Becoming “the fat girl”: Acquisition of an unfit identity
By Carla M. Rice. 2007
147 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Synopsis This article offers a feminist post-structuralist theory of fat based on body narratives of diverse women who recount becoming the “fat girl” within a Canadian context. Through examining cultural messages concerning fatness and fitness conveyed to contributors in childhood, it analyzes intersections of personal body histories with broader social histories. The article documents how devaluing perceptions of fat frame participants as “unfit” and how disparaging attributions of size interwoven with other differences disqualify their gender. Size stereotypes surface throughout accounts as a key contributor to women's eating and exercise practices that crystallize in their greater susceptibility to engage in problem eating and avoid activity. A difficult double bind also is created through persistent negative perceptions that obstruct participants' efforts at establishing credible feminine or tomboy identities. While anti-fat messages compromise their physical abilities and identity choices, women show creativity at self-making, mediating differences with improvisational identities as a constant and dynamic process.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Gender Studies, Pharmacy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/907a168c45da64d88c23414c74770df26c8df8be
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Gender Studies
In Pharmacy
Citations in the corpus
- Unbearable Lessons: Contesting Fat Phobia in Physical Education (2008, background): “Feminist scholarship (cf. Rice, 2006, 2007; Schoenfielder & Wieser, 1983), however, along with Gard and Wright’s (2005) feminist-influenced contribution to health and exercise studies, The Obesity Epidemic, question this medicalized solipsism between fat and unhealth by uprooting its scientific…”
- The body made flesh: embodied learning and the corporeal device (2009, background): “In particular, work by researchers (for example, Gard and Wright 2005; Larkin and Rice 2005; Rice 2007; Wright and Harwood 2009) critical of much mainstream and official literature on obesity has valuably illustrated how contemporary health discourse around weight, shape and size presages unpreceden”