ABSTRACT
This chapter pertains to how, through the performance of slimming/starving/emaciation, the body is only the terrain of young women who intersubjectively understand the practice as a mainstream, yet uncontrolled and psychologically problematic, means of doing docile femininity. It addresses how emaciated bodies are socially constructed and lived by a group of young men in amateur sport in Canada. The chapter discusses how men who regularly lose weight, restrict food, and often times emaciate their bodies come to intersubjectively experience and define what constitutes appropriately thinned bodies for men. The now massive academic and popular cultural literature on young people with eating disorders glosses over, almost entirely, the sort of interactionist focus Blumer and others advocated so long ago in sociology. Despite food restriction common usage in the sociology of physical culture, habitusis one of the most inconsistently defined or deployed concepts in research and academic discourses on athletic embodiment.
