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Scholarship has identified women as the ideal neoliberal subjects of late capitalism and, it is argued, that increasingly intensified practices of appearance and visibility are critical to their new labouring subjectivities. However, there is also a small but growing body of research on the relationship between men, the body, and practices of appearance and looking. In this article, we examine the experiences of men (n = 12, ages 23–33 years) in the highly aestheticized industry of the performing arts, including theatre, dance, film and television. Drawing on feminist- and Foucauldian-informed approaches to creative and cultural industries, we gleaned two overarching themes from this research, including: the imperative to take up a particular bodily ideal and the complexities and uncertainties this entails; and the necessity to successfully emotionally manage these complexities and uncertainties. Together these two dimensions represented key performativities in the emergence of the entrepreneurial subject for men in the performing arts. We conclude with preliminary observations about men working in industry-specific contexts, such as the performing arts, and how the experiences of these men shed insight on practices of visibility and appearance of men more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a relatively robust body of scholarship examining popular cultural representations of masculinity, yet there is comparatively little research on the men who take up and perform these representations. Based on interviews with 12 men in the performing arts, including dance, theater, film, and television, we examine the everyday lived experiences of men in the arts, with a specific focus on the complex and dynamic processes by which normative masculine performances are materialized. Using Judith Butler's theory of performativity, we argue that performances of normative masculinity in the arts are not nearly as stable and certain as we might imagine. Rather, normative masculinity is continuously formed and re-formed within an assemblage of discursive and nondiscursive relations that performatively materialize the seemingly stable white, heteronormative masculine subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that mass media representations of obesity operate biopedagogically and, in doing so, teach viewers how to think and feel about what it means to be fat. These teachings are what we call “life lessons”—that is, lessons aimed at instructing viewers in how to relate to both their own bodies and the bodies of others—and are readily discernible in a wide variety of magazines, radio segments, and television shows. We suggest that life lessons of this sort are neither separate nor entirely distinct from public health campaigns, but rather overlap with and, at times, intensify their messages. With this in view, we undertake a four-part analysis of how the North American mass media represent obesity. In the first part, we outline contemporary theories of biopower, biocitizenship, and biopedagogy and how they can be used to make sense of these representations. In the second part, we contextualize them by providing an overview of relevant public health policy such as the United State’s Let’s Move campaign and the World Health Organization’s Prioritizing Areas for Action in the Field of Population-Based Prevention of Childhood Obesity. In the third part, we present a systematic review of the critical literature on representations of obesity with an emphasis on the North American media landscape. And in the fourth part, we submit an episode of the popular television program Nip/Tuck to an in-depth critical examination as a case study of how mass media representations of obesity function biopedagogically. In the end, we show that the representations we discuss not only reflect public health priorities but also reproduce neoliberal ideas about how to manage the life of the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current sociopolitical context, the lean, muscular body has come to epitomize masculine health and beauty. Not all boys and young men, however, unequivocally subscribe to dominant constructions that position fatness as unhealthy and unattractive. Using qualitative inquiry with thirty-two “skinny” or “normal”-bodied young men (thirteen to fifteen years of age), I demonstrate that fat talk is a prominent resource through which “normal” masculine embodiment is achieved. More specifically, I reveal that sociocultural positioning influences how young men take up, make sense of, and articulate constructions of fatness and demonstrate how such articulations function in the materialization of their “normal” embodied subjectivities. I also examine how fat masculinities operate differently within diverse emplaced contexts and in relation to distinct discursive communities. Such a line of investigation I argue helps to reveal the ways in which power relations of privilege and oppression are performatively embodied in everyday contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a poststructural framework, this article critically examines how young men (13—15 years) actively fashion embodied masculine subjectivities by taking up available subject positions within discourse. The study employed semistructured focus groups and interviews with thirty-two participants from two locations in a large urban Canadian city. It is argued that young men are confronted with competing discourses of masculinity where they are simultaneously incited to work on and transform their bodies into culturally recognizable ideals, while at the same time remaining distant and aloof to the size, shape, and appearance of their bodies. Resolving this double-bind of masculinity, it is argued, remains a central task of reproducing the privileges of masculinity. This study demonstrated that young men take up, deploy, and perform discourses of normalcy, healthy active living, heterosexuality, and individualism as technologies of the self in negotiating the double-bind of masculinity. This study extends our knowledge base on the embodied experiences of young men. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]