ABSTRACT
Issues of gender and embodiment are currently central in discussions of young women’s health and well-being. The wide-ranging public discussion facilitated by the #MeToo movement has drawn attention to the prevalence of violence and harassment in contemporary Western societies. ‘Embodied’ approaches to youth and health emphasise that the body is more than an object upon which culture and society is written and highlight the importance of addressing bodies and embodied experiences as meaningful sources and agents of change. Paying specific attention to embodiment both conceptually and methodologically can illuminate the intersecting forces connecting bodies and sociocultural contexts. Aligned with this, we discuss the use of embodied performative methods to explore experiences of ‘gender in the everyday’ with young women from an Australian university. Participants’ engagements in these methods showed the centrality of the body in undertaking the daily labour of gender permeating their scholarly and social lives, and the toll on embodied and mental well-being. The young women described physically ‘carrying’ the doubled daily burden of shielding themselves from possible risk of sexual violence, and performing themselves into beauty and behavioural standards associated with femininity. They described the bodily effects of being ‘constantly on edge’ and ‘scared’ in university spaces, and elsewhere in public life, and feeling ‘sick’ at being treated as a ‘sexual object’. Embodied approaches and methods we used showed the gendered bodily labour in women’s daily work of care for the self. In the new gender order, it is important to seek research methods that help make visible this bodily labour and its felt affects and the many million micro acts of production, which accumulate as gendered embodied experience. Opportunities must be created through which to ‘imagine’ and ‘speak’ differently, in order to recognise the process of production and the entangling intersections of material and social elements in this ongoing process of gendered becomings.
