Thin but not skinny: Women negotiating the “never too thin” body ideal in urban India ☆ , ☆☆ Jaita Talukdar ⁎ Department of Sociology, Loyola University New Orleans, USA article info Synopsis Available online 22 March 2012 With western companies spreading the “never too thin” body ideal to non-western societies, many expect a global increase in the pathology of eating. This study examines the dieting and slimming practices of 27 women living in urban India. Though the women were involved in various dieting routines and wanted thin bodies, they set limits to the ideal of an ultra-thin body. Instead, the women directed their dieting and slimming practices toward embellishing their contemporary identity as educated, well-informed clients of a burgeoning health indus- try and as cultural agents responsible for protecting generational beliefs surrounding food and body. Grounding my research in theories that understand women's negotiations of their bod- ies in contexts that have been impacted by forces of globalization, yet regulated by their famil- ial worlds, I provide a culturally nuanced argument of why and how urban Indian women set limits on the ultra-thin ideal. The women used cultural strategies, or what I refer to as specu- lative modernity, that rely on traditional notions of beauty and well-being to filter and selec- tively adopt new beliefs of food and body. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction In 2005, I spent seven months in a city in India studying the dieting and slimming practices of 27 college-educated, profes- sionally trained or employed women. Maya, a law student, was one of the women who had agreed to talk to me about her body, specifically about whether she struggled with her body weight and had dieted to lose weight. Listening to Maya at first filled me with the fear that the western cultural ideal of beauty that equates excessively thin bodies with attractive bodies is becoming a global phenomenon. Weighing 51 kg (114 lbs), Maya urgently wanted to lose another 10 kg: “I am desperate [to lose weight]. I want to eat [only] an apple a day.” Yet, when I asked her if she had started her ‘an apple-a- day’ diet, she rolled her eyes, laughed and said, “No! I cannot [do that]. My parents will throw me out of the house [laughs].” On the grounds that it would be unacceptable to her par- ents, Maya's response had changed in a matter of minutes, from a desperate need to lose weight into a swift dismissal of undertaking any drastic steps to achieve that desired body. Her own laughter and the rolling of her eyes indicated, howev- er, that the proposition of eating only apples was equally unac- ceptable to her and even somewhat preposterous. Maya, initially, had come across as a “new recruit” of the “cult of thinness” (Hesse-Biber, 1996; Hesse-Biber, 2007), the phenomenon in which women experience an uncontrollable desire to lose weight and aspire for excessively thin bodies (hereafter ultra-thin bodies). Research documents that such an obsession is responsible for women developing problematic relationships with their bodies (Bordo, 1993; Hesse-Biber, 1996). With western companies spreading the “never too thin” ideal (Seid, 1989) to non-western societies, many expect a “global increase in the pathology of eating” (Naseer, 1997: 46). Maya's refusal, however, to execute a rigorous dieting Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 109–118 ☆ This research was supported by the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati. ☆☆ This paper was presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, 20th–23rd August, 2011 in Las Vegas. This paper was selected for presentation in the regular session on the ‘Sociology of the Body’. ⁎ Loyola University New Orleans, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, Campus Box–-30, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA. 0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2012.03.002 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif