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Revista Mal Estar e Subjetividade

Print version ISSN 1518-6148On-line version ISSN 2175-3644

Abstract

VILHENA, Junia de; NOVAES, Joana de Vilhena  and  ROCHA, Livia. Comendo, comendo e não se satisfazendo: apenas uma questão cirúrgica? Obesidade mórbida e o culto ao corpo na sociedade contemporânea. Rev. Mal-Estar Subj. [online]. 2008, vol.8, n.2, pp. 379-406. ISSN 1518-6148.

The body awareness became a fashion, an academic theme, as well as a major source of anxiety for women. In a society, where in addition of being seen as merchandise, the body is more than ever, the privileged locus of identitary construction. Facing such unattainable goals and such impossible ideals, women are due to have a very anxious and persecutory relationship with their own bodies. The body culture, took care of the contemporary society, producing and negotiating subjectivities. Different corporal practices, more and more radicals, are being used to escape the great villain called "fat". Associated to ugliness, negligence and character weakness, different women bear testimonies along this work speaking of the social exclusion and discrimination experienced. In this article we aimed to understand the morbid obesity from a psychoanalytic view, presupposing a subject of language as much as a subject of joy. Obesity is viewed as a symptom, since symptom is a phenomenon structured as a language, but also as joy with which one did not know well what to make. Symptom is a condensed point of joy that captures the subject, leaving him in suspension. We intend to view obesity in this article, stressing the medical speech -, a pathology that demands correction, the bariatric surgery or "surgery of the obesity". Taking obesity or mere fatness as the paradigm of ugliness, the authors points out how intolerant society became of those who deviate from what the body culture has established as normal. It is from these points of view that we can stress the role of the culture in the growing medicalization of the body and understand the phenomenon of the obesity/surgery as anchored in a culture that is increasing its controls and regulations of the human body.

Keywords : body culture; morbid obesity; bariatric surgery; compulsion; joy.

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