• Home
  • People
    • Current Council Members
    • Past Council Members
  • From the Chair
  • Awards
    • Call for Awards
    • 2022 Award Winners
    • Past Award Winners
  • Ask a Mentor
  • Members' News
  • Teaching
  • Blog!
  • Contact
ASA Section on Body & Embodiment
Tweet, tweet! Follow us on Twitter!

If you can’t take the fat out of the girl: The embodied strategies women use to protect against anti-fat bias in the labor market

1/25/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
Erica Toothman, PhD
University of South Florida


While conducting interviews for my dissertation research, I would ask women if they had ever experienced fatness-related discrimination while at work [1]. Given my interests in the fatness-related wage gap, it seemed like a logical thing to ask; however, this question was seldom met with an affirmative response. Usually, they would pause in reflection, issue a noncommittal mumbling, and respond with one or more of the following lines: “I don’t know,” “possibly,” “maybe?” “I don’t think so?” Or simply, “no.” Their uncertainty motivated me to ask different questions, specifically, questions about their embodied experiences. I would ask how they felt in their bodies, how they saw their bodies, and how they thought others saw their bodies in paid labor market settings  (e.g., interviewing and the workplace). While my interviewees were unsure if they ever really encountered discrimination, nearly all of them worked in settings where fatness was devalued and many described ways they would use their bodies in defense against potential anti-fat bias.
 
Upon analyzing these interviews, I was taken back to my grade school days. It was during this time that I quickly grew accustomed to classmates’ jokes and pranks directed at my fatness. The teasing occurred so frequently that walking by any laughing group of kids would stir up my insecurities. I would wonder, “What are they laughing about? Oh. They must be laughing about my body.” My weight had become such a subject of ridicule for my peers that it was difficult for me to imagine anything else attracting their attention. Groups of laughing youngsters started to serve as a constant reminder that I did not fit in -- into acceptable clothing, shoes, desks, or social circles. (I sometimes feel that way today.) Those kids could have been laughing about anything, but they were always laughing at my weight.  
 
Uncertainty is a powerful tool for controlling bodies. Michel Foucault described how officials could effectively control prisoners (and eventually the citizenry) if people were uncertain when, or even if, they were being monitored (Foucault 1979). Extending this insight to women’s bodies, Sandra Lee Bartky described how women discipline their bodies in order to conform to patriarchal expectations of appearance and comportment (1998). Women need to be slender (but not too scrawny), well coifed (but not overdone), smiling (but demure), unthreatening (but not a pushover), and taking up as little space as possible. What is acceptable for our bodies is contingent on the day, the setting, the subject, and the beholder. When acceptable standards are a moving target and the enforcers of these standards are nowhere yet everywhere, bodily discipline becomes a round-the-clock endeavor. According to Bartky, women are experts in this practice.
 
Workplaces have become spaces where people are expected to discipline their fatness even if weight is unrelated to the requirements of the job. As an example, many employers have instituted weight management programs for their employees (Benedict and Arterburn 2008). The women in my study described interactions with supervisors, co-workers, and customers that point to the devaluation of fatness in the workplace. Some describe their experiences with the abovementioned weight management programs, and even more of them observed or participated in dieting regimes and competitions with coworkers. (These coworkers were usually other women.) Some of the women received weight-related commentary during work hours, and a few were even treated differently by supervisors, colleagues, and customers. Fatness was not explicitly banned (or even denigrated) where most of these women worked, but anti-fat sentiment was certainly present.
 
In addition to working in fat-conscious (or even fat-phobic) environments, individuals may encounter anti-fat bias during job interviews, wage negotiations, promotion consideration, or while socializing with colleagues. While studies on real employers’ biases are rare, a tidy pool of research reveals that anti-fat bias may pervade various dimensions of the paid labor market (reviewed in Puhl and Heuer 2009). Experimental research also indicates that fat workers tend to be perceived as underperforming, unfit, lacking interpersonal skill, and lacking self-control (Giel et al. 2010). One study estimates that as many as twelve percent of American adults report some form of discrimination or mistreatment based on their height or weight -- with higher rates reported among women, younger individuals, and the obese (Andreyeva, Puhl, and Brownell 2008). However, interview research by Hayden and colleagues revealed that while fat women have experienced discrimination, many had trouble articulating their specific experiences with it (2010).
 
The women in my study were wary of labeling any of their experiences as discrimination.  However, they would describe extensive efforts they used to protect themselves from anti-fat bias, regardless if they had suspected any bias or experienced any discrimination. These preventative strategies constitute embodied impression management (for more on impression management, see Schlenker and Weigold 1992). These women would discipline their bodies in ways that distanced themselves the negative stereotypes associated with fat people. Some women would reduce or alter their eating habits in front of coworkers (to appear more in control of their desires).  Some women would work their bodies harder than expected (so that they would not appear lazy). Few even extracted their bodies from unnecessary interactions entirely (as to not be seen struggling in uncomfortable situations, like walking up stairs). Most of the women I interviewed dressed in dark clothes in order to obscure their fatness, or strategically used cosmetics and high heels to emphasize feminine features such as long hair and long slender legs.  
 
Back in school, I too would try to minimize the impact of my fatness with my body. The small desks would leave red marks on my arms and legs, so I learned how long it would take for them to disappear before leaving class. I could estimate if my body would fit in a chair or even hold my weight. The school required us to tuck in our shirts, so I devised a way to billow my shirt so that it appeared tucked in but also camouflaged my hips bulging above and below my waistband. I would carefully choose my food during lunch, never leave the house without a body-shaping garment under my clothes, and ensure with a degree of precision that my large body would not bump into another person or accidentally step on their feet. (I did not want my fat body to inconvenience anyone.) From time to time, I would even smile at jokes made at my expense in attempts to be gracious. I suppose I became an expert in using my body to shield others from the negative impact my fatness.
 
Fatness matters at work. While estimates vary, research has consistently found an unexplained fatness-related wage gap among women [2] (Mason, 2012; Judge and Cable 2011; Han, Norton, and Stearns 2009). Discrimination is usually offered as an explanation for this fatness-related wage gap; however, there are few ways to empirically test this relationship due to lack of data, the subtlety of discriminatory behavior, and the inability for targets to even put their finger on it.
 
When I started this project, I was hoping to find the processes that produce the fatness wage gap. What I really uncovered were the subtle ways that women comport their bodies to protect against anti-fat bias (and thus, discrimination). The additional efforts made by these women constitute appearance labor, that is, the additional time and energy spent into maintaining a suitable appearance (Peluchette, Karl, and Rust 2006). For fat women, this pursuit is especially labor-intensive, given the limited availability of plus-size clothing -- a lamentation echoed by many of my respondents [3]. Their embodied labor was offered up as a form of compensation for the potential negative impact of their fatness at work [4].
 
Research on the embodied experiences of fat folks, both in and out of the workplace, enhances our understanding of how expectations of appearance and comportment have far-reaching consequences. Many of the women in my study described other ways they would discipline their bodies in other contexts (i.e., at school, at home, in medical offices). The research described here attends to the experiences of mostly white, middle class, cisgender women. We need to know more about these processes to make social change and resistance possible for people whose bodies transgress multiple axes of domination [5].


-----------
[1] The data used in this project are drawn from weight-related oral histories I collected from twenty women with fatness-related labor market experience.
[2] Research on the fatness-related wage gap for men is less consistent.
[3] Thirty-six percent of American women are obese (Flegal et al. 2012), but only about seventeen percent of the retail market is dedicated to plus size clothing (Clifford 2010).
[4] To read more about strategies for coping with obesity stigma, see Puhl and Brownell 2003.
[5] The intersectionality framework establishes that individuals can simultaneously occupy multiple disadvantaged locations in systems of inequality including race, gender, class, disability status, sexuality, age, and fatness (Kwan 2012; Collins 2007).



2 Comments

Some Great Body Stories of 2015

1/1/2016

0 Comments

 
By Laura Carpenter, Gemma Mangione, Kate Mason, Carla A. Pfeffer,
and Heather Laine Talley


As another year comes to a close, lists chronicling everything from the year’s best films to 2015’s worst fashion proliferate. This year, the Body and Embodiment Council reflected on a year of news coverage. Here are some of our favorite stories...
 
  • Black Death as Reality TV: Is Watching the Videos Too Much?    In a year where Black Lives Matter activism continued—in response to the April 4th shooting of Walter Scott, the July 19th shooting of Samuel DuBose, the deaths of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland while in police custody, and even the shooting of Black Lives Matter protesters in Minnesota—many commentators have drawn connections between dominant social values and the devaluation of black bodies. In many cases, these deaths (particularly those of DuBose, Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner) have been captured on camera. In this essay, author Kirsten West Savali asks about the ethics of watching these videos. Does the act of watching these videos fulfill a duty to witness the violence that targets black bodies? Or does the widespread viewing of these deaths contribute to their dehumanization (and justification)? – Kate
 
  • Paid Family Sick Leave Policy Proposed This year saw cities like NYC, Jersey City, NJ, and Portland, Oregon make up for the gap in federal policy by extending paid sick leave protections to workers. The U.S. stands apart as a nation that offers no universal paid sick leave. This gap in protection and compensation disproportionately impacts low wage workers, women, and Latinos. The upswing in conversations about paid leave reflects a shift in labor policy wherein we take the body into account. Workers are embodied. Bodies get sick. Rather than labor laws that treat workers as disembodied actors, the push toward paid leave represents a new body consciousness. – Heather
 
  • Patrick Stewart Didn’t Know He Wasn’t Circumcised   It sounds ridiculous.  How could a grown man not know whether or not his foreskin is intact?  Yet, British actor Patrick Stewart—you might remember him as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation or Professor Xavier in the X-Men movies—recently confessed that, for much of his life, he mistakenly believed he was circumcised.  (Most UK males are intact, by the way.)  Such misapprehensions are surprisingly common.  In fact, studies find that roughly one-third of males (and many of their sexual partners) incorrectly report their circumcision status.  How can this be?  The likely culprits no doubt include Anglo-American discomfort with nudity, body shame, and adults’ reluctance to discuss genitalia and sexuality openly with children (and other adults, for that matter). – Laura
 
  • Uterus Transplant Surgery Could Help Trans Women to Become Pregnant   In mid November, various media outlets began reporting on the Cleveland Clinic’s impending venture into uterine transplantation. In the small and “highly experimental” study, ten cis (non-transsexual) women diagnosed with Uterine Factor Infertility (UFI) will be selected for uterine transplantation from ten deceased cis women donors. This study will mark the first time that uterine transplantation has been undertaken in the United States. While remarkable all on its own, days later the media began to speculate on possibilities even broader than those outlined in original coverage of the study. By late November, media outlets described the study as a potential first step toward trans women giving birth through uterine transplantation. In these stories, the potential social, ethical, and medical implications of trans women as gestational and birth mothers are explored. Such coverage marks a potential shift toward greater media consideration and inclusion of trans women and possibilities for trans women’s lives. What was notably absent in these stories, however, is that despite the spate of coverage on the possibility of trans women using medical technologies to gestate and give birth, the media was relatively silent on the possibility of cis men also using these same medical technologies. In this way, childbirth was constructed by the media as something mediated by (and predicated upon) gender identity as a woman, regardless of one’s sexual anatomy. In other words, gestation and childbirth remain understood by and through the media as “women’s work,” despite medical technologies that may one day generate much broader possibilities. – Carla
 
  • Why are so many disabled roles played by non-disabled actors? This thinkpiece from the BBC News "Ouch" (a blog and podcast from the BBC dedicated to telling the stories of disabled people) revisits an enduring question about disability representation in cinema. Reflecting on Eddie Redmayne's 2015 Oscar-winning performance as the physicist Stephen Hawking -- who has lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) for more than 50 years -- the article asks us to consider what it means for able-bodied actors to continually receive critical acclaim for (and maintain a monopoly over) portraying disabled bodies. The issue raises important questions about opportunity structures in the production of culture, symbolic boundaries between interpretation and appropriation, the performance of embodied racial and disabled identities, and the commercialization of embodiment. – Gemma
 
  • Firefighter Receives Full Face Transplant in Surgery Called Historic This isn't the first face transplant, but this story reflects some dramatic changes since the first transplant took place in 2010. Patrick Hardison’s transplant is by far the most extensive to date, but the stories about this procedure reflect a shift in science coverage, too. No longer do fantastical images of the John Travolta thriller Face/Off appear when describing the technology. Nor is there the kind of panic about the psychological and ethical crises that the procedure might invite. Yet, there persists a real gap between how these stories are covered in the US and in the UK, where facial difference has become politicized and situated within a disability rights framework. The story of this new and historic transplant reminds us about the need to continually unpack the social context that inspires the need and desire for biomedical interventions.  – Heather
0 Comments

    Discuss!

    Guest bloggers discuss hot topics, teaching ideas, and research dilemmas on bodies. 

    Archives

    August 2020
    June 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from Ranoush., ibropalic, www.WinningMan.com, Dancewear Central, Key Foster