298 research outputs found
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Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of The Biggest Loser Australia
The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality television weight-loss programme that positions itself as a response to the so-called âobesity crisisâ. Research on TBL has thus far focussed on audience responses and its effect on viewersâ beliefs about weight loss. This article focuses instead on how meaning is constructed in TBL. We conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a key episode of TBL (the 2012 Australian season finale) to examine how the textual, visual and auditory elements combine to construct meanings beyond the ostensible health messages. Although the overt message is that all contestants have worked hard, turned their lives around and been âsuccessfulâ, examination of editing choices, lighting and colour, clothing and time spent on contestants allows us to see that the programme constructs varying degrees of success between contestants and provides accounts for these differences in outcomes. In this way the programme is able to present itself as a putative celebration of all contestants while prescribing narrow limits around what constitutes success. TBL reinforces an ideology in which âsuccessâ is a direct result of âthe workâ of weight loss (both physical and emotional), which can apparently be read straightforwardly off the body. TBLâs âcelebrationâ of weight loss thus reproduces and strengthens the widespread view of fat bodies as physical manifestations of individual (ir)responsibility and psychological dysfunction, and contributes to the ongoing stigmatisation of obesity
Embodied Discourses of Literacy in the Lives of Two Preservice Teachers
This study examines the emerging teacher literacy identities of Ian and A.J., two preservice teachers in a graduate teacher education program in the United States. Using a poststructural feminisms theoretical framework, the study illustrates the embodiment of literacy pedagogy discourses in relation to the literacy coursesâ discourse of comprehensive literacy and the literacy biographical discourses of Ian and A.J. The results of this study indicate the need to deconstruct how the discourse of comprehensive literacy limits how we, as literacy teacher educators, position, hear and respond to our preservice teachers and suggests the need for differentiation in our teacher education literacy courses
Fat, syn and disordered eating: The dangers and powers of excess
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Fat Studies on 8 April 2015 available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21604851.2015.1016777This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this groupâs language of âSyn.â Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body which has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders which hold womenâs bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating.This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this groupâs language of âSyn.â Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body which has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders which hold womenâs bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating
Sounding Situated Knowledges - Echo in Archaeoacoustics
This article proposes that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's âSituated Knowledgesâ can be productively brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as âsounding situated knowledges.â Sounding situated knowledges re-reads debates around the ânature of soundâ with a Harawayan notion of the ânatureculture of sound.â This aims to disrupt a traditional subject-object relation which I argue has perpetuated a pervasive âsonic naturalismâ in sound studies. The emerging field of archaeoacoustics (acoustic archaeology), which examines the role of sound in human behaviour in archaeology, is theorized as an opening with potentially profound consequences for sonic knowledge production which are not currently being realized. The echo is conceived as a material-semiotic articulation, which akin to Haraway's infamous cyborg, serves as a feminist figuration which enables this renegotiation. Archaeoacoustics research, read following Haraway both reflectively and diffractively, is understood as a critical juncture for sound studies which exposes the necessity of both embodiedness and situatedness for sonic knowledge production. Given the potential opened up by archaeoacoustics through the figure of echo, a critical renegotiation of the subject-object relation in sound studies is suggested as central in further developing theories of sonic knowledge production
Resisting the mantle of the monstrous feminine : women's construction and experience of premenstrual embodiment
The female reproductive body is positioned as abject, as other, as site of defciency and disease, the epitome of the âmonstrous feminine.â Premenstrual change in emotion, behavior or embodied sensation is positioned as a sign of madness within, necessitating restraint and control on the part of the women experiencing it (Ussher 2006). Breakdown in this control through manifestation of âsymptomsâ is diagnosed as PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome) or PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder), a pathology deserving of âtreatment.â In this chapter, we adopt a feminist material-discursive theoretical framework to examine the role of premenstrual embodiment in relation to womenâs adoption of the subject position of monstrous feminine, drawing on interviews we have conducted with women who self-diagnose as âPMS sufferers.â We theorize womenâs self-positioning as subjectifcation, wherein women take up cultural discourse associated with idealized femininity and the reproductive body, resulting in self-objectifcation, distress, and self-condemnation. However, women can resist negative cultural constructions of premenstrual embodiment and the subsequent self-policing. We describe the impact of women-centered psychological therapy which increases awareness of embodied change, and leads to greater acceptance of the premenstrual body and greater self-care, which serves to reduce premenstrual distress
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