Peer-Reviewed Journal Details
Mandatory Fields
Monaghan, LF,Malson, H
2013
January
Critical Public Health
"It's worse for women and girls': negotiating embodied masculinities through weight-related talk
Published
()
Optional Fields
masculinities gender obesity discourse fatness stigma PUBLIC-HEALTH STIGMA ETHICS POLICY FAT
23
304
319
Numerous critical analyses have already established the profoundly gendered nature of normative body ideals' and weight-management practices in Western cultures. Such studies have, amongst other things, elucidated how body dissatisfaction, dieting' and other weight-loss practices are discursively constituted as both feminised and feminising. Critiquing the over-determined normativity of thinness as a key index of femininity, these analyses have also highlighted how fatness, as abjected flesh, is equated with the feminine and how, in the context of an alleged obesity crisis', fat' men, as well as women and children, risk stigmatisation. An emergent research literature now explores men's engagement with body ideals', weight management and body projects' more generally. This article builds on that work, exploring the negotiation of embodied masculinities in the weight-related talk of men who risked being labelled overweight' or obese'. Drawing on interviews (N=37), the study illustrates how big' men attempted to shield their threatened masculine identities by contrasting their own bodily bigness, corporeal concerns and embodied practices with those of women and girls. Also attentive to sexualities, ethnicity and class, this article illustrates the context-specific, intersectional and contested nature of embodied masculinities and body projects in these epidemic' times.
10.1080/09581596.2012.754843
Grant Details