Understanding Representations of Fat Women and Counter-narratives of Resistance

Understanding Fatphobia

Fatphobia (anti-fat or weight bias) is a “feature of social systems that unjustly rank fatter bodies as inferior to thinner bodies, in terms of not only [their] helath but also [their] moral, sexual and intellectual status”

(Manne, 2024)

Those are narratives far too familiar for a lot of people. Narratives that hurt, that impact self esteem and that are discriminatory. On this website, the approach is different. We want to see :

• How is this narrative built? 
• What are the mechanisms in place to make us believe that our body is not good enough? Not looking good? 
• Which counter narratives exist?

We invite you to navigate our website to explore a few examples of how, through movies, pop culture, AI, social media and the language, social and cultural mechanisms which hierarchise bodies are built.

Who are we? (click to discover)

We are going to talk about fatphobia, marginalization, representation, algorithms, care, health… But first let’s use the concept of Donna Haraway of “Situated Knowledges” (Haraway, 1988). Our work is indeed produced from specific viewpoints, fulled by our different five group members and their perspective coming from Italy, France and Austria. We are all students taking the class “Communication practices, diversity and inclusion”, three through an Erasmus Program and two full time students in Padova. We all have different relationships to our bodies, and a few are/have been personally impacted by fatphobia during their lives, which motivated working on this topic. Looking at those different perspectives is interesting as much as understanding our bias and limitations, coming all from Western European countries, carrying and approaching the topic from an occidental perspective. However, through our work, taking an intersectional approach is needed as fatphobia is a social structure deeply intertwined with others such as class, gender, racism, ableism… Through our work, we will therefore show the intersectional discriminations taking place in fatphobic narratives and representations.

Some theoretical resources

In order to talk about fatphobia, let’s first use some resources to explore the effects of fatphobia and understand what is at stake and how all the fatphobic representations, narratives are hurtful and how they carry intersectional discriminations. The goal with giving this context is to show how important and meaningful changing the narratives is. We therefore invite you to go through the website to understand fatphobic mechanisms and build a new narrative, a new perspective with the perception of the body.   

Elise Sánchez’s text “When Weight Is Political” (originally in french: Quand le poids est politique) is rooted in the social sciences and is an engaged essay that demonstrates how fatphobia is a systemic form of discrimination that intersects with other forms of oppression (notably gender and class). This text provides an overview of fatphobic violence using testimonies from people directly affected, showing how impactful these forms of violence are and how those who experience them are consistently held responsible for their weight. She also highlights the absurdity of fatphobic norms, explaining that the definition of fatness varies depending on individuals and countries. Elise Sánchez’s text emphasizes that fatphobia is part of a broader system of domination and that it specifically affects women, which is essential for our research since we want to highlight how fatphobia is influenced by other forms of oppression. She also provides an overview of the violence faced by fat women, ranging from devaluation to sexist and sexual violence : “Obese women thus report ten times more histories of sexual abuse and four times more physical violence compared to women of normative body size.”.

Mathilde Lavrilloux’s text “Relationship to the Body and Thinness Norms Through the Lens of Gender: What Issues Are at Stake?” (originally in french: Rapport au corps et normes de minceur au prisme du genre : quels enjeux?) is an article situated at the intersection of social psychology and the humanities, adopting a sociological and psychosocial approach. The author conducted a quantitative study aimed at understanding how thinness norms influence one’s relationship to the body. The survey was conducted with 450 women and 195 men and offers a gender-comparative analysis showing how women are more pushed to thinness, being pushed to have a body that corresponds to an ideal of the female body perceived as an object, with the aim of being desirable according to fatphobic heterosexual norms. She is showing how the injunction to thinness is gendered and specifically targets women who experience high levels of body dissatisfaction influenced by gendered norms, and that this has an impact on their mental and physicological health. The “Stunkard Figure Rating Scale” used in the study asks interviewees to position themselves among a series of figures with different body sizes, indicating the silhouette they believe they have, the one they would like to have, and finally the one they consider healthy. Mathilde Lavrilloux reveals that “women reported wanting a silhouette significantly thinner than the one they considered healthy.” This finding is striking and the result wasn’t the same for men, making it a useful element for demonstrating the impact of gender norms on behaviors and representations. 

Another text that needs to be studied is “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” by Sabrina Strings. Indeed, it shows how fatphobia is rooted in racism and colonialism. Using a historical perspective she explains how initially thinness was not originally valued in the U.S. and Europe but how with Enlightenment, fatness started to be represented as inferior, “immoral” and associated to blackness, and thinness to whiteness, self-control, morality… This shows how the stereotypical language and ideas around fat-phobia is deeply rooted in colonialism, racism and is not used for health reasons but to create intersectional discriminations and narratives. Therefore, contemporary fatphobia can’t be analyzed without linking it to its racial history. On top of that, it is still affecting disproportionately black women suffering from the intersections of those forms of oppression.

The text “The Impact of Body Talk on Body Dissatisfaction, Fat Phobia, and Negative Affect” by Lauren Stutts and Taryn Myers is a psychology article that explores the impact of body-related discourse on body dissatisfaction and internalized fatphobia. This online study, conducted with 195 women in the USA, divided participants into three groups. Some were exposed to “fat talk,” depicting two women exchanging negative comments about their bodies, others were exposed to “body function talk,” depicting one woman making a negative comment about her body and the other one responding by emphasizing body functions rather than appearance. The final group was a control group in which two women discussed their future plans without focusing on the body. Women exposed to fat talk experienced an increase in fatphobia and psychological distress. Those exposed to body function talk showed a decrease in body dissatisfaction and fatphobia.

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These four texts provide interesting and very different research contributions, each addressing fatphobia from a different perspective. They show how thinness norms are reproduced and normalized in everyday discourses. Their results suggest that the way fatphobia is represented and how we talk about bodies influence people’s self-perception and their relationship to thinness norms, which may be of interest as a potential tool for reclaiming and reshaping these same norms. And this is the reason why through this website we will try to analyze representations and how in society, as a whole, a lot of fatphobia is normalized in everyday discourses. Knowing the power of discourses and representation on body perception as described before, you will find different resources on this website to challenge those narratives.