O corpo como sintoma: o mal-estar do masculino contemporâneo em mídia impressa

Abstract

This study analyzes how the media, particularly the print media, conceives models of male bodies that glorify and instill images of an ideal self, relating them to consumer objects. Specifically, it seeks to question how the body is transformed into a symptom of culture and how the processes of signification of these contemporary ideals of male beauty are created. We start from the hypothesis that the hypervaluation of the body is created by the media through ultra-signified images that establish a mythical system that can reach multitudinous consumers, guided by the development of psi apparatuses, which organize and introduce a neo-narcissistic hedonism. This transdisciplinary approach enables an investigation into the media discourses that shape bodies idealized by consumerism and that cause the individual to experience malaise and distress, leading him to assimilate influences from the medium and to find satisfaction in an ideal of self differentiated from the melancholic self. From the outset of this study, the questions were aimed at discovering how the media is able to set up models of male bodies that transform fantasies into notions of reality, and how it is possible for experiences of the imaginary to become increasingly closer to generating interferences in the real body. The corpus consists of covers of the Brazilian magazines Men s Health and Junior, aimed at the male audience, cataloged for a period of three years from January 2012 to December 2014. Other national and international titles from the same period, which exemplify the same behavior of signification in the media, also illustrate this research. In terms of methodology, this is a reading of the mediatic object, involving the observation and analysis of printed materials published in magazines from the perspective of synthetic psychoanalytic semiotics, and therefore, a transdisciplinary study underpinned by bibliographic and document research with systematic monitoring of the aforementioned media. The theoretical framework comprises classical studies of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as an analytical method to consider the symptoms of the body as effects of a culture, and also the processes of consumption of significations and their ideological representations interpreted via the semiotic path that Roland Barthes undertakes to analyze the myths created by the media. These elements provide the epistemological frameworks needed to analyze the object