The open access journal Youth (ISSN 2673-995X) is inviting abstracts for a new Special Issue entitled “Body Image: Youth, Gender and Health”, with Dr Julia Coffey Guest Editor for this issue.
Special Issue Call:
Issues connected with gendered bodily experience, embodiment, and body image are fraught and contested topics in studies of youth. Young people’s embodied identity (including body-related concerns, or body image) is forged in relation to prevailing gendered and racialised body ideals. These ideals are arguably intensifying through a range of social, cultural, and structural dimensions which shape the conditions of the possibility for identity and experience in young people’s lives, including precarious and insecure working conditions, financial pressures, and the demands of a heavily visually focused digital culture with contemporary social media. The proliferating aesthetic standards of ‘perfect’ beauty are presented as normal and everyday in social media. Cultural studies and sociological accounts show how this pressure manifests in self-branding as an increasingly common-sense way of negotiating social digital media. Young people are encouraged to ‘optimise’ themselves through ‘body work’ to improve their appearance as a crucial form of (gendered) self-work required in digital youth cultures.
This Special Issue invites contributions exploring topics of youth body image. This Special Issue seeks articles which situate body image as a social and cultural, not individual, phenomena, to extend beyond dominant pathologising approaches of body image and embodiment in which bodies passively absorb media images of cultural representations. This Special Issue welcomes theorisations and methodological approaches in which the active role of bodies in the formation of identity and everyday life is highlighted. Articles exploring the ways body image intersects with inequalities, including but also extending beyond gender to include the contours of sexuality, racialisation, class, ability, and location, are encouraged.
Abstract submission deadline:15 October 2022 (recently extended)
Full manuscript deadline: 30 May 2023
Whilst as an Open Access Journal Youth requires a publication fee (1000 CHF), fees can be waived for invited papers. Please email your abstract toJulia.coffey@newcastle.edu.auif you wish to discuss a paper proposal, or submit an abstract via the link on theSpecial Issue website:https://www.mdpi.com/journal/youth/special_issues/body_image_youth