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«Худой значит нормальный»: управление телом в среде городской молодежи
This paper analyzes the corporeal culture of modern urban youth that in- cludes the standards, criteria and evaluation methods of dealing with the body. Contemporary youth is involved in many contexts that regulates their bodily production: the media, family, school, peer group. However, the young people produce within their environment conventional shared repre- sentations and practices regarding bodily shapes and sizes, which both reproduce and override the general cultural codes. Analysis of qualitative interviews with 40 young people aged 16 to 29 years old, living in St. Pe- tersburg, have demonstrated that among the urban educated youth weightreflexive culture is formed. Its constitutive elements are the routinized everyday monitoring of young people’s body, regular self-evaluation of own body and its assessments by other people, the special competences to manage the size and the shape of the body, and gender neutrality. Reflexive corporeal assessment produces normalized anxiety and discontent by the own body, which is corresponding to the cultural norm of «slender» body. This paper analyzes the corporeal culture of modern urban youth that in- cludes the standards, criteria and evaluation methods of dealing with the body. Contemporary youth is involved in many contexts that regulates their bodily production: the media, family, school, peer group. However, the young people produce within their environment conventional shared repre- sentations and practices regarding bodily shapes and sizes, which both reproduce and override the general cultural codes. Analysis of qualitative interviews with 40 young people aged 16 to 29 years old, living in St. Pe- tersburg, have demonstrated that among the urban educated youth weightreflexive culture is formed. Its constitutive elements are the routinized everyday monitoring of young people’s body, regular self-evaluation of own body and its assessments by other people, the special competences to manage the size and the shape of the body, and gender neutrality. Reflexive corporeal assessment produces normalized anxiety and discontent by the own body, which is corresponding to the cultural norm of «slender» body.