A imagem do corpo feminino na mídia: a história do presente, o peso da leveza e a economia da sedução

Abstract

Starting from media experiences involving the female image, the reflection proposed seeks to investigate and understand, from 2014 until today, how the female silhouette has been designed, shaped, and resignified to circulate in the mediatic environment, building a history of about the female body in the present times. Therefore, we ask how the images that challenge women today work. Do they naturalize senses about body, beauty, and success? What does a body, nowadays, have to present to be considered beautiful? How does the media, as a privileged space for reproducing and circulating images, discuss the female body? In the last nine years, what has changed regarding stereotypes of the female body? To answer such questions, we will mobilize the theoretical-methodological premises Kamper (the looking machines), Leite (economy of seduction and attention), Lipovetsky (aesthetics of lightness), Lipovetsky and Serroy (trans-aesthetic capitalism), and Sanches (media text of the new diet, beauty, and fitness). The results indicate that, in approximately ten years, the image of the female body in the media continues to be resignified in a practically identical way. Stereotypes operate in the logic of the aesthetics of thinness. Transformed into images, the body has lost its natural and historical essence. The history of the present of the female body turns out to be impossible: the images manage to get rid of the bodies, whereas the opposite proved impossible.