Interpreting Weight

The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness

Jeffery Sobal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351511711
• Subtopic: Social Psychology

What is "too fat"? what is "too thin"? Interpretations of body weight vary widely across and within cultures. Meeting weight expectations is a major concern for many people because failing to do so may incur dire social consequences, such as difficulty in finding a romantic partner or even in locating adequate employment. without these social and cultural pressures, body weight would only be a health issue. while socially constructed standards of body weight may seem immutable, they are continuously recreated through social interactions that perpetuate or transform expectations about fatness and thinness. Written by sociologists, psychologists, and nutritionists, all of the chapters in this book focus on how people construct fatness and thinness, examining different strategies used to interpret body weight, such as negotiating weight identities, reinterpreting weight, and becoming involved in weight-related organizations. Together these chapters emphasize the many ways that people actively define, construct, and enact their fatness and thinness in a variety of settings and situations.

I
INTRODUCTION

1
Social Management of Fatness and Thinness

DONNA MAURER and JEFFERY SOBAL

People manage their appearance, particularly their weight, in order to make attractive social presentations and obtain positive social reactions. Many strive to manage appearance through weight control because thinness is widely valued and rewarded in contemporary postindustrial societies. Yet how do people construct their weight-related identities and manage them in social situations? How is the ideal presentation of weight shaped by social and cultural contexts? What roles do organizations play in shaping weight ideals? Are reinterpretations of cultural expectations about body weight possible? The chapters in this volume explore these various questions, focusing on the symbolic and interpretive processes involved in managing fatness and thinness. In the following sections, we provide a thematic overview of the chapters in this book.

Weight Identities

People construct and shape their personal identities through social interaction (Mead 1934). Weight identities are continually open to change. This is particularly evident when someone experiences dramatic weight loss (English 1993). For example, people who lose large amounts of weight undergo a dramatic process of identity change, using informal personal and social rituals to ease the transition and to mark their new status (Rubin, Shmilovitz, and Weiss 1993). This identity change process depends on status cues in the social environment, which are messages that indicate to a person how fat others perceive him or her to be (Degher and Hughes 1991). When external cues do not match a person's internal perception of how he or she appears to others, the person "recognizes" the inappropriateness of the previous identity and constructs a new one. In this volume, Douglas Degher and Gerald Hughes elaborate on the development of a fat identity through the use of internal and external cues, and explain five major ways of coping that people use to minimize the negative effects of possessing a fat identity. People use these coping methods to socially manage their stigmatized identity.

While the social management of the stigma of obesity may focus on the neutralization of negative characteristics associated with the stigma (English 1991), it also may include resistance to the application of a deviant identity or label. Gina Cordell and Carol Rambo Ronai's chapter explains how some stigmatized individuals use narrative resistance to manage their identities and protect themselves from the "external cues" described in the chapter by Degher and Hughes. The authors show how stigmatized individuals, by distancing themselves from people they perceive as fat and the negative attributes associated with them, attempt to resist a deviant identity. In a further analysis of resisting deviant identity, the chapter by Leanne Joanisse and Anthony Synnott also articulates a variety of ways in which large people react to and resist stigmatization, including forms of active, passive, and reflective resistance. The chapters in this section all address the ways stigmatized individuals develop their identities and manage the social reactions of others.

Redefining Weight

Weight-related constructions are malleable and shaped by cultural environments, social organizations, experts, and individuals (Fallon 1990). Obesity and eating disorders, for example, are seen as culture-bound syndromes that reflect culture-specific meanings and norms (Ritenbaugh 1982; Swartz 1985). Expectations regarding ideal body weight within a particular culture also depend on a variety of social statuses, including gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (Sobal 1991). Ideal weights and ways of obtaining them are not objective facts, but constructed ideals and prescriptions. The chapters in this section suggest that body weight ideals and ways to achieve them are open to negotiation and reinterpretation. They also point to variations in the ways broader cultural discourses influence interpretive processes.

For many people, especially women, weight control is an ongoing project (Germov and Williams 1996). At any given time, as many as sixty-five million Americans may be dieting, with more than seventeen thousand different weight loss plans from which to choose (Hesse-Biber 1996:39). Increasingly, however, commercial diet programs seem to be attracting fewer customers (Fraser 1997), while people are engaging in more diffuse weight control practices that may or may not include conventional dieting (Levy and Heaton 1993). In this volume, Gwen E. Chapman analyzes how many people may be shifting from dieting for weight loss to "healthy eating" for weight control. These two discourses on body weight are interrelated, although the "healthy eating" discourse emphasizes permanent lifestyle changes rather than the temporary eating plan promoted by most diets. She proposes that dissatisfaction with the success of conventional diet plans, as well as other discursive shifts within government- sponsored health and nutrition programs and the mass media, have all contributed to an environment in which the "healthy eating" discourse has emerged.

The medical and psychological professions possess a profound capacity to structure the mainstream discourse on fatness and thinness, medicaliz- ing weight and defining the clinical categories for obesity and eating disorders (Sobal 1995). These clinical categories ultimately can affect how diagnosed individuals perceive themselves and the ways they are treated by others. As Susan Haworth-Hoeppner describes in her chapter, medical discourse on eating disorders does not necessarily reflect people's lived experience. While medical discourse sets up a dichotomy between "normal body image" and "abnormal body image" to describe people's selfperceptions, she finds that body image and body satisfaction exist more as a continuum than as dual categories. All of her study participants (clinically defined anorectic, self-defined anorectic, and nonanorectic) expressed degrees of dissatisfaction with their appearance and weight. Her research raises important questions about how medical professionals define normal body image.

Definitions of weight depend on specific cultural contexts. Weight definitions change throughout the life course (Gordon and Tobias 1984), but they are especially evident during life transitions. During these times, our attention to body weight and appearance are especially heightened. Cultural expectations regarding people's weight may change to accommodate changes in their social roles. As people move from one role to another, they often engage in public presentations that mark these transitions. Jeffery Sobal, Caron Bove, and Barbara Rauschenbauch focus on one important social ritual—weddings—to explain how participants (especially brides) construct expectations regarding body weight through three sets of interacting social processes: interpretation and definition; negotiation and management; and performance and presentation. Their chapter draws attention to the influence of cultural expectations on the social processes involved in the construction of body weight.

Organizational Processes in Weight Management

Social organizations provide opportunities to negotiate, interpret, and solidify meanings about weight that exist within the culture. People often seek membership in organizations in order to bond with others who share common experiences. Weight loss organizations, for example, provide various “latent social services” to their members by enabling them to “let off steam,” and by providing social support and opportunities to gain practical knowledge about dieting (Allon 1975). These organizations offer their members sets of meanings that they may use to define themselves and others, and they may employ a variety of strategies to motivate their members to lose weight (Laslett and Warren 1975).

Weight-related organizations often provide blueprints for understanding and reconstructing the self. Such organizations may play an important role in the process of “dramatic self-change” (Athens 1995). In this volume, Rebecca J. Lester identifies Overeaters Anonymous (OA) as a “technology of the self” that people may use to reshape their inner lives and describes how the OA recovery process may reinforce cultural values that uphold disordered eating patterns. Lester explains that the philosophy of OA is not focused on changing specific compulsive eating behaviors, but on reforming “sick” selves into “healthy” selves.

While weight-related organizations may offer some unique interpretations of cultural meanings, Karen Honeycutt’s chapter suggests that women involved in highly divergent groups with contrasting ideologies— a size acceptance organization and a weight loss organization—as well as women involved in neither group, share some common weight interpretations. As in Haworth-Hoeppner’s chapter earlier in this volume, Honeycutt finds that all women in her study, regardless of organizational affiliation, are intensely preoccupied with weight. Her chapter considers the difficulties that organizations may experience when trying to transform dominant cultural expectations about weight.

College athletic teams may not be immediately perceived as weight- related organizations, yet the performance demands upon college athletes often lead them to be highly preoccupied with food and dieting (Brownell, Rodin, and Wilmore 1992; Marquart, Koszewski, and Sobal 1994). In her chapter, Elizabeth Ransom describes how the structure and environment of women’s collegiate cross-country track teams lead female athletes to be preoccupied with weight and at risk for developing eating disorders. For many of the women in her study, the desire to appear both feminine and athletic sets up contradictory demands that are difficult to reconcile. Along with the other organizations discussed in this section, college athletic teams provide a set of legitimated meanings that their members are expected to appropriate.

Reinterpreting Weight

Although current cultural standards of body weight may appear to be immutable, new interpretations of these standards frequently emerge. Certainly, those who have the power to set and shape weight standards can use their capacity to effect new definitions (Sobal 1995), but less influential individuals and small groups also can reinterpret extant definitions and create new ones. For example, as demonstrated in earlier chapters in this volume, weight-stigmatized individuals can resist negative social responses and expectations. The chapters in the final section demonstrate in more detail how reinterpretations of weight are possible at both micro- and macrolevels. Thomas F. Cash and Robin E. Roy explain the concept of body image as a key component of the self and articulate some of the ways a negative body image may be reinterpreted into a more positive one through educational efforts. While people certainly can benefit directly by developing a more positive body image, this positive body image can best be sustained in a cultural environment that accepts people regardless of body size. In the final chapter, Jeanine C. Cogan outlines how people can work toward a shift in the dominant cultural paradigm regarding body weight. As definitions of “ideal weight” change, so can the accompanying social consequences, making it easier for people to maintain a positive body image.

Conclusion

All of the chapters in this volume demonstrate the centrality of body weight to people’s everyday lives. Various chapters elaborate different concerns about the social management of fatness and thinness, using, developing, and extending important sociological concepts to examine the connections between social interaction, culture, and social structure.

References

Allon, N. 1975. “Latent Social Services in Group Dieting.” Social Problems 23:59–69.

Athens, L. H. 1995. “Dramatic Self Change.” Sociological Quarterly 36(3):571–586.

Brownell, K. D., J. Rodin, and J. H. Wilmore, eds. 1992. Eating, Body Weight, and Performance in Athletes: Disorders of Modern Society. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger.

Degher, D., and G. Hughes. 1991. “The Identity Change Process: A Field Study of Obesity.” Deviant Behavior 12:385–401.

English, C. 1991. “Food Is My Best Friend: Self-Justifications and Weight Loss Efforts.” Research in the Sociology of Health Care 9:335–345.

English, C. 1993. “Gaining and Losing Weight: Identity Transformations.” Deviant Behavior 14:227–241.

Fallon, A. 1990. “Culture in the Mirror: Sociocultural Determinants of Body Image.” Pp. 80–109 in Body Images: Development, Deviance, and Change, edited by T. F. Cash and T. Pruzinsky. New York: Guilford.

Fraser, L. 1997. Losing It: America’s Obsession with Weight and the Industry That Feeds on It. New York: Dutton.

Germov, J., and L. Williams. 1996. “The Epidemic of Dieting Women: The Need for a Sociological Approach to Food and Nutrition.” Appetite 27:97–108.

Gordon, J. B., and A. Tobias. 1984. “Fat, Female and the Life Course: The Developmental Years.” Pp. 65–92 in Obesity and the Family, edited by D. J. Kallen and M. B. Sussman. New York: Haworth.

Hesse-Biber, S. 1996. Am I Thin Enough Yet? The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Laslett, B., and C. A. B. Warren. 1975. “Losing Weight: The Organizational Promotion of Behavior Change.” Social Problems 23:69–80.

Levy, A. S., and A. W. Heaton. 1993. “Weight Control Practices of U.S. Adults Trying to Lose Weight.” Annals of Internal Medicine 119:661–666.

Marquart, L. F., W. Koszewski, and J. Sobal. 1994. “Motivations, Risks, and Nutrition Counseling for Weight Loss in Athletes.” Topics in Clinical Nutrition 10(1):48–57.

Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ritenbaugh, C. 1982. “Obesity as a Culture-Bound Syndrome.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 6:347–361.

Rubin, N., C. Shmilovitz, and M. Weiss. 1993. “From Fat to Thin: Informal Rites Affirming Identity Change.” Symbolic Interaction 16(1):1–17.

Sobal, J. 1991. “Obesity and Socioeconomic Status: A Framework for Examining Relationships Between Physical and Social Variables.” Medical Anthropology 13:231–247.

Sobal, J. 1995. “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity.” Pp. 67–90 in Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems, edited by D. Maurer and J. Sobal. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Swartz, L. 1985. “Anorexia Nervosa as a Culture-Bound Syndrome.” Social Science and Medicine 20:725–730.

II
WEIGHT IDENTITIES

2
The Adoption and Management of a “Fat” Identity

DOUGLAS DEGHER and GERALD HUGHES

The interactionist perspective plays an important part in contemporary identity theory At its core is an emphasis on “process” rather than viewing identity as a static entity. Attention is focused on the interaction between the individual and others and the consequences of this for con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Interpreting Weight
• copy
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Weight Identities
• Part III Redefining Weight
• Part IV Organizational Processes in Weight Management
• Part V Reinterpreting Weight
• Biographical Sketches of the Contributors
• Index