Introduction

This book is about a contemporary problematic that traverses the lives of many people, mostly women, broadly in Western and Northern societies. Through the second half of the last century, it came to be theorised as ‘body image’, and Psychology made sense of it as Psychology usually does with human preoccupations and problems: purifying it as a measurable construct located in individuals. Within or outside this purification, discourses of body image affect our decisions and concerns on an everyday basis, and constitute an important part of the way we organise our social lives. This book is about how discourses of body image traverse and organise our identities and social relations.