The before-and-after template: Researching and reflecting on body image concerns in globalizing India (personal reflection)

Abstract

There was a time when I was quite an admirer of the before-andafter (hereafter BAF) template that applauded the transformation of the body from being fat to becoming thin. The ubiquity of BAF stories to capture the transformation of the body shows us how deep-rooted our distaste has become for not-so-thin bodies, where being fat is always the before story and always a shortcoming. In this essay, I too use a BAF template, albeit one that is stretched out in time, to reflect on my personal struggles with body weight, and my quest for thinness. I come to this story both as a young teenager growing up in urban India in the 1990s, desperate to fit into a smaller size jeans, and as a feminist sociologist who only after many years of researching women’s body image concerns has realized that my weight issues were intimately tied to my struggles of expressing who I was or wanted to be in a world that was rapidly changing around me. Hence, a before and an after in this story.