Prevailing perceptions of the Body in village Community and Its Relationship to the Culture of Consumption A Study in the Context of Gender

The current study drives at identifying the prevailing perceptions of the body of both men and women in the village community in the context of gender and its relationship to the culture of consumption. The study has adopted the views of Pierre Bourdieu regarding the social structure of the body and Erving Goffman's Theory of self-presentation in daily life. The study has used the case study method, which is applied to twenty cases, ten cases of women and ten cases of men, who have already improved or improving their body image in light of the culture of consumption. The ethnographic narrative method has also been used. The study has come to a number of results, including that: There is a difference between the ideal perception that both women and men adopt about the image of the body and the realistic image that they perceive about their bodies. The study has also concluded that the male body, like the female body, is also subject to controls, symbols and social representations that represent frameworks and determinants through which the body image is formed. The study results indicate that there are several factors that push villagers to change their body image in light of a number of mechanisms and manifestations included in the culture of consumption, foremost of which comes the role of technological media, the media and the cultural products that they broadcast that leads to commodification and deformity of the body.