The Fat Self in Virtual Communities: Success and Failure in Weight-Loss Blogging

Abstract

Weight and weight loss are major cultural preoccupations in the United States today, and stigma stemming from being socially categorized as fat appears to be steadily worsening. Online spaces and, more specifically, blogs (weblogs) provide a potentially safe and empowering space in which people struggling with weight issues can create new, virtual selves. We report on cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of the narratives of 234 US-based weight-loss bloggers. Using a novel approach to sample online texts systematically through coding of key themes, we identify some ways in which online narratives resist and cope with weight-related forms of social rejection and marginalization. However, apart from a small subsample of explicitly stigma-challenging, fat-accepting blogs, the majority of the narratives painfully document long-term weight-loss failure. Rather than being empowering, virtual performances of weight-loss struggles reflected in online blogs mostly mirror and reinforce larger antifat social tr...