Free What's Wrong With Fat? by Abigail C. Saguy Page A

looks at what people and societies make of this reality.” 35 The publication of The Fat Studies Reader in 2009 was an important watershed in the establishment of this new field. Five years earlier, Wann founded the fat studies list server and invited about 50 researchers working on weight-related topics (including me) to join. Wann already knew many activists doing work on this topic, thanks to the many talks she had been giving on college campuses for about eight years. The list membership grew over time so that, as of August 20, 2012, it had 674 members, including a mix of scholars, activists, and activist-scholars. Since then, there has been a proliferation of fat studies panels at national and regional conferences of various academic associations.
    In contrast to work by scholars and clinicians that takes a health at every size approach and thus challenges obesity researchers on their own terms, fat studies as a field seeks to change the terms of the debate by placing social inequality and fat subjectivity—rather than health risk—at the heart of the analysis. Given the focus on fat subjectivity, as an important object of fat studies scholarship, being fat oneself is potentially a source of authority, rather than discrediting within this new area of study. 36 Stated differently, while devalued in the fat field as a whole, fatness is a valued form of bodily capital within this specific part of the fat field. 37
    More generally, this speaks to the way in which the internal logic of particular problem frames has independent consequences for what kinds of claims and claimants are credible. To fully understand this point, we must carefully examine the distinct logic of each of these frames. These six frames—immorality, medical, public health crisis, health at every size, beauty, and fat rights—are ideal types. In other words, actual claims about body weight often mix two or more of these frames, as we will examine at the end of this chapter. By understanding the internal logic of each of these frames, however, one sees how debates over obesity/fatness are best understood as encounters between different ways of understanding fatness.
    IMMORALITY FRAME
    According to what I call an immorality frame, fat is condemned as evidence of sloth and gluttony. The problem is seen as a moral one, requiring a moral remedy: namely, greater self-restraint and faith in God. The master frame is that of sin. Fatness is thus likened to other sins, such as sexual immorality. According to some accounts, the belief that fat was a sign of immorality began to spread in the late-nineteenth-century United States, firmly taking hold by the beginning of the twentieth century. 38 This represented a break from earlier periods and other places in which corpulence was appreciated as a sign of beauty and high social status. Some historians contend that this shift was largely driven by economic change. Namely, the agricultural and industrial revolutions had reduced food shortages so that fatness was no longer a reliable sign of wealth. As the poor got fatter, which they did at first in part to emulate the rich, the symbolic meaning of body size flipped, and fat came to signal low social status. As heft became a marker for lower prestige and status, people with greater resources had more ability and motivation to avoid the stigma of corpulence. 39
    According to other accounts, while corpulence was a valued aesthetic in Europe into the late nineteenth century, thinness (at least in women) has been associated with self-control and whiteness since early in U.S. history. In this national context, fatness has long been associated with lack of control, immorality, barbarity, and blackness. According to a recent historical study, fatness was temporarily fashionable in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the influence of wealthy female German immigrants, who championed a fleshy aesthetic to the American elite. However, it quickly fell out of fashion due to its