Fat Shame

Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture

Amy Erdman Farrell

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814728345
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

To be fat hasn't always occasioned the level of hysteria that this condition receives today and indeed was once considered an admirable trait. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture explores this arc, from veneration to shame, examining the historic roots of our contemporary anxiety about fatness. Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Amy Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Firmly in place by the time the diet industry began to flourish in the 1920s, the development of fat stigma was related not only to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period related to consumer excess, but, even more profoundly, to prevailing ideas about race, civilization and evolution. For 19th and early 20th century thinkers, fatness was a key marker of inferiority, of an uncivilized, barbaric, and primitive body. This idea—that fatness is a sign of a primitive person—endures today, fueling both our $60 billion “war on fat” and our cultural distress over the “obesity epidemic.”

Farrell draws on a wide array of sources, including political cartoons, popular literature, postcards, advertisements, and physicians' manuals, to explore the link between our historic denigration of fatness and our contemporary concern over obesity. Her work sheds particular light on feminisms' fraught relationship to fatness. From the white suffragists of the early 20th century to contemporary public figures like Oprah Winfrey, Monica Lewinsky, and even the Obama family, Farrell explores the ways that those who seek to shed stigmatized identities—whether of gender, race, ethnicity or class—often take part in weight reduction schemes and fat mockery in order to validate themselves as “civilized.” In sharp contrast to these narratives of fat shame are the ideas of contemporary fat activists, whose articulation of a new vision of the body Farrell explores in depth. This book is significant for anyone concerned about the contemporary “war on fat” and the ways that notions of the “civilized body” continue to legitimate discrimination and cultural oppression.

1
Considering Fat Shame

Toward the end of fall semester in 2006, leaders from the national office of Delta Zeta sorority visited its DePauw University chapter, ostensibly to encourage the sisters in their recruitment efforts. Membership in what one unofficial survey on the campus had called the “socially awkward” Delta Zeta chapter had declined to the point that the national office was considering shutting it down. The national officers met with the thirty-five members individually, discussing each one’s specific plans to increase membership. A week before finals, twenty-two of the members received a letter from the national chapter explaining that they had been placed on “alumna status”—in other words, they had been kicked out. By the beginning of the following semester, the letter explained, they had to find other housing.

According to a New York Times interview, the ousted members included all the “overweight” women as well as the only Vietnamese and Korean women. (The one African American member never received an expulsion letter, nor did she receive a letter asking her to stay. She presumed she had been kicked out.) The national officers countered that the evictees demonstrated insufficient commitment to the sorority. According to the evicted sisters themselves, it was all about looks and popularity, not about commitment. They pointed out that the national office had purged the sorority of the girls who did not match the stereotypical image of a “sorority girl,” one who was attractive and well liked by fraternity brothers. Indeed, the national officers had actually requested that these same “unpopular”—that is, fat or nonwhite—sisters stay upstairs during a recruitment party, instead bringing in slender Delta Zeta sisters from neighboring Indiana University to meet with prospective sorority members.

While many of the rejected sorority sisters described feeling depressed after they received their letters, their sorrow soon turned to activism. Many of those who had been allowed to stay in the sorority quit in solidarity with their sisters. DePauw faculty began a petition objecting to the focus on these women’s looks over their academic and service accomplishments. The president of DePauw, Robert Bottoms, wrote a letter of recrimination to the national office of Delta Zeta. By the end of February, the New York Times had picked up on the story, followed by stories in Time, Newsweek, and Ms. Public outrage, as well as the anger of alumni and parents, led the president to kick the Delta Zeta chapter off of campus. After refusing any more communication with what it termed a hostile media, the Delta Zeta national office launched a federal lawsuit against DePauw for defamation and breach of contract. In its press release, however, it did acknowledge the “negative impact caused by the stereotypes imposed on college women in general and sorority women in particular.”¹

The story of this Delta Zeta saga may seem of little import—certainly all the rejected young women found housing for the winter term and the fate of Delta Zeta as a whole may not much interest readers other than Delta Zetas themselves. On a larger level, however, it is an interesting story about the creation of social hierarchy in the United States. While the mission statements of U.S. sororities often focus on the role of the organization in philanthropy and in creating a supportive network for its members, the reality is that sororities and fraternities are also deeply about the construction and maintenance of social status, both within the collegial environment and after graduation. Perhaps in a way the national leaders of Delta Zeta were speaking honestly when they said the twenty-two young women they kicked out were inadequately committed to the sorority; that is, if, de facto, to be a sorority member is to be concerned with maintaining and reaching the height of the social scene, and, if, de facto, this meant that one needed to be white, thin, and “American,” then, by definition, these twenty-two young women could never “look” committed.

Within this Delta Zeta controversy, what particularly interests me is the way that “fatness” served as a crucial marker of social status, or rather the lack thereof. Interesting as well is the way that fatness intersected so pointedly with issues of ethnicity, class, and gender within this saga of college life in the 21st century. Indeed, the attempt by the Delta Zeta national office to reinstate a hierarchy of “white, thin, and privileged” encapsulates many of the key social issues and struggles that this book addresses: the enduring power of fat stigma; the way fat denigration overlaps with racial, ethnic, and national discrimination; the connections between both of these (fat and ethnic denigration) and class privilege; and, finally, the ways that all these elements (fat denigration, ethnic discrimination, and class privilege) intersect with gender and the construction of what it means to be a “popular girl,” a properly constituted gendered subject. What is it about fat that makes it so stigmatized? What are the connections between fat denigration and ethnic, class, and gender discrimination? What does it mean that an institution known for bolstering economic privilege and normative femininity—a college sorority—would kick out the young women who are too “fat,” too “ethnic”? Why is body size connected to a “right to belong,” a “privilege of membership”? What is it, in particular, about fat that makes it such a liability? Why did the rejected sisters experience lingering feelings of shame and depression although they knew they had been victims of discrimination? Despite these powerful negative feelings, what gave them the strength to resist the judgment of the national officers?

Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture takes up these questions through a historical exploration of the links between body size and notions of belonging and social status, or, to use a term more common in contemporary studies of culture, to ideas of citizenship. The connections between body size and citizenship are particularly salient today, when the concern about a national “obesity epidemic” garners extraordinary attention and resources, vying for front-page coverage against news of economic collapse, two wars, elections, and environmental disasters. Indeed, popular and scientific literature often argues that Americans’ body size puts the United States at more risk than the failing economy, the ongoing wars, or problems of global warming, pollution, or other forms of ecological degradation. We are an extraordinarily “fat-aware” culture, yet little attention is given to the cultural meanings attributed to fatness or the fat person, or how these meanings might shape the experiences of the fat person or the discourse surrounding this “health crisis.” This book attempts to address this silence by exploring the roots of our contemporary ideas about fatness, the ways these cultural narratives still percolate today, and the voices and actions of those who have rejected dominant ideas about the rights and identities of the fat person.

Prompted by intense student interest in eating disorders and thin body ideals, I began this project interested in the history of dieting in the United States. I regularly taught Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls, an important history of anorexia nervosa in the United States, and I was curious about the industrial and commercial apparatus that supported the cultural mandate for thinness. My research quickly led me to two discoveries. The first is that the date generally understood as the advent of the diet industries and a thin body ideal—1920—was incorrect. Periodicals like Harper’s Weekly and Life included countless ads for diet products and numerous cartoons lampooning fat people throughout the late 19th century. It is more accurate to understand 1920, then, as the moment when the burgeoning advertising and consumer industries could tap into and exacerbate the fat denigration and early reducing industries that were clearly in existence by the second half of the 1800s. The second thing I discovered is that the endless parade of diets from the last decades of the 1800s to the present resemble one another in surprising ways. William Banting’s 19th-century high-protein and no-starch diet became today’s South Beach and Atkins diets. The milk diets of the early 20th century became today’s Slim Fast and NutriSlim liquid diets. The incongruous mixture of whole grain foods and Christianity by Sylvester Graham, Horace Fletcher, and John Harvey Kellogg became today’s wheat and fig “Bible Bar” marketed by Tom Ciola, the author of Moses Wasn’t Fat. One-food fixes for obesity have remained a constant, though the specific item has changed: in the early 20th century it was the banana; in the 1960s, melba toast and cottage cheese; in the 1970s, grapefruit; in the 1990s, cabbage; in the first decade of the 21st century, olive oil. Mechanical “flesh reducers” have long remained popular, from the obesity belts of the 19th century to the French-originating “Bergonie” chairs of the early 20th century, to the recently marketed “Ab Energizers,” the electric stimulating abdominal belts. Difficult as it is to mark a clean line between the dieting industries and the medical industries, one must include as well the long history of pharmaceutical products designed to suppress appetite (from arsenic to fen-phen and leptin) or “burn off” fat (from tapeworms to amphetamines to ephedra), as well as the surgical procedures focused on excising fat (the gynecologist Howard Kelly performed the first fat-removal surgeries in the late 1880s) to contemporary liposuction. Even reconfiguring the digestive tract has had a long history, from Kellogg’s anal sphincter surgeries to the stomach stapling of the 1960s to the increasingly popular gastric bypass surgery of today.²

What began to interest me more than the particular permutations of weight loss methods was the formidable meaning attributed to fatness in these dieting tracts. The authors of weight loss tracts and the advertisements for weight loss products articulated anxiety, scorn, even outrage toward the fat they promised to eradicate. It is easy for us to assume today that the cultural stigma associated with fatness emerged simply as a result of our recognition of its apparent health dangers. What is clear from the historical documents, however, is that the connotations of fatness and of the fat person—lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly, and lacking in will power—preceded and then were intertwined with explicit concern about health issues. Every diet that has emerged on the scene has come with a larger social agenda and cultural meaning. In all of them, fat is a social as well as physical problem; in most of them, the social stigma of fatness—and the fantasy of freeing oneself from this stigma—coincides with or even takes priority over issues of health.

I began this project interested in the history of dieting in the United States, then, but the sources I discovered transformed my work into an exploration of the meaning of fat. As I read political cartoons, advertisements for commercial reducing methods and products, doctors’ manuals, and popular articles, I realized that fat was neither neutral nor insignificant, but was a central protagonist in the cultural development of what constituted a proper American body. The development of fat stigma, I realized, related both to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period over consumer excess and, importantly, to prevailing ideas about race, civilization, and evolution. This book argues, then, that fat denigration is intricately related to gender as well as racial hierarchies, in particular the historical development of “whiteness.”

In the fall of 2008 the New York Times published a poster titled “Measure of a Man” that listed the height and weight of each presidential candidate since the late 1800s to identify whether taller, thinner, shorter, or fatter men are more likely to be elected to the highest office a citizen in the United States can hold.³ Only in a culture that is fixated on the significance of body size could such a poster—which linked weight and the privileges of citizenship—be imagined, even in a comic way. As I conducted this research over the last ten years, during a time of heightened concern about the fatness of the American public, I have been keenly aware of the interplay between these earlier ideas of fat denigration and the contemporary manifestations of fat stigma, whether they emerged in popular culture portrayals that explicitly mocked fat people or in the language of physicians and government documents that couched fat denigration simply as concern over people’s health or well-being. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicians, politicians, and academics used body size as one important marker—along with gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality—to measure one’s suitability for the privileges and power of full citizenship. These ideas about body size continue to have salience, as fat stigma divides people into those who belong and those who don’t, those who are praised and those who are mocked, those who merit first-class treatment and those who are expected to accept second-class, inferior status, those who might become president and those who, as the poster suggested, might not.

As I explored the links between body size and citizenship, I also quickly became attentive to the voices and activism of those who have resisted dominant ideas about fat stigma. Cultural denigration of fatness is powerful today, drawing on over a century’s development of fat stigma, but it is not monolithic. That is, people have resisted and challenged fat stigma, most explicitly since the late 1960s. Through novels and poems, “big-only” dances and swim clubs, Internet chat rooms, online magazines, and organizations like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and the International Size Acceptance Association, these activists have worked to “rewrite the fat body” and to claim their full rights as citizens. That is, they challenged the connotations of fat as ugly, as lazy, and as unhealthy. The ousted sisters of Delta Zeta may not have recognized themselves as fat activists, but their vocal rejection and organized reaction to the discrimination they faced as fat women was an important form of fat acceptance work. Just as the sisters of Delta Zeta supported one another, fat activists over the last four decades have challenged both explicit discrimination and more subtle fat denigration. Their work and voices are important to understand both for the light they shed on the manifestations of fat stigma and its limits.

Stigma and Fatness

The May 2010 cover of the Atlantic pictures a bloated Statue of Liberty, whose triple chins rest heavily on a distended robe that looks more like fat rolls than draped cloth. “FAT NATION,” the headlines read, continuing, “IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK. HOW TO BEAT OBESITY.” The visual image of this cover story by Marc Ambinder speaks to the shame and anxiety evoked by the contemporary “obesity epidemic,” of a nation trying to shed what Erving Goffman called a “discrediting attribute.” Published in 1963, Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity still serves at the classic study of how stigma works.⁴ While his study does not focus on fatness, his concepts allow us to understand the implications of fat denigration for both individuals and an entire culture. Clearly, fatness is a discrediting attribute, for which people will go to extraordinary extremes to eliminate. One has only to think of the tapeworms and arsenic of the early 20th century or the digitalis/amphetamines of the middle 20th century or the debilitating gastric bypass surgery of today to recognize these extreme measures. It is a physical stigma, or what Goffman calls an “abomination of the body,” one that is clearly visible. Fat people cannot hide their stigma, though marketers of bathing suits and clothing certainly attempt to convince consumers that their product will make the person look ten pounds slimmer. Because our culture assigns many meanings to fatness beyond the actual physical trait—that a person is gluttonous, or filling a deeply disturbed psychological need, or irresponsible and unable to control primitive urges—it also has many traits of what Goffman calls a character stigma. As the essays of writers like Susan Stinson and Marilyn Wann demonstrate, fat people are often treated as not quite human, entities to whom the normal standards of polite and respectful behavior do not seem to apply. They might be accepted in certain circumstances, but, as the fat protagonist in Neil LaBute’s 2004 play Fat Pig finds out when she begins to date a thin man who consistently hides their relationship and then rejects her because of her weight, that acceptance will only go so far.⁵ Often that tolerance is only extended as long as the fat person does not expect too much—an actual romantic relationship or a decent, well-paying job, for instance—and also consistently puts on a self-deprecating mask. The various forms of discrimination that fat people experience, in schools, at doctors’ offices, in the job market, in housing, and in their social lives, means that, effectively, their life chances—for a good education, for fair and excellent health care, for job promotion and security, for pleasant housing, for friends, lovers, and life partners . . . in other words, for a good and safe life—are effectively reduced.

Like all other forms of stigma, fat stigma is relative, dependent on the historical and cultural context. Perceptions about fat—whether it’s considered beautiful or ugly, dangerous or healthy, a sign of wealth or a sign of poverty—differ from place to place and from time to time. Women in the United States today face a far different standard regarding body size than those of other times or other cultures. In 1825, the French writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin exclaimed that “thinness is a horrible calamity for women.” “A scrawny woman,” he continued, “no matter how pretty she may look, loses something of her charm with every fastening she undoes.”⁶ From the perspective of an American woman in the 21st century, it’s difficult to imagine a world where being thin would be a calamity. The ways that a fat American colonist would have experienced his body in the 18th century, probably as a sign of prosperity and health, differs greatly from those of a man living in the context of the 21st century, when his body is a sign of our contemporary “obesity epidemic.” Even today, however, body size standards in some cultures are far different from those in the United States. Young women in Namibia, for instance, describe themselves in positive terms as “fat and attractive.” Among the Arab population in Mauritania, “plumping up” is the goal for marriageable young women.⁷ And it was only with the introduction of American television in the 1990s that the Fijians in the South Pacific began to experience eating problem...