Girls and the school ball: A matter(ing) of space and time

A New Materialist Analysis of Health and Fitness Social Media, Gender and Body Disaffection: ‘You Shouldn’t Compare Yourself to Anyone… but Everyone Does’

“…Instead, I examine the relations between entities that come to matter and the generative potential or lack thereof that emerges through these entanglements [13]. The analysis draws on Ingram's (2019) [19] work on intra-action focused on the 'school ball', which offers a useful articulation of this approach to entanglements in relation to girls and femininity. Through her research, she describes the school ball as an entanglement in which 'girls, discourses of femininity and all manner of materialities are not individual preexisting elements; instead, they only become 'distinct' in relation to one another through intra-active relations of entanglement' (p. 2).…”

“…Bringing new materialist thinking into an understanding of digital health pedagogies [2] enables us a move beyond a human-centric or device-centric approach, to focus instead on the relationality and entanglement of learning about health and the body through social media intra-actions. Ingram [19] describes it as how 'human and more-than-human are entangled in knowledge production' (p. 2). In this paper, I attempt to advance these understandings through integrating material and affective dimensions of learning about the body and health within and through social media; in particular, exploring intra-actions that produce ways of knowing and doing 'fit femininity' and 'fit masculinity'.…”

“…In this fragment, we can trace what Ingram [19] describes, as 'multiple temporalities (past-present-future)'. Anna refers to multiple bodies and a range of temporalities; past bodies, other's damaged bodies, future transformed bodies.…”

“…The 'past-present-future' [19] self is continually being (re)assembled through these digital entanglements; connections between bodies, non-human entities and discourses of health. As Ingram found in her examination of the school ball, these relationships are not linear.…”

‘I feel pretty’: beauty as an affective-material process

“…Alongside these pervasive expectations, the school ball is a rich landscape of material and affective forces: clothing, beauty-body practices, feelings and sensations. The article draws on fieldwork from a study interested in the human and more-than-human forces that collaboratively produce girls and the school ball (Ingram, 2019). The focus for this article is to consider how theoretical tools from feminist new materialisms invite an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about the human as discursively produced towards a relational becoming involving multiple co-constitutive forces.…”