Deviant Bodies and Suitable Clothes

Abstract

This chapter discusses how Norwegians with bodies that deviate from dominant bodily ideals find suitable clothes. In the social sciences, interest in the body has increased rapidly during the last decades, in parallel with a growing interest in clothes and fashion. This development may be understood as a response to an increased significance of images related to language and symbolic register. The chapter draws on the data material from Nordic research project. It consists of 20 interviews, with 11 women and 9 men, ranging in age from 18 to 62 years. It includes informants with visually deviant bodies. A Norwegian proverb says, “Beauty comes from within” – meaning that there is a correspondence between who we “are” and how we look, and that beauty is something else and more than a beautiful exterior. However, in fairy tales and pop culture the good and the kind are always beautiful.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.