Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In Fat!So? Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size, author Marilyn Wann challenges readers to rethink fat denigration and to accept their “flabulous” selves. By flipping through her book quickly, one can see the fat woman in the corner of each page dance, shake, and throw her rotund arms joyfully in the air. Equally “hip” and humorous are Wann’s popular workshops, where she encourages each participant to “weigh in” on a scale she has remade so that, whatever one’s weight, a compliment pops up where the pounds should be. Laced throughout her humor, however, are Wann’s serious points about the dangers of dieting and weight loss surgery, the profits made by corporations at the expense of fat people, and the ways women in particular lose self-esteem and power in a fat hating culture.
In contrast to Wann’s work is Rory Freedman’s and Kim Barnouin’s best selling Skinny Bitch (it has sold over 850,000 copies), and, most recently Skinny Bitch in the Kitch. In their books Freedman and Barnouin describe animal cruelty, the lax oversight of the Food and Drug Administration (which watches over the interests of food companies, not people, they argue), and the ways that mainstream dieting books and programs hurt women; the solution they propose is a vegan diet, “tough love” for “savvy girls” who have always wanted to be “skinny bitches.” Despite the disclaimer on their website that “a Skinny Bitch is someone who enjoys food, eats well, and loves her body as a result. It has nothing to do with how much you weigh or what size you are! Skinny Bitches come in all beautiful shapes and sizes!” the “hook” for their book, which reviewers have called an Omnivore’s Dilemma in disguise, is the promise of weight loss. The first words of the book (“Are you sick and tired of being fat? Good.”) are the lure for reading pages on the food industry.

This paper explores the crossing—or, rather, collision-- of these two important contemporary activist movements represented by Fat!So? and Skinny Bitch:the fat acceptance movement and the anti-corporate food industries movement. One challenges the pervasive diet industries and discrimination against fat people, the other challenges a food system made rotten, they argue, by corporate greed, animal cruelty, and dangerous methods of food production. Both have gained significant national and international attention and participation in the last decade. Blogs on local foods, organic farming and stealth tactics for fighting genetically modified food compete for “virtual” space with on- line forums like the one Wann moderates, “Fat Studies,” or Kate Harding’s more recent “Shapely Prose.” Organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have grown substantially over the last decades just as the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Accepance (NAAFA) has increased its membership. This paper illuminates the movements’ similar emphases on reclaiming health, the sanctity of the human body and women’s autonomy as well as their dramatically different stance on the meaning and role of the fat body.

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Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The current investigation builds upon previous research identifying a social norm for women to engage in “fat talk”, a term which refers to ritualized verbal exchange during which women express body dissatisfaction to each other. Previous work conceptualizes “fat talk” as a normative interaction that reinforces social bonds between women, yet this research has drawn upon interactions occurring in either experimental conditions or amongst primarily white, middle-class adolescent women of average weight. To more completely understand the meaning and function of “fat talk”, this investigation draws upon over 200 hours of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation of “fat talk” in a racially diverse “plus size” women’s clothing store. Results indicate that “fat talk” often reinforces cohesion among women of similar body types and ethnic/class backgrounds. However, attempts at “fat talk” between women of different body types or ethnic backgrounds tended to prompt exclusive boundary-making behaviors. Furthermore, “fat talk” between sales staff and customers, and between employees and their employers, functioned to express deference and reaffirm subordinate statuses. These findings are discussed as they relate to inequality between women.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In her seminal work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas (1966:160) argues, “Where there is no differentiation there is no defilement.” Thus, without boundaries, we would not have any basis on which to judge, label, and stigmatize. While generally symbolic in nature, as there is rarely a tangible line denoting where divisions lie, boundaries are fundamentally responsible for defining our social worlds, and are a necessary focus for any work exploring how we form and perceive daily interactions and stigma. Throughout this paper I explore the boundary between fat and thin which has great consequences for those who are defined as (or define themselves as) being on the so-called wrong side of the fat line. More specifically, I focus on what messages make fat meaningful to fat people by analyzing twenty in-depth interviews. My findings show that both the medical community and the fashion industry are responsible for boundary drawing. It is also clear that social processes define what is fat and what is not, and we are all, at least to some extent, vulnerable to them. However, what particular messages affect fat people the most depends upon where they are in the life course, and their specific day-to-day experiences.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Contemporary legal and social discrimination against fat people has been well documented by scholars such as Esther Rothblum in her books on the psychology of fat discrimination and Sondra Solovay in her work on legal issues and fatness. This discrimination has intensified in the context of our national preoccupation with the “obesity epidemic” and the “war on fat.” Despite the significance of this issue to American culture—the daily headlines on the “crisis of obesity”, the $40 plus billion diet industry, the celebrity feuds between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump*—American studies as a field has paid little attention to the contemporary questions that this “crisis” raises or the historical foundation of this crisis in earlier decades of American history.
Drawing from political cartoons, travel postcards, medical literature, and diet propaganda, this paper explores the roots of fat stigma that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Hillel Schwartz and Peter Stearn have argued that the abundance created through an industrial, consumer culture created a cultural uneasiness that manifested itself in a desire to control body size. This paper, part of a larger project entitled Fat Shame/Fat Pride: A Cultural Study of Stigma, Feminism, and the Fat Acceptance Movements, argues that fat stigma emerged not just as an expression of discomfort with consumer culture, but as a key marker to differentiate the “civilized” from the “uncivilized” body. The project of becoming a middle class citizen depended not just on the hierarchies of race, class, and gender, but also, significantly, on body size. Physicians and their clients lamented that they were not “Hottentots or Moors” but were middle class Americans who needed to demonstrate their right to participate in American society through a particular body type that differentiated them from the “primitive” bodies of those in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. And, as suffrage material from the early decades of the twentieth century demonstrates, white suffragists participated in this drama of body size reduction for the same reasons that they jettisoned the participation of African American women: to prove that they worthy of the highest standards of white civilization.
In Born Again Bodies, Marie Griffith argues that phrenology first taught Americans to measure personal traits through outward appearance; clearly, these early lessons have been cemented and augmented by a relentless advertising culture that continually tells us we are what we look like. This paper explores the question of why we have a particular cultural investment in thin and fit bodies. More than a rejection of cultural overabundance, this paper argues that fat phobia and fat stigma were key to the consolidation of the cultural borders of our nation, our marking of who belonged as a full citizen and who did not. The pervasiveness and strength of this earlier fat stigma still resonates today, in the powerful discourse surrounding our “crisis of obesity” as well as in the social and legal discrimination faced by fat people.

* When Rosie O’Donnell recently made fun of Trump’s hair, he called her a “fat pig” and a “big fat slob.” The media focused on it for days.