A systemic stigmatization of fat people

• Main Author: Brandheim, Susanne
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för sociala och psykologiska studier 2017
• Subjects: obesity; fatness; systemic; stigmatization; medicalization; transformative; second-order reality; Social Work; Socialt arbete
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-62752; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:978-91-7063-809-1; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:978-91-7063-905-0

The aim of this work was to develop knowledge about and awareness of fatness stigmatization from a systemic perspective. The stigmatization of fat people was located as a social problem in a second-order reality in which human fatness is observed and responded to, in turn providing it with negative meaning. Four separate studies of processes involved in this systemic stigmatization were performed. In study I, the association between weight and psychological distress was investigated. When controlling for an age-gender variable, this association was almost erased, questioning the certainty by which a higher weight in general is approached as a medical issue. In study II, the focus was on stigma internalization where negative and positive responses combined were connected to fat individuals’ distress. We found that both responses seemed to have a larger impact on fat individuals, suggesting that the embodied stigma of being fat sensitizes them to responses in general. In study III, justifications of fatness stigmatization was explored by a content analysis of a reality TV weight-loss show. The analysis showed how explicit bullying of a fat partner could be justified by animating the thin Self as violated by the fat Other, thus downplaying the evils of the bullying act in favor of highlighting the ideological value of thinness. The implications of these studies were related and seated in a context comprising a historical aversion toward the fat body, a declared obesity epidemic, a new public health ideology, a documented failure to reverse this obesity epidemic, and a market of weight-loss stakeholders who thrive on keeping the negative meanings of being fat alive. The stigmatization of fat people was intelligible from a systemic perspective, where processes of structural ignorance, internalized self-discrimination, and applied prejudice reinforce each other to form a larger stigmatizing process. In paper IV, it was argued that viewing fatness stigmatization as oppression rather than misrecognition could hold transformative keys to social change. === There are social groups in society that are categorically connected, for example by their physical, cultural or psychological markers. For political, or moral, reasons, some of these groups seem to trigger special attention in form of forceful response processes at several societal levels. This is the case with the contemporary ‘obesity epidemic’ phenomenon; postulated by the World Health Organization as one of the most severe threats to the health of future mankind. One of the downsides with such special attention is that the fat individuals find themselves caught up in seemingly unavoidable processes of devaluation. Instead of investigating the catastrophic (well-known) psycho-social consequences of these individuals, this work focuses on connecting the devaluing processes that form a systemic stigmatization of fat individuals. From this critical perspective, it is argued that the pervasive stigmatization of fat people is not an unfortunate consequence of structural norms that passively exclude its ‘non-fits’, but an intelligible outcome of a highly active set of processes that continuously construct and re-construct a historical aversion towards fat people.