Thin but not skinny: Women negotiating the “never too thin” body ideal in urban India

Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif

Thin but not skinny: Women negotiating the “never too thin” body ideal in urban India☆,☆☆ Jaita Talukdar ⁎ Department of Sociology, Loyola University New Orleans, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online 22 March 2012

S y n o p s i s With western companies spreading the “never too thin” body ideal to non-western societies, many expect a global increase in the pathology of eating. This study examines the dieting and slimming practices of 27 women living in urban India. Though the women were involved in various dieting routines and wanted thin bodies, they set limits to the ideal of an ultra-thin body. Instead, the women directed their dieting and slimming practices toward embellishing their contemporary identity as educated, well-informed clients of a burgeoning health industry and as cultural agents responsible for protecting generational beliefs surrounding food and body. Grounding my research in theories that understand women's negotiations of their bodies in contexts that have been impacted by forces of globalization, yet regulated by their familial worlds, I provide a culturally nuanced argument of why and how urban Indian women set limits on the ultra-thin ideal. The women used cultural strategies, or what I refer to as speculative modernity, that rely on traditional notions of beauty and well-being to filter and selectively adopt new beliefs of food and body. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction In 2005, I spent seven months in a city in India studying the dieting and slimming practices of 27 college-educated, professionally trained or employed women. Maya, a law student, was one of the women who had agreed to talk to me about her body, specifically about whether she struggled with her body weight and had dieted to lose weight. Listening to Maya at first filled me with the fear that the western cultural ideal of beauty that equates excessively thin bodies with attractive bodies is becoming a global phenomenon. Weighing 51 kg (114 lbs), Maya urgently wanted to lose another 10 kg: “I am desperate [to lose weight]. I want to eat [only] an apple a

☆ This research was supported by the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati. ☆☆ This paper was presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, 20th–23rd August, 2011 in Las Vegas. This paper was selected for presentation in the regular session on the ‘Sociology of the Body’. ⁎ Loyola University New Orleans, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, Campus Box–-30, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA. 0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2012.03.002

day.” Yet, when I asked her if she had started her ‘an apple-aday’ diet, she rolled her eyes, laughed and said, “No! I cannot [do that]. My parents will throw me out of the house [laughs].” On the grounds that it would be unacceptable to her parents, Maya's response had changed in a matter of minutes, from a desperate need to lose weight into a swift dismissal of undertaking any drastic steps to achieve that desired body. Her own laughter and the rolling of her eyes indicated, however, that the proposition of eating only apples was equally unacceptable to her and even somewhat preposterous. Maya, initially, had come across as a “new recruit” of the “cult of thinness” (Hesse-Biber, 1996; Hesse-Biber, 2007), the phenomenon in which women experience an uncontrollable desire to lose weight and aspire for excessively thin bodies (hereafter ultra-thin bodies). Research documents that such an obsession is responsible for women developing problematic relationships with their bodies (Bordo, 1993; Hesse-Biber, 1996). With western companies spreading the “never too thin” ideal (Seid, 1989) to non-western societies, many expect a “global increase in the pathology of eating” (Naseer, 1997: 46). Maya's refusal, however, to execute a rigorous dieting

110

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

routine undermines this position that women around the world are carving out media-generated, excessively thin bodies. Worth noting, though, is that in spite of holding off on her plan to eat only apples daily, a thin body was an immensely attractive proposition to Maya and to the rest of the women in this study. As I will demonstrate, the women experimented with varied dieting routines, aspired to look good in thin bodies, and wanted fit and energetic bodies—seemingly similar to the experiences of women who show a strong yearning for an ultra-thin body ideal. Yet, the women overwhelmingly rejected and made clear their discontentment with ultrathin bodies. Their narratives were also marked by a considerable amount of ambivalence when they described their diets or assessed the role of appearance in their efforts at losing weight. These findings suggest that the existing theoretical framework that modern women across the world (especially those in non-western contexts) are indiscreetly adopting the western bodily ideal that a woman is “never thin enough” not only fails to capture complex negotiations of women (Mohanty, 1991) but is insensitive to the fact that bodily practices are often caught up in satisfying and meeting competing cultural notions of ideal femininities. Bodily practices of Indian women such as dieting and slimming are often subjected to variegated cultural forces and embedded in oppositional cultural spaces (Espiritu, 2001; Pyke & Johnson, 2003; Thapan, 2004) where modern beliefs of the body run the risk of being in conflict with familiar, traditional practices of life. For instance, if women are urged to lose weight to express their independent selves, a thin body continues to be desired in young brides as part of the historical institution of arranged marriages (Rao & Rao, 1990). More importantly, in spite of her very public involvements, an Indian woman's body is firmly located in the private sphere of the family, community, and nation that modernization, and now liberalization, projects have failed to dislodge, even if these changes have somewhat elevated the overall status and conditions of women (Chatterjee, 1989; Radhakrishnan, 2011). The positioning of the woman's body in a sacred, interior world of community or nation is a potent legacy of the Indian nationalist movement when women were expected to deny colonial influences and maintain a particular form of femininity that was rooted in the spiritual, self-sacrificial heritage of being a good Hindu woman (Sarkar, 2001). By grounding my research in theories that understand women's negotiation of their bodies in contexts that have been impacted by forces of globalization and yet regulated by their traditional, familiar worlds, I provide a culturally nuanced argument of why and how urban Indian women set limits to the ultra-thin ideal even when they experience an intense desire to lose weight. Dieting, bodies and modernity Dieting to “attain an ideal of outward physical, as opposed to spiritual, beauty” (Brumberg, 1988: 229) is a modern discourse of the body. As a practice of managed eating to improve one's health, dieting can be traced to seventeenth century Europe (Turner, 1982). Dieting as a practice of administered weight loss to look attractive, however, became popular only when western women experiencing relative freedom from

religious–familial constraints on their bodies turned to fashion to express their modern selves (Seid, 1989). Dieting helped women fit into contemporary styles of clothing and slim bodies became synonymous with the new-won freedom and the prospect of self-fulfillment that western women were experiencing at the time (Brumberg, 1997). The fashion and beauty industry played a significant role in promoting the thin body as attractive (Hesse-Biber, 2007), but the appeal of dieting equally lies in the broader workings of modern forces on the individual body. Modern dieting helps foster intimate relationships with one's body, and its outcome (a slim body) is focused on how satisfactorily it appeases the self (Turner, 1996). Born out of a concern to lose weight, dieting is typically found in societies where women are actively involved in the public sphere (Miller & Pumariega, 2001). If modernization has brought to light a woman's achievements, a slim body has become a medium to express the modern self. Currently, research on dieting in non-western societies is premised on the grand narrative that an influx of new, contemporary beliefs as well as styles of living lure women into individualized practices of the self (Becker, 2004). This is also the case for research on dieting practices of urban Indian women and their preferences for slim bodies. Dieting, in addition to acquiring higher education and professional careers, is included in the litany of tasks urban Indian women are exhorted to do to achieve a modern self (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Runkle, 2004; Thapan, 2004). Englishlanguage magazines like Woman's Weekly and Femina have been providing tips on eating and exercise to Indian women since the seventies (Johnson, 1981). However, the influx of western companies in the late 1990s like L'Oreal, Christian Dior and Tommy Hilfiger, when the Indian government liberalized its economic policy, drastically affected the fashion industry. Apart from young women who have historically been expected to be thin at the time of marriage, a well-rounded body has been the preferred body-type. Soon, films and commercials overturned well-rounded bodies in favor of ultra-thin bodies to meet international standards of physical beauty (Munshi, 2001). Parallel to films and the world of fashion, beauty pageants in the country also provided multi-national companies with opportunities to market their products. In 1994, for the first time in its history, the Miss India beauty pageant received heavy foreign endowments (Parameswaran, 2005) and was watched by millions of Indians. The look of the contestants, who won coveted international titles the same year, became synonymous with the confidence and poise the women showed on a global stage. Internally, however, it was the ultra-thin bodies of the contestants that set the standard for women competing in pageants, movies or fashion industries (Runkle, 2004). This very thin look also became the identity statement of young, middle or upper class, professionally trained urban Indian women (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003). Indian feminists, however, view women eager to lose weight as naïve clients of an industry that is dictated by western corporate interests in search of fresh markets from a rapidly burgeoning, Indian middle class (Chaudhuri, 2001; Fernandes, 2006; Kishwar, 1995). Eating disorders among college-educated women living in Mumbai and Delhi (Shroff & Thompson, 2004; Tendulkar et al., 2006) have been linked

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

to an exposure to the ultra-thin body. If the body emerged as the centerpiece of the western woman's self at the turn of the twentieth century, it also bore the scars from extreme dieting as western women developed unhealthy eating habits to lose weight (Martin, 2007; Orbach, 2005). Feminists fear that urban Indian women, in the hopes of attaining ultrathin bodies, will succumb to the “cult of thinness” (HesseBiber, 2007) and develop problematic relationships with their bodies. While beauty pageants and fashion magazines routinely display and commend the “new look,” they do not preclude defying traditional expectations associated with the Indian woman's body (Munshi, 2001; Thapan, 2004). Premised on the “modernization thesis” that women are indiscreetly adopting western-styled bodies, research on dieting and slimming has failed to account for traditional discourses that are equally powerful in informing the urban Indian woman's body (Chaudhuri, 2001; Munshi, 1998; Thapan, 2004). In the next section, I document the large and still emerging body of research that has indicated that cultures have their own trajectory and logic in the ways that they modernize, of which some clearly indicate that modern bodily processes share a dialectical relationship with what is considered to be “traditional”. Therefore, dieting, slimming and other bodily practices of urban Indian women need to be situated in the larger discussion of modern experiences of women whose lives, to some extent, are still controlled or regulated by their familial and cultural worlds. Bodies and speculative modernity The liberating effect of modernization on the body (Giddens, 1991; Turner, 1996), as seen in the literature on dieting, has been studied at length. What happens, however, when tradition is inserted in these discussions? Though some see limited analytical use of concepts like “tradition” and “modernity”, Bhabha's “third space of enunciation” (2004) or Canclini's “hybrid cultures” (1995) have brought attention to the argument that what is considered traditional vis-àvis modern is not stage-specific, chronologically developing, mutually exclusive phenomena, but contemporaneous social forces to reckon with. Not incidentally, research on bodily practices of women have shown that being part of a modern world requires a constant engagement with (re)classifying practices, beliefs, and values as traditional or modern. Deliberating over their roles as caregivers of their community, exercising sexual propriety or protecting community practices (such as veiling), and upholding tradition while being modern are embodied social experiences for women. What it means to be traditional or modern, though, is not a static process but is actively being invented and reinvented (Giddens, 1999; Thapan, 2004) by women across cultures. In urban Indian contexts, the influx of global enterprises has beckoned women to pursue contemporary styles of living (Chaudhuri, 2001; Ganguly-Scrase, 2003). Yet the woman is expected to protect the family by being a good homemaker (Munshi, 1998), a loyal kin member (Majumdar, 2002), and exercising sexual restraint (Puri, 1999). Bodies are tangible representations of one's self-beliefs (Giddens, 1991) and an expressive medium of showing allegiance to the values of a group. Bodily practices of women living in contexts that have

111

distinguishable oppositional cultural spaces attain heightened visibility and become subjects of scrutiny. This requires, on part of the woman, constant negotiations with competing cultural expectations made on their selves and, by extension, on their bodies. Cultural turf wars over women's bodies have been documented to result in anxiety and marginalization (Espiritu, 2001; Pyke & Johnson, 2003). Of particular relevance to this paper, however, are findings indicating that when caught between oppositional cultural worlds, women create “in-between” rationales (Bhabha, 2004) that enable them to partake in both worlds without having to abandon either one of them. Thapan (2004), and more recently Radhakrishnan (2009), have found evidence of the “in-between” rationalizing that urban Indian women employ to satisfy conflicting cultural demands of taking on modern roles while fulfilling their familial and communal obligations. As Munshi (1998: 87) argues, “while traditional discourses of patriarchy have not been subverted or altered in any substantive way, the new Indian woman has, at the very least, strategized and negotiated her position to a more comfortable one within the dominant structure”. Examples include women in high-paying careers willing to quit by the time they are 35 years old (Radhakrishnan, 2009), young women delaying sexual encounters with their romantic partners until after marriage (Puri, 1999), and beauty pageant participants extolling the importance of family in their victory speeches (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Runkle, 2004). Despite women becoming active participants in a world where professional ambitions and fostering of individual identities are valued, they simultaneously set limits to behaviors that, according to traditional expectations, challenge respectability. Since families and the nation have an ultimate hold on the Indian woman's body (Chatterjee, 1989), women prioritizing career over family, making public spectacle of their bodies, and having intercourse outside the sacred institution of marriage are seen as weakening the moral fabric of communities in which they live, and generally avoided. This negotiation strategy of balancing competing expectations – that has been called “respectable modernity” (Thapan, 2004) and “respectable femininity” (Radhakrishnan, 2009) – offers attractive alternatives to popular, western definitions of modernity (Brenner, 1996). Such “in-between” rationales can also be found in the narratives Muslim women provide regarding veiling, or more particularly about their decision to cover their heads with a veil or hijab. Research has repeatedly shown that the head veil provides a Muslim woman eager to pursue a career or an education, with a “symbolic shelter” enabling her to move freely in and savor the freedoms of a public life without having to antagonize communal sentiments (Hussain, 2010; Williams & Vashi, 2007). The head veil, is viewed as a personal ally in public spheres by the women and believed to deflect the wandering gazes of men and add seriousness to women's public pursuits. In some cases, the “hijab-as-liberator” (Read & Bartkowski, 2000:405) rationale is based on an awareness of pervasive sexist harassment that non-veiled women have to experience and failures of the modern world to protect its women. While these women embrace the hijab, they are critical of and reject the abaya (the garment that covers the whole body and the face) as a practice that perpetuates old

112

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

relations of domination that keep women dependent on the men of their communities. The abovementioned studies thus suggest that women with access to modern worlds but who are nevertheless expected to satisfy traditional definitions of feminine propriety, create “in-between” rationales to partake in both worlds. These rationales, however, are premised on both a critique of traditional and modern practices as well as an awareness that modern experiences, like traditional arrangements, can create oppressive conditions for women. Bhabha (2004) refers to these rationales as “the third space of enunciation” that provide “the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood” or “innovative sites of collaboration” (2004: 2). Bodily practices, as seen in the research on Muslim women and urban Indian women, are losing their legibility. Determined more by the meanings attached to the body than its actual practice, researchers are obligated to study the “meaning-making” (Lamont & Molnar, 2002) process underlying the practice. Studies investigating the cultural experiences of women have become increasingly critical of the ‘women-ascultural dopes’ thesis (Davis, 1995). Rather, the focus is on the strategies that women employ to satisfy competing cultural demands made on them. Theories of “alternative modernity”(Brenner, 1996) provide nuanced accounts of modernity while capturing negotiation strategies women develop to reconcile conflicting cultural demands made on their bodies. Nevertheless, they do not adequately account for the screening processes through which women subject both modern (contemporary/new) and traditional (familiar/old) practices of the body before incorporating them into their lives. In other words, women not only critique experiences of modernization but also subject traditional practices to a similar kind of introspection. I call this “speculative modernity”. It is along this line of thinking that I investigate dieting among a group of urban, college-educated women living in India. Given the wealth of evidence, documented above, that urban Indian women constantly negotiate cultural practices ranging from sexuality to employment, I suspected their dieting and bodily concerns would be similarly affected. While much has been written about the role played by popular media and beauty pageants in popularizing an ultra-thin look in urban India (Kishwar, 1995; Parameswaran, 2005; Runkle, 2004; Thapan, 2004), there are few studies that have gone beyond textual analyses to look into actual, lived experiences of dieting and slimming in women. Existing research on slimming or bodily practices of women in urban India (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Thapan, 2009) does not focus exclusively on dieting practices of women or narratives surrounding their attempts at losing weight. Using speculative modernity as a central theoretical concept, I not only investigate the dieting patterns of women in a city in India but I also explore to the extent that traditional and modern ideologies of eating and body affect women's eating practices and bodily perceptions. Methods To understand the dieting practices of urban Indian women, I spoke with 27 Hindu women living in Kolkata, an eastern metropolis of India. I used a combination of snowball and purposive sampling methods to recruit women who had

at least a baccalaureate degree or were enrolled in a college program. My empirical goal was to examine the eating habits of women who have been sufficiently exposed to contemporary messages about food and the body. College-educated women are more likely to have been exposed to global communities that have been further boosted by educational and professional opportunities that the new economy offers (Ganguly-Scrase, 2003; Radhakrishnan, 2011). These women were also witnesses to and engaged in a rapidly changing Kolkata: multiplexes (movie theatres) that show recently released Hollywood films, and newly-built malls that house American franchises such as Tommy Hilfiger, Gold's Gym, and GNC, India. These women, I was convinced, lived their lives on the edge of the modern western world. To find the women for this study, I decided to start a snowball in my extended circle of friends and family and identified a distant cousin, whom I will call Rani, as my first respondent. Given her occupation as a salesperson of cosmetics and branded soaps, I knew my cousin was wellconnected to people living in her area. Though Rani declined to be interviewed, she referred me to my first interviewee. The average age of my interviewees was 34 years and ranged from 20 to 56 years. Family monthly income ranged from Rs.15,000 (US$375) to Rs.210,000 (or US$5,250) 1 and almost all the women claimed a middle-class status. The women in this study also varied in terms of their occupations and career goals. Six of the women were housewives and eight were college students (some were graduate students or studying for professional degrees such as business, law, and medicine), while the others were employed as school teachers, sales managers, market researchers, software personnel, and college professors. I have changed the names of the women I interviewed to protect their identities. The interviews typically took place in the homes of the respondents during the afternoons or sometimes over a cup of coffee/tea in the evening. Some invited me to their place of work. The fact that I was Ph.D. student at an American university (at the time of these interviews) who had recently migrated to the United States kindled their interest in me. Rarely was my request for an interview turned down. On the contrary, I was made to feel welcome in living rooms to do the interviews that, on some occasions, spilled into very private areas such as their bedroom. The rich interview data that I was able to collect was a result of the comfort and assurance that the women felt because of the social statuses I occupied as a researcher: gender (a woman), social class (my respondents assumed it to be middle-class), and nationality (a fellow Indian). I mirrored some of their own personal aspirations to pursue higher education, travel to another country, or be independent. During the course of the interview I found that some of the women tried to rope me in by saying, “I am sure you worry about your weight” or “You may have experienced this”. While I never felt the need to respond to them or correct them, I realized that the women were making assumptions about me even if I was someone who would be perceived to be of normal weight (58 kg/128 lbs). Given my geographical location (based in the United States), social class, and gender, the women seemed to assume that I was equally wrapped up in bodily concerns, especially those pertaining to my body weight. All these factors made me an insider and the women

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

were willing and enthusiastic about sharing information about their diets. Using semi-structured interviews, I asked questions about their knowledge of and encounters with dieting practices, and more specific questions about their dieting regimes and their motives for dieting. All interviews were tape-recorded. Questions on dieting and weight-loss efforts opened a floodgate of information. I provided cues such as “weight-loss”, “looks”, and “good health” throughout the interview process to draw specific responses from them. I personally transcribed and translated the interviews as it is common to combine Bengali, Hindi, and English words in daily conversations. I used a grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) approach to code and recode themes emerging from the interviews. This proved to be challenging as the women did a constant backand-forth as they accepted and rejected, in varying amounts, normative expectations associated with thinness and dieting. However, while analyzing the data, I was attentive to the fact that the women were constantly improvising as they provided liberal accounts of their bodily practices while staying true to tradition. Below I present my findings that I have organized around three distinctive themes—description of diets, appearance concerns while dieting, and health motives guiding dieting practices.

113

crop and is typically eaten more than once a day. Neeta (21 years, part-time model) shared with me that her effort to lose around 4 kg (8 lbs) involved avoiding rice “like anything” and to replace rice with ruti (flatbread made out of wheat) for both her meals. Although most women shared the belief that consuming large amounts of rice added weight to the body, especially to the abdomen, others, like Neeta, provided a more contemporary explanation, viz, that the carbohydrates in rice produce weight gain and must be eliminated from their diets if they wanted to lose weight. Interestingly, none of the women could identify exactly how carbohydrates would make them fat or where they had learned this piece of information; instead, it was part of a general understanding gathered from newspapers or magazine articles. As mentioned, in spite of the changes made to their diets with the purported goal of losing weight, there was a lot of hesitation in accepting the term “dieting” to describe these changes. Reena (24, management student) said: “I am not really dieting because all I am doing is not having rice. And for breakfast I have fruits.” Similarly, Moira (27, executive) had recently tried what she called an “American diet” that involved eating only fruits the first day, vegetables the second day, only fruits and vegetables the third day and then only soups on the last day of the diet. Yet, like others, she said:

Dieting and urban Indian women Almost all the women had made some fairly recent changes to their eating practices and several expressed an interest in knowing more about how to lose weight or keep their weight under control. Based on these findings, it would not be unreasonable to link the women's bodily concerns to the relentless media portrayals of thin bodies (in television, movies, and billboards) that have made women acutely aware of their own bodies. However, as the women talked about their diets, the bodies they wanted to achieve, and the motives guiding their weight loss efforts, it became clear that their ideas and practices were derived from a complex set of negotiations that involved modern aspirations as well as traditional commitments. Thus, far from blindly following the thin-body dictate, the women made conscious efforts to design both practical and interpretive strategies that allowed some freedom and flexibility in how they dieted and the way they framed meanings surrounding dieting. “Well thought out diets” Changes to one's diet included eliminating or minimizing the consumption of butter, soda, chocolates, and what the women referred to as “oily food” (cooked or deep-fried in lot of oil). Almost all the women, however, steered away from the term “dieting” to describe their personal eating styles— practices that western women would readily refer to as dieting (Nichter, 2000). Instead, the women focused on the scientific nature of their dieting practices and provided rationales to illustrate that dieting was a means of expressing their identities as educated, well-informed women navigating new information on eating. The women varied in the amount and type of food that they had stopped eating, but the biggest casualty was rice. In Bengal and its adjoining states, rice is a widely grown

To me, dieting is some kind of a restriction where you are starving yourself to lose weight. I do not see myself as starving or even feeling hungry just because I am not having carbohydrates. I am not restricting my intake of food; I am just changing the percentage. I would take it as a diet [but] within quotes. The term dieting, for the women, represented starving, and was considered an aberrant way of managing food intake. To rescue their eating habits from being considered deviant practice, the women distanced themselves from the term while simultaneously finding ways to control what they ate. In societies where large parts of the population struggle to procure food, deliberately eating less as a lifestyle choice and not out of a health predicament is a cultural anomaly subject to disapproval (Seid, 1989). The women recounted many instances of family members, especially elderly family members, responding unfavorably when they refused food offered to them or when they would take small helpings of food. Starving had also taken on a new meaning that had a pronounced western cultural influence. Dieting was equated with a self-induced practice of attaining ultra-thin bodies that resulted in psychological problems around eating and selfcontrol. Neeta shared with me that some of her colleagues in the fashion world were “bulimic”. She recalled a photo shoot during which the crew made fun of her for eating all the food that was served during lunch. She also remembered that after lunch one of the models went into the restroom and threw up. While Neeta believed that these were indications of the pervasive pressure to eat minimally, she also felt that she was able to resist practices like regurgitation because she was a student of biology and “there should be a scientific reason in everything.” Unlike her colleagues, she had chosen to “eat less” of high-calorie food, and to “eat right”, which included eating at least a couple of hours before going to bed.

114

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

While almost all women expressed an interest in making dietary changes and others had started the process, none of them admitted to using extreme measures like regurgitation or diuretics. 2 Western discourse informing them about ultrathin bodies was also informing them of the physical and psychological problems associated with excessive thinness. As knowledge of eating disorders has spread in urban India, it has increased the fears associated with extreme dieting. Long-standing stigma attached to mental illness in the country (Loganathan & Murthy, 2008) could also compound the fear of displaying ultra-thin bodies. The narratives, instead, were filled with references to how their eating styles were “scientific” in nature which, in their minds, clearly distinguished them from undesirable starvation diets. Neera (46, IT professional), who had gained extra weight during her pregnancy, had been dieting since her daughter was born (almost 15 years ago). In the beginning, she used to go to a dietician but now she gets all her information from ediets.com, a website that helps people keep track of their daily calorie intake. At the very onset, she shared: I will explain it [dieting] to you scientifically. If you can tell a person's weight and the age, then you can tell if the person is in the normal range or if the person is overweight. Neera, here, is talking about calculating body mass index (BMI) to determine a healthy weight. She had first learned about BMI from her nutritionist and had begun using online tools to calculate her own BMI to monitor her weight. Clearly, Neera had a limited understanding of what constitutes a scientific method and was unaware of some of the controversies and inaccuracies surrounding BMI as an effective tool of determining good health (Hesse-Biber, 2007). Dealing with numbers, charts, and graphs while computing her BMI convinced Neera, though, that her method was scientific and hence reliable (Mallyon, Holmes, Coveney, & Zadoroznyj, 2010). Some of the women would talk about diets that they had personally designed. Tina (28, saleswoman), an avid dieter, talked of at least three kinds of diets she had followed, but she was most excited about her vitamin C diet. After repeatedly falling sick with the common cold, and getting tired of being treated with antibiotics, she incorporated large amounts of food that she believed had high vitamin C content such as amla (Indian gooseberry) and cod liver oil (sold in select stores). By sharing information about her vitamin C diet, Tina was illustrating her breadth of knowledge about different kinds of foods and their nutritional properties, both those that were available locally and those that had been recently introduced in the market. For most of the women in the study, dieting was not just about following a book or consulting a professional, or aspiring for a thin body, but an experience in “mixing and matching” (Moira, 27) information; in other words, engaging their minds. They further customized personal experiences by giving their diets made-up names: “vitamin C diet” (Tina, 28), “diet management” (Neera, 46), and an “American diet” (Moira, 27). Being modern means the ability to be reflexive of the process (Giddens, 1991), that is, to exhibit not only an engagement with modern lifestyles, but also to be conscious of and evaluate the process of living. Talking in an educated and

informed manner about experimenting with diets, the women in the study reflected their depth of understanding of the science of food and bodies. Also, the fact that the women were not tied to health professionals and could convincingly lift the information from newspaper or magazine articles to recreate it in different settings (the interview being one of them) was a sign of their mastery of information and the relative autonomy they believed they enjoyed over experts in the field. In this sense, dieting gave the women a sense of control over their food, eating, and body. This is not to suggest that no Indian women starve themselves or have problematic relationships with food. In fact, most of them expressed weight related anxieties and a distinct fear of fat that typically assails women obsessed with ultra-thin bodies, which I turn to in the next section.

Thin but not skinny Dieting, as a practice of administered weight loss, has become hopelessly entangled with an insatiable need to be thin. Turner (1996: 148) contends that “the purpose of the modern diet of consumer society is the production of desires”. For women, this has come to mean making themselves desirable or physically attractive in spite of the demonstrated connection between dieting and self-loathing (Hesse-Biber, 1996; Martin, 2007). The women showed some amount of fear associated with gaining weight but knew that expressing a desire to “look good” in thin bodies carried the risk of reducing their dieting to the practices of women they believed were blinded by the thinness norm. Lest it compromised their identity as educated, mindful individuals, the women made every effort possible to deflect attention away from a crass appearance-based motive dictating their weight concerns. Furthermore, they created a guard against pining for ultra-thin bodies by linking such behavior to women who were not only vain but belonged to a world where individuals were self-serving, hedonistic, and, in a sense, western. Most women expressed an acute distaste for fat bodies. Mita (27, market researcher) shared with me, “I feel the pangs of looking bad when I go to a mall and my [dress] size is not there. I have to stuff myself into it, and that really puts my self-esteem down.” Mita could easily have been one of the women that Hesse-Biber (1996) interviewed for her study on the extent to which American women are dissatisfied with their bodies. However, when I probed a little more, Mita shared, “The main reason [for me] to lose weight is to be able to fit into clothes. [It is] not really to look good, but so that you can wear anything” (emphasis added). By “anything” Mita meant not only traditional clothes such as the sari and salwaar kameez, but also western and contemporary clothes, like jeans, trousers, skirts and dresses, and their changing styles and cuts. Wearing western-styled clothes is not new to Indian societies, but the women were excited about the ready availability of new styles of clothing in newly-built malls and shopping complexes. The desire to fit into western styled clothes fueled the urgency of losing weight. Most pronounced among collegegoing or professional women, the wearing of western clothes played a strategic role in signaling their modern, liberal selves to others and their comfortable familiarity with modern spaces

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

of college campuses, coffee shops, malls, pubs, and public spaces in general. Yet, these very women faltered a bit when they tried to reconcile their need to lose weight to look good and wear western clothes comfortably with what outwardly appeared to be a practice that was dictated by a pure, and hence vain, appearance-based motive. Like Mita, almost all the women invariably and aggressively denied the claim that appearance or physical beauty per se had a role in their decision to eat less. Neither did any of the women mention that they wanted to lose weight to satisfy a romantic partner or a male relative, or even a generalized male gaze. This was regardless of the fact that matrimonial columns in daily newspapers continue to demand that prospective brides be thin and light-skinned, affecting not only an Indian woman's chance of getting married but also her sense of self-worth (Runkle, 2005). The reluctance of the women in my study to even tacitly acknowledge an appearance-based motive for managing their food intake can be viewed as an effort to break free of a tradition that has told Indian women for centuries that their personal fates depended on their physical appearance. However, their status as the new liberal educated Indian women equally affected their dismissive stance toward an appearance-based motive underlying their eating habits. Their status was incompatible with a self that was focused exclusively on the external aspects of their bodies. Therefore, the women negotiated a stance that was partially premised on a critical appraisal of the value historically bestowed on the female appearance, partially inspired by their participation in the global marketplace, and yet one that was cautious of uncritically endorsing a western definition of physical beauty. The appearance-based motive underlying dieting practices was simultaneously discredited and acknowledged by the disdain the women showed for other women who engaged in extreme dieting in the hope of attaining ultra-thin bodies. In fact, most of the women who expressed a desire to lose weight were quick to qualify that they wanted to lose only a small amount of weight, as they did not want to risk wearing a “hungry face,” to use Tina's words. Tina, introduced above as an avid dieter, was worried about the weight she had gained in recent years. While she wanted her “fat to disappear” she clarified that she did not want to lose a large amount of weight as she felt that “people [who] are excessively thin look undernourished. A hungry face does not look good, it looks hungry. Thin, no flesh and like a bag of bones …like the ones you see on television and on runways.” Here, Tina makes a direct reference to western-styled bodies as seen on fashion runways; these bodies belong to the world of high fashion and, by extension, to the modern world. Casanova (2004) in her research on young Ecuadorian women's body-image issues similarly found respondents being critical of bodies of Hollywood actresses and supermodels as too skinny and “sick-looking”. While the fashion and beauty industries in India have followed the western trajectory of success (Anand, 2002), haute couture, with its drastic cuts and esoteric styles displayed on ultra-thin bodies, is still considered uniquely western. In the women's accounts, it was these very thin bodies that were associated with opulence and at the same time purposelessness. As such, they were easy to reject as too

115

alien and modern, even as their pervasive presence in the media provided constant reinforcement of the notion that success and happiness in the modern world came in thin bodies. Maya's story that I used to introduce the paper was further evidence that traditional ideas of beauty reinforced the contempt of ultra-thin bodies. Eating only an apple a day was impossible for her to undertake while she lived with her parents. Almost all the women in the study either lived with their parents or their parent-in-laws and meals involved serving and eating with family members. Often, as in Maya's case, daily meals were supervised by mothers or elderly female kin who not only serve as gatekeepers of family meals but also keep alive colloquial beliefs about food, beauty, and overall well-being. Though desperate to lose weight, Maya was cautious. She shared that “Beauty does not glow in a skinny body. My mother tells me that if I do not eat rice then I will lose my glamour. I should not give up rice.” While most of the women, like Maya, had minimized or completely eliminated their intake of rice, they were also held back by traditional notions of beauty that made it difficult for them to sustain rigorous dieting schedules or wholeheartedly engage in them. The fact that Maya strongly believed her mother further demonstrates that while new ideas about food and bodies are encroaching, they have not completely erased traditional ideas of physically attractive bodies or eating as an important family ritual. Bass (2001) made a similar observation about African American families arguing that the importance attached to food and family dinners in the community prevented young women from developing unhealthy practices centered around eating less. “Investing in health” In contrast to the ambivalence that permeated the women's thoughts around dieting for “looks,” dieting for health reasons was met with a lot of enthusiasm. In fact, the women used a health-based motive as a master discourse to dictate their eating habits and weight loss concerns and to effectively neutralize any conflict they felt in accounting for the suspect appearance motive. Men who diet have been similarly found to emphasize scientific principles of weight management to disassociate themselves from concerns of appearance that are incongruent with masculine ideologies of the body (Mallyon et al., 2010). Here, the women were invoking the scientific argument to defeminize their weight loss efforts. Directed toward fulfilling their roles as efficient employees, productive homemakers and prospective child-bearers, the health motive for the women in this study, added instant respectability, both in a traditional and modern sense, to their practice of dieting. The notion that a good life requires a healthy constitution is not new, but the eagerness the women displayed when recounting their goals for a healthy body was quite palpable. Physicians and public health professionals have been actively promoting the belief that fat bodies are reservoirs of illness and have to be avoided at all costs. This became evident in the accounts of women as they spoke about their physicians warning them of the health hazards associated with a fat body and asking them to consult diet charts. As was the case in early twentieth century America (Seid, 1989), the healthy body is defined as one with no or minimal fat.

116

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

Rita (30, school teacher) had, like most women in the study, responded positively to this “wellness wave” (Sarkar, 2009) that was sweeping urban India. At the time of the interview, Rita had a thirteen-month-old daughter and the weight Rita had gained from her pregnancy made it difficult for her to cope with the demands of work and taking care of her young daughter. Growing up, Rita was “plump” and, unlike her sister, was not affected by the dieting frenzy that Rita claimed affects most women. But she has realized recently that fat bodies pose unique problems for women responsible for both work and family. She shared: “I have gained some weight, and I have problems getting my work done. I want to be thinner, but to be thin I have to diet, and I cannot get around to doing that.” She did, however, make small changes that included giving strict instructions to her cook to use less oil in their food. Women like Rita who were dismissive or amused by any talk of appearance or looks became energized when asked if health motives dictated their weight loss efforts. Leela (45, housewife), like Rita, had only recently felt that her body weight was a problem. As the mother of two grown children, Leela believed that a thinner body would help her overcome feelings of tiredness and exhaustion. Dieting, not to meet aesthetic standards, but for good health to become successful homemakers or employees clearly had more social value. It was not only women juggling work and childcare responsibilities who were feeling the discomfort of gaining weight and making changes to their diets. Tina had stopped eating meat to prevent health ailments in the future and described her dietary changes as “investing in her health.” Bodies had become commodities or objects that required constant supervision to function effectively. This new consciousness surrounding the body was also an indication of their heightened awareness of the risks of modern living and a response driven by their commitment to do something about it. Tina said: Life has become so stressful; there is work, there is home and then there are other things. I want to have children in a couple of years but I have read in a magazine that stress, weight, and bad health may lead to problems in conceiving. By invoking potential future complications and taking steps in the present, the women were showing traits of what Rose (2001) would call “modern personhood” or the constant monitoring, risk analysis and management of personal health. Furthermore, the women believed that attending to one's health, which involves monitoring and regulating the body, was both a requirement of a modern life and an individual responsibility. Yet, the fact that they repeatedly referred to adequately fulfilling their roles as professionals, caregivers, or prospective child-bearers as the underlying cause that triggered their eating habits suggests that their weight loss efforts, even when directed at individual health, had to be legitimized outside their bodies. Conclusion This paper has provided a detailed account of the urban Indian woman's engagement with dieting and the thinness norm. I have argued that managing diets and aspiring for

thin bodies are deemed attractive propositions to such women because they are the means to claim a modern identity — to express themselves as thoughtful and motivated workers, efficient managers of their families, and purposeful participants in public life. This modern identity, however, is couched in a body linked to experiences of anxiety and frustration that typically accompanies a desire for ultra-thinness. Aspiring for and acknowledging an ultrathin motive thus thoroughly discredit women's efforts at carving out a new identity. Particularly in the case of the Indian woman, acknowledging a thinness motive contains the dual trap of rendering their practice as either too hedonistic or as being controlled by the patriarchal belief that physical look (a thin body) determines a woman's chances of getting married. In their stead, I contend that women construct new rationales for wanting to lose weight that does not automatically link them to either mindless vanity (in the western sense) or a forced submission to beauty standards (in the traditional sense). The women in this study clearly maintained a “discourse of restraint” (Radhakrishnan, 2009:202) in their dieting and slimming practices that was directed at embellishing their contemporary identity as not only well-informed and scientifically oriented clients of a burgeoning health industry but also as cultural agents responsible for protecting generational beliefs surrounding food and body. This positioning of their eating and bodily aspirations at a critical intersection of traditional and modern ideologies of eating and body gives credence to my argument that the women use a speculative modernity to guide and make sense of their dieting practices. What facilitates these innovative strategies is their desire to be in both worlds; that is, to create individualized, personal experiences with their bodies and food while not disrupting familial and communal beliefs of eating and the body. The women partially embraced both traditional and contemporary dicta of good health and well-being, but stayed critical of absolutes in each of these discourses. Furthermore, the women used cultural strategies to rely on traditional notions of beauty and well-being to filter and selectively adopt new beliefs of food and the body. Discourses of cautious, regulated or moderate lifestyles mushroom in societies showing early signs of economic prosperity, be it industrial Europe in the 1700s (Turner, 1982), post-World War II America (Seid, 1989), and now post-liberalized urban Indian societies. In this sense, the women showed some amount of restraint in their bodily aspirations directing most of their concerns toward the obligations they felt to simultaneously serve the self, family, and the nation. Research on thinness aspirations, especially of women in non-white communities, has provided a complicated picture of women's engagement with the norm of ultra-thinness. Actual negotiation of one's body tends to vary considerably along class, ethnic, and nationalistic dimensions as women adapt, modify, and in some instances reject the ultra-thin body when it fails to represent their familial, ethnic or cultural definitions of beauty (Bass, 2001; Casanova, 2004). Though greater attention has been paid to the diverse types of bodies women aspire to, the field is still premised on mutually exclusive propositions: women have either succumbed to the ultra-thin body (often identified in the literature as white/

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

Anglo-American women) (Crago & Shisslak, 2003) or flatly rejected it (often identified in the literature as women belonging to non-white communities) (Hesse-Biber, Howling, Leavy, & Lovejoy, 2004; Parker et al., 1995). Studies contend, however, that when women of non-white communities climb the social class ladder or adopt white/ Anglo-American values of achievement, they lose their traditional beauty aesthetic and subscribe to the thinness model (Cachelin & Regan, 2006; Jung & Lee, 2006). Despite being well-acquainted with western styles of living and aspiring for a cosmopolitan identity, the women in this study did not easily submit to the ultra-thin ideal or completely abandon their traditional beliefs of beauty, food, and bodily wellbeing, but neither did they instantly reject thin bodies. This research attempts to explain eating and bodily practices of women who fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of possibilities of women's engagements with thin bodies, an aspect often overlooked in this field of study. This can prove to be an important epistemological position in social science research on the body as being part of global multicultural (or multi-ethnic) settings is increasingly becoming a lived reality. Hesse-Biber, Livingstone, Ramirez, Barko, and Johnson (2010: 705) for instance, in a recent study found that some young, college-going, African-American women negotiated with their bodies from an “in-between” place of being “not black enough, not white enough”. Finally, this study lends credence to the argument that national or ethnic beliefs of the female body (Casanova, 2004; Lovejoy, 2001) and familial arrangements of eating (Bass, 2001) affect how women interpret and act upon new, albeit tempting, cultural messages concerning ultra-thin bodies. It also simultaneously urges future research on thinness aspirations of women living in both non-western and western contexts to take account of the roles family practices and tradition play in modifying the ways western/AngloAmerican eating habits and body types are expressed, especially if a woman's identity in these social contexts has been sufficiently affected by values of individualism, or if she is intimately involved in protecting and serving familial and communal arrangements. In the meantime, my study suggests that our understanding of dieting as a consequence of appearance-based body dissatisfaction, imported from the West, is an oversimplification that renders women's skillful navigation across treacherous cultural territories invisible. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people for reading early drafts of this paper and giving me helpful comments and suggestions: Annulla Linders, Kelly Moore, Sue Mennino, Erynn Masi de Casanova, Leopold Eisenlohr, Shirlena Huang and the anonymous reviewers of this paper. I would also like to thank the Taft Research Center at University of Cincinnati for funding my project and the women who took time out of their busy lives to talk to me. End notes 1 The conversion rate is based on the approximate rate at the time of the study in 2005 when [US] $1 = Rs. 40. 2 This could partly be a result of the fact that bulimia is viewed negatively

117

in society and the women were not comfortable sharing this information with me during a course of an interview.

References Ahmed-Ghosh, Huma (2003). Writing the nation on the beauty queen's body: Implications for a ‘Hindu’ nation. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 4(1), 205–227. Anand, Anita (2002). The beauty game. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Bass, Margaret K. (2001). On being a fat black girl in a fat-hating culture. In Michael Bennett, & Vanessa Dickerson (Eds.), Recovering the Black female body— Self representations by African-American women (pp. 219–230). New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Becker, Anne E. (2004). Television, disordered eating, and young women in Fiji: Negotiating body image and identity during rapid social change. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 28, 533–559. Bhabha, Homi (2004). The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Bordo, Susan (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brenner, Suzanne (1996). Reconstructing self and society: Javanese Muslim women and “the veil”. American Ethnologist, 23(4), 673–697. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs (1997). The body project: An intimate history of American girls. New York: First Vintage Books. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs (1988). Fasting girls: The history of anorexia nervosa. New York: First Vintage Books. Cachelin, Fary M., & Regan, Pamela C. (2006). Prevalence and correlates of chronic dieting in a multi-ethnic U.S. community sample. Eating and Weight Disorders, 11(2), 91–99. Canclini, Nestor Garcia (1995). Hybrid cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Casanova, Erynn Masi de (2004). “No ugly women”: Concepts of race and beauty amongst adolescent women in Ecuador. Gender and Society, 18(3), 287–308. Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (2001). Gender and advertisements: The rhetoric of globalization. Women's Studies International Forum, 24(3–4), 373–385. Chatterjee, Partha (1989). The nationalist resolution of the women's question. In Kumkum Sangari, & Sudesh Vaid (Eds.), Recasting women: Essays in Indian colonial history (pp. 233–253). New Delhi: Kali. Crago, Marjorie, & Shisslak, Catherine M. (2003). Ethnic differences in dieting, binge eating, and purging behaviors among American females: A review. Eating Disorders, 11, 289–304. Davis, Kathy (1995). Reshaping the female body: The dilemma of cosmetic surgery. New York: Routledge. Espiritu, Yen L. (2001). “We don't sleep around like white girls do”: Family, culture and gender in Filipina American Lives. Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 26(2), 415–440. Fernandes, Leela (2006). India's new middle class: Democratic politics in an era of economic reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ganguly-Scrase, Ruchira (2003). Paradoxes of globalization, liberalization, and gender equality. Gender and Society, 17(4), 544–566. Giddens, Anthony (1999). Tradition. Reith Lectures BBC Radio. Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Glaser, Barney G., & Strauss, Anselm L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, Livingstone, Stacey, Ramirez, Daniela, Barko, Emily E., & Johnson, Alicia L. (2010). Racial identity and body image among Black female college students attending predominantly White colleges. Sex Roles, 63(9–10), 697–711. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene (2007). The cult of thinness. New York: Oxford University Press. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, Howling, Stephanie A., Leavy, Patricia, & Lovejoy, Meg (2004). Racial identity and the development of body image issues among African American adolescent girls. The Qualitative Report, 9(1), 49–79. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene (1996). Am I thin enough yet? The cult of thinness and the commercialization of identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Hussain, Naseem A. (2010). Religion and modernity: Gender and identity politics in Bangladesh. Women Studies International Forum, 33(4), 325–333. Johnson, Lynda D. (1981). Magazine use of middle-class English-speaking Indians in New Delhi, India. Paper presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism, East Lansing, MI. Jung, Jaehee, & Lee, Seung-Hee (2006). Cross-cultural comparisons of appearance, self-schema, body image, self-esteem, and dieting behavior between Korean and U.S. women. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, 34(4), 350–365. Kishwar, Madhu (1995). When India ‘missed’ the universe. Manushi, 88, 26–31.

118

J. Talukdar / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118

Lamont, Michele, & Molnar, Virag (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 167–195. Loganathan, Santosh, & Murthy, Srinivasa R. (2008). Experiences of stigma and discrimination endured by people suffering from schizophrenia. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 50(1), 39–46. Lovejoy, Meg (2001). Disturbances in the social body: Differences in body image and eating problems among African American and White women. Gender and Society, 15(2), 239–261. Majumdar, Rochona (2002). ‘Self-sacrifice’ versus ‘self-interest’: A nonhistoricist reading of the history of women's rights in India. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 22(1–2), 20–35. Mallyon, Anna, Holmes, Mary, Coveney, John, & Zadoroznyj, Maria (2010). “I'm not dieting, I'm doing it for science”: Masculinities and the experience of dieting. Healthy Sociology Review, 19(3), 330–342. Martin, Courtney (2007). Perfect girls, starving daughter: The frightening new normalcy of hating your bodies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miller, Merry A., & Pumariega, Andres J. (2001). Culture and eating disorders: A historical and cross-cultural review. Psychiatry, 64(2), 93–110. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1991). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, & Lourdes Torres (Eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism (pp. 51–80). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Munshi, Soma (2001). Marvelous me. In Soma Munshi (Ed.), Images of the modern woman in Asia: Global media, local meaning (pp. 94–122). Great Britain: Curzon. Munshi, Soma (1998). Wife/mother/daughter-in-law: Multiple avatars of homemaker in 1990s advertising. Media, Culture and Society, 20(4), 573–591. Naseer, Mervat (1997). Culture and weight consciousness. London: Routledge. Nichter, Mimi (2000). Fat talk: What girls and their parents say about dieting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Orbach, Susie (2005[1986]). Hunger strike: Starving amidst plenty. London: Karnac Books. Parameswaran, Radhika (2005). Global beauty queens in post-liberalization India. Peace Review, 17(4), 419–426. Parker, Sheila, Nichter, Mimi, Nichter, Mark, Nancy, Vuckovic, Colette, Sims, & Ritenbaugh, Cheryl (1995). Body image and weight concerns among African American and White adolescent females: Differences that make a difference. Human Organization, 54(2), 103–114. Puri, Jyoti (1999). Woman, body, desire in post-colonial India: Narratives of gender and sexuality. New York: Routledge. Pyke, Karen D., & Johnson, Denise L. (2003). Asian American women and racialized femininities: “Doing” gender across cultural worlds. Gender and Society, 17(1), 33–53. Radhakrishnan, Smitha (2011). Appropriately Indian: Gender and class in a new transnational class. Durham: Duke University Press.

Radhakrishnan, Smitha (2009). Professional women, good families: Respectable femininity and the cultural politics of a “new” India. Qualitative Sociology, 32(2), 195–212. Rao, V. Nandini, & Rao, V. Prakasa (1990). Desired qualities in a future mate in India. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 20(2), 181–198. Read, Jen'nan Ghazal, & Bartkowski, John P. (2000). To veil or not to veil? A case study of identity negotiation among Muslim women in Austin, Texas. Gender and Society, 14(3), 395–417. Rose, Nikolas (2001). The politics of life itself. Theory, Culture and Society, 18(6), 1–30. Runkle, Susan (2005). The beauty obsession: International standards for fair and lovely. Manushi, 145, 11–16. Runkle, Susan (2004). Making ‘Miss India’: Constructing gender, power and the nation. South Asian Popular Culture, 2(2), 145–159. Sarkar, Saswati (2009, January 2) Riding the wellness wave. India Today. Sarkar, Tanika (2001). Hindu wife and Hindu nation: Community, religion, and cultural nationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Seid, Roberta Pollack (1989). Never too thin: Why women are at war with their bodies. Englewood Cliffs: NJ Prentice Hall. Shroff, Hemal, & Thompson, J. Kevin (2004). Body image and eating disturbances in India: Media and interpersonal influences. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 35, 198–203. Tendulkar, Prajakta, Krishnadas, Rajeev, Durge, Vijay, Sharma, Sumit, Nayak, Sapna, Kamat, Sanjeev, et al. (2006). Study of eating attitudes and behaviors in junior college students in Mumbai, India. Journal of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 18(2), 43–48. Thapan, Meenakshi (2004). Embodiment and identity in contemporary society: Femina and the ‘new’ Indian woman. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38(3), 411–444. Thapan, Meenakshi (2009). Living the body: Embodiment, womanhood and identity in contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Turner, Bryan S. (1996). The body and society: Explorations in social theory. London: Sage Publications. Turner, Bryan S. (1982). The government of the body: Medical regimens and the rationalization of diet. The British Journal of Sociology, 33, 254–269. Williams, Rhys H., & Vashi, Gira (2007). Hijab and American Muslim women: Creating the space for autonomous selves. Sociology of Religion, 68(3), 269–287. Dr. Jaita Talukdar is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Loyola University New Orleans. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, culture, globalization, body, health, and food. In her projects, she focuses on how modern individuals interpret and, in the process, modify social and cultural meanings about body, food, and eating.