Love your body! An exploration of new empowerment discourse as related to body capital, and body image and eating concerns among women

Abstract

Over the past years, a new discourse referred to as “Love Your Body” (LYB) has emerged as a dominant and important gendered discourse related to women’s appearance within the context of the commercialization of feminism. Although allegedly aiming to promote positive individual-level outcomes among women, including positive body image and self-confidence, the LYB discourse contains multiple contradictions and tensions. Furthermore, it is aligned with the current oppressive system of body capital, which confers privilege on some individuals based on their physical appearance. As such, it may, in contrast, increase pressures on women to continue to adhere to unrealistic appearance ideals, ground their self-worth in their appearance, and undermine efforts of resistance against social appearance-related pressures. In this way, rather than alleviate body image and eating concerns and related body change behaviors, it may exacerbate them and have a detrimental effect on women’s psychological wellbeing and social functioning. In addition, the LYB discourse may have collective negative effects by impeding social change towards equity and social justice. The data related to the effects of the LYB discourse to date are scant, representing an important gap in our understanding of how this discourse and representations of contemporary postmodern femininities may affect women. Increasing our understanding of these effects is important to better understand how this discourse operates as well as its effects at the individual and collective level, and to further inform efforts to decrease sociocultural pressures upon women and to provide them with the critical tools to identify and resist them.