Body concealment: the flip-side of self-objectification
Carmen Cervone, Caterina Suitner (Università di Padova), Magdalena Formanowicz (SWPS University), Silvia Galdi (Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli), Francesca Guizzo (Surrey University), Daniela Ruzzante (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)
Self-objectifying women are usually conceived as equating their worth to the appeal of their bodies and valuing their appearance over their personhood (i.e., “body as self”). We argue instead that in certain conditions, women who self-objectify may rather be motivated to disappear in order to protect themselves. This, in turn, should lead them to behaviors (e.g., through clothing or posture) aimed at concealing their body. An event that may trigger this response is sexual harassment: victims may engage in body concealment as a coping strategy against the shame and fear deriving from such an event. To date, body concealment has been studied primarily in relation to body-image (e.g., Jewett et al., 2016; Walker et al., 2018) but never as an outcome of self-objectification. We present two studies validating a new measure of body concealment, as well as a correlational and an experimental study investigating this phenomenon.
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