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Sex Roles (2012) 66:575592 DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-0022-5
FEMINIST FORUM
Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias
Janna L. Fikkan & Esther D. Rothblum
Published online: 19 June 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Although research and scholarship on weight-based stigma have increased substantially in recent years, the disproportionate degree of bias experienced by fat women has received considerably less attention. This paper reviews the literature on the weight-based stigma experienced by women in North America in multiple domains, including employment, education settings, romantic relationships, health care and mental health treatment, and portrayals in the media. We also explore the research examining the intersection of gender and ethnicity related to weight stigma. Across numerous settings, fat women fare worse than thinner women and worse than men, whether the men are fat or thin. Women experience multiple deleterious outcomes as a result of weight bias that have a significant impact on health, quality of life, and socioeconomic outcomes. Because of this gender disparity, we argue that feminist scholars need to devote as much attention to the lived experiences of fat women as they have to the fear of fat experienced by thin women.
Keywords Fat women . Feminism and weight . Weight-based stigma . Weight bias . Women and weight
Introduction
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminists began to draw increasing attention to the gendered nature of weight preoccupation and disordered eating, with Orbachs self-help book, Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978), perhaps the best known of this genre. Helping women to see their private struggles with compulsive eating and hatred of their bodies as rooted in the social constraints placed on womens autonomy and patriarchal devaluation of all things feminine (including fat bodies) had a major impact on the field of psychotherapy and has spawned subsequent generations of feminist writing on the topic of women and weight. However, as critics noted then (e.g., Diamond 1985), the assumption that fat was indicative of pathology and, in Orbachs formulation, unconscious drives to defend against unwanted experiences (such as intimacy), was left largely intact. Additionally, the resolution of these psychological issues was seen as the pathway to permanent weight loss, thus also leaving unquestioned the assumption that thinness should still be a...