Imagem corporal e suas representações sociais: um estudo com adolescentes do município do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Nowadays the western society gives high importance to aesthetic appearance associating it with health, happiness, success and power. But given the unlikelihood that all conform to a single standard, is recurrent the distortion of body image. Because of these discontents, people search restrictive diets, physical activity and makes use of harmful practices (vomiting, laxatives, teas or formulas) in order to be in accordance with the standard socially constructed. Our objective is to know and understand the social representations (SR) around the body of adolescents of the ninth year of primary education of Rio de Janeiro. We conducted seven focus groups and twelve semi-structured interviews with adolescents from public and private schools, in the districts of the city of Rio de Janeiro with lower and higher Social Development Index. Moreover, in the end of the focus groups we applied a questionnaire to characterize the socioeconomic context in which the study subjects lived and some daily practices about food and their body. We used used the structural approach for the interpretation of the SR, with the support of the EVOC, and the analysis of practices of discourse. Teenagers related the body to their various parts (legs, belly, arms), beauty, health, wisdom, sensuality and success to getting a job. The aesthetic standard considered beautiful for them is in body thin, but with curves (thin waist, shapely legs, large buttocks and breasts). In majority of the focus groups, thinness as a beauty standard was contrary to the stereotype of skeletal models, which was associated to eating disorders. For men the SR of the body beautiful is in muscular body. When it came to the opposite sex, men valued female body parts (buttocks and breasts). On the other side the women's SR on the beauty of the male body was based on muscular body and in some aspects related to hygiene, personality (kindness, sympathy) and how to dress. Regardless the socioeconomic conditions, the SR of adolescents considering the body incorporates the aesthetic standards reported by media where the prestige is the thin body. Although there is a plurality of bodies, in the studied context it was not taken into account since there is a dictatorship of the beauty that discriminate those who are not within these standards. This might have encouraged some young people to make use of slimming teas, laxatives or induce vomiting in order to lose weight. The question that arises is not the fact that there is only one standard but how that young people deal with this pressure and prioritize beauty as symbolic capital