The influence of cultural images and other people on young women's embodied agency

Drawing on young Finnish women's group discussions and individual written accounts of their body experiences, this article discusses the role of cultural images and other people in young women's body experiences, and the spaces available for young women's embodied agency. Through using insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2003) and George H. Mead (1934/67), it is shown how other people play a significant role in a young woman's relation to cultural body ideals and to her own body. The situation of a young woman, her own body being often compared by others and by herself to the image of the ideal woman, and as such, becomes an inhabited and presented visual space (Frost, 2005), a spectacle (Tseelon, 1995), which creates a context of living as an objectified body. However, this context also allows possibilities for particular forms of agency, which are discussed in the article.