Health and beauty of the female body – some representations in Brazil in the twentieth century

Abstract

There is a set of knowledges and devices that tell us what the body is. These multiple devices, such as the media, the avertising and the industry, for instance, produce several representations of body. In the theoretical field of Cultural and Gender Studies, to which this text belongs, representation is understood as a way of producing meanings in the culture scope. These meanings are produced through language and are implied in power relationships. Positions of subjects, differences and identities are built through these relationships. In this text, I have tried to situate the body, mainly the female one, as a historical, social and cultural construction, produced in multiple ways in time and space. I have localized some of the transformations, permanences and/or disruptions operated in representations of the female body in the interrelation between health and beauty throughout the twentieth century. I have pointed out, to a certain extent, how the hygienistic social medicine took hold of eugenic discourses, aiming at producing new concepts of hygiene, health and body for the population. I have concluded that reconstructing and disciplinating the body to reach fitness, in the way it was defined in the twentieth century, become a life style that must be incorporated into the individual’s quotidian, as well as an alternative of pleasure and health that counts on the use of different technological and scientific resources.