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ASA Section on Body & Embodiment
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What We’re Thinking About

5/15/2016

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The Body and Embodiment Council was asked to share a favorite sociological idea or concept. Here are some responses.

Healthism (Kate Mason)
This term, popularized by Deborah Lupton (1995), refers to the privileging of health over other concerns and priorities. More recently, I’ve revisited the term while reading Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, a collection edited by Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (2010). For me, this term captures the way in which “health” has evolved from being a simple descriptor for bodies to a moral imperative, always just out of reach and always the standard against which our practices of caring for our bodies are measured. As an ideology, healthism supports widespread education about health, workplace “wellness” policies for weight loss and smoking cessation, etc. Yet healthism goes beyond giving people the tools and knowledge to make choices for themselves, urging constant self-surveillance and often-obsessive attention to bodily self-improvement. And as Susan Bordo and Eve Sedgwick remind us, having options for changing our bodies (Bordo) or sexuality (Sedgwick) are not truly “choices” when society only views one choice—in the case of healthism, longer life and increased productivity—as legitimate.

Missing Bodies (Heather Laine Talley)
In Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (New York University Press, 2011), Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore demonstrate that even as bodies and embodiment have increasingly become subjects of popular fascination and academic inquiry, particular bodily experiences are missing from our cultural register. Scholarship on embodiment relies on concepts like  objectification, surveillance, and social control. These processes rely on seeing. Casper and Moore innovate our understandings of stratification and oppression by demonstrating that in some cases inequality is the result of not being seen at all. Their work leaves me asking not only who is devalued but also who is invisible? Casper and Moore propose an “ocular ethic,” an approach that asks us to critically interrogate cultural narratives, demographic data, public health policies, and global relations by asking not simply how particular bodies are represented and managed but rather which bodies are “missing” either through literal omission or through misrepresentation. Casper and Moore push us to ask how can the ocular ethic or critical “way of looking” at numbers and figures that are either anonymous or absent shape our courses of action. This approach holds significant potential for intervention efforts in issues ranging from infant health to military deployment.  

Embodied Health Movements (Laura M. Carpenter)
Embodied health movements (EHMs) are social movements in which activists use their own embodied, physical, subjective experiences of illness to question and change medical knowledge and practices. One of three broad types of health social movement identified by Phil Brown, Stephen Zavestoski, Sabrina McCormick, Brian Mayer, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Rebecca Gasior Altman (Sociology of Health & Illness, 2004), EHMs involve 1) challenges to existing scientific and medical practice and knowledge; 2) activists collaborating with health professionals and scientists (unlike most health social movements); and 3) making activists’ bodily experiences central to movement activity.  Participants in EHMs may have direct bodily experience of the illness or practice in question (e.g., the DES daughters studied by Bell), the kinds of bodies that can be affected (e.g., healthy women in the breast cancer movement; see Klawiter), or concerns about things happening to others’ bodies (e.g., female opponents of male circumcision).  Some EHMs strive to convince the medical community to recognize a disease; others demand different kinds of treatment for, or research on, a particular condition.  Advocacy-oriented EHMs work within the biomedical paradigm and rarely demand inclusion of lay knowledge, whereas activist-oriented EHMs challenge biomedical paradigms and pursue democratic participation.

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Taking Up Digital Space: Power and Potentialities of Fatness on Social Media

5/1/2016

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by Katherine Phelps
Doctoral candidate of Sociology
University of Massachusetts-Boston


In 2013, in Portland, Oregon, the fat positive revolution “got bigger.” A volunteer-run organization called Nolose (National Organization for Lesbians of SizE), centered on ending fat oppression and catalyzing a fat and queer positive culture, organized a conference to continue a conversation of fat acceptance at home and around the world. Part of the conference proceedings was the initiation of a project entitled “I need fat acceptance because…”, a platform on which individuals could express their reasons for needing and supporting a fat acceptance and fat positive ideology. The project has proliferated over the past few years, particularly in digital space on the popular social networking and blogging site Tumblr. Posts are both personal and overtly political, ranging from “I need fat acceptance because I am not going to hate my body anymore”, to “I need fat acceptance because it is decolonization”, to “I need fat acceptance because without it, there is no way to live in my body.” More posts in the project can be viewed here.

The politics of this project are indicative of the current cultural climate surrounding fatness in the United States; a push-pull of privilege and oppression, invisibility and representation, what society considers good or bad. The containment of fatness and fat bodies, particularly fat female and fat queer bodies, remains a paramount project at institutional, social, and cultural levels in the United States. Much of the persistent cultural anxiety surrounding fatness is predicated on the recognition of the power inherent in taking up space, literally and figuratively.

Because “fat” is deeply embedded in the Western collective conscience as unequivocally bad, size acceptance and fat positive movements have worked up against extreme derision and tacit body knowledges (Murray 2007) that have thus far precluded the movement from becoming more visible in the mainstream. However, something remarkable seems to be transpiring in contemporary digital spaces, with an unparalleled increase of visibility of fat bodies, and beyond this, an appreciation and lauding of fat female and fat queer bodies and what those bodies might represent in terms of meaningful social change. Through the literal presentation and performance of fatness in public domain online, body narratives of agency, empowerment, and love (of both the self and other fat bodies) are unsettling current feelings about fatness and potentially establishing a foundation for a fundamental cultural transformation, one that knows fat bodies as good bodies.

Nolose and the “I need fat acceptance” project are certainly not alone in their efforts. We are beginning to see multiple uses of online platforms and new media in spreading an ideology of body positivity and fat acceptance. There is very real resistance to attempts to constrain fat bodies—and the Internet is where the bulk of that resistance is taking place. In addition to making fat bodies visible via social media such as Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook, there has also been an increase in online activist campaigns, specifically by way of hashtag activism; using Twitter hashtags for political/social/cultural activist efforts. Primarily, hashtag activism surrounding fat acceptance and body positivity is within the beauty and fashion, as well as the medical, frameworks.


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As a challenge to the present structure of the fashion and beauty industry, campaigns such as #droptheplus, #rockthecrop, #plussizeplease, #plusisequal, and #effyourbeautystandards have worked to dismantle the negative connotations surrounding the language of plus size (as compared to “straight” sizes in the fashion industry). These efforts drive home the reality of a massive market of fat women who seek the same choices and opportunities to wear stylish clothing as are offered thin, or “average-sized” women. Devoted to a body positive ideology, these hashtags incite social media users to share their body narratives, and make themselves visible. Empowerment is made possible through visibility—fat bodies from all racial, ethnic, class, sexual and abled backgrounds, in public spaces, unapologetically taking up space, and the accompanying hashtag language helps to dispel cultural myths that fat individuals are lazy, stupid, or morally wayward (Erdman Farrell 2011; Rothblum and Solovay 2001).

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Within the medical framework, we have seen #losehatenotweight, #diagnosisfat, and the Health at Every Size model. #Diagnosisfat is a particularly poignant example of how social media can operate as a platform for sharing experiences of fat and size-based oppression and challenging those existing oppression paradigms. This hashtag is used to tell stories about mistreatment and misdiagnosis on the part of the medical profession. One user shares the story of visiting the doctor and being told that their blood pressure was too high, but when asked what their blood pressure is, the doctor responded they had not taken it yet.

This example is a significant reinforcement of fat being viewed as inherently unhealthy. #Losehatenotweight and Health at Every Size are centered on a holistic idea of health, promoting the reality that having a fat body and being a healthy individual are not mutually exclusive. These efforts have helped to expand discussion and public discourse on not only physical health, but mental and emotional health as well.

These re-imaginings of body politics through online activism, though welcome in many ways, remain complicated by constructs such as gender, race/ethnicity, class, ability, and sexuality. Body size is a dimension of diversity, and therefore must be approached intersectionally. We are not necessarily seeing equal representation in terms of how fatness is becoming visible in social media, and fat activism, much like feminism, is still largely a white, female enterprise. A recent example of a misstep in the body positive movement is the #aeriemen campaign—an advertising campaign for underwear that featured “real” men of various sizes and racial identities. Cis men are largely kept out of the conversation of body positivity; the assumption being that fat oppression does not extend to men in a heteronormative, patriarchal system. In fact, the campaign turned out to be a parody rather than a sincere approach to male body image issues. In order for fat acceptance to take hold and create tangible change, an intersectional approach is crucial, and this means working to make more fat bodies visible in digital spaces accessible by many, and move public discourses on fat acceptance from margins to mainstream.
 
Though we still have a long way to go in advancing fat acceptance, the reality is that online platforms can be and are being used to disrupt structures of corporeal containment through novel avenues of “taking up space”, making fatness visible on a global scale, and altering perceptions of fatness as a problem essentially in need of a solution. One could very much argue that the Internet, social media in particular, is now functioning as a space where body positivity and size acceptance are “trending.”



References
 
Erdman Farrell, Amy. 2011. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press.
 
Murray, Samantha. 2007. “Corporeal Knowledges and Deviant Bodies: Perceiving the Fat Body.” Social Semiotics 17(3): 361-373.
 
Rothblum, E. and Solovay, S. 2009. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press.

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