Living Unembodiment: Physicality and Body/Self Discontinuity Among African American Adolescent Girls

Abstract

Social conditions shape health and health disparities. However, inquiry and intervention in the social determinants of health all too often rests on thin engagement with customary demographic correlates and predictors rather than robust, empirically and theoretically informed engagement with health and health disparity as biocultural phenomena—the integrated product of structure, materiality, and subjectivity. Within‐group variability is neglected. Lived experiences of nonnormative status in multiple, mutually informing cultural systems are undertheorized. This article reports on research addressing these gaps—a study exploring experiences of body/self discontinuity and physical‐activity engagement among African American adolescent girls. Data suggest that experiences of body/self discontinuity, or unembodiment, are common to membership in multiple, nonnormative social categories, vary in degree and quality, and may bear on disposition toward leisure‐time physical activity. Unembodiment shows promise as a means of characterizing variability in physical‐activity engagement within groups evincing low levels of this health behavior.

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