Figure-hugging clothes or an unfitting body? From fashion to Psychopathology / Roupa justa ou corpo injusto? : da moda à psicopatologia
AUTOR(ES)
REGINA CLAUDIA EUFRASIO RODRIGUES
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2009
RESUMO
This research is about the human female body, and it raises a discussion about how the body responds to the demand of fitting into the patterns of beauty and youth imposed by the human culture and how such imposition makes the pain, the sickening and the psychological suffering to emerge.The body is culturally produced in its forms and representations in order to adjust women to the social structure. The contemporary society, through the exacerbated cult to the young and beautiful body, instituted its exposition, transforming it in an object of consumption under the logic of the system, from which fashion is one of the trends to be followed. The influence of Merleau-Ponty (1945/1994; 1961/2004; 1964/2005), one of the thinkers who lends his knowledge to the construction of my reflections, is basic in relation to the studies which are centered in the body and its relation to culture. The intertwinement between body, mind and the world, in which the body creates and recreates meanings every single moment so that the person can transcend the biological body and reach the living body, the biggest instrument of perception and apprehension of the world and its phenomena. A qualitative research was carried out, in which interviews were conducted with ten (10) women ranging from 35 to 45 years old, treated at the public service, with complaints related to the body in their medical reports.The critical phenomenological method was used in order to comprehend the meaning of the ordeal experienced by women who suffer and become sick in search of an ideal of a perfect body. The results pointed out that the interviewed women associate the overcoming of problems to the transformation of their body image, whereby cosmetic surgery, food diets offered by the media, the extenuating exercises and the use of medication for the control of the appetite are the most common practices among these women. In the sociocultural scope, the woman is subjected to a lot of pressure to maintain a beautiful and young body, which translates a life of success and accomplishments, a fact that in fact produces suffering and psychiatric debility. Food becomes a source of compensation and yielding of tensions. The experience of debility, to the interviewed subjects, manifested its multiple outlines, from the secondary gain of affection and attention to a way of softening conflicts and saving oneself from certain responsibilities towards life, thus expressing the forms of an unauthentic existence. Keywords: Body; Fashion; Psychopathology; Culture: Phenomenology.
ASSUNTO(S)
corpo e mente - dissertaÇÕes psicopatologia - dissertaÇÕes fenomenologia - dissertaÇÕes moda - dissertaÇÕes psicologia social
