The Image Discourses of Adolescents: “Group Work Process” As a Catalyst to Talk about Bodies

“Good looks are not important!” - this is what young people, aged twelve to fourteen, say, if they are asked for their preferences of body representations. But: when they are confronted with medial body pictures, you can observe, that the opposite is true: Then bodies are “horny” or “fucking awesome”, “athletic” and “sexy”. Or even not: in the worst case bodies are “unsportsmanlike”, somehow “amorphous” – and so to speak “gay”! In my paper I introduce via case-study fragments a research conception, which increases the verbal method of the group discussion on the visual level by the “collage of images” and by the “group-selfie”. Their triangulation (as a closed “group-work-process”) is to help us record and with that understand better body (re)presentations of pupils also in the context of sport in- and outside school than by exclusively verbal approaches. In order to that I want to talk about methodological questions of my qualification-work which is based on a current project at the TU Dortmund, which focusses on adolescent migrants in comparison to autochthonous pupils: Its goal is to evaluate how gender, social class, migration and their intersections predict the socialization process of teenagers regarding their body images and cultures. The originally planned method of group discussion in the framework of the Documentary Method is suitable to identify collective orientations. However we already have been anticipated and which has been proven through experiences in the field, problems arise during discussion, if we are focussing on questions concerning the body and thereby only stay on the verbal level. Along empirical examples firstly I want to discuss in what way it’s difficult for pupils to talk about bodies and secondly to outline how the extension of the group discussion through methods of the Visual Sociology turns out as a catalyst.