NEDIC Conference Journal 2018

domestic inequity, salary gap, and other challenges.
These challenges are greater for young women who
are poorer, heavier in weight, and whose
race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity,
and physical disability exposes them to greater
discrimination and fewer resources [1,8].
Enhancing positive embodiment relates to
social changes at all levels of the social environment
that attend to the physical experiences of diverse
girls and women.
4. Privileges and challenges in the mental
domain of internalized social stereotypes
Social stereotypes are powerful tools for
maintaining social inequities. For example, the
strong pressures on adolescent girls and women to
stay thin deprives them of the right to take space,
inhabit their bodies comfortably, and act with
embodied agency in the world [1]; internalizing such
pressures relate to negative body image and eating
disorders [16]. The DTE emphasizes the importance
of scrutinizing and altering multiple social
expectations that women face towards enhancing
positive embodiment.
4.1 Femininity-related stereotypes
Regarding femininity, the DTE highlights
both appearance-related and comportment-related
sets of expectations. Appearance-related
stereotypes, clustered under the ‘woman’s body as a
deficient object’ category [1], privilege men as the
holders of the objectifying gaze and compel women
to engage incessantly in body repair. Indeed,
internalizing an objectified gaze at one’s body, or
self-objectification, is related to body shame,
depression, disordered eating and sexual
dysfunction [17, 18, 19, 20]. Comportment-related
stereotypes, clustered by the DTE under the ‘woman
as docile category [1], involve the expectation that
adolescent girls and women act demure, submissive,
contained, and be other-attuned. Such disciplining of
women leads to the assigning of penalizing labels to
those who are perceived as not complying with the
‘woman as docile’ dictate by being assertive (labelled
as ‘bitch’, ‘aggressive’), self-attuned (labelled as
‘selfish’, ‘narcissistic’), angry (‘PMS’), or by pursuing
sexual engagements (‘slut’) [1]. Such disciplining
constricts women’s self-attunement and embodied
agency in the world, marks the body as an
uncomfortable site to inhabit.
4.2 Ethnicity-related/racial
stereotypes
Social stereotypes exist in relation to all
dimensions of social location, shaping embodiment.
Patricia Hill Collins [21] described constraining
stereotypes as “controlling images” that work to
limit the possibilities of acting in the world, making
“racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social
justice appear to be natural, normal and inevitable
parts of everyday life” (p. 69). In the research
program on embodiment [1], the internalization of
ethnicity-related/racial stereotypes was an
important factor that shaped embodiment. Alice, for
example, the only Aboriginal girl in her mostly White
school in a middle class neighbourhood of a town
with racial-related tensions, felt uncomfortable
being tall since she felt “Like I’m a giant and they’re
afraid of me.” Claire, a woman in her 20s of African-
Canadian heritage, did not feel comfortable
expressing her experienced anger in social situations
where she was subjected to prejudicial treatment as
she was afraid that such expression would, “reaffirm
that we are animals or primitive.” Grace, a woman in
her 50s of African-Canadian heritage, could not
accept her weight, since she feared that being
heavier in weight meant embodying a “subservient”
role.
A critical lens towards social stereotypes is
therefore important to positive embodiment.
5. Privileges and challenges in the social
power and relational connections domain
At the intersection of gender,
ethnicity/race, sexual orientation, social class,
physical disability, and gender identity, social power
affects embodiment in three ways: first, directly,
through regulating the availability of social resources
and, hence, individuals’ living conditions; second,
through subjecting particular individuals to
prejudicial harassment; and, third, through
individuals’ internalization of inequitable and
prejudicial treatment [1]. Inhabiting privileged
bodies assures access to resources (e.g., education,
employment) and freedom from damaging and,
often body-based, harassment, hence facilitating
positive embodied worth. Women experience
gender inequity in multiple domains of their lives,
such as: a gender pay gap, with a greater gap among
women of colour, women heavier in weight, women
living with disabilities [22]; job segregation and ‘glass
ceilings’ in work sites [22]; and inequity in the home
sphere. Poverty rates are consequently higher for
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