‘She Was Becoming Too Healthy and It Was Just Becoming Dangerous’: Body Work and Assemblages of Health

Abstract

This chapter builds on recent theoretical developments in sociological and feminist theory to pursue non-foundational or non-dualist approaches to studying the body beyond the ‘human agent’ in relation to health. The paper unpacks the complex ways ‘health’ was conceptualised and embodied in relation to social life, drawing on qualitative interview data with young people in Australia about their body work practices. Health was described in interviews as a set of practices, activities or performances that involve the body and have social dimensions. Health is commonly understood to entail a state of being that can be attained through a series of practices such as diet and exercise. However, as participants describe, the experience of ‘health’ is not the straightforward result of undertaking ‘healthy’ practices, and these practices require negotiation so as not to slip over and become ‘dangerous’ such as through under-eating or over-exercising. Understanding health as assemblages (Duff 2014) which are embodied and produced through a range of networks and relations can assist us to understand the complex and contradictory ways health is engaged with and produced in young people’s lives. Body work practices are key dimensions of health assemblages. This approach can also assist in unsettling simplistic links between health and ‘healthy’ practices, and health and appearance.