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Body Talk and Boundary Work Among Arab Canadian Immigrant Women

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Abstract

This paper places Latour’s (2004) concept of “body talk” alongside literature on symbolic boundaries to consider how the symbolic judgements and evaluations that comprise body talk frame the impact of structural pressures on the body. Drawing from individual and focus group interviews with 36 first-generation Arab Canadian immigrant women, this study shows that the female body, and practices of feeding and exercising it, are sites where structural inequalities embedded in the immigration process are materially experienced, resisted, and managed. In constructing boundaries between Arab women’s bodies in Canada and the Arab world alongside those of so-called “Canadian” women, we argue that women communicate their immigration and settlement struggles and recoup dignity otherwise compromised in the migration process—ultimately allowing them to frame their struggles as products of their moral integrity as immigrant wives and mothers. Through these findings, this paper demonstrates the role of body talk in framing the impact of structural pressures on the body, while simultaneously highlighting the centrality of boundary work to that framing.

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Notes

  1. For the purpose of this study, we define Arab immigrants as individuals who have migrated to Canada from Middle Eastern and North African countries around the Arabian Peninsula who speak some variation of the Arabic language. Please see our discussion on page five for the reasoning behind this paper’s use of this identifier.

  2. We recognize the potential that utilizing the term “Arab” holds in reinforcing a monolithic conception of this heterogeneous group. The authors’ choice to categorize the women under this identifier is based around the decisions made at recruitment. Arab was deemed a broad yet representative identifier under the advice of a community broker who facilitated this study’s requirement while also working directly to provide health-related support to immigrant women (please refer to the methodology section for more detail on recruitment). In turn, participants generally self-identified by their national origins, rather than as “Arab,” though did not express any hostility to or estrangement from the term.

  3. While racial politics are often considered less blatant in Canada than in some other western nations (through both its policy of official multiculturalism and that policy’s manifestation as discourse within the national imaginary), scholars of multiculturalism have argued for the persistent importance of race in the Canadian context and the role of these discourses in perpetuating color-blindness that masks racial inequalities (see Mackey 2002).

  4. Ladies-only gyms are important for this group as they represent spaces where women can be active while simultaneously upholding their ethno-religious values based on modesty.

  5. This does not mean that white bodies are not subject to surveillance. Research also shows that low-income populations (especially mothers), including those that are white, are subject to particularly intensive scrutiny around health and body weight (Boero 2010; Wright et al. 2015).

  6. The work of Abou-Rizk and Rail conducted with young, Christian Lebanese immigrant women, finds that this group reproduced mainstream anti-obesity narratives that conflate health with thinness and idealize white, thin bodies, as ways to assert their Canadianness and disassociate themselves from Muslim Lebanese women, whom they reified as uneducated, closed-minded, and traditional in ways that reproduced neocolonial discourses.

  7. Note that migration here functions alongside other impacts on the body such as aging and childbirth. It is possible that part of what participants perceived to be the impact of migration on their bodies is actually the effect of these other contemporaneous factors. However, we remain confident in our conclusions due to the specificity by which women speak of their challenges with migration, and the parallels between their experiences and those documented in existing research that have been shown to impact health and body size.

  8. Washing floors in this context is usually considered a fun, cooling chore involving a lot of soapy water and rubber-ended scraping sticks that push the water down drains found in the floors of balconies, washrooms, and kitchens. In Canada, it is rare to find a drain in the floor, and because houses commonly have wood flooring, this oftentimes enjoyable exercise is curtailed.

  9. Wallahi (or alternatively Wallah) is an Arabic phrase meaning “[I promise] by my God” that is used to denote particular credibility or truth in a statement.

  10. Participants’ notions of “back home” are presented here as relatively homogenous, yet the reality of “home” clearly differed for each woman. Participants came from diverse family and class backgrounds and their home countries differed in their level of safety and political stability. However, women idealized their homelands in notably uniform ways in the context of this study, characterized by warm weather, local, regular (and therefore fresh) food shopping, and informal, intensive patterns of female socialization (and the regular household labor required to sustain this).

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Acknowledgements

This project was supported by POWER (Promotion of Optimal Weights through Ecological Research), a team research grant provided by the Canadian Institute for Health Research in partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. We would like to thank Shaymaa Rahme and Hina Syed, whose work as research assistants on this project was incredibly valuable, as well as Yvonne Chu and colleagues at the Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative. Our thanks also go to members of the University of Toronto’s Feminist Food Working Group for their feedback on early drafts of this paper, as well as to Andrew Deener, David Smilde, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers, whose comments greatly strengthened the piece.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2J4, Canada

    Merin Oleschuk

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, 13-15 Tory Building, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H4, Canada

    Helen Vallianatos

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Oleschuk, M., Vallianatos, H. Body Talk and Boundary Work Among Arab Canadian Immigrant Women. Qual Sociol 42, 587–614 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-019-09428-w

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