What's Wrong With Fat? (36 page)

68. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; Collins,
Black
Feminist Th
ought
.

69. Janna L. Fikkan and Esther Rothblum, “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the
Gendered Nature of Weight Bias,”
Sex Roles
66, no. 9 (2011): 575–92 ; Abigail C.
Saguy, “Why Fat Is a Feminist Issue,”
Sex Roles
68, no. 9 (2012): 600–607. This is
not to say that fatness is not also an issue for men. See: Sander L. Gilman,
Fat
Boys: A Slim Book
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004) ; Lee F. Monaghan,
Men and the War on Obesity: A Sociological Study
(London: Routledge, 2008).

70. Jeffery Sobal and Albert J. Stunkard, “Socioeconomic Status and Obesity: A
Review of the Literature,”
Psychological Bulletin
105 (1989): 260–75 ; K. M. Flegal
et al., “Overweight and Obesity in the United States: Prevalence and Trends,
1960–1994,”
International Journal of Obesity
22, no. 1 (1998): 39–47 ; Campos,
Th
e
Obesity Myth
.

71. Roberts,
Killing the Black Body
.

72. Sobal and Stunkard, “Socioeconomic Status and Obesity”; Flegal et al., “Overweight
and Obesity in the United States.”

73. Morone,
Hellfire Nation
;
Rogan Kersh and James Morone, “How the Personal Becomes Political:
Prohibitions, Public Health, and Obesity,”
Studies in American Political Development
16 (Fall 2002): 162–75.

74. Stanley Cohen,
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
(New York: Routledge, 1972) ; See also
Elizabeth Armstrong and Ernest L. Abel, “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: The Origins of
a Moral Panic,”
Alcohol & Alcoholism
35, no. 3 (2000): 276–82 ; Erich Goode and
Ben-Yehuda Nachman,
Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance
(Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994) ; Philip Jenkins,
Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in
Contemporary Great Britain
(Hawthorne: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992) ; Jeffrey S.
Victor, “Moral Panics and the Social Construction of Deviant Behavior: A Theory
and Application to the Case of Ritual Child Abuse,”
Sociological Perspectives
41
(1998): 541–65.

75. Gina Kolata, “For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monsters,”
New York Times
,
October 29, 2006.

76. Nanci Hellmich, “Rising Obesity Will Cost U.S. Health Care $344 Billion a Year,”
USA Today
, November 17, 2009.

77. Associated Press, “Feds: Obesity Raising Airline Fuel Costs,”
USA Today
, November
5, 2004.

78. Ibid.

79. Elizabeth Landau, “Thinner Is Better to Curb Global Warming, Study Says,”
CNN.
com
, April 20, 2009.

80. Cohen,
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
, xviii. See also Sander L. Gilman,
Fat: A Cultural
History of Obesity
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008).

81. Lydia Lovric, “Child Obesity a Form of Abuse,”
Winnipeg Sun
, June 6, 2005.

82. Marni Jameson, “Fed Up with Fat and Saying Something about It,”
Los Angeles
Times
, February 1, 2010.

83. Ibid.

84. Gerard F. Anderson et al., “Health Spending in the United States and The Rest of
the Industrialized World,”
Health Affairs
24, no. 4 (2005): 903–14
;
Thomas
Bodenheimer, “High and Rising Health Care Costs. Part 2: Techological Innovation,”
Annals of Internal Medicine
142, no. 11 (2005): 932–37.

85. Guthman,
Weighing In
.

86. Anna Kirkland, “Conclusion: What Next?” in
Against Health: How Health Became
the New Morality
, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2010), 195–204.

87. Other “triggers” of government action include self-help organizations, demon
industry, a mass movement, and interest groups. Rogan Kersh and James Morone,
“The Politics of Obesity: Seven Steps to Government Action,”
Health Aff airs
21, no.
6 (2002): 144.

88. Ibid.

89. Associated Press, “Feds: Obesity Raising Airline Fuel Costs.”

90. Andrew L. Dannenberg, Deron C. Burton, and Richard J. Jackson, “Economic and
Environmental Costs of Obesity: The Impact on Airlines,”
American Journal of
Preventive Medicine
27, no. 3 (2004): 264.

91. Susan Bordo,
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
(Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993) ; Naomi Wolf,
Th
e Beauty Myth: How Images of
Beauty Are Used against Women
(New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.,
1991).

92. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English,
For Her Own Good:
150
Years of the
Experts’ Advice to Women
(New York: Anchor Press, 1989) ; Rachel Maines,
Th
e
Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

93. Sharlene Hesse-Biber,
Am I Th
in Enough Yet? Th
e Cult of Th
inness and the
Commercialization of Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

94. Raymond S. Nikerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many
Guises,”
Review of General Psychology
2, no. 2 (1998): 175–220 ; David Hirshliefer,
“The Blind Leading the Blind: Social Influence, Fads and Information Cascades,”
in
Th
e New Economics of Human Behavior
, ed. Mariano Tommasi and Kathryn
Ierulli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 188–215. Theodore D.
Sterling, “Publication Decisions and Their Possible Effects on Inferences Drawn
from Tests of Significance—or Vice Versa,”
Journal of the American Statistical
Association
54, no. 285 (1959), 30–34 ; Jonah Leher, “The Truth Wears Off,”
New
Yorker
, December 13, 2010.

95. Wolf,
Is Breast Best
, 118.

96. For example, Ehrenreich and English,
For Her Own Good
; Maines,
The Technology
of Orgasm
; Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm” 485. Peter L. Berger and Thomas
Luckman,
Th
e Social Construction of Reality
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,
1967) ; Karen Knorr Cetina,
Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

97. Wolf,
Is Breast Best?
xv.

98. Ibid., 64. Beck,
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
; Elizabeth Armstrong,
Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of
Moral Disorder
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) ; Deborah
Lupton,
Th
e Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body
(London:
Sage Publications, 1995).

99. Armstrong,
Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility
.

100. Epstein,
Impure Science
, 13.

101. Linda Bacon,
Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight
(Dallas:
BenBella Books, 2010).

102. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant,
An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press., 1992).

103. Jacqueline Weinstock and Michelle Krehbiel, “Fat Youth as Common Targets for
Bullying,” in
Th
e Fat Studies Reader
, 120–26.

CHAPTER 2

1. Frames are simpler and more internally consistent than
discourses
, which refer to
the sum total of talk produced by an organization, institution, or society at a
given point in time and have a greater diversity of idea elements and more
conflict and more inconsistencies than frames. They are also different from
ide
ologies
, which are complex systems of belief that are more encompassing and
elaborate than frames. Francesca Polletta and M. Kai Ho, “Frames and Their
Consequences,” in
Th
e Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis
, ed. Robert
E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

2
.
David A. Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes, Microbilization, and
Movement Participation,”
American Sociological Review
51, no. 4 (1986):
464–81.

3. Polletta and Ho, “Frames and Their Consequences.”

4. I do not consider that libertarian arguments against government intervention in
“obesity” constitute a fat frame, in that they are affirm the general principal of
small government, rather than staking a particular position on the nature of fat.
One could evoke, however, an “ugly” fat frame, in which fatness is considered a
problem because it is ugly or unfashionable. Indeed, as others have demon
strated, this is a powerful frame that holds considerable sway over the fashion
industry and the minds of many women and girls. This particular frame has been
extensively examined in previous research. This book focuses instead on the
medical and public health frames. On what we could call the ugly framing of fat
ness, see Susan Bordo,
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the
Body
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) ; Naomi Wolf,
Th
e Beauty
Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women
(New York: William Morrow
and Company, Inc., 1991) ; Mimi Nichter,
Fat Talk: What Girls and the Parents Say
about Dieting
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
;
Wendy
Chapkins,
Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance
(Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 1999).

5. Importantly, social and cultural capital can be transformed into economic capital,
for instance via the advantages they provide in competition for employment and
marriage partners. Bourdieu speaks of there being specific “rules of the game”
associated with each field and different forms of capital. For instance, cultural
capital is especially prized and economic capital somewhat suspect in the artistic
field, whereas economic capital is prized in the economic field. To take another
example, having published books that have been translated into other languages
is a valuable form of symbolic capital within the academic field, but would not
provide an advantage (and, in fact, could be a liability) in, say, the field of
professional sports. See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in
Handbook for
Th
eory and Research for the Sociology of Education
, ed. John G. Richardon (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58 ;
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and
Homo Academicus
,
trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

6. Bourdieu,
Homo Academicus
.

7. J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

8.
Forbes
, “The Global 2000,” Forbes.com, http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/18/
biz_07forbes2000_The-Global-2000_Rank.html.

9. Wikinvest, “Weight Watchers International (WTW),” http://www.wikinvest.com/
stock/Weight_Watchers_International_ (WTW).

10. Information obtained from www.guidestar.org.

11.
Forbes
, “The Global 2000.”

12. Jeffery Sobal, “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity,” in
Eating
Agendas
, ed. Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer (New York: Aldine de Gruyter,
1995), 67–90.

13
.
Personal correspondance with ASDAH president Deb Lemire, November 19,
2011.

14. Health at Every Size is a registered trademark of the Association for Size Diversity
and Health and is used with permission.

15. Traci Mann et al., “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are
Not the Answer,”
American Psychologist
62 (2007): 220–33.

16. Loic J. D. Wacquant, “Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour among
Professional Boxers,”
Body & Society
1, no. 65 (1995): 65–93.

17. Ibid. Ashley Mears,
Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model
(Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011) ; for a fascinating discussion of how “fit
models” sell their embodied cultural capital and bodily capital, see Kjerstin Gruys,
“Living Mannequins: How Fit Models Accomplish Aesthetic Labor through Bodily
Capital and Embodied Cultural Capital,” paper presented at the annual meeting of
the American Sociological Association, Denver, CO, August 17, 2012.