'It's worse for women and girls': Negotiating embodied masculinities through weight-related talk

Monaghan, Lee F.; Monoghan, L.; Malson, Helen

Abstract

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. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: Jan 7, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 15, 2016
• Journal: Critical Public Health
• Print ISSN: 0958-1596
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-3682
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 304-319
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2012.754843
• Keywords: masculinities, gender, obesity discourse, fatness, stigma,; weight-related talk, body image
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/939620
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2012.754843
• Additional Information: Additional Information : Published online: 07 Jan 2013
• Contract Date: Nov 15, 2016