The research design

Against the background of the critical realism paradigm, the naturalistic standpoint, semi- structured interview protocol and the recursive approach to interviewing established the conceptual framework and provided a technical basis upon which the overall design of the present study was shaped. These methodological practices helped to clarify the premises upon which to build and conduct an exploration of Schilder’s (1935/1978) assumptions about the dynamic body image, and were thereby the underlying factors determining the sampling and recruitment for the research.

5.2.1 Sampling

As stated in Section 4.1 above, it was planned that the study would explore Schilder’s (1935/1978) dynamic theory by studying the experience of movement by people involved professionally in the practice of body movement. The target group for this study was identified according to three characteristics. They were to be (a) women at or over the age of eighteen years who (b) were specialists in one of three styles of movement and (c) performed that movement. As a small sample would permit the collection and analysis of rich descriptions, a sample of five from each movement style would be sought, totaling fifteen participants overall.

5.2.1.1 Women participants

The criterion restricting participants to women was largely a design choice. Choosing to interview only women could ensure that data analysis would be a considerably simpler task than if both sexes were included in the study. Underlying this decision were supporting ideas pertaining to the role of the sexed body in the construction of the body image and gendered subjectivity.

From a philosophical stance, Gatens (1996) argued that much of what is understood about the body image in psychoanalytic theory contains a sweeping androcentric bias. Lacan’s (1949/1977) account of the mirror stage, she noted, and arguably the assumptions underlying structural- functional models within the discipline of psychology, present an overly scopophilic point of view of the body. The emphasis Lacan placed upon visible markers in defining the unity of the body, she argued, assumed that “the child sees its wholeness before it feels its wholeness...” (p. 33). Gatens wrote:

…[T]here is something particularly masculine about [the] privileging of sight over all the other senses, such as the tactile, which it is suggested, is more closely aligned with the feminine… Yet in this very insistence on the privileging of the seen and the visible lurks the archaic defence mechanism of disavowal. Freud describes disavowal as a process which allows both denial and acknowledgement to operate simultaneously. The subject entertains two conflicting or contradictory ideas at once: one idea acknowledging ‘reality’; the other denying it…(p. 33).

It is notable that Lacan’s (1949/1977) description of the mirror stage was evaluated by Gatens (1996) as a disavowal of what, in neuroscientific circles, has been identified as the supramodal perceptual system. The unity of the bodily ego of the female and thus feminine subjectivity, Gatens argued, is far more aligned to the tactile. Not all authors in the psychodynamic field, however, have taken this scopophilic, or masculine, point of view on the formation of the body image.

Notably, Deutsch (1944, p. 135) reinforced the pertinence of both the tactile and kinesthetic sensory systems in her identification of the role of “inner perception” and in the development of

what she referred to as “feminine intuition”1. The capacity for inner perception, Deutsch argued, was organized more clearly in females, since girls’ recognition of the specificity of their reproductive organs requires them to ‘look’ inward.

Erikson (1968) later reinforced the correspondence Deutsch (1944) made between the girl’s integration of her sexual and reproductive organs, and the construction of her body image through the concept of “inner space”. Erikson’s first description of inner space suggested that it derived from the cumulative experience of having a female body. However, he later qualified his assertion that inner space was specific to the female body, by highlighting that males and females “make use of, …share, and at times…imitate the [body image] configurations most typical of the other sex” (Erikson 1975, p. 233). In this way he refined inner space as the construction of the body image through one’s most immediate perceptual experience and thus, while emphasizing that females are physically organized to recognize this more directly than males, he noted that men are able to observe this perceptual experience as well. However he qualified this in noting that males are most likely to acquire the capacity for inner perception through what Schilder (1935/1978) referred to as body image interplay.

Body image research pertaining to the sexual specificity of the female body, and particularly that pertaining to inner space, has had little popularity in the English speaking world. However, one study conducted by Amann-Gianotti, Di Prospero and Nenci (1989) illustrated that, when the body image is studied with respect to sexual specificity and the activity of inner perception or self- -apperception, it is constructed in a way very different from that inferred by structural-functional models. Amann-Gianotti, et al. (1989), influenced by Kestenberg (1968) and Erikson (1964 & 1968), suggested that the internal location of the female sexual organs, that is, the non-visible nature of the vagina and uterus, not only affects the quality and intensity with which 11 to 18

1 _{Deutsch (1944) conceptualized “feminine intuition” through the German word Einfühlung, which}

in English is often translated as empathy. She wrote: “…Einfühlung…depends on the richness of one’s own emotional experiences, which underlie the ‘inner perception’ or the ability to understand one’s own feelings and psychologic relations and, by analogy, those of others. This brief definition of intuition describes an ability that is to a high degree characteristic of women” (1944, p. 136-7).

year-olds relate to their body image, but also the rate with which they are able to integrate the specificity of their sexual and reproductive body into their body image.

5.2.1.2 Specialists in movement

The present study aimed to sample specialists in one of three styles of movement. They would be recruited according to their training in either (a) contemporary dance (b) Middle-eastern dance (often referred to as belly dance) or (c) aerobics, as an instructor. At the time the research design began to crystallize these three styles of movement were considered different enough from one another to suppose that specialists of each might have different ways of understanding the body image. Schilder (1935/1978) had identified movement as a significant influence on the construction of the body image, and thereby it could be supposed that each movement style might conceivably structure the body image differently.

In addition to these parameters, it was also identified that movement had an ontogenetic relationship to the sexed body of women. This position described in the literature on Dance, directly underscores the discussion on the sexual specificity of the participants described in Section 5.2.1.1 above. In that literature it has been suggested that, not only is inner perception on the side of the female body, but the dancer is also. S. Gardner (1996) wrote that:

Really, the ‘dancer’ has never been ‘neutral’, but has always been on the side of the feminine (other of masculinity). There is, however, within the broad field of ‘dance’, a constellation of practices, of projects of the body in which the feminine of the dancer is being redefined… Through these practices the dancing feminine becomes, perhaps, more a woman…(p. 58).

Adding to this she noted:

Through Irigaray, I’ve come to understand how the image, like the word, always involves a repression, and that in patriarchy what is repressed is always ‘woman’ (and women): movement as movement is on the side of women (p. 58).

Dance in this excerpt, is intimately connected with the body image construction of women. However, it is important to note that S. Gardner’s (1996) discussion was made within a particular academic discourse that conceptualizes dance practices in a highly specific way. It is not the intention here to dilute or transform that very particular understanding of movement and dance,

but to explore the parameters she outlines on the status of movement in relation to the sexed body, as a means by which to explore the relationship between body image and movement.

5.2.1.3 Performances

The third consideration for the participant sample was that participants had experience performing their chosen movement to a public or audience. Performances were defined according to the symbolic interactionism of Goffman (1959), described in Section 4.3.2.2 above, and circumscribed performance as a social interaction in which a public implicitly acknowledges the presence of the solo performer, in order to save the show. The parameters of participants’ fullest performance, however, would be determined by the participants themselves and according to the kind of experiences they each liked to expect. The performance of movement was thus a feature to be shared by all the participants.

5.2.1.4 Qualitative sampling techniques

This study set out to use intensity sampling techniques and snowballing in order to obtain the final group. According to Patton (2002b), intensity sampling locates information-rich cases within specified settings. This would be appropriate for recruiting participants from the health and fitness industry and from the dance community where clubs, centres and studios provide a location from which to begin. Snowballing has been described by Miles and Huberman (1994) as an effective way to locate cases within specified fields of study, because it locates information-rich cases through people who know where those information-rich cases are. Snowballing was considered for recruitment of participants here because each interviewee could be asked whether they knew of anyone else that might be interested in participating in the project.

5.2.2 Recruitment

Initial contacts with possible participants were to be arranged using intensity sampling of: (a) inner suburban dance classes (b) women’s fitness centres and (c) contacts through the State of Victoria funded “Ausdance” organization. Contact with each organization required cold calling. Cold calling involved introducing the first respondent of the phone call to the study and inquiring if persons within that organization fitted the profile targeted by the study. The first respondent would be given a brief introduction to the aim of the research and what participants’ contributions would entail, as set out as “Recruitment script” in Appendix I. In the case of fitness centres, this first respondent was the centre manager.

Contact with persons fitting the sample profile would then be organized in one of two ways. The first required each organization contacted by cold calling to pass on a message to any persons they identified as fitting the sample profile. The first respondent to the cold calling (i.e. centre manager or receptionist) would be given the telephone contact details of the researcher and a brief verbal description of the project. The second approach would use the snowballing technique described in Section 4.6.1.4 above. This was to involve asking participants to pass on information about their participation in the study to one of their associates, and if the person were interested, provide the contact details of that person to the researcher.