Fat Talk and Thin Ideals: Culture, Social Norms and Weight

FYSEMR 71X Subject & Catalog Number

Description

In 1995, the Fiji Islands were one of the last places on the planet to receive broadcast television. Within just three years, body weight ideals had transformed from large to thin and purging had become as common in Fijian high school girls as in their Massachusetts counterparts. How can we understand what happened in Fiji? And, likewise, how did heaviness in the U.S. migrate from signifying prestige to stigmatizing? 

In this seminar, we will examine the bio-social dimensions of disordered eating and being overweight as well as the volatility of weight ideals and their enduring moral salience. We will draw from anthropological and clinical perspectives to explore the rapidly shifting landscape of body shape ideals in the U.S. over the last century, the arrival of eating disorders in the Global South, the medicalization of obesity, and the emergence of pervasive weight stigma—as manifest in ‘fat shaming’ and even in policy interventions that have had unintended consequences. We will ask what the social structural determinants of obesity are, as well as how social adversities relating to the built environment, toxic food environment, climate change, and food deserts are embodied. 

We will examine variation in how the body is cultivated for self-presentation across diverse cultural contexts alongside evidence that the media have accelerated the globalization of thin ideals. We will conclude by considering both emerging threats inherent to pervasive social media platforms and digital photoshopping as well as potential opportunities to reset social norms through social movements and policy.