What is Body-Hatred?

Abstract

As the Introduction outlines, the overall thesis of this volume is that the relationship between young women and their bodies is a negative and frequently damaging one, that girls can be said to suffer from a set of emotions which can be distilled into the term ‘body-hatred’. This chapter explores some important dimensions of the concept of body-hatred. Firstly, it considers how medicine, usually in the form of psychiatry, has positioned such feelings as abnormal, and treated them as individual pathology. It then goes on the consider how some feminist sociological approaches can dissolve the categories of ‘sick’ and ‘normal’ and offer the opportunity to consider how all young women may be subject to chronic discontent about their appearances.