Fatness

In this qualitative study, we intend to discuss how adolescent students in a Brazilian public school classroom define their body image and personalize the themes beauty standards and fatness. Grounded on a critical approach to language teaching, these two social themes were problematized in eight lessons of Ensino Médio (secondary education). The discussion of the empirical material suggests that (1) body image is strongly connected to gendered relations, making life experiences of men and women different based on the bodies they have, and (2) beauty standard and fatness are strongly related to students’ lives since twelve out of nineteen students personalized the themes by telling oppressive stories they went through because of their bodies.

SUMMARY WRITING THE HISTORY OF FATNESS AND THINNESS IN GRAECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY Fatness and thinness has been a much underexploited topic in the study of classical Antiquity. After carefully analyzing the Greek and Roman vocabulary to denote the matter, I catalogue information on concrete instances of persons who were considered to have suffered from overweight, or emaciation. On a second level, I deal with popular mentality regarding overweight or thinness. Thirdly, medical and/or philosophical theory regarding weight problems are studied. In this, the moral discourse linking obesity with gluttony or weakness and avarice with underweight will be studied. I will also ask whether changed Christian attitudes towards the body and bodily functions lead to new concepts regarding the matter. For these different levels of questions, I take into account concepts of disability history, asking whether the obviously impairing factors of excess weight or the opposite of it lead to social disfunctionality, hindering people from important social functions and subjecting them to social stigma.

I set out in this chapter to defend two claims. First, that many of the ways people behave towards fat folks are microaggressions specifically aimed at disciplining unruly bodies. Fat people are a marginalized social group, and microaggressions are a tool of their marginalization. This point allows me to make my second and most important claim: that if we are to make sense of how we wound each other to enforce bodily norms, we must expand the concept of microaggressions beyond its traditional focus on what is done to people targeted because of their
membership in marginalized social groups. That is, I will claim that in addition to harming fat people themselves, microaggressions directed toward fat people have the additional consequence of also harming those who are not (yet) fat. On my account, what makes a slight, snub, or insult a microaggression is not primarily that it is aimed at a marginalized person. Rather, it is that it props up an oppressive system that, among other things, marginalizes such persons. We must redefine microaggressions to include verbal, behavioral, and environmental slights, snubs, and insults that affect persons who are not marginalized as well as those who are and, in doing so, prop up the system of norms that justifies marginalization.

Examples include verbal and environmental microaggressions within friendships as well as with strangers, and in clinical and academic settings. I address concern trolling, and introduce a class of microaggressions I call "cautionary microaggressions" which are aimed at people who are not (yet) fat and which position fatness as to be avoided at almost any cost, including disordered eating.

I close by asking the reader to consider whether cautionary microaggressions might apply to members of other marginalized groups, as well, or whether the case I have made is unique to the use of microaggressions to discipline unruly fat and still-ruly not-yet-fat bodies.

This article aims to claim ‘body size’ as an increasingly important axis of signification. In the article I draw on research from various disciplines to present an exploratory overview of the different ways in which body size categorizations – being (considered) fat or slender – intersect with other axis, such as gender, race, sexuality, social class and age. I argue that an intersectional perspective on body size adds to our understanding of the layeredness and complexity of power differentials, normativities and identity formations that co-produce inequalities. Furthermore I attempt to show how processes of exclusion and marginalization based on body size categorizations are similar to racist, ableist and misogynist logics and practices. Hereby, I intend to demonstrate the vast (negative) impact of body size categorizations, specifically but not exclusively on the lives of those who occupy the marked position in relation to this axis: the ‘fat’. I argue that an intersectional perspective helps us to see body size discrimination more clearly and can help disrupt dominant discourses about the body in order to create a truly ‘healthy’ environment in which bodies of all sizes, shapes, colors, and abilities can be celebrated

Resumen
Este artículo examina los elementos que componen la representación del cuerpo gordo en tres obras literarias escritas por autoras mexicanas: las novelas Vapor (2004), de Julieta García González y Pandora (2015), de Liliana Blum, así como el cuento "Eucaristía" (2008) de Marina Herrera. Sus tres protagonistas -Gracia, Pandora y Otilia, respectivamente- comparten la particularidad de ser mujeres gordas y, asimismo, están caracterizadas de manera similar. Después de la revisión de diversos ítems a la luz de las propuestas del 'activismo gordo' latinoamericano y de algunos estudios antropológicos, se concluye que estos textos siguen una suerte de receta narrativa que convierte a los personajes en arquetipos e incluso reitera discursos 'gordofóbicos'.
Abstract
This article examines the elements that make up the representation of the fat body in three literary works written by Mexican authors: the novels Vapor (2004), by Julieta García González and Pandora (2015), by Liliana Blum, and the short story "Eucaristía" (2008) by Marina Herrera. Its three protagonists -Gracia, Pandora and Otilia, respectively- share the peculiarity of being fat women and being similarly characterized. After the review of various items in the light of the proposals of Latin American ' fat activism' and some anthropological studies, it is concluded that these texts follow a kind of narrative recipe that turns the characters into archetypes and even reiterates ' fatphobic' discourses.

Gluttony is recognized by most moral and ethical codes, except for the most ardently hedonistic, as a moral failing.  While the term "gluttony" has etymological roots in Latin and Old French, the moral assessment of gluttony, in the Western world, goes as far back as the Ancient Greeks.  Presented here is a brief historical sketch of the concept of gluttony as understood in the Western world.  Changing conceptions of gluttony will be traced from Ancient Greek philosophers through the Judeo-Christian understanding of gluttony as a sin and to the way that gluttony has become intimately connected to moral judgments of fatness.  In addition to this historical sketch, arguments for the abandonment of the traditional language of gluttony are explored.  Made by researchers looking specifically at eating disorders and food addictions, it is claimed that language of gluttony, as historically and traditionally understood, ought to be jettisoned as this language fails to capture the psychological complexity of the compulsion(s) to overconsume.

This essay argues that modern perceptions of the agency of fat people have been inflected by older ways of thinking about fat and fattening. This claim rests on two basic points. Firstly, the potentially encumbering materiality of fat has long been cited as preventing movement in ways that frustrate agency. Secondly, fat has implications for agency by virtue of the power relationships implied in the act of fattening, which has been repeatedly framed in the West with reference to animal consumption. Discourses of fat and fattening are thus saturated with allegations of failed agency, whether by citing the confining materiality of fat itself or by associating the fattened person with abject animality. After exploring these claims with reference to select examples from classical antiquity, the essay presents surveys how similar ideas mobilized weight-loss discourses from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, by which time most of our current anti-fat thinking had been firmly entrenched.

El culto del cuerpo se ha convertido en nuestros días en un fenómeno social de gran significación. La presentación del yo físico adquiere una especial relevancia en los nuevos estilos de vida. Diversos grupos sociales (médicos, psicólogos, sociólogos, modistos, publicistas, estilistas, esteticistas, periodistas...) centran su interés en la definición social del "cuerpo". El objetivo es contribuir a la creación de un modelo idel único y generalizable, legitimando determinadas prácticas sociales dirigidas hacia este fin. La definición de este modelo está en manos de un grupo de "diseñadores de cuerpos" que asumen el papel de especificar los límites de la normalidad corporal en nuestra sociedad. La expresión corporal se ha convertido en un lenguaje que, en último extremo, manifiesta el status y la posición social. Por otra parte, en las últimas décadas se plantea la cuestión de conocer cómo las diferencias biológicas …
Body worship has become nowadays a social phenomenon of major interest. The introduction of the physical "I" takes a special relevance in a new life styles. Several social groups (doctors, psychologist, sociologists, fashion designers, publicists, stylist, beauty consultante, journalist...) focus their interest on a socal definition on the "body". The goal is contribute to the settlement of a unique and general model, by legalizing some social practices aimed to that end. The definition of this model depends on a "body designers" group that itemize the limits of corporal normality in our society. Corporal expression has become a language that, at a last resort, states social position and status. On the other hand, on the last decades the question of getting to know how biological differences between human being change into social apartheid factors is getting under way. In such a way, several health problems are in front of the ideal "body" definition. Fatness is a good example to understand how social fashions use the category of illness to "label" what is "normal" under specific circumstances as "pathological" under other ones. Social exclusión to fat people, the repulse to fatness and the social construction of its marginal figure acquire a relevance worth a more thorough sociological exam. Because of this, it is necessary to understand how social criteria have prevailed to stigmatize people whose weight is neither o risk to health nor and obstacle to their social life...

This analytical and exo-autoethnography begins with a depiction of how my Jewish family wished to control my fat body to fit into whiteness. I close with a narrative about an interracial and transnational relationship in which I experienced embodied recognition across racial difference. The purpose is to illustrate the broader intersections between Jewish women’s fatness, associations with blackness, internalized antisemitism, assimilation into whiteness, and the links between the African and Jewish diasporas. Jewish mothers frequently critique their daughters’ bodies to try to assimilate into white femininity. Internalized gendered antisemitism creates disgust for one’s own body that is passed down to daughters. My mom wanted me to have a private pride in being Jewish that she could not access because of her gender, but did not want my Jewishness to physically mark me. Historically Jewish women have been associated with fatness, blackness, vulgarity, and lack of femininity. Collective recognition and acceptance of fat bodies across racial difference is possible through the connections between the Jewish and African diasporas and the challenge to white-centric beauty norms within Black communities.

Abstract: This article proposes that, at various historical moments, stereotypes about fat people as being corrupt, weak, and stupid have been complemented and perhaps even informed by perceptions of fat as a material substance with definite properties and qualities. In an effort to understand the formation and longevity of these three long-standing stereotypes this article submits that the material properties of fat – particularly its unctuousness, softness, and insensateness – have played important roles in motivating some of the responses this substance has generated both with reference to human bodies and their material worlds. Due to the conceptual slipperiness of ‘fat’ in its various forms (whether ‘frozen’ as a solid or liquefied as oil or grease), this analysis uses examples from ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew texts to track the ways in which this substance has resonated across these registers, revealing the surprisingly mercurial and ambiguous ways in which ‘fat’ has been understood culturally.

Within the expanding field of fat studies, we have come to understand different ways that fat bodies have been scrutinized for their “deviance” from the anticipated norms of society. The author interrogates the role racializing assemblages play in categorizing and disciplining bodies based on humanism and its fixed sizeist-normative temporality. With the supported idealized form, the human template as well as racialized and fat bodies are distinguished as lacking under the criteria of deficit. Subsequently, the promise of happiness in the context of Whiteness and thinness is set up as a form of normative time that must be followed to gain access to the privilege of being human. An autoethnographic methodology is used to situate the author’s own experience as a fat, racialized woman grounded in theory. In the latter portion of the paper the author discusses the affirmation of the body and its materiality within a new materialist framework. What is of utmost importance to consider in affirmative politics is that one’s race and fatness can be accentuated and accepted as forms of difference informing and intermingling with each other and our surroundings as they are brought to the forefront.

In this manuscript, the voices of women of size in North America and Finland indicate that there is a shared experience of being fat. Based on cross-cultural analysis of our respective empirical findings, we argue that there is a shared Western fat lived experience that perpetuates a stigmatized gendered landscape of living with a fat body. The emergent themes tended to revolve around two similar contradictions—the phenomenon of hyper(in)visibility and a belief their fatness is temporary or liminal state—both of which lead to an internalization of fat hatred. We argue that these findings stem from the tremendous stigma and mistreatment that both samples of women face in their daily lives. The present study contributes to the literature by addressing two research lacunas: 1) the lack of cross-cultural research in fat studies; and 2) the limited mainstream feminist research from the perspective of fat women.

Key Words
Fat studies, cross-cultural analysis, stigma, women and weight

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book summary in downloadable .pdf] 

In the modern jungle of burgers, couches, and remote controls, obesity is an enormous and growing epidemic. Weight-loss books and diet gurus urge us to "listen to our bodies," but our instincts are designed for the African savannah, not food courts. The sugary and fatty foods that we, as hunter-gatherers, are programmed to forage used to be hard to come by. Now they're as close as the vending machine down the hall.

Radical changes are necessary and, fortunately, are biologically easier than small or gradual changes in diet. Barrett tells us how to reprogram our bodies, break food addictions, and ignore our attraction to "supernormal stimuli"—artificial creations that appeal to our instincts more than the natural objects they mimic. Barrett delves into scientific research—from animal ethology to evolution—to show the disastrous direction in which our instincts have led us, and how, using our intellect, we can get back on course.  . . . . . . . .An elegantly written and eye-opening analysis of what makes us fat. -- Steven Pinker, PhD, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works
. . . . . . .
In this cogent, clearly argued, and thought-provoking book, Barrett shows how we are paying the price for our own plenty. -- David Spiegel, M.D. Medical Director, Center for Integrative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine; author of Living Beyond Limits
. . . . . . . .
Offers us a way to understand the pandemic of obesity that we find ourselves in. -- John Ratey, M.D. Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School, co-author of Driven to Distraction

Drawing upon Critical Disability Studies, Fat Studies, Affect Studies and Deleuze Studies broadly speaking this chapter seeks to critique the human grid of the personal registry. To affirm expressions of life that derive from fatness and impairment, this chapter argues there needs to be a shift in registry from the personal to the impersonal. The merging of Critical Disability Studies and Fat Studies, along with the use of a duoethnographic methodology will enable us to consider the embodiment and experience of fatness and impairment as equated to a negative and hopeless state of being under the personal register. However, with the notion of impairment in the nexus of fatness and disability, we are working towards affirming fatness and disability through itself under the impersonal register, instead of it being contingent upon a prescriptive notion of proper being.

The essence of this chapter is to bring forward a new way of thinking, where spasms or other impairments or fatness as simply matter that can be generative and creative as expressions of life. Within the Deleuzeguattarian affect, non-normative bodily capacities are understood to be innately creative and joyous. However, joy does not only refer to a positive outcome; joy in fact can be disruptive and painful. Nevertheless, these various versions of joy that is felt can be affirming for the materiality that is fatness and disability. We share a dialogue on how difference is experienced under the personal and impersonal registers as we think through affect and exposure. We offer a reconceptualization of fatness and spasms within the affective realm while questioning what can a fat and disabled body do? Thus, Affect Studies and a new materialist approach allows the exploration of the co-presence of fatness, disability, race and gender as a creative site in of offering a bodily-becoming that allows for possibilities of different forms of life and affects through exposure.

Key words: impersonal register, sizeism, ableism, affect, new materialism, becoming

The analysis of body composition through direct and indirect methods allows the study of the various components of the human body, becoming the central hub for assessing nutritional status. The objective of the study was to develop equations for predicting body fat% from circumferential body arm, waist and calf and propose percentiles to diagnose the nutritional status of school children of both sexes aged 4-10 years. We selected intentionally (non-probabilistic) 515 children, 261 children and 254 being girls belonging to Program interaction and development of children and adolescents from the State University of Campinas (Sao Paulo, Brazil). Anthropometric variables were evaluated for weight, height, triceps and subscapular skinfolds and body circumferences of arm, waist and calf, and the% fat determined by the equation proposed by Boileau, Lohman and Slaughter (1985). Through regression method 2 were generated equations to predict the percentage of fat from the body circumferences...

Weight stigma results from the mediatisation of ‘obesity’: conceptually, a medicalised problem resulting from personal bodily irresponsibility. We undertake a frame analysis of 1452 comments on a thematically related online news article published via The Guardian, about the status of ‘obesity’ as a disability in European Union (EU) employment law. We identify three themes: (1) weight as a lifestyle choice or disability, (2) weight as an irresponsible choice and (3) weight as a simple or complex issue. We contend that the design of the commenting platform prevents counter-narratives from challenging the dominant (‘obesity’) framing for three reasons: (1) content is driven by comments appearing earlier in the corpus, (2) the commenting system primarily supports argument between polarised rhetorical positions and (3) the platform design discourages users from developing alternative terminologies for producing counter-narratives. In this way, we explore how weight stigma is propagated through online media, and how users’ comments intersect with the affordances of the platform itself.

This article aims to claim ‘body size’ as an increasingly important axis of signification. It draws on research from various disciplines to present an exploratory overview of the different ways in which body size categorizations – being (considered) fat or slender – intersect with other axes, such as gender, race, sexuality, social class and age. The article argues that an intersectional perspective on body size adds to our understanding of the layeredness and complexity of power differentials, normativities and identity formations that co-produce inequalities. Furthermore, it attempts to show how processes of exclusion and marginalization based on body size categorizations are similar to racist, ableist and misogynist logics and practices. Hereby the article intends to demonstrate the vast (negative) impact of body size categorizations, specifically but not exclusively on the lives of those who occupy the marked position in relation to this axis: the ‘fat’. It argues that an inters...

This paper argues that the historical trajectories of television and cardiovas-cular disease prevention in the German Democratic Republic are interlocking. These diseases were largely understood as caused by an unhealthy modern lifestyle. Healthcare experts were convinced that health education was an effective strategy to persuade the population to follow a healthy lifestyle. With its rise as a new mass medium, health educators increasingly relied on television as a means to put their message across. Yet the new medium itself was a target of health education measures as excessive TV consumption was considered a potential threat to cardiovascular health. This article deals with the history of health-related problematizations of TV consumption. In the 1950s and early 1960s, during an animated discourse on the strain of a modern lifestyle television was considered a potential source of overstimulation of the nervous system. As this article argues, this interpretation was undermined by a modifi ed concept of TV consumption within the discourse of empirical audience research.

This talk explores how modern narratives that imbue fatness with personal and communal ethical significance compare to ancient narratives of fatness, particularly in archaic Greece politics.Through examining art and poetry, it explores how fatness was not exactly a marker of elite status, but was a metaphor of the abuse of status with economic, social, and moral consequences for family, community, and state. Although elitism was central to the significance of fatness in archaic Greece, so were ideas about uncontrollable appetite, lack of restraint, and communal harm familiar to us from modern narratives about obesity and socio-economic class.

Background: There is limited data examining the association of combined fitness and central obesity with health
related quality of life (HRQoL) in adults. We examined the association of combined cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF)
and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) in the form of a fit-fat index (FFI) with the Physical Component Summary (PCS)
and Mental Component Summary (MCS) HRQoL scores in United States Navy servicemen.
Methods: As part of a health fitness assessment, a total of 709 healthy males aged 18–49 years completed a
submaximal exercise test, WHtR measurement, and HRQoL survey (SF-12v2) between 2004 and 2006. FFI level was
classified into thirds with the lowest FFI tertile serving as the referent group. PCS and MCS scores ≥50 were taken
to indicate average or better. Logistic regression was used to obtain odds ratios (OR) and 95 % confidence intervals
(CI).
Results: The prevalence of average or better HRQoL scores was lowest in the referent FFI tertile, PCS 60.2 % and
MCS 57.6 %. Compared with the lowest FFI group in multivariate analyses, the OR (95 % CI) of having average or
better PCS was 1.63 (1.09–2.42) and 3.12 (1.95–4.99) for moderate and high FFI groups respectively; MCS was 1.70
(1.13–2.55) and 4.89 (3.03–7.89) for moderate and high FFI groups respectively (all P < 0.001). Consistent and
progressive independent associations were observed between age and MCS, and also between CRF and MCS.
Conclusion: Among males in the United States Navy, higher levels of FFI were independently and more
consistently associated with having average or better HRQoL (physical and mental) than other known predictors of
HRQoL.