Body Shaming: Perspectivising Gender in Contemporary Discourses

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue V, May 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186

Body Shaming: Perspectivising Gender in Contemporary Discourses

Adjah Ekwang Adjah
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.

Abstract: Body shaming is one gender construct that is aimed at ascribing negative comments on individuals’ body features. This has been considered from varying strands of study with apparent neglect to the typological and contextual indices of this act and its strategic construction in the media. Relying on the triangulation theoretical approach, the study adopted the pragmatic act theory complemented by polyphony, the theory of voice and intertextuality, and gender theories, to establish the nexus between body shaming and gender among Nigerian celebrities who are victims of body shaming. The study submits that typologically body shaming is enacted through same gender, other gender, and media construction within the contextual ambience of media trolling, conflict, relationship, family defence and reporting. From these findings it was submitted that body shaming act is instrumental to the proliferation of surgeries by women in order to fit into the “ideal” body structured engendered by the ideologies of (im)perfectionist ideology and is invariably salvaged through the advocatist ideology.
Keywords: gender, body shaming, context and ideology

I. INTRODUCTION

Body shaming, another wave of psychological threat to the sanity of humanity, has taken a tremendous toll in the discourse of gender in contemporary times. After its appropriation into different scholarly contexts, it is evidently established that the society’s construal of the human body has negatively impacted the views of many individuals’ perception of self – a construct in the parlance of physiological identity. In other words, the society has parochially set out its own ideals for what and how the male and female’s body should be structured, shaped and appreciated. This has, in the most disturbing fashion, dictated the valued positions of both genders towards who is dubbed beautiful and handsome. Not going too far, the practice of pageantry of the most beautiful in the world and other social exhibitions and their attendant criteria have stamped these artificial specifications of bodily “perfection” mostly among women. With the introduction and emergence of the (social) media, the situation has received a more debasing status, as companies and industries that are into fashion constantly promote this purported ideal body frames through adverts and mannequin’s – all geared towards invoking and validating the consciousness of the perfect body, shape, skin-colour and size. Beyond its psychological import, it poses a deleterious standard that promises constant state of depression for individuals who do not meet this artificial physiognomy. While many scholars have mainly evaluated this apparent genderised discourse through the lenses of public health, social sciences and feminist perspectives, a sufficient

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