“Después de la pandemia”

Corporalidades gordas, violencia estética y pánico moral en memes

Abstract

This text is based on a study of violence and daily discrimination against fat bodies. We start from considering the existence of normalization processes of certain thin body standards, where fatness would become a sort of "social discomfort" from a hegemonic medical-political point of view. From this background, we propose to analyze a series of memes shared from various social networks during the stages of isolation and social distancing as a result of COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina. As an object of analysis, we understand memes as expressive resources that condense a set of ideas, with the capacity to be transmitted rapidly in time/space variables. We ask ourselves, how are fat bodies exposed in memes as cultural products, and what imaginaries emerged or took hold in a pandemic context? What (pre)occupies us in this paper is to inquire into discourses that hierarchize some bodies from an imperative of compulsory thinness.