Abstract:

Abstract This article aimed to analyze the social cinematographic representations of obesity and its conceptual precursors in the filmography of Georges Méliès. A total of 198 films, produced between 1896 and 1913, were analyzed through the discursive analysis of the enunciation, in a Foucaultian perspective. Twenty-six films were considered relevant, from which 31 excerpts were considered significant. The constituted statements were grouped into six discursive formations, with contents that associated the condition with questions of socioeconomic status, beauty, physical capacities and behaviors. It was concluded that the analyzed material is an important primary historical source for the history of obesity, indicating that cinema may have been a propaganda tool in the dissemination of the valuation inversion that occurred in the historical process of pathologization of the condition.

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