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feminist-theory-blog · 2 years ago

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New Theory- Written Post

Standpoint theory began in Marxist and Hegelian traditions, In which Hegel argued that an oppressed individual or slave can find a state of consciousness freedom through their struggles against the oppressor. This gave rise to the idea that oppression and injustice are better explained from the perspective of the oppressed, rather than the oppressor. Standpoint essentially means perspective, and that is what this theory is centered around. “One has to either live as a member of an oppressed group, or do the necessary work to gain a rich and nuanced understanding of what such life worlds are like, in order to think within that group's standpoint” (Harding, pg. 194).

The basic tenant of this theory is that knowledge stems from social position. Sandra Harding coined the term standpoint theory to label epistemologies that emphasize a woman’s point of view. She argued that academics and those studying oppression and feminism often lose sight of the reality of social hierarchies because they are typically found at the top of them. “Scientific/ epistemological and ethical/political are inseparable in standpoint approaches to research” (Harding, pg. 193). Standpoint theory emphasizes the idea that the personal is political.

Standpoint theory faces a world of critique and criticism. The main critique being that women are automatically given epistemological privileges simply on account of them being women. It is like assuming every woman is a feminist simply because she is a woman. Some other critiques also stem from the assumption that all women face the same oppression and struggles, grouping them up and ignoring the diversity of marginalized groups.

Standpoint theory can be applied to body politics and the body positivity movement, because those in marginalized bodies are at a position to see things that others fail to understand. For example an able bodied individual’s daily experience includes showing up somewhere, walking up the stairs, and continuing their day. Meanwhile, someone in a wheelchair would notice the lack of a ramp or accessible infrastructure, and be forced to turn around and leave. The same is true for fat bodies as well, with many people refusing to listen to their point of view or be able to comprehend their daily struggles. One of my friends lost a lot of weight in their mid 20’s, and we had a discussion about how there were so many differences in how she was treated before and after. After she lost the weight (a result of starting a new medication), she was astounded by how people were suddenly paying attention to her. She was being heard in her grad school classes, people started taking her responses seriously and let her contribute to discussions. Her doctors started listening to her and explored the concerns she would bring to them. Men started asking her out in public rather than in secret. She told me that she thought the way she was treated before was normal, and would only question it occasionally by assuming she was just soft spoken and antisocial.

If you live in a marginalized body, you face daily road bumps and situations where you have to work more than others. Those with physical disabilities have to work twice as hard to have an accessible world. By taking their experiences and perspectives into account, we could begin to have a more comprehensive understanding of what they face. We could then learn what needed to be fixed and start taking steps in that direction. People with marginalized bodies are constantly being told what’s best for them by those who meet the conventional standard. Fat people are told that they lack discipline, and by losing weight they can solve all of their issues. They are told that their selfishness is hurting society. Physically disabled people are told they are receiving special treatment when they acquire accommodations. They are infantilized, treated like children, taken at face value as opposed to being understood.

“Significant causes of that poverty and misery are to be found in the ways that the most powerful social institutions, such as the economy, the law, and health, education, and welfare systems, are administered and managed so as to distribute their benefits primarily to the already socially advantaged and their costs primarily to the already socially disadvantaged. Standpoint research projects are focused on critically examining what's wrong and what's still useful or otherwise valuable in the dominant institutions of society, their cultures and practices” (Harding, pg. 195). Harding states that standpoint theory researches our culture, and seeks to find issues along with value in that culture. Identifying these facets is the first step towards changing the issues and enhancing the benefits.

I would identify standpoint feminism as a theory, because it includes a proposed explanation to how certain freedoms of consciousness are achieved. There is a system of principles that lay out epistemological knowledge in our society, and standpoint feminism defines those as being in an oppressed group. There is a conception of something to be done, and that is to assess the value placed on academic research and contrast that with those who are members of marginalized communities. The goal is to connect epistemology and research with real lived experiences, and that is what standpoint feminism aims to accomplish.

#body positivity movement #feminist analysis #feminism #feminist theory #theory

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feminist-theory-blog · 2 years ago

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Class Theory Written Post

Marxist feminism is a theory that regards classism and capitalism as the fundamental cause of women’s oppression. They argue that this capitalist system has perpetuated the idea that a woman’s body is the site for her labor. They argue that class differences under capitalism divide us like nothing else. I would like to apply this lens to the body positivity movement especially where it pertains to the fat acceptance and anti ableist movements.

There is a trend on Tiktok right now consisting of people out on the street asking strangers their opinion on ‘hot’ topics. For example, asking if blue balls are real, or if they think gay marriage should be legal. I will show one of these videos in another post, but a trend I see a lot is asking people’s opinions about fat bodies, especially fat women. These videos ask men if they would date a fat woman, if they would have sex with a fat woman, if their parents would approve of them being attracted to fat women. The most popular response given to these questions are that fat women are lazy, unproductive, and cannot maintain the ‘active’ lifestyle that they are looking for.

Society views fat bodies as a hindrance, simply because they are not perceived as being meaningful laborers or contributors to society. Men regard fat women as terrible partners because what they understand about fat women is that they cannot be workers. They cannot ‘match’ them in a physical sense. I heard someone having a debate once, about whether being fat was morally acceptable. They ultimately decided no, because fat people need more financial assistance from the government, which means that they did something to themselves that now everybody has to pay for. “Because all commodities are worth exactly the labor necessary to produce them and because workers’ labor power (capacity for work) is a commodity that can be bought and sold, the value of workers’ labor power is exactly the cost of whatever it takes (food, clothing, shelter) to maintain them throughout the workday” (Tong pg. 98) Fat individuals are simply not valued under the limitations of a capitalist society. Fat is not deemed morally acceptable despite the intentions of the individual with the body.

Being able to focus entirely on weight loss or a healthy lifestyle is a privilege. Many individuals and families do not have physical or financial access to nutritious food, nor do they have the time to prioritize calorie deficits or going to the gym daily. Weight loss is a luxury, and thus overweight individuals are seen as lazy, poor, noncontributors to society. ��Alienation is a profoundly fragmenting experience. Things or persons who are or should be connected in some significant way are instead viewed as separate. As Heilbroner saw it, this sense of fragmentation and meaninglessness is particularly strong under capitalism” (Tong, pg. 101). Weight indicates class to many, and the separation grows.

The same is true for disabled individuals, whose bodies are seen as being sub par and unable to contribute to society. People view accommodations as unfair advantages to those with disabilities, again using tax money to aid them. This goes along with the Marxist feminist ideas that a women’s bodies are seen as a site to their labor.

“Some children turn on their mothers, blaming them for everything that goes wrong in their lives: 'I'm a failure because you, my mother, loved me too much/too little’”(pg 115). This quote is in regards to how, in traditional roles, the mother acts as the domestic worker and leads the children and father to team up against the mother. This is due to social capitalistic ideals placed around working, intelligence, and more. There is this phrase on social media, referred to as an ‘almond mom’. An almond mom is known as a mother who keeps the house stocked with little to no food, healthy food at that. These moms eat a handful of almonds for dinner, and claim that they’re full after an appetizer at a restaurant. They refuse dessert and are blamed as the sole reason gen z young adults have eating disorders. The truth is that our mothers were faced with even harder stereotypes and body shaming than we were growing up. The husbands of these almond mothers joke about this with their children, but these husbands also contribute to the expectations that the mother faces. These mothers also definitely contribute to unhealthy relationships with food for their children, especially young daughters. They just don’t realize that they are victims to the same disease. Just like in the marxist example, young daughters are fated to end up like their mothers in the culture they live in. Instead of supporting each other they just end up splitting up into mother vs. father and children.

Overall as a society, I would say that we have decreased the frequency of people judging bodies for morality and character, but it isn't gone. Ask any woman you know or yourself, and find many examples of being reduced to your physical features. I still hear stories and see examples of men who don’t even genuinely regard women as people. People think that sexism is gone because the feminist movement exists, people think that fat phobia or ableism doesn’t exist because of the body positivity movement. Just don’t stop questioning the reality you live in and assessing where things may not be perfectly fixed.

#theory #feminist theory #feminist analysis #body positivity movement #feminism #The Bodyweight of the World

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feminist-theory-blog · 2 years ago

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Video Analysis #2

The video begins with outlining the basic concept of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, specifically his theories of psychosexual development. Freud emphasized the Oedipus complex as the cornerstone of gender development in psychoanalytic thinking. According to Freud, everyone is born with a basic sex drive or instinctual energy called the libido. The libido causes us to go through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. The core phase of infantile sexuality occurred at the phallic stage, when the Oedipus complex occurred. The child seeks pleasure from their genitalia, and sexual orientation and identification with same sex parent occurs. The child will take on the characteristics of their same sex parents to win the favor of their opposite sex parents.

Classic psychoanalytic theory understood feminine development in terms of a lack of something. Females were to remain stuck because they had no penis, and led to a lack in other areas, such as superego development, capacity for sublimation and moral judgment. This supposedly led to narcissism, masochism, and more. Freud thought the only way this Oedipus complex could be resolved in females was by taking on the passive, subordinate role as opposed to trying to make up for what they lack. They would make up the deficiency by replacing the need, having a baby, specifically a son. Otherwise, a woman might develop a masculinity complex and seek to appropriate masculine libido. The other alternative is that she may reject sexuality altogether, leaning into frigidity and inhibition and developing neurosis. “She instead argued that patriarchal culture first forces women to be feminine (passive, masochistic, narcissistic) and then tries to convince women they like being feminine. In this light, women who want what society considers truly valuable—namely, masculine things—will be labeled “sick”” (Tong, pg. 137). There are no positive outcomes to penis envy according to Freud.

Psychoanalytic feminists aimed to look at these topics from a different light. They maintained that gender was more psycho-social rather than biological. The same goes for women’s oppression, that it is rooted in social structures rather than biological explanations. They argue that we need to redefine and alter experiences of early childhood and family relations, as well as linguistic patterns that produce and reinforce masculinity and femininity. They denied the thought that women were biologically, psychically, and morally inferior to men. They addressed political and social factors affecting the development of male and female subjects.

Some early psychoanalytic theories include Horney’s concept of ‘womb envy’ in response to Freud’s penis envy. Womb envy is essentially men’s jealousy of women’s ability to bear children causes them to overcompensate by seeking wealth and status. She refuted the Oedipus complex by saying that children can become jealous of their parents for a variety of reasons that aren’t sexual. Later psychoanalytic theories began to question the traditional family structure where women and mothers were the primary caregiver of children. They placed the mother’s position as the most powerful, enviable, and influential parent, with identification and separation from the mother heavily influencing development of all genders.

Luce Irigaray suggested that female sexuality has been suppressed and prohibited as a forbidden topic. She considered the penis as the only sexual organ of recognized value. Rather than penis envy, women have been socialized to be recognized as defective or lacking. Female sexuality does not fit into male notions of sexuality, and reinforced that women discover autoeroticism and begin self embracing.

“On the one hand, women’s bodies are powerful because they represent the forces of life; on the other hand, women’s bodies are disgusting because they bleed and ooze. Because men’s bodies do not carry as much symbolic baggage as women’s do, men can imagine their own bodies to be largely free of the impurities and problems associated with women’s bodies” (Tong, pg 141). Tong and many other psychoanalytic feminists argue that due to the above reasons, women have been socialized to hate their bodies. They have been socialized to prioritize male sexuality and do whatever must be done to pleasure men.

This feminine socialization leads to “The denigration of the female body as dirty, foul, and sinful causes women to deny their bodily core of self respect, which then deprives women of the ability to reject confidently the negative feelings projected onto their bodies. As a result, many women come to hate their bodies and to punish them in many ways. Bulimia, anorexia, and overeating may at least in part be attributed to women’s “flesh” problems (pg. 141)” Women, being socialized to believe that their flesh is an issue leads them to feel a lack of control, which is known to be one of the factors causing eating disorders.

The combination of control over women’s bodies, women’s socialized oppression, removal of women’s self respect, and language surrounding feminine sexuality leads to body image issues. Negative self image and socialization that men can hold control over women are a combination that has been hard to overcome.

Video analyzed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cqE9wPJ-Os

#body positivity movement #feminism #feminist analysis #feminist theory #theory #The Bodyweight of the World

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feminist-theory-blog · 2 years ago

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Video Analysis

Sofie Ercolino begins her TedTalk by showing an image of a muscular woman and asks the audience to rate how masculine or feminine the image is. She goes into the history of gender image and muscularity ideals in society. She discusses how in the past, being overweight was seen as the ideal body type, as it was a symbol of wealth and power. Over time, society began to erect statues inspired by ancient Greek physique, as well as idealizing soldiers and their body types. Soldiers were viewed as iconic, and months of training left them muscular, the ideal body type. As Christianity came to dominate western culture, they brought with them the idea that society was overall too feminine. The church started athletic programs, encouraging young men to get into fitness and value it in their lives. Their goal was to create a generation of “gentleman barbarians”.

Ercolino claims the connection between the church and athleticism to be the explanation behind male body standards and gender roles. The same association was not made for women, despite the brief rise in frequency of female athletes. In the early 1900’s, there began to be controversy over the effects of an athletic lifestyle on a female reproductive system. They also called into question sexual appeal or feminine ideals. Some individuals opposed this, claiming that female athleticism would lead to a stronger reproductive system, and lead them to produce strong, stalwart sons. More often than not, female athleticism was seen as contrary to heterosexuality. “Weakness of mind and body are important in the reduction and seclusion of white bourgeois women from most domains of life, most areas of human existence. The gender system is heterosexualist, as heterosexuality permeates racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority” (pg 15).

She then shifts perspective to other culture’s body standards for men, starting with East Asia. The media in East Asia has shifted to emphasize ‘soft masculinity’ as the physical ideal for men. Alas, they still idolize petite women, almost to an unhealthy extent. She references an Incan God, who was androgynous in their culture. In Madagascar, boys with feminine appearances were socialized as girls. In Hawaii, kane means man, wahim means woman, and mahu means somewhere in the middle. Through colonization and enforcement of agricultural roles, masculine and feminine roles were invented and perpetuated. “The assumption that Yoruba society included gender as an organizing principle is another case of Western dominance in the documentation and interpretation of the world, one that is facilitated by the West’s global material dominance. She tells us that ‘researchers always find gender when they look for it’” (pg 8). Ercolino outlines our culture's definition of biological sex, and goes on to argue that it is in fact constructed. There are strict biological cues of gender, but many people exist outside of these characteristics, and are still male or female despite them.

In decolonial feminism, theorists argue that colonization was the lead cause of establishing gender roles, just as Ercolino suggested. Colonization led to capitalism, capitalism led to property ownership, establishment of property led to establishing lineage, lineage led to ownership of female bodies and prioritization of reproductive systems. Before colonization, body types and sex characteristics did not necessarily define gender. This is different from the world we live in today, where bodies are viewed as masculine or feminine at first glance. In the past, nationalism around the world led to the iconization of soldiers and their body types. Being muscular was the ideal male body type, and completely unsuitable for women. Now there is a rise of acceptance for ‘feminine’ men and ‘masculine’ women, as the lines get more blurry day by day. “Oyewumi understands gender as introduced by the West as a tool of domination that designates two binarily opposed and hierarchical social categories. Women (the gender term) is not defined through biology, though it is assigned to anafemales. Women are defined in relation to men, the norm. Women are those who do not have a penis; those who do not have power; those who cannot participate in the public arena. None of this was true of Yoruba anafemales prior to colonization” (pg. 9).

SInce colonization, feminine as a concept has included a woman's relation to men. Being understood and seen as a sex symbol has taken priority over most of a woman’s responsibilities surrounding her body. Perhaps fat women or disabled women are not seen as the ideal sex symbols that the women in media appear to be. Does this make them less feminine by definition? If we were to look back at body ideals in societies pre-colonization, what would we find?

We have all seen the upper Paleolithic statue known as a Venus figurine. They tend to emphasize the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, and vulva. The term Venus has been criticized for being a mirror of Western ideals rather than what the original artists had intended, but she was given her name for being a clear sign of security and success. Some argue that they are symbols of fertility or motherhood, based on the enlarged primary and secondary sex characteristics. There are several theories behind the creation of these figurines, one interpretation being that women’s menstrual cycles are aligned with the moon and ocean tides. Another interpretation suggested that the statues were constructed by women looking down, leading to the lack of faces and enlarged characteristics. Either way, they serve as proof of how ideal female body types have changed over the years.

Video analyzed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghq3JoZr9VE

#body positivity movement #feminism #feminist theory #feminist analysis #theory #The Bodyweight of the World

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feminist-theory-blog · 2 years ago

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Blog Checkpoint #3

“How to liberate my true hope? Everything is against me. The first obstacle to my escape is this woman's body barring my way, a voluptuous body with closed eyes, voluntarily blind, stretched out full, ready to perish” (de Beauvoir, pg 15). This quote is from Simone de Beauvoir’s introduction in her book, made popular during the second wave of feminism. It touches upon how our bodies bar ourselves from achieving or feeling what we wish. In the second wave of feminism, women discussed what it truly meant to be a woman. Beauvoir outlines the entire biological process in her book, but she concludes by saying that woman is made and not born. Woman is womb. Woman is sex. She breaks down how women have been socialized, treated and respected in our culture as inferior simply because their bodies came first.

The video I am analyzing is from a french creator, Alice Cappelle. She is having a conversation about body image, gender, and more. The difference here is that most of the issues she touches on are centered on social media. When second wave feminists were discussing the body and the meaning behind it, they obviously did not have social media, which makes today’s discussions slightly different from those in the past. One factor remains the same though, the fact that images come first and inform our minds who we are talking to or interacting with. “However, one might say, in the position I adopt that if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects” (de Beauvoir, pg 68).

Cappelle starts off her video by stating that she has observed a rise in social media of trending skinny body types and promotion of disordered eating. She references the recent Taylor Swift music video, Anti-Hero, that has been receiving controversy for a clip of her standing on a scale that reads ‘fat’. Swift has a history of eating disorders, and pressure from the media to remain a certain size. Cappelle explained that the clip was a way for her to show her struggle with body dysmorphia and self judgment. She then goes into the body positivity movement and outlines how the movement has been outshined by conventionally attractive, able bodied, white women who preach that it is easy to love your body if you just accept it. “They were saying things like ‘love yourself, you can breathe, you can walk’, but I can’t help but think about people who actually maybe struggle to breathe or can't walk, what would they think” (Cappelle, 2023)? She questions the self awareness of women in these spaces, who perhaps cannot comprehend that the movement was not designed for them, and then acknowledges her own white, conventionally attractive body as well. She explains her history with eating disorders, stating that she had everything, a thigh gap, athletic body type, etc, but she was still made to feel like it was not enough through the consumption of social media in the past.

Cappelle wishes to outline how to get over this social media based insecurity, or how to let go of the value it holds altogether. In my opinion, it is incredibly valid for skinny women to deal with their body image issues and find comfort in their skin. But while they have their own image issues, at the end of the day they are still the standard for the ideal desirable body type. Disabled women, women of color, overweight women, trans women and more all live with bodies that are prioritized over themselves. This has almost taken the body positivity movement out of their hands, almost making it unattainable. My other issue with the body positivity movement is that it puts women in the position to look inward as to why they are treated certain ways as opposed to looking outward. Finding clarity and peace with your body is incredibly important for mental health, wellness, and confidence, but after that is accomplished, there is still a society and culture out there who will treat you differently because of how you look. Women are more confident, thanks to this movement, but to achieve this they are told, through social media, to disregard social media and its standards. They are taught to consider how certain media makes them feel about themselves, not why the harmful media was posted in the first place. I think the body positivity movement had/has a lot of potential to be a great uniter for anti-sexist, anti-racist movements, but at the time it seems to have a very surface level approach to these issues. Body politics and desirability politics exist in many radical movements, and while it isn’t a bad thing that this body positivity movement is built on confidence, it can keep people from acknowledging the real reason these issues exist in the first place.

“He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it” (de Beauvoir, pg. 25). Cappelle rounds out the video by discussing gender and gender roles. She is a member of online communities such as Discord where she has seen a trend of people starting to explore gender and desirability politics through body positivity. She states that gender is fun and that gender expression can be a fun way to reject the patriarchy and beauty standards. I agree with her that this movement is healthy for young girls who are existing in a more accepting time than any of the young girls before them. They are being raised to be self confident over self hating, and to value themselves over other opinions. I think if this was the social media I was exposed to at a young age, I could have developed a healthy relationship with my body earlier in life. The whitewashed version of body positivity is flawed, but there are some amazing factors that could be developed through time.

video analyzed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31WJ0uzz8SI

#feminist theory #feminist analysis #feminism #body positivity movement #The Bodyweight of the World

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feminist-theory-blog · 2 years ago

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Blog Checkpoint #2

Body image in the modern century is a tricky subject. Back in the early 2000’s, the media was full of content promoting weight loss, idealizing skinny celebrities. Celebrities were called gross for wearing bikinis when they were slightly more than skin and bones. Jennifer Lawrence was considered plus size representation, as well as whatever size six model Victoria’s Secret has hired for ‘inclusivity’. Every magazine cover had tips and tricks to losing weight fast. Shows like Friends constantly made fat jokes and showed how completely different a character was treated after she lost weight.

Now in the early 2020’s, the body positivity movement has swept the nation. The body positivity movement is focused on the acceptance of all bodies, regardless of different physical characteristics like size, skin tone, physical ability and more. This movement is built on the concept that present-day beauty standards are an undesirable social construct. Just because this has become extremely popular on social media, it does not mean that the issue has been resolved.

On every body positivity post or page I’ve come across, the content was typically made for women by women. We can agree that negative body image and diet culture is mainly harmful to women, but why is that? My simple answer is that women are seen as objects of desire, and for some reason our society has built these standards that deem a person attractive. “Our culture is obsessed with desire: it drives our economy. We come right out and say we’re going to stimulate desire for goods and services, and so we’re bombarded daily with ads and commercial announcements geared to make us desire things” (Bornstein, pg. 40). Bornstein says this in regard to abolishing gender as a system, and how she received pushback on that concept because gender defines desire. I think this third wave approach to feminism and woman as a construct applies to this phenomena. Women who are plus sized are made out to be monsters, they are alienated, neglected, and hidden away by their partners.

Growing up as a plus sized woman and a lesbian, I felt extremely disconnected from femininity. I didn’t feel feminine, as being feminine was to be delicate, light, desirable, constantly working to make myself more desirable. I had a hard time believing people when they expressed desire for me, especially if they were male. Unlike the women surrounding me, I never felt like I was performing my gender, or trying to achieve this femininity that was needed to get into a relationship with a man. I never had any male friendships until college, because they truly never gave me a second look or respected me as somebody worth their friendship. I have since met some amazing men who really do value me as a person despite the knowledge that I would never be attracted to them. Alas, my disconnection from femininity felt wrong compared to my mother, my sister, my friends. I learned how to do makeup following YouTube tutorials, I starved myself for years and was skinny for a period of time, but it was never enough. I just didn’t feel like I was doing enough. Over years of healing I learned that I felt that way because everything ALL women hear throughout their lives is that they are never enough. Once I was able to release those expectations that I felt from the world I lived in, I have been able to truly feel feminine by my own definition.

Part of becoming comfortable in my own skin over the years has developed from my friendships with women as an adult. In college I found myself in a loving friend group of plus size women, queer women, women who shared life experiences with me that I thought nobody understood. “But the need for a recognizable identity, and the need to belong to a group of people within a similar identity-these are driving forces in our culture” (Borstein, pg. 3). This has been found so many times when social change is afoot. Consciousness raising sessions in old feminist days made women and women of color aware that they were never alone in what they were feeling. They learned that the guilt and self hatred they had developed over the years stemmed from a societal issue that was genuinely not their personal fault.

Postmodern feminists reject the idea that women exist in a man’s world on his terms. Women are challenged to write their own narratives in the world instead of following the one prescribed for them. “But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an “imaginary formation” which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived” (Wittig, pg. 247). Our physical characteristics are immediately noted and considered integral to our personalities and morals. These are all characteristics of our social system, as Wittig states above. By acknowledging this social system and its made up rules we can begin to let them go and find autonomous joy and acceptance.

#feminism #feminist theory #feminist analysis #body positivity movement #The Bodyweight of the World

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feminist-theory-blog · 2 years ago

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Blog Checkpoint #1

Topic: Feminist lens on fat-shaming, and how it related to topics such as food deserts, historical dehumanization of certain body types, and related issues.

The Bodyweight of the World

Fat shaming and body positivity is a trending topic on social media in recent years. There are multiple approaches to exploring how existing in a larger body results in social, medical, and financial issues. The moral character of overweight individuals is put into question, especially overweight women. Shame is an issue that women have been struggling with in regards to their relationship to the people around them. Weight has been framed as a control issue, those with more weight are seen as lacking the control and judgment to protect their own health. Parents with overweight children are seen as irresponsible and neglectful. The truth is that in most low income communities, foods with little nutrition are sometimes the only affordable and available option. Losing weight and maintaining 'health' is an expensive endeavor, and many people don't have the resources to allot it into their lives. This losing game breeds self hatred and shame, that extends into the psyche of many. The mental health consequences of existing in a fat body generally outweigh the physical health effects, as recent studies have shown that weight doesn't necessarily indicate healthiness. People are turned away by doctors every day, told that their weight is the root of any issue and refusing to diagnose the underlying issue. This ignorance is only worse when that patient is a woman, and worse when she is a woman of color. Weight has been found to make a woman (especially a Black woman) more likely to be targeted by police on account of being seen as irresponsible and threatening. Performative gender roles make this into an issue that harms more women than men, as people yet again fail to look past the cover of the book.

#feminism #body positivity movement #The Bodyweight of the World

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