What happens when "child bearing hips" become 'too' wide and layered with fat? The medicalization of weight and body size pathologizes difference as deviance, framing fat women as a danger not only to themselves but to society at large when daring to reproduce. This dissertation seeks to uncover the long term impacts of weight stigma at different intersections in order to expand sociological understandings of fatness, health, gender, and inequality in motherhood. It highlights parallel mechanisms of surveillance (for example, between fat and poor mothers) to show how society constructs who "should" and "should not" be parents. Based on a series of 36 in-depth interviews with 18 mothers conducted in the first half of 2022, findings illustrate that the negative social and medical perception of fat motherhood has a significant detrimental impact on the lived experiences of fat mothers. Findings also pull from material culture in the form of representational artifacts from motherhood brought by participants in order to understand how medical and social anti-fatness impacts identity and experiences, and contributes to inequality in fat motherhood. / Doctor of Philosophy / What happens when "child bearing hips" become 'too' wide and layered with fat? The medicalization of weight and body size pathologizes difference as deviance, framing fat women as a danger not only to themselves but to society at large when daring to reproduce. This dissertation seeks to uncover the long term impacts of weight stigma at different intersections in order to expand sociological understandings of fatness, health, gender, and inequality in motherhood. It highlights parallel mechanisms of surveillance to show how society constructs who "should" and "should not" be parents. Based on a series of 36 in-depth interviews with 18 mothers conducted in the first half of 2022, findings illustrate that the negative social and medical perception of fat motherhood has a significant detrimental impact on the lived experiences of fat mothers. Mothers were also invited to bring objects that were of importance to them to discuss the ways in which society's negative views about weight impacted their experience.

Denna uppsats ingår inom det vetenskapliga fältet Fat Studies där målet är att utmana den stigmatisering som överviktiga individer upplever socialt och psykiskt. Syftet med denna uppsats är att studera hur överviktiga karaktärer porträtteras i den amerikanska reality-serien Here Comes Honey Boo Boo samt hur genus och klass representeras i relation till fetma. Mina frågeställningar är följande: 1) På vilket sätt porträtteras de överviktiga karaktärerna i tv-serien Here Comes Honey Boo Boo? samt 2) Hur representeras genus och klass i relation till fetma Here Comes Honey Boo Boo? Mitt metodval ingår inom den kvalitativa innehållsanalysen. Jag har applicerat en textanalytisk metod på mitt studieobjekt där jag kartlagt nyckelscener och huvudteman. Jag har i relation till uppsatsens syfte försökt finna återkommande mönster att bygga min analys på. Den teoretiska begreppsramen består av Stuart Halls (2013) representationsteorier samt Bakthins (1984) begrepp carnivalesque. Sedan vävs begreppet panopticism in med understöd av Betterton (1996) och Kristevas (1982) teoretiseringar för att erhålla en allmän bild om hur kvinnan relateras till sin vikt. För att teoretisera begreppen klass och genus i relation till fetma används begreppsförklaringar tagna från Rothblum och Solovays (2009) antologi The Fat Readers studie. Studien visar flera intressanta resultat i relation till teoretiseringen. Det mest utmärkande resultatet är att serien Here Comes Honey Boo Boo försämrar den rådande bilden som finns av överviktiga individer genom att porträttera dem på ett förlöjligande, humoristiskt och groteskt sätt. Kroppsliga reaktioner och andra djuriska instinkter är ett genomgående inslag i serien och tyder på att Here Comes Honey Boo Boo är en serie vars handling utgår från begreppet carnivalesques grunder. Ett överraskande resultat är det faktum att överviktiga män och kvinnor porträtteras på olika sätt i serien trots att kroppshyddorna är lika stora. Det var svårt att borste från aspekter som klass och genus i relation till fetma, de är närvarande i form av kroppen som klassbeteckning och skillnader i representationer mellan könen.

This project analyzed First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign for how it constructs obesity and health. Let’s Move! is a national internet-based campaign to end childhood obesity. The literature on Let’s Move! is limited and focuses on the privatization and corporatization of children’s physical education in public schools. Taking an intersectional approach to critical fat studies, I use critical discourse analysis to investigate how the language used in the Let’s Move! campaign (re)enforces and (re)signifies cultural notions of fat as a social problem – specifically that fat bodies are diseased, unproductive, and a financial burden. I maintain that the Let’s Move! campaign is a symptomatic text that reveals a moral panic over the so-called childhood obesity epidemic by insisting that childhood obesity is a threat to national economy and security. I contend that Let’s Move! constructs good citizens as informed consumers, and the biopedagogies recommended by Let’s Move! promote White middle-class norms as the proper way to live while ignoring structural inequalities. Furthermore, I posit the campaign employs neoliberal discourses to frame mothers as responsible for their obese children’s weight and encourages women to conform to the cultural notion of the “good mother.” Overall, I argue the Let’s Move! campaign produces classed, raced, gendered, and able-bodied ideals of citizenship that function to further marginalize poor and minority groups.

Thesis advisor: Stephen J. Pfohl / Using qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with vegans of diverse backgrounds and body types, this study aims to investigate how vegans understand their own bodies and the bodies of others in relation to their consumptive practices and habits. The context of fatphobia in vegan activist spaces and communities surrounds this research as a tension within veganism that helps to elucidate the ways vegans use and engage with their bodies, further helping to understand not only vegan embodiment but also how fat vegans navigate these tensions with their own bodies. Vegans often engage with veganism as a tool for better understanding their own bodies and the social identities their bodies are associated with. This reflexivity causes them to not only concern themselves with how they relate to their own bodies but also with how others view and perceive their bodies. Thus, vegans respond to anxieties and fears about these perceptions by constructing their bodies in opposition to the stereotypes others apply to them (unhealthiness, preachiness, militancy, etc.). This may result in the exclusion of some bodies which are socially understood as fitting these roles (such as fat bodies as unhealthy) and, further, the ethical nature of vegan practices also causes these bodies to be seen as immoral or especially indulgent. This research helps to understand more precisely how vegans act as bodies in promoting their veganism and how they sometimes exclude other bodies in their attempts to defend vegan bodies. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

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Previous research has explored the ways in which health, beauty, and gender discourses are used to promote and regulate an ideal of thinness. Further, research has explored how the fat acceptance movement and fitspiration has fought to resist such narratives. However, in the age of hashtag feminism a new group on social media, body positivity, has become the buzzword among celebrities, news conglomerates, and fashion companies. This study draws on interviews with body positive influencers and Instagram posts tagged #bodypositive and #fitspiration to examine the extent to which body positive influencers and users modify understandings of normative feminine body ideals and to what extent they resist and accommodate traditional discourses of gender, health, and beauty. In doing so, I explore which bodies are newly included and who is left out. / Doctor of Philosophy / In that last 5 years body positivity has gone “mainstream”—gaining the attention of women across the United States, circulating across a variety of mass media sources, being viral content on social media, and becoming the buzzword among celebrities, news conglomerates, and fashion companies. But what is body positivity and its impact? This dissertation sought to explore that question as it relates to gender, health, and beauty in the context of social media. Drawing on interviews with 12 body positive influencers and an examination of 210 Instagram posts tagged #bodypositive or #fitspiration I examine the extent to which body positive influencers and users modify stereotypical understandings of femininity, particularly the idea that the healthiest, most attractive, and most feminine body is a thin body. Findings suggest that body positivity is understood by influencers as made up of five aspects: (1) a connection to the fat acceptance movement; (2) an opposition to diet culture; (3) the belief that all bodies are good bodies; (4) celebrating self-love; and (5) proclaiming that all people have a freedom to be beautiful. In addition, my examination of Instagram posts shows that although a greater variety of body sizes appear in posts tagged #bodypositive than those tagged #fitspiration, both center hyper-feminized and sexualized white women who transgress stereotypes of femininity in one dimension, fatness or muscularity. As such, Instagram influencers and users struggle to negotiate an adherence to the traditional understandings of femininity, beauty, and health at the same time as they seek to expand them.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class Americans have considered the thin body--ostensibly the result of self-control and self-discipline--a moral imperative and a symbol of good citizenship. In this thesis, I provide a critical perspective on fat studies by examining the ways in which the field authorizes itself in a society that deems the fat body unhealthy, costly, and immoral. As one potential solution to fat-hatred, fat studies proposes fat-positivity, but I argue that fat-positivity requires an extraordinary act of imagination in which the fat person overcomes what I term the ideology of thinness and subsequently feels good about herself. Importing models of ambivalence from disability studies, I propose ambivalence as an alternative to fat-positivity. I argue that ambivalence is a legitimate response when living in a society that de-values one's embodiment, but ambivalence is undertheorized by fat studies scholars. In Chapter 2, I analyze from a feminist perspective Tweets with the hashtag "feeling fat," tracing the emotion to cultural ambivalence about consumption and consumerism. In Chapter 3, I examine how the genre of the fat memoir authorizes itself during an "obesity epidemic" and what those methods reveal about gendered selfhood. Instead of indicting these Twitter users and fat memoirists for their purported lack of fat-positivity, I emphasize instead the social situations that give rise to these cultural forms. I suggest that drawing attention to ambivalence is a form of political resistance.

The aim of this essay is to discuss some of the shared legacies of oppression between queerness, femininity, and fatness in order to theorize a form of activism that can do justice to these intersecting identities. A key component of this is to discuss the complexities of negotiating the shame and pride that go hand in hand with stigmatized identities, a project recently taken up by queer theorists that has yet to be well represented in fat studies or activist circles. This essay will engage with conversations happening in queer theory and fat studies about shame as it relates to the politics of attachment. I hope to begin a conversation about how to organize effective activist circles that can do justice to queer fat femmes' complex relationships with visibility, embodiment and community building. / text

This exam paper has examined visual portrayals of overweight and fatness in two swedish upper secondary school textbooks, one in physical education and one in social science. The textbooks were analyzed in regard to numeral representation, interacting social categories such as gender and age, depiction in forms of activities and stereotypes and relation to context close to or far away from a swedish context. The analysis showed an underrepresentation of overweight and fat bodies in both textbooks, but the represention of overweight bodies in the textbook on physical education were nearly nil whereas in the textbook on social science there where representations of both overweight and fat bodies. Combined the both textbooks gave a representation of health and youth as not represented by overweight or fat bodies.