ABSTRACT
As way of entry, I will start with a general observation: Overwhelmingly, whenever personal appearance (how somebody ‘looks’ in the eyes of others) is expressed as problematic, it is so expressed with regard to that person’s identity (what that person is). In order to build a comprehensive account of the ways in which ‘body image problems’ are articulated in talk, my first step is to explore the underlying grammar (i.e., the set of rules for expressing and understanding statements) that sustains this relation between appearance and identity. Following the steps of Harvey Sacks’ Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA; Sacks 1992), my first task is to describe that ‘grammar of body image’, which is basically composed of social identity categories, activities bound to those categories, and relations between members of the categories.
