Fat Acceptance

This work intends to explore the outsider position of the fat
body in Western society, in particular the female gendered fat body,
analyzing the repressive forces that the patriarchal society exercises
to control this body out of the “Norm,” in an interesting dichotomy of
visibility and invisibility. In the paper I highlight how the exclusion of
the fat female body through shame finds its purpose in maintaining
the structure of heteronormativity and reducing women’s agency.

Discourses regarding a ‘global obesity crisis’ and alternative frames (e.g. weight‐inclusive approaches to health) have proliferated through various media of communication. These media range from traditional print and visual formats (e.g. newspapers and television shows) to digital media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube), which enable different publics to produce, and not just consume, text, images and other data relating to the body. Reflecting a sociological understanding of educational practices as extending beyond formal schooling, mediated obesity discourse and counter‐movements have also been conceptualised as public pedagogies, which instruct people how to relate to their own and other's bodies, health and subjectivities. This article examines what is critically known about various media at a time when governments and agencies are reinvigorating the global war on obesity, with populations being ‘advised’ to become and remain conscientious weight watchers. In conclusion, t...

Sizeism permeates and shapes how scientific and professional communities-including therapistsperceive, understand, and behave toward anyone considered fat. In this article, we use scientific evidence to argue for the recognition and establishment of fat acceptance to subvert sizeism. We first critically review the Weight Normative Approach, which dominates scientific discourse on weight, despite being based on sizeist assumptions that are discredited by data. We then articulate the tenets of the Weight Inclusive Approach, which honors size diversity and the promotion of wellness within a social justice framework. We end with strategies for therapists to align their practice with the Weight Inclusive Approach.

In our review of the literature on women and weight bias (Fikkan and Rothblum 2011), we attempted to cull findings from multiple disciplines that demonstrate the impact (social, educational, and financial) of the stigma of women's weight. We undertook this for two purposes: the first was to address a gap in the weight bias literature, which tends to make only a side note mention that fat women suffer worse penalties than do fat men; the second, to raise the point that feminist scholars, though highly attuned to pressures on women to be thin, have spent less time discussing the disparate impact for women of being fat, despite the mounting evidence of how much weight bias impacts women. We offered some of our own thoughts on the persisting neglect of this topic among feminist writers, despite previous calls to action (Rothblum 1992, 1994). Given the dearth of attention to what has become one of the most frequent types of discrimination against women (Puhl et al. 2008), we asked: "is fat a feminist issue?" We were delighted with the response from the commentators and the thoughtful exploration they devoted to our question and to this issue within feminist scholarship. Here, we briefly summarize some of the main themes identified by these writers, offer our own thoughts on these themes and repeat their call to action for further study of this important area of women's lives.

In our review of the literature on women and weight bias (Fikkan and Rothblum 2011), we attempted to cull findings from multiple disciplines that demonstrate the impact (social, educational, and financial) of the stigma of women's weight. We undertook this for two purposes: the first was to address a gap in the weight bias literature, which tends to make only a side note mention that fat women suffer worse penalties than do fat men; the second, to raise the point that feminist scholars, though highly attuned to pressures on women to be thin, have spent less time discussing the disparate impact for women of being fat, despite the mounting evidence of how much weight bias impacts women. We offered some of our own thoughts on the persisting neglect of this topic among feminist writers, despite previous calls to action (Rothblum 1992, 1994). Given the dearth of attention to what has become one of the most frequent types of discrimination against women (Puhl et al. 2008), we asked: "is fat a feminist issue?" We were delighted with the response from the commentators and the thoughtful exploration they devoted to our question and to this issue within feminist scholarship. Here, we briefly summarize some of the main themes identified by these writers, offer our own thoughts on these themes and repeat their call to action for further study of this important area of women's lives.

Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body examines the external pressure on a fat woman and also criticizes the manner in which an obese body is socially objectified. Besides telling her own story of weight gain, she gravely identifies different problems of plus-size women in a thin obsessed body-intolerant society. Thus, she unmasks the patriarchal fixations in many social institutions and cultural practices which exploit the idea of thinness destroying the normal life of obese women. This paper’s basic interest is to discuss the problematic public life of these women who do not possess a culturally defined ‘normal’ body centering on selected facts that have contributed to Roxane Gay’s life. The paper elaborates on strange public reactions, ill-treatments in public spaces, and fat shaming in media which are distressful but regularly visible in the life of fat women. Presenting the notion of body positivity as an antithesis to thin obsession, the paper aims to conclude that only by creating a mentality to accept diverse body types, may the social and cultural challenges involved in an obese woman’s life be answered.

Keywords: Fat, Fat shaming, Thin obsession, Body-intolerant society, Body positivity

This is a commentary on Ward and McPhail's (2019) article "Fat Shame and Blame in Reproductive Care: Implications for Ethical Health Care Interactions." Here I examine three aspects of fatness and health care that deserve more attention by researchers and clinical practitioners. First is the nature of fat phobia and the ways that hatred of fatness permeates the world, including health care. Second is the ways that fat studies scholars and fat activists can work together to reduce fat phobia and improve fat women's lives and health. Third is training and promotion of fat-affirmative psychotherapy to provide supportive space for healing from the effects of fat phobia and stigmatization of fat bodies.

Although her name is not among the committee members, this study owes a great deal to the extensive help of Kathy Forde. It could not have been done without her. Thanks go to my mother and fiancé for helping me survive the process, and special thanks go to L. Nicol Cabe for ensuring my inescapable relationship with the Internet and pop culture.

Despite the increasingly important role played by image memes, we do not yet have a solid understanding of the elements that might make a meme go viral on social media. In this paper, we investigate what visual elements distinguish image memes that are highly viral on social media from those that do not get re-shared, across three dimensions: composition, subjects, and target audience. Drawing from research in art theory, psychology, marketing, and neuroscience, we develop a codebook to characterize image memes, and use it to annotate a set of 100 image memes collected from 4chan's Politically Incorrect Board (/pol/). On the one hand, we find that highly viral memes are more likely to use a close-up scale, contain characters, and include positive or negative emotions. On the other hand, image memes that do not present a clear subject the viewer can focus attention on, or that include long text are not likely to be re-shared by users. We train machine learning models to distingui...

In this paper, we explore new forms of networked feminist humour curated on Tumblr. First, we consider the Misandry Mermaid Tumblr by exploring how the site remediates antifeminist discourses of man-hating by deploying a sarcastic discourse of misandry. We argue that the site is plagued, however, by a form of gender binary antagonism. Then, we explore an anti-manspreading site, savingroomforcats, showing how the site challenges hetero-masculine spatial dominance through the humorous insertion of cats into manspreading images. We argue that these posts tend to lack an intersectional awareness of racialised masculinity. Finally, we explore the site critiquemydickpic, which subverts dominant understandings of dick pics as threatening, generating a queer politics of disrupting phallicoriented desire. Introduction: networked feminist humour Historically, just as humour has been used as a mode of activism to challenge the stereotyping of minority groups (C. E. Case and C. D. Lippard 2009), humour is a crucial way in which different styles of feminisms work to challenge misogyny and sexism. J. Gallivan (1992) suggests that feminist humour is characterised as "humour which reveals and ridicules the absurdity of gender stereotypes and … inequalities." Humour makes common assumptions "visible, and their stereotypical distortions laughable" (Z. M. Zimbardo 2014, 61). Feminist humour differs from the staid, outdated sexist joke that relies on tired tropes for titillation and, instead, endeavours to shed light on sexism through exposing and criticising them via satire (J. Gallivan 1992).

This paper attempts to expose the stereotyped images of women presented by the Facebook users in their statuses. It shows how their statuses, in the form of jokes, actually render stereotyped pictures of women in our society. Secondly, it tries to point out what are the socio-cultural effects of gender stereotypes occurred in Facebook. For fulfilling the purpose of the research, 183 samples of Facebook humors have been collected. Later, they are interpreted and analyzed thematically to search for their having relevance with the traits of gender stereotypes. Qualitative approach has been used for data analysis. The result shows that the samples collected from Facebook contain ample evidences of the presentation of women as stereotyped beings. The study bears the significance that the result found through it will contribute positively to further studies in social science in relation to the interaction between gender ideology and social media.

Synopsis Visuality and feminism intersect tangibly over fat. By virtue of their gender, women face discrimination over bodyweight and are tyrannized by diet regimes. Beginning with an artistic critique of female fat-shaming, this chapter investigates the historical roots of widespread aesthetic prejudice against larger women. Most male bodies from art history could be imported into a contemporary fashion magazine, whereas the female bodies from the museum would mostly be rejected. Could art history, with its often voluptuous bodies in artists like Rubens and Gentileschi, be an antidote to the fat-intolerance of today? This essay argues that contemporary representations of fat have something to learn from these historical images, in particular the way they portray fat more with humour than with reproof, and for the intersection between the voluptuous nature of the medium (such as paint) and subject. A feminist perspective of fat in art history needs developing. This chapter, using philological methods, analyses the still under-theorised overlap of the aesthetic and the moral over fat.

My talk will address the growing visibility and popularity of 'disgusting' female bodies in contemporary popular culture as manifested in the body positivity phenomenon. I will provide a critical account of 'popfeminist body positivity' between transgression and commodification and examine the role of affect, disgust and shame in the transmedial encounters that produce 'disgusting' as well as idolised, feminist activist bodies at the same time. I will argue that debates surrounding body positivity are often configured along the oscillating lines of visibility and vulnerability.

Focusing on British plus-size model Felicity Hayward and her campaign #selflovebringsbeauty, I will explore how and which kinds of representation of bodies could facilitate what kind of political activism in the context of body positivity. Based on a conception of bodies as non-binary, relational, and in the process of becoming-essentialised and fixed only temporarily for activist purposes (reclaiming 'the disgusting body' by actively promoting a resignified, positively connoted stable notion of it) or in a derogatory context (being pinned down by slurs and hate speech)-I will ask which bodies come to be constituted as (hyper-)visible activist bodies (mostly minimally unruly, attractive, white, upper-class ones like Felicity Hayward's) and draw attention to those vulnerable bodies that remain hidden below the threshold of visibility as unspeakable/unshowable because of their age, class, disabilities, race or ethnicity.

Im Februar 2018 veröffentlichte eine Gruppe Schüler_Innen unter dem Schirm der Kampagne Pinksstinks ein Musikvideo zum Song „Not Heidis Girl“. In diesem beschreiben sie ihre Abneigung gegen das Sendeformat Germanys next Topmodel (GNTM), bekanntermaßen moderiert von Supermodel Heidi Klum. Gegen „Beautystress und das Bodyshaming“, welche die „Horrorshow“ von Klum produziere, setzt das Video und die dahinterstehende Pinkstinks-Kampagne „Freundschaft, Zusammenhalt und […] sich im eigenen Körper wohl zu fühlen“, sowie den Slogan „Vielfalt ist Schönheit“. (https://pinkstinks.de/notheidisgirl/ 05.11.2018)
Diese Kampagne und ihr Medienecho sollen zum Anlass genommen werden, in vorliegendem Beitrag die Chancen und Hürden ‚antilookistischer‘ Mädchen*arbeit, also solcher, die sich zum Ziel setzt, Mädchen* einen kritischen und selbstsicheren Umgang mit gesellschaftlichen Schönheitsnormen und einen positiven Bezug auf den eigenen Körper zu vermitteln, zu diskutieren. Gleich vorweg sei gesagt, dass es nicht darum gehen soll, im Stile mancher Social-Media-Kommentare schlicht anzumerken, dass die Mädchen im Video „zu hübsch“ und ja auch geschminkt seien und außerdem nicht alle ‚nicht-Normschönheiten‘ abbilden würden, also bspw. keinen Rollstuhl nutzen und auch alle mehr oder weniger normschlank daherkommen würden. Stattdessen soll herausgearbeitet werden, welche Schwierigkeiten in der antilookistischen Arbeit stecken, um zukünftige entsprechende Mädchen*arbeit konstruktiv zu unterstützen.

https://www.united-kiosk.de/bibliothek/xReader/xReaderTeaser/xreader.xhtml?id=0001&ebinr=2106952&year=2019&number=2&lang=de

"La graisse reste dans les imaginaires contemporains un élément ambivalent, une substance phénoménologiquement dégoûtante de par son absence de forme, et dangereuse par sa capacité à déformer l’apparence. Des imaginaires dystopiques s’associent à une graisse qui proliférerait irréversiblement. La graisse demeure une matière parasitaire. Reléguée au statut de « pourriture » et « déchet » organique, depuis l’Antiquité, la graisse fait l’objet d’acharnements techniques qui visent à la retirer du corps humain. Néanmoins, nous sommes confrontés aujourd’hui à la naissance de procédés qui revalorisent cet élément. La découverte de cellules-souches dans le tissu adipeux témoigne d’un tournant culturel qui fait de la graisse un « or lipidique » à stocker dans des biobanques. D’un côté fleurissent des collectifs de médécins visant à approfondir les particularités de cet élément et, notamment, ses applications thérapeutiques. De l’autre, les sciences humaines et sociales font émerger le courant interdisciplinaire des « fat studies ». Par la présente contribution, je propose de parcourir une histoire des techniques et des imaginaires liés à la graisse, qui mettra en relief les correspondances entre le développement des pratiques d’épuration et de recyclage de la graisse, ainsi que les revendications des mouvements sociaux « fat acceptance ».

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English abstract:

In contemporary imaginaries fat stills is an ambiguous element, a phenomenologically disgusting substance for its absence of form and dangerous in its capacity to modify the appearance. Some dystopic imaginaries show fat as something irreversibly proliferating. Fat is still considered as a parasitic matter. Since Antiquity fat has been the object of disparate techniques to remove it from the human body. Nevertheless, in the last few decades some procedures have arisen, which revalorise it. The discovery of stem cells inside fat tissue has perhaps introduced a cultural change. Human fat can now be considered as “lipidic gold” and stocked in some specialized biobanks. Presently both biological and social sciences are working hard on fat issues under the interdisciplinary branch of “fat studies”. One explores its therapeutic medical properties and the other is centered on the sociability of fat people and the cultural stakes related to it. In this present contribution I will show a history of the techniques and imaginaries linked to fat. This introduction will help to show some correspondence between the development of techniques of medical “recycling” of fat, with the social questions raised by the “fat acceptance” movements.

Tumblr is an understudied social media site with a young, progressive, and queer user base of content creators. This study examines Tumblr posts about Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to understand the nature of Tumblr and the way a convergent culture that includes non-viewers negotiates a television show dependent on stereotypes. Discourses around authenticity, LGBTQ issues, and body acceptance resist the negative white trash connotations of the show, but this resistance is embedded in stereotypes around race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography. The result is a continuum in which users negotiate what the show means in how they use that show to communicate about other issues based on which axes of power they resist and uphold. This analysis gives insight into how online culture serves to reflect hegemonies without necessarily undermining them, how Tumblr memes serve to define the values of the site, and how an individual television show is co-opted into the online language of memes.

Cet article discute de l’institutionnalisation croissante du champ de recherche des fat studies. Entremêlant savoirs militants et connaissances universitaires, ce courant interdisciplinaire et intersectionnel veut dénoncer la discrimination basée sur le poids dans les sociétés occidentales en mettant en avant le vécu des personnes fat. Puisque ces théories et ces pratiques sont peu connues des communautés féministes francophones, en raison d’un déficit de traduction, l’auteure a choisi de présenter certains enjeux liés à la construction sociale des discours sur la « corpulence » et la reconnaissance des « corps gros » comme sujets épistémiques.

In 21 st century Western culture, obesity is such a maligned state of being that the notion of fat activism is unthinkable to most people. "Fat" and "activist" are not words that sit together well in the popular imagination. The idea of activism suggests a dynamic engagement with public life that could not be further from couch potato stereotypes associated with fat people, or popular paradigms which typify "the obese" as innately unwholesome, passive recipients of pity and intervention.