Dr Katy Day

There is a strong tradition of feminist scholarship on “family foodwork” which refers to key activities involved in feeding a family including researching nutritional information, meal planning, food shopping and meal preparation. It has been found that despite social changes, this work continues to fall disproportionately to women and is an important site for the performance of appropriate ‘food femininities’. Further, differential access to material resources and cultural capital means that the ideals set are not equally attainable for all groups of women. This paper draws upon the data from ten in-depth interviews with working-class and middle-class mothers around family foodwork. Employing a feminist poststructuralist framework, we examine the construction of good mothering identities via discourse around the family diet and feeding practices and the ways in which these reproduce class boundaries. In particular, we examine how the concept of ‘calibrated femininities’ is instructive here in the construction of good ‘middle-class’ femininities aimed at avoiding pathologised extremes (e.g. the ‘lazy’, ill-informed mother versus the controlling, fanatical mother) and the classed ways in which these are coded. We consider the implications of the findings for feminist debates around domestic labour, women’s subordination and the importance of class analysis to feminist psychologies.

In recent years, the spotlight in the British media has often been on girls’ and young women’s ‘wayward’ and self-destructive practices, creating a degree of ‘moral panic’. One example is heavy and so-called binge-drinking (Day et al., 2004), which has been cast within the media in various, negative ways, for example, as the price of women’s so-called emancipation and as an unfortunate breaking down of clearly defined gender roles in society (see Day et al., 2004). More recently, internet sites promoting extreme dieting have received attention from journalists, organizations (e.g. SCaRED1 ) and feminist scholars (e.g. Pollack, 2003) concerned about the impact of these on the health and well-being of the girls and women who visit the sites (see Day and Keys, 2009, for an overview). Such cyberspaces have typically been characterized as fora of female pathology with subsequent calls for their censorship (e.g. by Australian Labour MP Anna Burke). Whilst there are a plethora of feminist analyses of body modification or ‘eating disorders’ that have cast these practices in diverse, complex and sometimes contradictory ways (see Malson, 1998), there is a scarcity of feminist literature on women’s alcohol consumption. Although the two topics are clearly distinct, my research has elucidated a number of similarities and common themes pertinent to feminism. For example, representations around both eating and drinking (alcohol) tend to draw upon conventional ideals around femininity (and masculinity), such as the idea that ‘good’ women should exercise restraint and denial. Such representations invite feminist deconstruction (e.g. Hepworth and Griffin, 1995; Bordo, 1997). Furthermore, my research has highlighted how both women’s drinking and extreme dieting can be understood (partially) as practices by which girls and women challenge and resist gender ideals and social processes aimed at controlling women, and via which they sometimes attempt a (re)construction of meanings and identities. This is consistent with poststructuralist feminist arguments that girls and women have the ability to ‘rewrite’ gender ideologies, often in ways that benefit them by, for example, positioning them in more powerful ways (e.g. Eckermann, 1997). However, an analysis of such ‘destructive’ health-related behaviours in terms of resistance is by no means unproblematic as shall be explored.

Recently, we have seen the emergence of ‘pro-eating-disorder’ websites and Internet communities, providing opportunities for girls and women who practise self-starvation and purging to converse and swap ‘tips’ online. This has generated discussion about the feminist response to this so-called ‘pro-eating-disorder movement’. Although a number of studies have focused on online eating-disorder support groups, they have not examined the material posted on pro-eating-disorder websites. The study reported here is an examination of how members of the pro-eating-disorder movement construct their interests, activities and identities. This was done by performing a poststructuralist style of discourse analysis informed by a feminist perspective on the material downloaded from pro-eating-disorder websites. The analysis highlights the discursive work occurring on the sites around the power of beauty ideals and conformity to these. Yet at the same time, this sub-cultural group is engaged in counter-hegemonic work with regards to dominant meanings surrounding self-starvation and purging. Suggestions for future work are also presented.

Book review of Emma Rich, Lee F Monaghan and Lucy Aphramor (eds), Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives

Over the past decade there have been significant shifts both in feminist approaches to the field of eating disorders and in the ways in which gender, bodies, body weight, body management and food are understood, represented and regulated within the dominant cultural milieus of the early twenty-first century. Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders addresses these developments, exploring how eating disordered subjectivities, experiences and body management practices are theorised and researched within postmodern and post-structuralist feminist frameworks. Bringing together an international range of cutting-edge, contemporary feminist research and theory on eating disorders, this book explores how anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and obesity cannot be adequately understood in terms of individual mental illness and deviation from the norm but are instead continuous with the dominant cultural ideas and values of contemporary cultures. This book will be essential reading for academic, graduate and post-graduate researchers with an interest in eating disorders and critical feminist scholarship, across a range of disciplines including psychology, sociology, cultural studies and gender studies as well as clinicians interested in exploring innovative theory and practice in this field.

This book showcases a selection of current work and debates on weight and body management practices that are being produced from the vibrant arena of critical and postmodern approaches in the social sciences. Understanding weight issues in the developed world now occurs against a backdrop in which westernised cultural ideals about the body constitute the slim body as healthy, good, moral, attractive and 'normal'. Simultaneously the World Health Organisation has declared that the western world is in the grip of an 'obesity epidemic' despite the fact that so-called eating disorders and extreme dieting and body management practices are shown to be increasing. This timely book uses the three key areas of representation, identities and practice to contextualise weight and body management practices providing readers with innovative examples of how to explore and interrogate the way our understandings of health, identity and weight are constituted within and by normative discourses of contemporary western culture.

The media is a potent source of information and meanings where the unfamiliar and uncertain is concerned, this includes medical professionals. So portrayals of conditions such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) are worthy of exploration in that they inform public and professional understandings. In the study reported here, we explore representations of CFS/ME within UK print media (1998-2015) using thematic analysis informed by a constructionist feminist perspective. We found that portrayals of CFS/ME differs meaningfully, depending on whether the sufferer is identified as a man or a woman. More specifically, the psychological and emotional tended to be foregrounded where women were concerned and the scepticism surrounding CFS/ME as a ‘non disease’ was much more evident. On some occasions this was dealt with directly, whilst on others it was ‘leaked in’ or hinted at. This serves to delegitimise the illness in women. In contrast, the physical was usually foregrounded in the case of men suffering from the condition and their experiences were accredited greater legitimacy. We problematize these representations and discuss the potential impact upon public and professional sympathy, treatment options and long-standing, gendered constructions of illness.

Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter reviews social psychological and sociological work that has sought to unpick how culturally shared ideology produces classed identities to discriminate and minimise the space for collective, class-based resistance. In detail, we will argue that socially-located derogatory discourses are commonly reproduced in everyday life, how explicit discourse in relation to social class is often unavailable or avoided and how such socially produced classism can produce an uncomfortable emotional realm. Despite this, we will review empirical research that has demonstrated how working-class people sometimes can and do negotiate more positive identity positions for themselves and each other in a variety of everyday contexts and situations.

This chapter aims, first, to scrutinise contemporary research and theory within mainstream psychology around social class and, second, to analyse the interrelationship with this and the history of the psychology of social class. We will identify a selection of ways in which the discipline of psychology has researched, theorised and practiced social class and how these have accounted for where we are now. We will also consider arguments that the ‘psy’ disciplines have a ‘horrible’ history where psychological accounts have enabled notions of class oppression, poverty and inequality to be an ‘absent present’. Last, we will review some examples of mainstream psychological work on social class that has questioned social conditions and practices and explore how these may contribute to class-related psychologies.

This book will be a useful resource for both academics and students studying class from a critical perspective. This book argues for the importance of considering social class in critical psychological enquiry.

Female adolescents have long been identified as a group ‘at risk’ of developing an eating disorder (Fairburn & Harrison, 2003). Moreover, figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC, 2014) indicate that the number of hospital admissions for treatment of an eating disorder had risen by 8% in the preceding 12 months. In terms of girls who were admitted, the most common age was 15 (300 out of 2,320), whereas for boys, this was 13 (50 out of 240). Published statistics must be treated with caution, however. First, as these tend to be based on those receiving treatment, they provide only a partial account as many ‘cases’ remain unidentified. Second, as we shall argue, treating anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa (and other so-called eating disorders such as ‘binge eating disorder’) as identifiable conditions is fraught with problems. Nevertheless, there appears to be a consensus that eating practices that are a cause for concern are on the rise, and that young people are particularly vulnerable.

Discourse analysis is a useful and flexible method for exploring power and identity. While there are many ways of doing discourse analysis, all agree that discourse is the central site of identity construction. However, recent feminist concerns over power, agency, and resistance have drawn attention to the absence of participants’ first-hand experiences within broad discursive accounts (Lafrance & McKenzie-Mohr, 2014; Saukko, 2008). For those with an interest in power relations, such as feminist researchers, this is a problematic silence which renders the personal functions of discourse invisible. In this paper, we argue that the ‘personal’ and ‘political’ are inextricable, and make a case for putting the ‘personal’ into broader discursive frameworks of understanding. Further, we assert that feminist research seeking to account for identity must much more explicitly aim to capture this interplay. To this end we argue that voice is the key site of meaning where this interplay can be captured, but that no clear analytical framework currently exists for producing such an account. In response, we propose Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (FRDA) as a voice-centered analytical approach for engaging with experience and discourse in talk. We then set out clear guidance on how to do FRDA, as applied in the context of women working in UK policing. Finally, we conclude that by prioritizing voice, FRDA invites new and politicized feminist readings of power, agency, and resistance, where the voices of participants remain central to the discursive accounts of researchers.

Despite the proclamations of the media from the late 1980s onwards that feminism is ‘over’ and that we were living in a postfeminist era of gender equality1, many commentators argue that there has been a more recent, resurgent interest in feminism in the UK2. This ‘fourth-wave’ has been characterised by growing numbers of new feminist organisations, online communities and activist campaigns3. However, to date, there is a lack of critical work on this ‘fourth-wave’4. This article aims to address this. We consider some contemporary trends within feminist theory and activism and scrutinise some of the socio-cultural, historical and political changes that have given rise to these. We also lend our own thoughts as to whether more recent developments are something to celebrate, for example, as arguably constituting progress from previous ‘waves’, or whether these should be a cause for concern. In particular, we examine the encroachment of neo-liberal values on feminism, the role of technology, intersectionality and so-called ‘identity politics’. We conclude by considering what the major challenges and questions facing feminists now are and what the goals of the feminist movement should be.

Women's increasing alcohol consumption has come under intense scrutiny recently within the UK press and, as this paper will report, the coverage on the whole can be seen to present women who drink as problematic. Although feminist researchers have examined media constructions of gender, and although men's drinking has been the subject of critical analyses, there appears to be little feminist work on women's drinking per se. This is a significant omission, since gender representations around eating, drinking, or sex tend to draw upon conventional ideals around femininity (and masculinity) and as such invite feminist deconstruction. It is also necessary for feminists working in this area to examine critically scientific thinking on women's drinking, as media constructions and everyday understandings will inevitably be distilled from mainstream psychological “knowledge.” Indeed, science is often invoked in discourse to warrant particular constructions as legitimate or self-evident, as opposed to mere opinion.

More recent years have begun to see a shift in focus in academic writing towards the rather neglected topic of female aggression and violence (for example, Campbell, 1993, 1995; Burbank, 1994). Furthermore, some feminists have highlighted the benefits of drawing attention towards women’s aggression for feminist agendas (for example, Campbell, 1993; White and Kowalski, 1994). However, much of the existing work in this area situates women’s aggression in the context of normative heterosexual relationships and domestic domains, meaning that women’s aggression and violence in other (more public) contexts is often overlooked. This omission is puzzling now given that women are entering into more public domains and spaces which have historically been dominated by men (for example, Kua, 1994) and reports that most incidents where women report being attacked by other women take place in the context of pubs or clubs (Home Office, 1993). As such, this study examines women’s talk around aggression in the context of ‘nights out’. In sum, it is argued here that physical aggression can be understood as playing an important role in the construction of working-class femininities in ways that ‘make sense’ in local classed contexts, thus emphasizing the importance of contextual understandings of women’s aggression.

Social psychologists have paid relatively little attention to class compared with scholars from other disciplines (e.g. sociology). This is a concern as class shapes nearly every aspect of human life and has a profoundly psychological dimension. This chapter critically reviews mainstream social psychological work on class, highlighting the general failure of this to problematise the class system of countries like Britain and the United States. It then moves on to discuss critical social psychological work on class and what this has offered those seeking to alleviate the problems caused by social and economic inequalities. Finally, the chapter reviews the current ‘state of play’ for critical scholarship in this area, considering future directions for this field of study.

Karen Barad’s agential realism argues for an ‘onto-epistemological’ position where phenomena occur only during intra-actions with discursive and material apparatus. Applying agential realism to psychological phenomena has potential to overcome an often-met material/discursive divide within the discipline, unlocking important ethical and conceptual possibilities. Despite this, a Baradian approach has been dismissed as unworkable for psychologists due to its lack of explanation for experiential consistency. We re-butt this position while nonetheless noting that to fully realise Barad’s contributions, psychologists must open themselves to new ways of approaching their subjects. Three key tenets of a Baradian approach applied to psychological phenomena are outlined: 1. self-structure singularity 2. spatio-temporality and 3. playfulness and experimentation. Examples of Baradian-inspired qualitative research illustrate these tenets in action, highlighting how Baradian theory can transcend current conceptual and ethical limitations as psychological phenomena is viewed as continuously reconfigured through human-human and human-non-human intra-actions we all have responsibility for.

Despite persuasive arguments pertaining to the importance of social class in the shaping of human life, this has and continues to be neglected within psychological research. Using primarily a UK focus, we begin by outlining some of the ways in which ‘mainstream’ psychology typically conceptualises class (e.g. socio-economic status) and argue that such an approach has a number of detrimental implications, for example, neglecting structural inequalities and oppression and ‘othering’ the working class. We then present a selection of ‘critical’ and feminist-informed research on social class which, we argue, offers a more holistic and sophisticated understanding of class and, in particular, draws attention to the complexities involved in how people experience, understand and construct class, classed identities and class transitions. Further, such work provides insight into the many ways in which people reproduce, re-work and resist classed discourse in everyday contexts such as the home, work place and beyond. However, we acknowledge the need for investigation into how those with more economic power justify class privilege and discursively protect and maintain their status.

Social psychologists have paid relatively little attention to class compared with scholars from other disciplines (e.g., sociology). This is a concern as class shapes nearly every aspect of human life and has a profoundly psychological dimension. This chapter critically reviews mainstream social psychological work on class, highlighting the general failure of this to problematise the class system of countries like Britain and the United States. It then moves on to discuss critical social psychological work on class and what this has offered those seeking to alleviate the problems caused by social and economic inequalities. Finally, the chapter reviews the current ‘state of play’ for critical scholarship in this area, considering future directions for this field of study.

In a cultural climate of “intensive parenting” and concerns about the “obesity epidemic,” parents are expected to take responsibility for their children's health, particularly through the provision of a “healthy” diet. This study involved intergenerational dyad interviews with both middle‐class and working‐class mothers and daughters from the United Kingdom. Analysing the data using discourse analysis informed by feminist poststructuralist theory, we found that mothers were positioned as having prime responsibility for the nurturing of family members, including the provision of a healthy diet. However, providing a healthy diet alone was insufficient; mothers needed to demonstrate that time and effort had been taken in the preparation of meals using fresh ingredients. Those who failed to do so were positioned as “lazy,” thus inviting the blaming of mothers for any current or future health problems encountered by family members (especially children). However, talk from some of the working‐class mothers pointed to the unattainable and “classed” ideals that are set by such cultural expectations.

Traditionally, women's eating disorders are thought to be strongly influenced by media images idealizing a normative thin female body. Taking a different approach, The Anorexic Self critically examines diagnostic and popular discourses on anorexia that construct narrow and ideal notions of the female self. Paula Saukko analyzes the personal and political implications of discourses on the anorexic self in multiple contexts, including her own experience of being diagnosed anorexic; psychiatrist Hilde Bruch's postwar research on anorexia; and media coverage of Karen Carpenter, Princess Diana, and other women with eating disorders. Saukko traces the history of the discourses from postwar idealization of masculine autonomy to postindustrial valorization of feminine flexibility, and also explores their politically progressive and psychologically healing--as well as sexist and humiliating--dimensions. Drawing on narrative therapy, dialogic theory, and multisited ethnography, The Anorexic Self cultivates a less judgmental and more self-reflexive way of relating to ourselves, others, and societies in which we live.

By focusing on discourses within the ‘cultural economy’ of reality TV, the following considers the wider positioning of waged labor as essential for mental health during a period of austerity. The findings suggest that discourses of mental health and wellbeing construct figures of a ‘good’ welfare-recipient as one who achieves wellbeing through distancing themselves from the welfare state and progress toward waged work. Framed within the landscape of ‘psycho-politics’, wellbeing and unemployment are arguably entangled to legitimize current welfare policy, placing responsibility on individuals for economic and health security and dissolving concerns over austerity’s systemic impact.

While psycho-medical understandings of ‘eating disorders’ draw distinctions between those who ‘have’/‘do not have’ eating disorders, feminist poststructuralist researchers argue that these detract from political/socio-cultural conditions that invoke problematic eating and embodied subjectivities. Using poststructuralist discourse analysis, we examine young women’s talk around food and eating, in particular, the negotiation of tensions arising from derogating aspects of hetero-normative femininities, while accounting for own ‘feminine’ practices (e.g. ‘dieting’) and subjectivities. Analysis suggested that eating/dieting was accounted for by drawing upon neo-liberalist discourses around individual choice; however, these may obscure gendered, classed and racialized power relations operating in local and wider contexts.

The Internet is a space where the harassment of women and marginalised groups online has attracted the attention of both academic and popular press. Feminist research has found that instances of online sexism and harassment are often reframed as “acceptable” by constructing them as a form of humour. Following this earlier research, this present paper explores a uniquely technologically-bound type of humour by adopting a feminist, social-constructionist approach to examine the content of popular Internet memes. Using thematic analysis on a sample of 240 image macro Internet memes (those featuring an image with a text caption overlaid), we identified two broad, overarching themes – Technological Privilege and Others. Within the analysis presented here, complex and troubling constructions of gendered identity in online humour are explored, illustrating the potential for the othering and exclusion of women through humour in technological spaces. We argue that this new iteration of heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity in online sexism, couched in “irony” and “joking”, serves to police, regulate and create rightful occupants and owners of such spaces.

To assess the clinical effectiveness of treatments for childhood retinoblastoma. Electronic databases were searched from inception to April 2004. Studies of participants diagnosed with childhood retinoblastoma, any interventions and all clinical outcomes were eligible for inclusion. Randomised and non-randomised controlled trials and cohort studies with clear comparisons between treatment groups were included. Methodological quality was assessed. A narrative synthesis was conducted. Where possible, studies assessing common interventions were grouped together, with prospective and retrospective studies grouped separately. Emphasis was placed on prospective studies. Thirty-one individual studies, from 42 publications, were included in the review. Apart from one non-randomised controlled trial, only comparative studies of observational design were available for any of the treatments. Four of the included studies were prospective and the remaining 27 were retrospective. Most of the studies were of radiotherapy or chemotherapy, with few studies available on enucleation or focal treatments such as brachytherapy, photocoagulation, cryotherapy and thermotherapy. The methodological quality was generally poor, with a high risk of bias in all included studies. The main problems were in relation to how treatment was allocated and lack of consideration of potentially confounding factors, such as initial disease severity, in the study design and data analysis. The evidence base for effectiveness of treatments for childhood retinoblastoma is extremely limited. Owing to the considerable limitations of the evidence identified, it was not possible to make meaningful and robust conclusions about the relative effectiveness of different treatment approaches for childhood retinoblastoma. In the authors' opinion, the evidence base for the effectiveness of treatments for childhood retinoblastoma is not sufficiently robust to provide clear guidance for clinical practice. Ideally, good-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the effectiveness of different treatment options for childhood retinoblastoma are required. Research is required on all the treatments currently used for this condition. Where RCTs are not feasible, for ethical or practical reasons, only high-quality, prospective, non-randomised studies should be given consideration, owing to the generally higher risk of bias in retrospective studies. To reduce the risk of confounding due to allocation by clinical indication, studies should compare patients with similar disease severity rather than compare patients of mixed disease severities. Standardised outcomes should be agreed for use in studies assessing the effectiveness of treatment. These outcomes should encompass potential important adverse effects of treatment such as loss of visual acuity and cosmetic outcome, as well as beneficial effects.