Fat In Women Research Articles

Oprah and Ozempic: a commentary on Oprah Winfrey’s “shame, blame and the weight loss revolution”

ABSTRACT In this essay, we examine Oprah Winfrey's body as a site of cultural negotiation of body positivity, fat acceptance and the thin ideal. We analyze the intersection of race, body size, and media representation, focusing on how Oprah, as a black woman celebrity, navigates societal pressures related to body image. The rise of accessible weight loss medications ushers in a resurgence of the thin ideal, complicating the discourse around weight loss and body neutrality. Using fat studies and black feminist theories, we examine how Oprah's celebrity status is entangled with the acceptability of fat women, black women, and fat black women. By Analyzing Oprah's special “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,” we demonstrate that Oprah's language embraces body positivity yet, the framing of the show symbolically annihilates those who are content with their large bodies. The special's focus on weight loss, coupled with the absence of positive portrayals of fat bodies, underscores a broader pattern of symbolic annihilation. Hence, we explore the converging pressures of Oprah's celebrity, desire for thinness, and attempt to represent multiple viewpoints about the weight loss “revolution.”

BMI Is Bunk, but Fat Women Are Diseased: The Hypocrisy of “The Normal (White) Man”

“Obesity”, is defined as a body mass index (BMI) ≥ 30. Yet the tool, BMI, has been shown to be flawed in its weight classing. BMI categories were made by relying nearly exclusively on data about middle-class white males, creating “the normal (white) man”. Yet, BMI continues to be used as a diagnostic tool, and is increasingly deployed to stigmatize fat persons as “diseased”. This has critical implications for women—especially Black women and Latinas—who have some of the highest BMIs in the country. But, despite the consternation over the size of the bodies women of color have, there are nearly no studies to date examining the relationship between BMI and rates of chronic illness by race and gender. In this study, we examined the associations between BMI and type 2 diabetes (T2D) for women across race in comparison to white men. Relying on 20 years of NHANES data, we found that while Latinas and Black women were nearly 3 times and over 5 times as likely to have T2D than white men, respectively, the association between BMI and T2D was significantly weaker for Latinas than for white men. The association between BMI and T2D was markedly weaker for Black women. This study shows that racial and gendered health disparities cannot be explained by differences in rates of “obesity” as defined by a white male norm.

Performance enhancement of machine learning algorithm for breast cancer diagnosis using hyperparameter optimization

Breast cancer is the most fatal women’s cancer, and accurate diagnosis of this disease in the initial phase is crucial to abate death rates worldwide. The demand for computer-aided disease diagnosis technologies in healthcare is growing significantly to assist physicians in ensuring the effectual treatment of critical diseases. The vital purpose of this study is to analyze and evaluate the classification efficiency of several machine learning algorithms with hyperparameter optimization techniques using grid search and random search to reveal an efficient breast cancer diagnosis approach. Choosing the optimal combination of hyperparameters using hyperparameter optimization for machine learning models has a straight influence on the performance of models. According to the findings of several evaluation studies, the k-nearest neighbor is addressed in this study for effective diagnosis of breast cancer, which got a 100.00% recall value with hyperparameters found utilizing grid search. k-nearest neighbor, logistic regression, and multilayer perceptron obtained 99.42% accuracy after utilizing hyperparameter optimization. All machine learning models showed higher efficiency in breast cancer diagnosis with grid search-based hyperparameter optimization except for XGBoost. Therefore, the evaluation outcomes strongly validate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed technique for breast cancer diagnosis.

"Whatever I said didn't register with her": medical fatphobia and interactional and relational disconnect in healthcare encounters.

This article focuses on medical fatphobia as a specific phenomenon structuring interactions between patients and healthcare practitioners. Throughout the article, we use 'fat' and 'fatphobia' as the preferred terms in the body positivity and fat acceptance communities. It is well documented that 'fat' people frequently experience negative and highly stigmatising healthcare encounters where weight is disproportionately centred and over-attributed as a cause of ill-health. This can compound and worsen disordered eating, trigger mental health problems, and lead to healthcare avoidance. Although the regularity and risks of these weight-focused encounters are well established, there does not yet exist a coherent theoretical framework for understanding such discriminatory practises. In this article, we draw on the experiences of 15 fat women who are members of the Health at Every Size (HAES) online community to explore how they perceive their fatness impacting medical encounters. Through these data and specifically drawing on the framework of 'cultural health capital,' we suggest that given the deep purchase of cultural tropes surrounding it, fatness is perceived to embody and therefore confer on patients' assumptions of low cultural health capital. We argue that ubiquitously characteristic of medical fatphobia is what we call an 'interactional and relational disconnect' between fat patients and healthcare practitioners. We suggest that this disconnect structures fatphobic interactions by over-attributing fatness as the underlying cause of medical problems, which entrenches patient and practitioner ambivalence because of a lack of joint decision-making. We argue that interactional and relational disconnect is produced by, sustained by, and reproduces asymmetric power relations between patients and practitioners. While we demonstrate that patients develop tactics to mitigate and manage fatphobia in healthcare encounters, the persistent interactional asymmetry between doctors and patients means these attempts often fail. We conclude with a plea for sociology to take medical fatphobia seriously as a form of intersectional systemic discrimination. While movements like HAES, fat positivity, and body acceptance create kinship and support fat patients with self-advocacy in healthcare interactions, we suggest that systemic rather than individual change is necessary for effective healthcare inclusion and interaction.

What if Black Studies studied fat for real for real?

ABSTRACT Only four years after Black Studies departments began to form in the US, Johnnie Tillmon, then Chairwoman of the National Welfare Rights Organization, proclaimed in her 1972 article in Ms. magazine that her marginalized intersectional identities – woman, Black, poor, fat, middle-aged, and on welfare – gave her little to no value in the American imaginary. How, in the midst of establishing departments for the study of Black life, could Tillmon’s Black fat life not be studied as well? Cathy Cohen (1999) asserts that welfare reform, like women’s rights and HIV/AIDS, are “cross-cutting issues” that complicate “respectable,” singularized notions of group identity. Black Studies departments have long aligned with this “secondary marginalization,” and Black feminists have stepped in and fought to obtain epistemological space for Black women and femmes. However, there was a missed opportunity to connect Tillmon’s embodiment with the social justice work being done to establish Black Studies. Fat Black women, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, had been on the front lines, but their embodied experiences had no seats in the front of the Black liberation bus. Because of this disconnect, I posit that Black Studies’ secondary marginalization of fat Black women leaves a noticeable gap in its disciplinary project. I argue that Black Studies as a field must 1) engage with Fat Studies via a social justice commitment to disrupt Black fat women from being rendered hyper-visible as service-workers and hyper-invisible as decision-makers, and 2) utilize body size as an analytical category to gain more nuanced and deeper understandings of Black life.

The nuances of sizing for stouts in the early twentieth century

Mass manufactured garments for women have been around since the beginning of the twentieth century. With mass production, a ‘standardization’ of sizing was needed. Standardization of clothing was difficult as bodies were (and still today) not statistically proportionate and clothing was not one size fits all. To tackle the ‘difficult’ to fit – fat women, known as stout – manufacturers and retailers devised myriad sized numbering systems to accommodate different shaped fat bodies. They introduced half, odd and extra sizes along with stylish, stubby and old-fashioned stouts to create perfectly proportioned and specially designed garments to fit stout women with little to no alterations. These systems were confusing for consumers, retailers and manufacturers as no sizing system corresponded with any sort of standardization among businesses. This frustration further relegated fat women to the fringes of the apparel industry as undesirable and unfashionable.

A Study of Effectiveness of Calf Stretching in Managing Catastrophizing Pain in Plantar Fasciitis

Background: Calcaneus distress is a frequent moan in the trotter and talus , and plantar fasciosis , which accountsfor 11–15% of adult patients’ symptoms of the foot need medical attention. One in ten people are predicted to getPF at some point in their lives. It is further prevalent in mid-life fat women and adolescent athletes. The desire ofthis project is to evaluate the success of calf stretching by theraband among plantar fasciitis patients.Purpose: To determine the effects of calf stretching using theraband on managing pain among plantar fasciitispatientsMaterials and Methods: Fifty eight people were covered for addition and prohibition. They were splitted into twogroups: passive calf stretching group (29) and self-calf stretching group (29). The pre and post-test values weremeasured by pain catastrophizing scale. Group-A received passive calf stretching using theraband and group-Breceived self-calf stretching. Both programs were given for 2 weeks, weekly 5 days.Result: Using pain catastrophizing scale, Group A’s (Passive calf stretching group) post-test mean was 27.38and whereas group B’s (Self calf stretching) was 32.24. This demonstrates that group-A has decreased paincatastrophizing score less than group-B. And this suggests that group A showed considerably finer than group B.Conclusion: Passive calf stretching using theraband by group-A was found to be more effective than self-calfstretching of group-B.

Waist Circumference as a Tool for Identifying Visceral Fat in Women with Non-Metastatic Breast Cancer

Abdominal adiposity is associated with tumor development and poor clinical outcomes in breast cancer (BC) and can be identified by the measurement of waist circumference (WC) and visceral adipose tissue (VAT). This study aimed to evaluate the association between waist circumference (WC) and imaging measurement of central adiposity according to age group in women with BC. Abdominal adiposity was assessed by WC and VAT, obtained by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Body mass index (BMI) was assessed. The presence of inflammation was investigated by measuring C-Reactive Protein (CRP) levels. Multivariate linear regression models were applied to verify the association between WC and VAT. The significance level adopted for all tests was 5%. This study included 112 women with a mean age of 55.5 ± 11.4 years. After adjusted models, WC remained associated with VAT and for every centimeter increase in WC, there was an increase of 3.12 cm2 (CI: 2.40 − 3.85; p < 0.001) in VAT. WC was associated with VAT in women with breast cancer, proving to be a simple, fast, and noninvasive approach that can be used as a proxy to identify visceral fat.

Oh my God, that pool party: Shrill and fat femininity in a postfeminist media culture

ABSTRACT The Hulu original comedy Shrill is a communicative text for understanding fat women’s subjectivity in line with discourses of neoliberalism and postfeminism. Based on interviews with twenty-five women who watch the series, I argue that Shrill offers an avenue through which audiences reckon with expectations of the female body and celebrate resistance to those expectations; in a media landscape that has routinely erased fat women completely or made their bodies a site of comic relief, Shrill engages with rhetorics of body positivity and self-acceptance. While it pushes back against neoliberal, postfeminist discourses of the disciplined female subject, it simultaneously reifies notions of the “right” kind of fat femininity, one that is marked by class (middle- to upper-class) and race (white).

An analysis of discriminatory actions found in 200 Pounds Beauty movie

This study aims to find the discriminatory actions in the 200 Pounds Beauty Movie. 200 Pounds Beauty is a 2006 film. This film tells the story of a fat woman named Hanna who wants to become a famous singer. However, because of her plump body, Hanna receives discriminatory treatment from other characters. Discrimination is the unfair treatment of a person or group of people who have differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and others. Therefore, the authors chose the film 200 Pounds Beauty to analyze the discriminatory treatment received by Hanna’s character. To be able to conduct research, the author uses a structural approach method. Then, the researchers collect data using the library research method and present the data collected in a sentence and pictures. From the research that has been done on the film 200 Pounds Beauty, it can be said that many of the acts of discrimination are accepted by Hanna’s character. Each discrimination that has been carried out has a different effect. The authors suggest that future researchers analyze discrimination more deeply.

(Re)presenting The Big Grrrls

ABSTRACT Watch Out For The Big Grrrls, Lizzo’s successful extension into reality television content, showcases the rhetorical power of fat-flaunting. This close textual analysis of the series finds that Lizzo enacts emancipatory rhetoric to impart her method of strategic fat-flaunting to aspiring fat women dancers. Self-love and vulnerability emerge as critical elements required for delivering the hopeful Big Grrrls from the burdens of fat-hate and maintaining Lizzo’s buoyancy above her critics.

How a woman ‘did her utmost’ to ensure Dombrovsky’s imprisonment. Based on evidence in the 1949 criminal case file

Researchers and memoirists have for some time been focusing on Y. Dombrovsky’s fourth criminal proceedings (1949). Their peculiar appeal lies in a fatal woman’s involvement. Among the writer’s friends and acquaintances who testified during the proceedings, there is a record of one Irina Strelkova. Years later she would be condemned as a female Judas. Accounts would emerge insisting that it was her testimony that sealed Dombrovsky’s fate, featuring prominently in the prosecution’s case and bringing about his ten-year prison camp sentence. The accusers rely on Dombrovsky’s letter published soon after his death that talks of Strelkova and her enthusiasm during the investigation — in short, her eagerness to bury him. The article attempts to get to the bottom of these accusations and, should they prove false, discover the reason for this vilification. In order to do so, I. Duardovich scours the case file, uncovering previously unpublished and uncommented materials, thus making it the first comprehensive study of the proceedings.

A reflexive thematic analysis of #WhatIEatInADay on TikTok

Eating-related content is common on TikTok, a popular video-based social media platform, but studies of eating-related content on TikTok are limited. Given the documented association between social media use and disordered eating, investigation of eating-related content on TikTok is needed. One subset of popular eating-related content is “What I Eat in a Day” (#WhatIEatInADay), in which a creator documents the food they eat over the assumed span of a single day. We sought to evaluate the content of TikTok #WhatIEatInADay videos (N = 100) using reflexive thematic analysis. Two primary types of videos emerged. First, Lifestyle videos (N = 60), which included aesthetic elements, presentations of clean eating, stylized meals, promotion of weight loss and the thin ideal, normalization of eating as a fat woman, and disordered eating content. Second, Eating Only videos (N = 40), which were primarily focused on food, and included upbeat music, an emphasis on highly palatable foods, displays of irony, emojis, and excessive consumption of food. Because viewing eating-related social media content has been associated with disordered eating, both types of TikTok #WhatIEatInADay videos may be harmful to vulnerable youth. Given the popularity of TikTok and #WhatIEatinADay, clinicians and researchers should consider the potential impact of this trend. Future research should examine the impact of viewing TikTok #WhatIEatInADay videos on disordered eating risk factors and behaviors.

Embodied ambivalence in Taiwan: fat women and gender minorities’ negotiation and subversion of their hyper(in)visibility

ABSTRACT Based upon Jeannine Gailey’s concept of ‘hyper(in)visibility’ of fat women (2014), this article has two goals: (a) to analyse Taiwanese self-identifying fat women and gender minorities’ management and negotiation of their (in)visibility; and (b) to examine the local appropriation of the important international feminist movement that is fat activism in a non-Euro-American context. Drawing upon in-depth conversations with Taiwanese women, fat activists, and gender minorities who self-identify as fat, the findings reveal that they embody a paradoxical hyper(in)visibility. Given their large body size, fat women and gender minorities are hypervisible and their bodies are dissected publicly and privately, while at the same time their corpulent bodies are marginalized and overlooked. Moreover, since the most important criterion determining whether a Taiwanese woman is considered beautiful is thinness, the beauty cult also means a fat-phobic culture within which participants suffer from a dehumanizing gaze. As a result, some fat women choose to enact docile and cute femininity by embodying the figure of a ‘marshmallow girl’, while activists subvert gender and body-size norms and fight for fat acceptance and body diversity. Some activists try to reverse and queer the fat-shaming and abject representational codes and embody fat euphoria momentums.

The Cuban Vote by Carmen Pelaez (review)

Reviewed by: The Cuban Vote by Carmen Pelaez Horacio Sierra THE CUBAN VOTE. By Carmen Pelaez. Directed by Loretta Greco. Colony Theater, Miami New Drama, Miami Beach. April 22, 2022. Carmen Pelaez’s The Cuban Vote demonstrated just how vital regional theatre is and how well it is able to reflect the realities of local communities and the sociopolitical discourses they sustain. Inspired in equal measure by the international attention Miami’s Cuban American community garners every election cycle, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and the snappy writing of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, Pelaez’s play buzzed with urgent energy and left the audience pealing with laughter at jokes that lampooned the three-ring circus that is Miami’s political scene. But just as the retort “Fidel Castro is dead”—delivered deadpan by the play’s main character, Carolina Clarens (Carmen Pelaez) when she was being interviewed by a right-wing, Spanish-language radio host—sent shudders through the audience, The Cuban Vote takes everyone to task for the political mayhem of the last twenty years. Liberals, conservatives, candidates, political consultants, mainstream media, social media, naïve Cuban Americans nostalgic for pre-Castro community, cynical Cuban Americans who are “over the whole Castro thing,” and every disengaged Miamian in between are all held to account. Carolina is an intelligent and wonky candidate for mayor of Miami-Dade county. Despite having managed the office of a former mayor, who also happens to have been her father, Carolina is faltering in the polls. With a skeleton crew consisting of her seen-it-all mother, Ofelia (Evelyn Perez), and social media influencer sister, Blanca (Marcela Paguaga), the campaign needs help. Blanca’s boyfriend, the obnoxiously charming bitcoin bro Benji Carbonell (Kristian Bikic), is eager to wed Blanca. But Blanca [End Page 87] has informed Benji that her mother won’t consent to the marriage until Carolina is elected mayor. Benji calls in a favor from a Miami native, Alex Mesa (Andhy Mendez), who has made a name for himself in Washington, DC as a slick political consultant. Benji pays Alex’s salary to ensure Carolina wins her campaign and Benji can marry Blanca. After Alex convinces another formidable candidate not to enter the race, he realizes how unlikable Carolina is. To offer voters a clear contrast between Carolina’s governing prowess and the clueless schmucks who usually dominate Miami’s political scene, he recruits a drunk viejo sitting at a bar, the scene-stealing Gilberto Ruiz (Jonathan Nichols-Navarro), to run for office. Gilberto—a character clearly inspired by the Christopher Sly lark at the beginning of Taming of the Shrew—believes he has what it takes to be mayor. The play soon amps up the didacticism as it serves up a cautionary tale with which we are all too familiar: experience, merit, and know-how are often overshadowed by superficial showmanship. Especially in a city as flashy as Miami. Click for larger view View full resolution Andhy Mendez (Alex Mesa), Carmen Pelaez (Carolina Clarens), and Kristian Bikic (Benji Carbonell) in The Cuban Vote. Photo: Stian Roenning. Pelaez’s keen appreciation for the local vernacular of Miami’s Cuban American community not only makes for great jokes, it also underscores regional theatre’s ability to offer representation to communities that are often excluded from Broadway and from canonical theatre that is deemed to be representative of the American experience. As The Cuban Vote makes clear, political machinations, ambitious individuals, and falling in love, may be universal, but the way in which these themes are expressed have more power when the audience feels a visceral connection to them. For example, a popular meme riffs on how Hispanic communities will take someone’s insecurity (big nose, skinny, red-headed) and make it a loving nickname (narizón, flaco, peliroja, respectively). The double-edged sword of such nicknames is on display in The Cuban Vote when Gilberto continually disparages Carolina by calling her “la gorda” (the fat woman) during interviews. In response to a debate question about climate change and rising sea levels, Gilberto’s anti-intellectualism is subsumed by his callousness: “Let the seas rise. I float! [To Carolina] Especially...

“She Didn’t Think Fat Women Deserved to Have Children”: Memorable Messages From Healthcare Providers in the Context of Fat Pregnancy

Infertility is physically, emotionally, psychologically, financially, and socially challenging. For people in larger bodies, infertility challenges are intensified as providers often blame them for their inability to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term. Using a memorable messages framework, we examined messages that fat women (N = 69) with an infertility diagnosis received while trying to conceive, pregnant, and in the postpartum period. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we found three core messages that fat women received from providers: (a) body size is a primary reason for infertility, (b) weight loss will lead to a successful pregnancy, and (c) denial of care.

Body Size on Cinema: A Critical Discourse Analysis on Contemporary Indonesian Cinema

This article discusses how a fat body in a film is used as a metaphor for a deviant, dangerous, and irresponsible personality through the various narratives occupied by the characters in the film. This research is qualitative research with the main data source is Imperfect film released in 2020. The approach used is a combination of film studies and Sara Mills' critical discourse analysis. The results of the study show that although Imperfect promotes gender equality in society, the narrative that is built still position fat bodies and black skin as non-ideal, especially for woman. Furthermore, Imperfect film positions fat women as a subculture group that struggles as well as agents of change. In conclusion, this study provides an understanding of how the cinematic discourse on size and weight in the context of the structure of the wider community is related to gender issues and films as popular media still have not placed a positive side on weight and skin color, especially in Indonesian society.

Les héroïnes (fatales) brésiliennes : archétypes et métamorphoses

"This work proposes to observe the appropriation of the myth of the femme fatale, the great guiding myth of French decadence and its system of symbols in the Brazilian imaginary. Three Brazilian heroines, which fall under the theme of fatality in women, constitute the main corpus of this research: the oblique Capitu, the heroine of Machado de Assis in the novel Dom Casmurro (1900); Gabriela, la mulâtresse de Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958) by Jorge Amado, and Hilda Furacão, the prostitute from the homonymous novel by Roberto Drummond (1991). The echoes of the myth allow us to see that these heroines are fatal women par excellence, their figures moving within an evolving patriarchal society in Brazil."

“Completion of a Circle”: Female Process of Self-Realization and Individuation in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride and “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth”

In The Robber Bride and its sequel, “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth,” Margaret Atwood underscores the complex feminine identity through the femme fatale, who is depicted using mythic Gothic figures, such as the vampire. Atwood contradicts socially-sanctioned roles for women. She shapes newer and more complete social and personal female identities, questioning how inadequately the patriarchal system represents their multiplicity. The author describes how the protagonists challenge the patriarchal definition of the feminine Self on their Jungian journey towards individuation, for which the fatal woman, as the Shadow Self, acts as a catalyst.

Running as a way fat women re-story their bodies and construct a runner identity in a North American sociocultural context

AimThis research sought to identify the process by which women who identify as fat or as not having a typical athletic body construct an athletic identity and persist in their running and other athletic endeavors despite body size-related barriers. MethodsFrom an online recruitment effort, 19 North American women runners in larger bodies completed interviews in which they told the story of how they had become runners. A narrative analysis with a feminist, constructivist approach was conducted to identify story types. ResultsFour narrative types were identified: reclaiming the body, reclaiming health, space-making, and future-imagining. Through finding a size- and pace-inclusive running community, running persistently, and completing races, women relinquished the stories they’d believed that their bodies were not athletic since childhood and constructed an identity of runner in a fat body. ConclusionsThese women’s engagement in running is a personal form of resistance against those who define athletic and healthy as “thin” or “fit.” They have found a welcoming athletic community and have moved on to leadership where they are working to make running accessible to other women in bodies like theirs. Those reading these narratives should consider ways in which fat bodies have been excluded from athletics, as well as ways to support the work being done by women runners in fat bodies to redefine health and athleticism.