‘Your fatty bum is really ugly!’ Gender, fat-shaming, and beauty-related tensions in contemporary Taiwanese families

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Taiwan, traditional expectations about female appearance combined with a rising capitalization of women’s physical attractiveness generate tensions between parents, especially mothers, and their daughters. In this article, I explore the expanding and multifarious forms and causes of fat-shaming and beauty-related conflicts within contemporary Taiwanese families, focusing on couple disputes, generational collisions between mothers and daughters, and other types of friction within kinship. Relying on 62 in-depth interviews with highly educated women, findings reveal that, while beauty and its related aspect, thinness, are seen by many women and parents as a determinant of embodied human capital for women, different attitudes toward female beauty result in various forms of interpersonal conflicts. For the sake of children’s future competitiveness and under the social pressure of ‘saving face,’ it is often mothers who introduce appearance dissatisfaction, thus the family becomes the first place where fat-related bullying takes place. Mothers often encourage and even impose on their daughter’s intense bodily discipline, and some of the resulting problematic inducements – particularly forceful behaviours based upon fat-shaming – generate disputes and emotional shocks. This finding illustrates that women’s struggle for body autonomy is often compromised by their relational selfhood, material considerations, and heavy social norms concerning female appearance.