| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 新聞研究所 === 101 === I view clothes shopping experiences as key processes of “doing gender” in everyday life, in which fat women often struggle with fat stigmas. The main issues to be discussed in this article are thus the following: 1) How do fat women cope with fat stigmas during these processes? 2) What are the connections between fat women’s self-identities, gender-doing and their clothes shopping experiences? In this context, a "fat woman" is defined as: A woman (who identifies herself as a woman) always gets negative feelings through clothes shopping experiences due to her outsized body size(s).
Research data are collected from forum discussions and 14 interviewees. The results are as follows: Before encountering clothes shopping situations, fat women are already devaluating their fat bodies in shopping space, e.g. on streets. Once fat women enter clothes shopping processes, their "body sizes" become the key factor that limits fat women’s activity within certain places and the social roles they play. There are three types of coping tactics: integrating, onlooking and resisting. Fat women show their reflexivity on clothes shopping experiences through normalizing their bodies, negotiating with fashion discourses from the position of subjects, and accepting their bodies in the way they are.
Clothes shopping experiences interweave different daily encounters in fat women’s everyday life, in which they play various kinds of “gendered roles” such as female employee, daughter or girlfriend. Summing from the above, I notices that the different gender doing experiences between “thin (normal) women” and “fat women” usually make the latter more frustrated in most daily encounters. In clothes shopping context, resources for justifying fat bodies are needed. As to the empowerment of fat women, diversity of shopping channels, places and clothes are as important as establishing different fashion discourses, e.g. fat female fashion icons.
To reverse fat stigmas, I suggest that we avoid defining “fat” intuitively by medical discourses (e.g. BMI) but by situating fat bodies as subjects, thus we will not be subject to dominated fat discourses and thereby limit the rich meanings of fat bodies. Fat women’s clothes shopping experiences show that “ body sizes” is a key factor affecting individuals in doing one’s gender. In Taiwan, there is still room for us to raise the awareness of “body size issue” and further address it as a gender issue.
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