A Thin Body is a Holy Body: The Spiritualized Thin Ideal in American Culture

• In Event: 20809 - Section on Sociology of Body and Embodiment: Open Session

Abstract

Central to the messaging of the multi-billion-dollar diet industry in the United States is the moral virtues of bodily discipline. Seen in common diet and weight loss terms like “guilty pleasure”, “sinfully delicious”, and “clean eating” this language is often spiritualized, imbued with Protestant Christian values. As these values remain heavily present in explicitly evangelical cultures, better understanding the contours of these religious attitudes towards bodies, and particularly gendered bodies, can tell us much about broader white, American attitudes. Utilizing participant’s articulated experiences of their bodies and body image within an evangelical movement called purity culture, I explicate how the gendered and spiritualized thin ideals they experience are shaped by power structures and shape their self-perception in return. I then lay out three uses that thinness and the pursuit of thinness through disordered eating holds for them and those around them in their communities, serving as a bodily representation of cultural ideals of bodily discipline, modesty, and whiteness. I analyze participant narratives of the spiritualized thin ideal in the context of purity culture and its power structures, and their experiences of thinness as an achievement of faith. In doing so, I expand understandings of religious bodily discipline to examine gendered pursuits of thinness and thinness’s conceptual entanglement with an achievement of holiness or piety. I argue that thinness allows women to pursue the gendered evangelical ideal body and demonstrate associated spiritual strength, conforming their bodies to social-spiritual values. I contextualize these findings in wider conservative power structures and American bodily attitudes, allowing analysis of thinness as both a tool and outcome of white, patriarchal power and control.

Author

• Rebecca Wolfe