View article

The article focuses on exploring how girls ‘bodies are being moulded by the Finnish school. For my PhD research I have gathered data on women‘s experiences of being fat. One of the findings was that for most of the women who had been fat as a child named school as the place where they had learnt or they had been told directly or implicitly that they were too fat or their bodies were somehow deviant to the norm. It is evident that school is one of the most central places where girls are taught and where they learn the boundaries of the acceptable or ideal female body. In this article, I ask how the orders and organisation of the school set and reproduce this effectually gendered and violent standard of an acceptable female body, and how it affects on young girls ‘idea of themselves and their bodies.

In this article, I will apply Foucauldian thinking by considering being fat as a discursive category that is created, produced and reproduced through social practices for example through school and its institutions such as school health care and physical education. The data used in this article consists of 35 autobiographical writings and 12 thematic interviews with Finnish women aged between 21 and 65 years.