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    #Bodypositive : performances of body positivity by influencers on Instagram : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology (Health Endorsement) at Massey University, Albany Campus, Aotearoa/New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Jones, Aroha Moana
    Women around the world are increasingly using the social media platform Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application, to promote body acceptance and address unrealistic appearance-related ideals. Drawing on ideas of performance and performativity (Butler, 1988, 1990; Goffman, 1959, 1976) this research examines the performative practices and performances of body positive influencers on Instagram and considers how influencers are self-presenting, both visually and textually, to discursively construct and produce body positive identities. I interpreted the performances of body positive influencers as meaningful practices of resistance that offer promising moments of instability and threaten to destabilise narrow, predominantly white, Western, hetero-normative beauty standards, including the thin-ideal. Instagram appears to offer body positive influencers a productive space for reimagining and re-imaging the ways that bodies are enacted and performed. However, despite this, influencers occasionally slip from body positive discourses to pre-existing discourses of idealised female beauty and conventional feminine rhetoric, thus, at times repeating and (re)producing the very ideologies they purport to reject. An unexpected finding of this research was that many of the influencers discussed body positivism alongside deeply personal accounts of recovery from eating disorders and disordered eating. This thesis is unique and distinguished from previous research, in that it explores body positivity in the context of eating disorder recovery. Key findings are that the current iteration of body positivity on Instagram can be read as an undertaking that troubles hegemonic norms of female beauty, facilitates corporeal performances of resistance, and opens a new space for the performance, documentation, and discussion of recovery.
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    "I didn't need to know that!" : the regulation of women with endometriosis : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology (endorsement in Health Psychology) at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Westeneng, Tasha Lee
    Endometriosis is a condition that primarily affects women of reproductive age and has the potential to impact upon every facet of women’s lives. The relevance of gender to endometriosis is frequently acknowledged within the literature, although only a small number of studies have taken a gendered and critical stance to the topic. Using online illness narratives in the form of blog posts, this study uses a feminist post-structuralist perspective to explore how women construct their endometriosis experiences, drawing upon discourses that regulate the female body. This study found that women are regulated by discourses of Ideal Femininity, which encompasses discursive constructions of ‘silencing’, ‘sacrifice’, and a ‘disordered body’. Discourses of Legitimation involves the construction of an ‘open body’ and ‘dismissal’. These finding suggest that women with endometriosis have limited control over their bodies due to the negative and dominant representations of the female body. Therefore, representations of the female body should be considered when positioning endometriosis as an individual and pathologised issue for women. It is imperative that we challenge discourses that position women as responsible for their condition by way of being female and where endometriosis is constructed as a reproductive disorder; this could go some way to address the unjust social power relations that govern women’s bodies.
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    Becoming strong women : physicality, femininity and the pursuit of power : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology at Massey University, Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2002) Bell, Martha Guinn
    Women outdoor leaders are often told that they are too aggressive and strident and that they risk being too strong to be role models for their students. They experience competition, hostility, misogynist epithets and sexual advances, as well as coercion to prove themselves from their male students and colleagues. Many of these women report self-doubt and low confidence about their competence and that they do not advance in their careers because they take time to perfect their physical skills. Cultural feminist analyses recommend that activities for women ought not to require intense physical strength and women outdoor leaders should not be so competent that ordinary women cannot aspire to be like them. Prescriptions for all-women groups encourage non-competitive learning experiences which enhance the development of women's inner strengths and protect their psychological safety in the outdoors. Non-separatist remedies agree that women-only courses ensure women are not intimidated by men's physical superiority and argue that they should prepare women to re-enter mixed outdoor programmes with more confidence. These suggestions, however, do not account for the relations of the physical through which women and men socially and subjectively embody physicality. This project takes up corporeal feminism in order to examine in a group of women outdoor leaders their lived experiences of physicality and embodied identity and how these effect often contradictory gendered subjectivities. It responds to the literature by arguing that heterogendered norms are sustained when the performance of prowess is rejected as the 'male model.' In contrast, I argue that women in this study who embrace the 'hard, physical' as masculinity are allowing a non-normative bodily strength to reinscribe their feminine subjectivities. Other women who desire an "acceptable" femininity, whether "big and boisterous" or "staunch," are expanding the possibilities for gendered subjectivity. Strong women know what their bodies can do and often enthusiastically want others to experience this. Their physical prowess makes visible the social conditions through which normative femininity is inscribed as limited physical strength. When they reinscribe femininity with a lived power of strength, endurance and bodily control, they become more effective at challenging gender heteronormativity through alternative physicalities.