Older women's relations to bodily appearance: the embodiment of social and biological conditions of existence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our purpose in this paper is to explore and deepen the understanding of older women's relations to bodily appearance by looking at two different conditions of existence. Recent research has touched on the experiences of older women in societies with youthful norms of beauty, but the diversity of older women's experiences has been little explored, and there has been little dialogue between theoretical writing and empirical research on the topic. It was therefore decided to conduct an empirical study of older women's relations to bodily appearance, applying Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory and particularly the concept of habitus to the body. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 51 francophone women aged 65 to 75 years from working-class and affluent neighbourhoods of Montréal (Québec, Canada). The findings showed clearly that, despite the social differentiation associated with variations in economic and cultural capital, older women's relations to bodily appearance converged as they aged. Two previously unidentified and overlapping processes of attitudinal change were recognised: (1) differentiation by social class, and (2) convergence with increasing age. In conclusion, we discuss the embodiment of women's social and biological conditions of existence in the context of personal ageing. The notion of age-habitus is introduced to explain how older women maintain their social value in the context of omnipresent youthful ideals of beauty for western women.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".