“I was always at odds with my mother’s expectations of me”: How mothers shape queer daughters’ body image and physical activity engagement throughout the life course
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mothers often model the “doing of femininity” for their daughters by engaging in diet and physical activity to retain slim, toned, and youthful appearances. How queer women have embodied these messages surrounding femininity has been absent from the literature. The purpose of our study was to examine how older queer women storied their mother’s involvement in their physical activity and body image experiences throughout their life course. Four narrative themes were constructed from a thematic narrative analysis of life history interviews with 17 queer women aged 65 to 86. Participants experienced body freedom in early life; deriving pleasure and confidence from sport and play. Puberty triggered a sense of self-consciousness about their bodies, hindering physical activity, while their mothers' simultaneous emphasis on maintaining slim figures through dieting urged daughters to appeal to the male gaze. This messaging taught participants to corset their embodiment via the performance of feminine appearances, often creating a tension with their desire to express their ‘tomboy-ness.’ In emerging adulthood, participants met other queer women, which provided expanded narrative scripts of womanhood, and catalyzed self-exploration and opportunities to resist the “doing” of idealized femininity. Despite this newfound sense of body-related authenticity, age-related body changes, and accompanying body-related shame and anxiety, compelled them to re-lace the corset. Consequently, they resorted to (or resumed) physical activity as a means to regulate their body shape and size. The findings highlight the importance of interpersonal relationships, age, sexual orientation, and gender expression in shaping women’s body image and physical activity participation.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".