I, object: Bringing women’s body image to the table in Northern Ireland

My doctoral research concerns making autoethnographic objects to illustrate my experience of poor body image and bulimia in a broader cultural context. I aimed to highlight how intersectional factors can impact different women’s body images. However, my autoethnography risked inadvertently presenting my (White) experience as generalizable. Holding workshops with my objects was a way to mitigate this possibility, but further reflection on my positionality was needed. Although my participants and I are White, I am an outsider-insider in Northern Ireland. My autoethnographic objects took two forms; one may be best defined as ‘liminal object illustration’. By mimicking tableware, I used their social and cultural associations to destabilize their familiarity and influence the workshop activity. The women made their own objects on themes arising from our conversations for a collaborative exhibition. This article refers to original data from the workshops and exhibition, collected between October 2022 and May 2023.