Her name is Jenifer

fat representativity matters

Abstract

Although fatphobia is understood as the prejudice against fat people, such prejudice is experienced in a much more visceral way among women. The stigma of weight in contemporary society and the media representations of fat women operate in a kind of tug of war, sometimes tending more to one side, sometimes to the other. When studying such representations in a research that combines literature review and content analysis in a complex perspective, it was understood that the idea of fat corporealities permeates precisely the way they are represented in the media, including in this context their clothes. This paper presents, in addition to some of the mechanisms of action of fatphobia in the relationship of weight with the media, a way of deconstructing this prejudice from the non-stigmatized media representation of the fat body, having as example the clip of Jenifer, song by Gabriel Diniz, whose interpretation of the main character was on Mariana Xavier, a fat woman. Issues related to beauty standards with regard to female body size in different cultural contexts are addressed in a study that extrapolates the interrelationships between fat, race and class and whose objective is not only to inscribe fatphobia as an object of studies in the field of communication and arts, as well as promoting the reflection that the deconstruction of this prejudice and the (re)appropriation and reframing of this body necessarily involves the representation of fat women in the most diverse ways and in the most diverse spaces.