| dc.description.abstract | My fieldwork lasted for six months, from the summer 2002 to the end of that year. My original plan was to look at women and their relationship to their bodies, more specific their own breasts. As my fieldwork was an urban one, being played out in Rome, my search for informants was an important and crucial part of the further development of the fieldwork. Who the women who became my informants were, pointed out the direction in which my fieldwork took. As my network developed in Rome, consisting of women who where to be my informants, I was that the manner in which I had found these people, a kind of “snowball” effect, had led to that all of my informants came from the same social class. This forced me to have a closer look at class, and as I did, this became a keyword for these theses, in addition to the two other keywords, gender and body. The result of this is that these theses have high-class women in Rome and their relationships to their bodies as the main subject. I collected lifestories from these women in order to find out how their relationship to their body had developed. As I did, I found that they had a very psychoanalytical way of talking about themselves, their childhood, their relationship they had to their body growing up and their current relationship to their body. I found that many of them had been seeing a psychologist because they had developed a bad relationship to their body and they needed help to solve problems in relation to this. In this way my theses also took a psychological turn. I have looked at women’s relationship to their bodies in the light of psychological theories and taking into consideration their class and their upbringing as a result of the membership in this class.
I have also looked at the political and historical setting my fieldwork took place in. This is important because I found it to be a very particular moment in time for Italy, something I argue had an influence on the view people had on women and their bodies. In particular I look at the way the media has changed and the way the media present women. My informants view on this is also interesting, and I argue that this influenced their way of talking about their body, especially the fact that I did not get any information about breasts, in the sense that my informants did not want to speak about this subject. Instead they wanted very much to speak about slimness, and this is also something I consider in these theses. My informants relationship to their bodies is complicated and several factors are influencing this. I argue that some of them are special for my informants and some of them more general for the country or for all western women. Life stories is a tool that enables the researcher to get a thorough view of these people in particular and their lives. It is not a tool that gives a good opportunity to generalize. | nor |