Abstract
Obesity is a highly stigmatized category. Rather than focus on a taken-for-granted understanding of stigma, this chapter explores how the embodied effects of stigma—of shame and pride—shift in bodies according to different contexts, situations, and historical circumstances. Key to this analysis is the ways in which shame is shaped by class. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Probyn (Blush: Faces of shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Tyler (The Sociological Review, 63(2), 493–511, 2015), we point to the multiplicity of de-stigmatizing strategies, and how shame and pride operate to produce creative strategies of “living poor” and distancing oneself from representations of fatness.
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly, several studies point to different strategies to diminish the stigmatizing impacts of the language of obesity. Vartanian (2010), for example, suggests that using the word fat, rather than obese, results in less stigma. Thomas et al. (2008) also found that people who are overweight or obese prefer the word fat.
- 2.
Megan Carney (2015) makes a similar observation in her ethnographic work on chronic food insecurity among migrant Mexican and Central American women living in Southern California. Participants in her study described “making do” practices, where food and other necessities were limited, rationed, and economized (2015, pp. 169–173).
- 3.
Jack Monroe comes from an English working-class background and found herself unemployed with £10 a week to feed herself and her young son following the global financial crisis and welfare cutbacks. She set about to tackle her own food insecurity , cobbling together ingredients in her tiny kitchen and posting her “austerity recipes” on a blog. She soon became a well-known figure, writing cookbooks (Cooking on a Bootstrap, 2018), doing media interviews, and advocating for the rights of people living in poverty. In effect, the “girl called Jack” became the voice of resistance and the face of resilience in austerity Britain.
- 4.
Dole bludger is Australian slang for someone who would rather receive welfare than work. It is a derogatory term replete with negative moral judgments.
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Warin, M., Zivkovic, T. (2019). Shades of Shame and Pride. In: Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01009-6_7
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