Decorated Bodies in Female Adolescence: Processes of Incorporation as Illusio

The question of the significance of the body in adolescence has so far been a marginal topic of youth and youth culture theories. In this article, the relationship between corporeality and adolescence is discussed in two respects using the example of the youthful practice of make-up: On the one hand, the intersectional dimension of this particular bodily technique and thus the particular moment of (body) representations in historical and contemporary body hegemonies is highlighted. On the other hand, the motif of the habitualisation of specific cultural techniques of representation, which is to be understood more as anthropological, is elaborated with Bourdieu using the concept of illusio. In this way, the field of tension between hegemonic representations and their varieties is conceived as a space beyond social determination and individual control. Adolescent body cultures then become thematic less in the deficiency status of the not-yet, rather they constitute spaces of working with the experience of these tensions.