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

Abstract

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.