Women's Experiences of Embodied Joy: Resisting the Cultural Dictate of Bodily Dissatisfaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among women in North America, body dissatisfaction is prevalent and well documented. Women are often unhappy with their bodies and strive to change their bodies to fit the dominant cultural ideal of beauty and femininity. Within this context, in which women are expected to focus tremendous resources, time, and energy on bodily striving and body dissatisfaction, some women are able to resist these expectations. They experience joy with their bodies—joy that is not contingent on their appearance, size, or weight. With respect to women’s embodied experiences of joy, a number of significant gaps exist in the research literature. The current study examined women’s experiences of embodied joy through the use of qualitative research methods, including individual interviews and a focus group. A feminist constructivist grounded theory frame was utilized. The findings of this analysis indicated the presence of four core dimensions of women’s joyful body experiences as a form of resistance to bodily dissatisfaction. The first core dimension addressed the experience of embodied joy, which included attunement, growth, liberation, and thriving. The second core dimension addressed participants’ active creation of environments that nurtured joy, including: creating spaces that facilitated embodied joy, creating internal openness to the experience of joy, and seeking supportive social relationships. The third core dimension addressed enacting joy in the context of resistance and struggle, specifically when navigating the imposition of the other’s external gaze. This core dimension included the themes of media deconstruction, disengagement from problematic relationships, personal practices of resistance, and critical political consciousness. The fourth core dimension involved enacting joy in the context of resistance and struggle as a journey towards joy, which included reclaimed childhood experiences, disruption and reconnection, and guiding other girls and women. The present study has implications for clinical work as well as for health promotion. Ultimately, women’s experiences of embodied joy both reflected their resistance to cultural dictates and further enabled them to resist the dictate of bodily dissatisfaction.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".