In this installment, we look at Sophie John’s dissertation, a third year at Corpus Christi College. Her research uses Foucault’s work to examine Instagram’s visual culture and associated discourses surrounding women’s health.
What is your dissertation about?
My dissertation looks at the way in which the visual culture on Instagram is affecting the way that women’s health is performed in co-gender gyms, using Michael Foucault’s notion of biopower and Judith Butler’s idea of performativity as an analytical framework. This is situated in the field of health and feminist geographies.
I look at how Instagram is creating knowledge’s surrounding women’s health and how this knowledge is situated in discourses of power. In particular, I focus on the glutes. At first this may seem like a really abstract, crazy thing to do a geography dissertation on, but in reality the glutes are deeply embedded in discourse! There is a dark, racial history surrounding the awful treatment of the Saartjie Baartman (‘the Hottentot Venus’) under British colonial rule in which she was labeled a ‘freak’ due to the additional fat layers on her glutes as a result of steatopygia (the development of extra fat around the buttocks that occurs particularly among Khoisan women). There’s the first use of the word ‘cellulite’ in English printed culture in Vouge in 1968, and the demonisation of female fat that followed. Most recently, and the focus of my research, is on the way fitness influencers on Instagram are creating new knoweldges with their ‘Peach Plans’ and ‘Booty workouts’. This leads one to ask, if the way women are using the gym is changing, what is the future for the role of the gym in preventative and public healthcare systems?
Why is this research important?
When talking to my family about my plans, one of the first questions has always been, ‘How is this geography?’ or ‘why is that important?’. Well, the gym has been an essential component of primary (preventative) healthcare, but the shift to aesthetic-based motivations for working out challenges the gym’s role. The rise of ‘fitness influencers’ on Instagram, many of whom do not hold personal training or gym based qualifications, means that information, both accurate and inaccurate, is readily available at the touch of a button. I’m sure that we’ve all been exposed to the ‘thigh-gap’ or ‘hip-dip’ trends and it’s important to understand the role that Instagram has on the way women understand their own health and consequently how they use the gym. I hope this research shows that we need more diversity amongst the fitness community on Instagram and more regulation around who is giving out health information.
How did you find conducting the fieldwork remotely?
I primarily relied upon survey data and interviews, which could all easily be conducted remotely. My survey looked at how women aged between 18-54 engaged with health and fitness content on Instagram and how they used the gym, whilst the interviews were conducted with experts (both fitness influencers and gym staff/PT’s) to add more depth to my research. I also did some discourse analysis on Instagram posts, so for me conducting fieldwork remotely wasn’t such an issue!
My advice to second years would be to choose a topic you’re interested in!! I initially had chosen to do a different idea because I thought it would be more “academic” but I just didn’t have enough passion for it, and doing something about the gym was always in the back of my mind. So after submitting my dissertation proposal I decided to switch and I love this idea! It’s interesting both from an academic perspective, but also from a personal interest… we’re all exposed to ideas about what is healthy and what we “should” look like, so unpicking the discourse surrounding this has been really interesting but also rewarding! I would also say be organised with your notes and don’t underestimate how hard it is to get people to fill out a questionnaire!
DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR ONLY AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OR OPINIONS OF COMPASS MAGAZINE AS A WHOLE OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY