‘It’s worse for women and girls’: negotiating embodied masculinities through weight-related talk

Abstract

Numerous critical analyses have already established the profoundly gendered nature of normative body ‘ideals’ and weight-management practices in Western cultures. Such studies have, amongst other things, elucidated how body dissatisfaction, ‘dieting’ and other weight-loss practices are discursively constituted as both feminised and feminising. Critiquing the over-determined normativity of thinness as a key index of femininity, these analyses have also highlighted how fatness, as abjected flesh, is equated with the feminine and how, in the context of an alleged ‘obesity crisis’, ‘fat’ men, as well as women and children, risk stigmatisation. An emergent research literature now explores men’s engagement with body ‘ideals’, weight management and ‘body projects’ more generally. This article builds on that work, exploring the negotiation of embodied masculinities in the weight-related talk of men who risked being labelled ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’. Drawing on interviews (N = 37), the study illustrates how ‘big’ men attempted to shield their threatened masculine identities by contrasting their own bodily bigness, corporeal concerns and embodied practices with those of women and girls. Also attentive to sexualities, ethnicity and class, this article illustrates the context-specific, intersectional and contested nature of embodied masculinities and body projects in these ‘epidemic’ times.

Keywords:

• masculinities
• gender
• obesity discourse
• fatness
• stigma

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC grant number; RES-000–22-0784), awarded to Lee F. Monaghan. Lee would like to thank the ESRC, his research contacts and former colleagues at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (Robert Hollands and Gary Pritchard) for their assistance with the study.

Notes

1. The lifecourse and ‘quest for longevity’ have been described elsewhere as important considerations when accounting for men’s dieting careers, with one respondent from the slimming club stating most of his peers were ‘around about 50’ and concerned about dying and regaining their lost youth (Monaghan 2008, 88; though, there were many other recurrent triggers for dieting such as enacted or felt stigma). The age of each interviewee is provided in the ensuing analysis in order to give readers additional contextual information.