Bodily sensibility: vocabularies of the discredited male body

Abstract

Warning: this article contains strong language. This paper explores how men might interpret and respond to a masculine bodily aesthetic in the wake of the putative obesity epidemic that reportedly affects most men in Western nations. This aesthetic, legitimated through discourses of health and risk management, is also shaped by popular representations of lean, toned and hard male bodies and their antithesis: the grotesque, ‘morbidly obese’ (sic) body. Empirically, this paper benefits from insights generated during a slimming club ethnography in Northeast England and in-depth interviews with men, although valuable observations were also made at informal situations where talk about weight and bodies was commonplace. In particular, the paper explores the use of vulgarised idioms (e.g. ‘fat bastard’) that emerged among men when constructing masculine identities, and other people who could shape or spoil their identities. A four-fold ideal-type typology is presented in order to understand how men, in association with other people, reproduced and resisted the aesthetic as part of their gendered identity work. The typology highlights what we call a bodily sensibility and vocabularies of the discredited body, which reflect and provide ways of managing everyday life and the stigma of what medicine calls obesity. This is in a culture where war has been declared on obesity and men have increasingly to account for themselves if they are seen to deviate from bodily ideals, or normative embodiment.