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The Harm Inflicted by Polite Concern: Language, Fat, and Stigma

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Abstract

Understanding language as a social action draws attention to the ways in which fat stigmatizing discourses do social harm. Drawing on interviews and experiences situated in Osaka, Japan and north Georgia, US, this paper looks closely at the ways in which fat stigma is expressed across the two sites, both blatantly and through more subtle language use. We identified four key themes in people’s narratives around localized ideas about fatness. These themes are: (1) expressed pity or concern for fat people; (2) reported experiences of indirect stigma in public settings; (3) reported experiences of direct stigma in private settings; and (4) robust and repeated associations between fat and other conditions that had locally relevant negative connotations in each site. We further identify the expressed concern and pity articulated in the first theme as a form of cloaked, “dressed up” stigma and as such, we argue that it enacts social harm, especially when it co-occurs with more blatant forms of stigma. Linguistic niceties around caring actually, at least in these contexts, reify symbolic connections between fat bodies and their social failure.

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Notes

  1. We use this label for two reasons: (1) our participants in north Georgia identified themselves as White; and, (2) this is the predominant term used in the region.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all of the people in Osaka, Japan, and north Georgia who agreed to talk with us about food, fat, body ideals, and negative fat sentiment. We also thank our collaborators Jessica Hardin and Amber Wutich for help in developing the research design including interview protocols for the larger project of which this is a subset.

Funding

This project was made possible through funding we received from the Virginia G Piper Charitable Trust to Mayo Clinic-Arizona State University Obesity Solutions initiative.

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  1. School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 872402, Tempe, AZ, 85287-2402, USA

    Cindi SturtzSreetharan & Alexandra Brewis

  2. Seattle University, 901 12th Ave., Seattle, WA, 98122, USA

    Sarah Trainer

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Correspondence to Cindi SturtzSreetharan.

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This study was approved by the Arizona State University’s Institutional Review Board in Summer 2016 (STUDY0003997). All research activities were performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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SturtzSreetharan, C., Trainer, S. & Brewis, A. The Harm Inflicted by Polite Concern: Language, Fat, and Stigma. Cult Med Psychiatry 46, 683–709 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09742-5

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