Azzarito (2010)
Foucault’s analysis of the body:
It is an emancipatory socio-educational and political
project
It (en)genders research on the feminine ‘docile body’
in society.
Media is:
• A material site for girls’ identity formation
• Presents conflicting images of femininity
• Challenge young women’s self-expression and
physicality development
• Discourses of new femininities in sport, fitness
and health promoted by the new economies
• Emerging contemporary monocultural
discourses:‘Alpha Girl’ and the ‘Future Girl,’
• Powerful sporty, fit and healthy femininities
• These discourses contradict the traditional
feminine docile body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdaHl4oWJHM 2.29
Alpha girl: How to spot an alpha girl
‘New pedagogies’ (i.e. media, magazines and website)
Body as defined through these media :
the feminine body is defined and circumscribed as a
complement to and/or in opposition to the masculine
body
Popular culture constructs unrealistic ideals of women’s
bodies
Role of media in pedagogizing and celebrating
slenderness, lack of muscularity and athleticism.
Technologies of the self for achieving ‘perfection:
Dieting and fitness practices promoted in health,
fitness and fashion magazines
These serve as technologies for achieving an
unattainable, monodimensional notion of slenderness
with its promise of ideal femininity
The docile body in an ‘insane’ Western culture:
• In extreme cases, the body becomes an anorexic or
bulimic girl’s body
• An obsessive body not only framed by but also
culturally trapped
The Alpha and the Future Girl
• Emblems that represent new femininities
• They are self-made, ambitious and independent
girls
• They have found sport and career paths as the most
important areas of self-definition
• They find these representations as socially
successful bodies
Western representations of non-Western girls are
represented as antithetical and trivial in their
positions compared to the white girls.
In contrast, the Alpha and the Future Girls are
marketed as universally available for all girls
The reason is that these images are implicitly framed
by whiteness as a notable difference.
Such images of the white girls are sustained by
globalization (Azzarito, 2009b),
Media is replete with important sites of pedagogizing
(invisible and visible pedagogies of identity) girls’
construction of their bodies
The Muslim girl’s body remains portrayed not only as a
covered body, a ‘silent body,’ but also as an oppressed
and constrained female physicality
• Often bodies are (mis)represented by the media
• The media is a complex web of fantasies and realities
that
• inform their embodiment of the
race/gender/class/religion
• Schooling girls’ critical media awareness
•
• Critical media pedagogy enhances young people’s
critical consciousness of virtuality and reality in the
media.
Schooling hybridity promotes multiple and fluid forms
of girls’ bodies
It celebrates ‘difference’ and the ‘possibilities to which
heterogeneity gives rise’
It allows, engenders and legitimates girls’ hybrid
narratives of the diverse ways they want to represent
themselves
They want to become diverse and represented so in the
context of physical-activities.