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Sex Roles (2012) 66:600607 DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-0084-4
FEMINIST FORUM
Why Fat is a Feminist Issue
Abigail Saguy
Published online: 25 October 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract The proposition that fat is a feminist issue is almost an axiom within the feminist literature. And yet, different feminist scholars see fat as a feminist issue for radically different reasons. An analysis of mainly U.S. research suggests that for some, fat is a symptom of underlying distress and compulsive eating as a coping mechanism for this gendered anguish. For others, higher rates of obesity among poor women and women of color is a scandalous form of environmental injustice necessitating policy interventions to combat obesity in these populations. Others have argued that fat is a feminist issue because the fear of being or becoming fat tyrannizes average-size and relatively thin women, limiting their quality of life and often leading to eating disorders. In contrast, Fikkan and Rothblum (2011) argue that fat is a feminist issue because fat women are subjugated to bias, discrimination and abuse precisely because they are fat women. Unlike other approaches, they put actual fat women at the heart of their analysis, comparing their experience to that of both thin women and to fat men. They rightly signal the importance of examining how the social experiences of fat people vary by sex, social class, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation, among other factors. While emphasizing the importance of their perspective, this article advocates that this line of feminist analysis be pushed even further.
Keywords Fat . Feminism . Obesity
Introduction
Fat is a feminist issue. Far from being controversial, this statement is almost an axiom in the gender literature. And yet, there is wide disagreement about why this is the case. For Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, fat is the telltale result of womens compulsive eating, itself a coping mechanism for gender inequality (Orbach 1978). Orbach sees womens binge eating as driven by an unconscious desire to hide from male sexual objectification and trivialization, as well as from competition with other women. Her book promises to help women get in touch with the emotions that contribute to binge eating, cycles of dieting and regain, and unconscious fears of being thin (Orbach 1978). Orbach...