The purpose of this study was to assess whether there is a relation between body-image and self-consciousness and if there are any sex differences on measures of these two concepts. A total of 267 undergraduates, 56 men and 211 women whose ages ranged from 19 to 25 years, were tested. Analysis indicated a significant negative correlation between body-image and self-consciousness and between body-image and social anxiety. Private and public self-consciousness correlated positively with each other as well as with social anxiety. Men and women differed significantly on social anxiety only.

Postmodern critiques problematise the import of social psychology into non-western contexts on epistemological and ideological grounds. Yet, British approaches to the discipline remain popular with critical social psychologists in South Africa. One such import product is discourse analysis, which, as a “postmodern” social psychology, seemingly resolves challenges of “intellectual colonialism” by endorsing a constructionist understanding of social psychological phenomena. However, by extending a conception of language into a discursive ontology enables only a partial social psychological understanding of the often insidious nature of experience and social conduct even when discourses change. What is required is an understanding of these aspects of social agency as also pre-reflexively and non-propositionally patterned, making necessary a conception of culture that works, so to speak, directly on the body. This remains impossible in a theoretical system that has to fall back on the notions of reflexivity and ideology in order to explain the social and political determination of experience and meaningful conduct.

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The purpose of this study was to assess whether there is a relation between body-image and self-consciousness and if there are any sex differences on measures of these two concepts. A total of 267 undergraduates, 56 men and 211 women whose ages ranged from 19 to 25 years, were tested. Analysis indicated a significant negative correlation between body-image and self-consciousness and between body-image and social anxiety. Private and public self-consciousness correlated positively with each other as well as with social anxiety. Men and women differed significantly on social anxiety only.

In this response to Kevin Durrheim we argue that he misrepresents some of our arguments by Implying that talk of pre-reflexive patterning of social form and experience and the role of the body in this suggests biological and cultural essentialism. He further overstates the consensus amongst discursive social psychologists and social constructionists on these matters, as we briefly show in relation to the problem of the body in social psychology.