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

Monoghan, Lee; 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 relational (hierarchical) nature of embodied masculinities and body projects in these ‘epidemic’ times.

• Acceptance Date: Jan 7, 2014
• Publication Date: Apr 4, 2014
• Deposit Date: Aug 13, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 28, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Obesity, Discourse and Fat Politics
• ISBN: 9780415749312
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315795645
• Keywords: masculinities, gender, obesity discourse, fatness, stigma, body image
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/819271
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415749312
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Obesity, Discourse and Fat Politics on 04 April 2014, available online: https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415749312
• Contract Date: Jul 28, 2016