"It's Just Gym": Physicality and Identity among African American Adolescent Girls

It’s Just Gym presents the findings of a study that explored how a group of African American adolescent girls attending a suburban, middle-class high school in the Midwest experience and enact their physicality in school settings. This study was devised as an attempt to critically examine how local cultural context informs the disproportionately high levels of obesity and the disproportionately low levels of physical activity documented among African American females beginning at puberty. The study aims were to (1) question the lay and scientific conventional wisdom regarding body size and health promotion among African American females and (2) present an alternate framework for exploring the institutional and social contexts in which the study participants expressed that physicality. In this mixed methods exploration that included surveys, focus groups, interviews, observation, electronic activity monitoring, anthropometry and personal network assessment, school-based physical education and extra-curricular activities, gender, race and class emerged as key, intersecting contexts of physicality. Relational strategies – including personal network composition and the circumstances of resort to separation – were explored, as were the participants’ experiences of recreational and functional exertion. Emerging from these explorations is a set of accounts of body conceptualization and physical activity engagement among the participants that are characterized by patterns of similarity and difference. These patterns reflect the dynamic operation of intersecting contexts, individual experience and relationship dynamics in these young women’s identities. That is, these patterns indicate that body conceptualizations and activity predilections among the participants were the outcomes of a complex, yet not wholly individualized, set of influences, circumstances, perceptions and behaviors that are not readily predicted by any one category of identity. Thus, in addition to being a unique case study, the process by which these findings were obtained presents a model for investigation, analysis and understanding of local contexts of physicality-informed identity across localities and populations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor dc:publisher

Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• McClure, Stephanie M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Anderson-Fye, Eileen

• African Americans
• Behaviorial Sciences
• Cultural Anthropology
• Gender
• Health Education
• Public Health
• identity
• physicality
• physical activity
• body image
• embodiment
• African American females
• adolescent
• high school

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1365183024

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:case1365183024