THE WEIGHT OF THE MEASURE: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF MEDICAL DISCOURSE FROM DOCUMENTS ON OBESITY

Abstract

The body considered fat or even if it appears to have a little fat, has long been frowned upon. In the historical trajectory of the body, we observe that the body moves between forms considered ideal to meet certain standards of health, beauty and social prestige. In view of this, subjects seek to shape their bodies in order to meet the social dictates of each era and, from this, the meanings for the thin and fat body become established and stagnate. In this plot, the fat body is, among many other adjectives, classified as sick. Based on this, this research seeks, using French Discourse Analysis as its theoretical and methodological contribution, to analyze, from documents that have obesity as their theme, how the medical discourse present in these documents establishes and formulates the discourse on health and the disease in terms of the body. To this end, we consider it necessary to understand how this medical discourse works. Based on the analyses, we therefore defined BMI, an instrument considered worldwide as a means of diagnosing obesity, as a discursive event, given that it re-signifies the meanings of health and illness for the body, thus making health and disease categorized numerically. We consider that this occurs because medical discourse is institutionalized, since it makes up institutionalized practices in the Health AIE, which is why it has secured its place of being able to say about/about the body, health and illness. From this perspective, it is a discourse whose predominant functioning is authoritarian which, due to the way it addresses the issue of obesity, focusing on weight loss as the only way to be healthy or to recover it, ends up reinforcing the inadequacy of the body. fat, (re)producing a meaning effect in which being fat is being sick.