“How do you deal with food temptation?” Building a feminine identity in the media about dieting

Abstract

Body control, characterized by a strong concern with the presentation and the shape of the body in order to align it with a hegemonic ideal of slim beauty, is a contemporary phenomenon created, sustained and reinforced by a range of public and private discourses, and by a network of social practices which includes exercises, diets, cosmetic products, and cosmetic plastic surgery. In this article I discuss, from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, cultural studies and sociology, how the discourse of thematic women’s magazines on dieting and slimming operates, in tandem with other discourses, in the construction and reconstruction of post-modern female identities. To do so, I analyse two texts on dieting collected from two Brazilian women’s magazines which thematize the body: Boa Forma and Corpo a Corpo. The analysis indicates that these texts play a strong pedagogical role in terms of body control, awarding those women who are successful at internalizing techniques to self-discipline their bodies, and pointing out the subjective and social risks to those who cannot resist the pleasures of ‘gluttony’.