‘The Lay Gaze’—Rural Norwegian men’s assessment of others’ health based on pictures

In this article, we explore lay men's understanding of the relationship between other's bodily appearance and health—‘the Lay Gaze’. We applied the theoretical concepts of biopower, medical gaze, bodyism and healthism—the ideology where one feature is that a slim body is equivalent to a he...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSociology of health & illness Vol. 43; no. 9; pp. 1935 - 1950
Main Authors Hervik, Stein Egil Kolderup, Skille, Eivind Åsrum
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.11.2021
Subjects
Adult
Age groups
Aged
Biopolitics
biopower
Black people
Blacks
body
Educational Status
Elderly men
Ethnicity
Health
healthism
Heterogeneity
Human body
Humans
Interviews
lay perspective
Male
Medicine
Men
Men's Health
Norway
Older people
Rural Population
Rural schools
Norway
healthism
health
lay perspective
biopower
body
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Summary:In this article, we explore lay men's understanding of the relationship between other's bodily appearance and health—‘the Lay Gaze’. We applied the theoretical concepts of biopower, medical gaze, bodyism and healthism—the ideology where one feature is that a slim body is equivalent to a healthy body—and interviewed 18 adult and elderly men in rural Norway, representing a heterogeneous group regarding age, ethnicity and education. To explore the interviewees’ subjective perception or ‘gaze’, the interviewees were presented with eight pictures of different people. Our main findings were, first, that the sample of a relatively heterogeneous group of adult and elderly lay men in rural Norway talk similarly about body appearance and health and follow the healthism discourse with an embedded association between body appearance and health assessment. Second, we found some variation regarding how interviewees define other standards for the elderly and black people.
Bibliography:Funding information
The authors received no additional funding for this work.
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ISSN:0141-9889
1467-9566
DOI:10.1111/1467-9566.13368