Des perceptions de la minceur et de l’obésité de 1850 à nos jours

It is commonplace that body image and beauty ideals have changed over time and that today beauty is identified with lean bodies. Food and eating have always played, and still play, a prominent role in the discussion of the ideal of obesity, since eating too much was clearly identified as its evil cause, from which illness or premature death would result. Numerous inquiries have tried to prove this relationship and great effort has been made to make the obese eat less, and so to turn them into leaner individuals. But a closer look, and a look at the work body history has done in recent years, shows that this explanation is a construct itself and leanness has been disassociated from the concrete, bodily sphere. In fact, being lean has turned into a central virtue of modern societies, as for example the use of the term “lean management” shows.
Analysing different semantic fields, the papers focuses on the meaning read into lean and fat bodies respectively, following the hypothesis that the medical discourse on fatness/leanness had succeeded in dominating all other discourses on health and disease in modern societies. This may be one of the most important results of the successful medicalization of society, in which “health” became not only a cultural value, but a virtue, defined in “objective” measures, of which leanness has become the most important.