Theorizing the young woman in the body

In the last decade attention has been given in the media and in medical and psychological texts to young women’s unhappy and unhealthy relationships with their bodies. In 1999 the author undertook qualitative research on contemporary western young women, with identity and appearance issues as its major focus (Frost, 2001). However, the concern of this article is not with the empirical research per se (this is discussed elsewhere, e.g. Frost, 2004) but with the examination of the theoretical model which informed the research. It argues that by utilizing interactionist, structural and post-structural theory a framework of understanding was established against which the complex and ambivalent experiences of young women inhabiting their appearances could be understood, and to which the empirical research contributed a further dimen-sion. Initially the article gives some consideration to the imperative of personal display for all subjects of late consumer capitalism, drawing primarily on inter-actionist theories of the body as a site of visual presentation. To interrogate the gendered nature of body experience it then harnesses Foucauldian feminist approaches. A structuralist frame of reference is deployed to understand th