“Gordura não é coisa de macho”: reverberações da gordofobia nas masculinidades de homens gordos

Abstract

Fatphobia is a form of intersectional, structural, cultural and institutionalized violence that affects fat people, discriminating against and harassing their bodies. It is present in different scenarios and is anchored in historically determined pathologizing knowledge, using health and beauty discourses in the media, in the cosmetics industry, pharmaceuticals and procedures that can “cure” a body that has been “sickened” by stigma social caused by this supposed knowledge. It is noted that the majority of productions that question fatphobia were produced by and about fat women, thus there is a need to include the male audience in this debate, since they are also affected by fatphobia in different ways. One of these ways is in the aspect of masculinity, considering the plural ways in which men are subjectivized in Brazil, I investigated how these processes can be fatphobic, considering that hegemonic masculinity has an athletic and muscular body pattern, with fat being an attribute of femininity. In this way, fat men start to have their masculinity put to the test because they possess in excess what the “successful man” seeks to eliminate.” I use an epistemology of authors who study masculinities in a plural way and from a feminist perspective and make use of transdisciplinary studies of fat corporalities. In this sense, this work aims to analyze how fatphobia affects the masculinities of fat men in the metropolitan region of Belém. It is a field research, with a qualitative approach that, through semi-structured interviews, aims to produce information that can be analyzed based on content analysis, in order to answer the proposed objectives. Nine men aged between 20 and 37 participated in the research. From the content analysis, three categories emerged, such as: “It is easier to talk about being fat than about being a man” where I discuss the processes of subjectivation of fat men based on the body, sports and compulsory cisheterosexuality; “It's basically the same outfit, it may not be what you like, but you have to wear it”, in which I talk about the love neglect and fetishization that fat men experience due to fatphobia and “It's my body, it's what I I have!" in which I talk about the forms of suffering and coping experienced by fat men. Finally, this research aims to raise the need for fat men to join the discussions and the anti-fatphobia movement, in addition, it also elucidates the need for future research with cisheterosexual fat men, since only one of the participants identifies in this way, thus, some questions could not be reached regarding this specificity, but highlighted possible idiosyncrasies.