Habitar e cuidar do corpo : leitura fenomenológica-hermenêutica de vivências body positive

Abstract

This research aims to elucidate the ways in which women who have consumed body-positive content throughout their lives are embodying their bodies. Body positivity is sometimes described as a derivative of the 1979 US movement, fat acceptance, which, literally translated, would be fat acceptance. In Brazil, body positivity went through a process of localization. Alexandra Gurgel, an important influencer in this field, translated the term as 'movimento corpo livre'. The scientific community gives body positivity two main objectives: 1) active questioning of adjectives and discourses about bodies and 2) altering meanings (understandings) about bodies that diverge from exclusionary and ableist aesthetic standards. This new way of understanding the body, dissenting from a quantitative and exclusionary conceptualization of the body, becomes relevant in a society with a growing number of illnesses linked to corporeality. Today, the main means of propagating body positivity are social networks focused on visual content, especially Instagram. The vast majority of posts convey broad definitions of beauty and the valorization of inner positivity. In an attempt to understand the webs of meaning that body positive content opens up about the body and the world, we produced four narratives as a result of four dialogues with women who have come into contact with this content. These narratives seek to unveil, in particular, ways of embodying oneself during one's life and to reveal their approximations and distances from body positive ideas, with a specific chapter for these reflections. We consider the relevant findings of this research to be the idea that getting involved with body positive content causes, in particular, a lesser appreciation of thinness and the confrontation, in small face-to-face groups in which they are already inserted, of the dissemination of messages perceived as harmful to their experience in particular and that of all women, messages that highlight a decontextualized and solely aesthetic body.