Entre pesos e medidas : discursos sobre a silhueta feminina no Brasil (1901-2017)

Abstract

This thesis is part of the analysis of the French discourse, building on the reflection on how, historically, in the media discourse and in its associated domain, the female body was objectified and subjectified, as regards the control of its weight and its measures, receiving different denominations, raising different perceptions and, thus, producing senses and subjectivities. Our research is developed in the light of Michel Foucault, based on an archegenealogical methodology, in which the concept of device impels us to recognize the network in which the discursive and non-discursive practices on the female body, its weight and its measures were constituted / constitute; and looks for ways of analysis in the perspective of the Historical Semiology traced by Jean-Jacques Courtine. From the immense archive on the body, throughout the analysed period, historians have given us clues that the media discourse could be the right cutting: from printed publications from the early 1900s to the online of this 21st century, the sayings about woman, her body and her silhouette, in each age, showed themselves by naming the body of the woman, now supporting patterns, sometimes building them. In the announcements of Modernity, the first exclusively feminine journal - Revista Feminina - associated with the so-called journals considered as current – The Cigarra and FonFon - the woman of the early 20th century, envisioned the possibility of reaching new social positions, however, impelled to control other spheres of herself: the belly and, in sequence, the whole body. From the 1950s, the lifestyle sought by Brazilians was the US lifestyle: many appliances and a lot of ready and industrialized food were consumed, especially in the more affluent classes. At the same time, capitalist consumerism established as one of its enunciative regularities the use of the image of a woman with a long line silhouette in her major advertising campaigns. In addition, magazines such as Manchete, and the newspapers like O Globo discussed the causes of obesity, disseminating in society the medical knowledge built for this pathology. Since the 1990s, the national government has begun to consider the increase in obesity rates among the Brazilian population as a prerogative for the development of other onerous diseases to the State. Therefore, discourses based on biopolitical strategies came into play, so that the responsibility for the control of obesity fell on the subject, thus legitimating an intense vigilance over the body, as we can perceive it in the 21st century: in the statements that circulate in the various print and online media, obesity must be fought by every social body. Therefore, we can say that the control device of the female body, during the period observed by us, has expanded its strategic configuration, from controlling the behaviour to the tight control of weights and measures.