Imperativos midiáticos na corporeidade de jovens em tratamento oncológico: uma análise teórico-crítica

Abstract

The Contemporary Consumer Society presents unprecedented economic, technical, social and cultural transformations, implying new modes of subjectification and socialization, originated from, among other instances, the Cultural Industry. Their media imperatives perpetuate full satisfaction promises, associated with a given body model ideal - fitness. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the online statements of subjects on the margins from ordinary pattern, in this case, young women under cancer treatment, considering the way in which the media imperatives of the idealized consumption body affect them. Accordingly, we use as a priority the theoretical-methodological reference of Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School, whose methodological strategy is based on the dialectical observation of the particular phenomenon as an indication of what occur in the social whole, in order to expose its inherent tensions. Thus, we undertake a theoretical-critical research in the Instagram social network and the Youtube platform, in two stages. First, the statements of women considered to be carriers of the idealized consumption body, the "fitness Muses" - as the standard model to be followed - were investigated; then we explored publications of young women under cancer treatment to detect the relations between their speeches and those first. We found two different segments among the diseased young women: those who maintained the concern with a normalized body and those that dealt with their physical transformations unrelated to the search for an idealized image. From the analysis of the collected material, we obtained three recurrent thematic categories: Compulsive Happiness, Attention to Appearance and Transparency in Images, which express the mediatic influence of the idealized body. Reproduced in some aspects also by the diseased young women, we observe that today's ideals are based on the performatization of happiness and the omission of suffering, in order to establish an instrumental management of subjectivity. As reflections of the research, the results reiterate the frankfurtian criticism that the Cultural Industry maintains its homogenization aims, considered as “market plurality”, imparting new and subtle modes of control and subjectivation concerning the body, even in those that, due to the suffering of the cancer disease, do not fit into the idealized pattern. As a representative index of the compulsion to happiness, we present, at the end, the oncological coaching for further studies.