Abstract

NOVAES, Joana de Vilhena. Female body and sexuality: fatness, ugliness and social exclusion. Tempo psicanal. [online]. 2022, vol.54, n.2, pp. 357-380. ISSN 0101-4838.

This article seeks to investigate the place of the body nowadays, since it is never fully apprehended by cultural devices that allow its complete submission to social expectations. In this sense, it is legitimate to affirm that there is some epistemic difficulty, regarding the disputes of narratives around the fat body. Culturally legitimized, we observe a dominant discourse that suggests the responsibility of the subject for body condition. Similarly, the criminalization of fat increases when we overwrite it the issue of gender, as some vignettes will illustrate; the result of interviews previously conducted by the author, in the research she develops on the female body, image, psychic suffering and social regulation. The "ugliness" or the "strange" can often be taken as a message, whose strength lies precisely in its surprising presentation. In this sense, body practices can be understood in a scenario of indifferentiation, in the instantiation of everyday life, of subjection to the discourse of the other, but also, as a contestation, as a problematization of the body's status in contemporaneity.

Keywords : Female body; gender; fatness; ugliness and social exclusion.

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