body’, a focus on the surfaces of bodies has been useful for considering how body boundaries, most often implied to begin and end at the skin, (de)limit, (de)regulate, and (de)stabilise what we come to know as ‘a body’. Such work draws attention to how meaning is inscribed ‘upon’ such surfaces and on the fluids that move across, within, and through those surfaces: for example blood, breast milk, and excrement. This paper, however, considers the potential for thinking geographically about interior bodily surfaces by engaging with the placenta. The placenta is a temporary organ that forms in a womans body only during pregnancy and whose purpose is to mediate the flow of substances between a womans body and the foetus. It is often considered to have two surfaces, the maternal and foetal surface, or to be ‘a’ surface in and of itself. Our intention is to think geographically ‘with’ ‘the placenta’ in order to focus on what interior surfaces can ‘do’ rather than ‘what they mean’. In so doing our contribution is twofold. Firstly, we will focus on the ‘resurfacing’ of the placenta when it moves outside of the body to be placed upon other (bodily) surfaces, taken back inside the body of origin, or put to use in research. This is significant for highlighting the specific mobilities and temporalities of interior bodily surfaces. Secondly, we consider the theoretical and ethical significance of the placenta for geography by engaging with Luce Irigarays account of the placental relation between mother and foetus understood as a space of mediation or ‘space between two’. In particular we are interested in considering the geographical potential of the sexed specificities of interior body surfaces, or their ‘morpho-logics’, for understandings of relationality, between self and other, and body and world; in short, we work with the placenta as a ‘relational organ’ in order to uncover new and potentially enlivening ethical spaces of exchange.

Doing More Good than Harm? The Absent Presence of Children’s Bodies in (Anti-)Obesity Policy

The current moral panic about fatness in the United Kingdom (as in many other countries) has resulted in the ongoing development of numerous initiatives implemented in an attempt to defuse the so-called ‘obesity time bomb’. As the quote above illustrates, concern about the potential future implications of existing bodyweight/mass is heightened in UK policy discourse when it is focused on children and young people and resultant policy initiatives have in the main aimed to control and regulate children’s (potentially) obese bodies over and above adults’ (see also HOC, 2004; DH, 2008). Building on the critique of the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ developed in earlier chapters, here we question both the justifications for and the implications of the focus on children in UK anti-obesity policy.1 We do so with reference to recent work across the social sciences, which has questioned how socially constructed ideas about childhood mean that children are increasingly central to political attempts to predict and govern the future in ways which may have unintended consequences for children’s well-being in the here-and-now. We do so with reference to recent work across the social sciences, which has questioned how socially constructed ideas about childhood mean that children are increasingly central to political attempts to predict and govern the future in ways which may have unintended consequences for children’s well-being in the here-and-now. In particular, we draw on work which interrogates the anticipatory logics underpinning both dominant constructions of childhood within policy action which attempts to ameliorate future problems (Ruddick, 2006) and the political economies through which childhood is constructed as a period of investment for the future (Katz, 2008).

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat, female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigarays critical engagement with Merleau-Pontys account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Savilles bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.