Body Management Among the Religious Women

Considering the increasing importance of body management in the recent decades and noting the undeniable role of religion in the social lives of people, the current research tries to investigate the role of body management among the religious women. The contradictions in the experimental researches and the theoretical challenges have convinced us to apply qualitative method and the strategy of grounded theory. The data used in this research are gathered by interviewing nine religious Mashhadi women. After open coding, nine central issues were identified that determined the causal relationship, backgrounds, and interfering factors affecting the body management or abstinence from it. The findings of this research show that the religious society could move toward the body management especially in the public sphere. The backdrops for the formation of such a condition include the individuals’ religious socialization types, their mental image of themselves, the concern for physical change, and the anxiety about others’ social acceptance. The network of motivating social relations beside the selective view toward religion are among the causal conditions for the event and the absence of individual business is a facilitator in the process. Eventually, we chose the eclectic religious identity/religious adaptation as our theoretical core.