Abigail C. Saguy

Weighing both sides: morality, mortality, and framing contests over obesity.

Despite recent and growing media attention surrounding obesity in the United States, the so-called obesity epidemic remains a highly contested scientific and social fact. This article examines the contemporary obesity debate through systematic examination of the claims and claimants involved in the controversy. We argue that four primary groups-antiobesity researchers, antiobesity activists, fat acceptance researchers, and fat acceptance activists-are at the forefront of this controversy and that these groups are fundamentally engaged in framing contests over the nature and consequences of excess body weight. While members of the fat acceptance groups embrace a body diversity frame, presenting fatness as a natural and largely inevitable form of diversity, members of the antiobesity camp frame higher weights as risky behavior akin to smoking, implying that body weight is under personal control and that people have a moral and medical responsibility to manage their weight. Both groups sometimes frame obesity as an illness, which limits blame by suggesting that weight is biologically or genetically determined but simultaneously stigmatizes fat bodies as diseased. While the antiobesity camp frames obesity as an epidemic to increase public attention, fat acceptance activists argue that concern over obesity is distracting attention from a host of more important health issues for fat Americans. We examine the strategies claimants use to establish their own credibility or discredit their opponents, and explain how the fat acceptance movement has exploited structural opportunities and cultural resources created by AIDS activism and feminism to wield some influence over U.S. public health approaches. We conclude that notions of morality play a central role in the controversy over obesity, as in many medical disputes, and illustrate how medical arguments about body weight can be used to stymie rights claims and justify morality-based fears.

Constructing social problems in an age of globalization: A French-American comparison

Despite growing academic interest in political and cultural globalization, sociologists have failed to systematically account for the factors that favor cross-national convergence or divergence in the form or content of public political debates in news media. This article uses two original data sets on American and French news reporting on immigration and sexual harassment to test the effects of four factors potentially relevant to such convergence or divergence: 1) cultural repertoires, 2) legal constraints, 3) journalistic field relations to the state and market and competition among journalistic outlets, and 4) global position of nation-states. Differences in dominant national cultural repertoires correlate with persistent cross-national variations in media frames. Legal reform related to the two issues offers a strong explanation of shifts in framing over time. Lesser news media autonomy vis-à-vis the state is associated with fewer journalistic enterprise stories on immigration and less reporting on sexual harassment scandals, while greater competition may make sensationalized reporting on immigration more likely. Americas dominant position in the global political economy correlates with substantially greater visibility of U.S. policies and personalities in France, than vice versa. There is some evidence for greater cross-national divergence in issue frames over time, as U.S. global visibility and influence have increased.

Coming out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma.

This paper examines the surprising case of women who “come out as fat” to test and refine theories about social change, social mobilization, stigma, and stigma resistance. First, supporting theories about “social movement spillover,” we find that overlapping memberships in queer and fat activist groups, as well as networks between these groups, have facilitated the migration of this cultural narrative. Second, we find that the different, embodied context of body size and sexual orientation leads to changes in meaning as this narrative travels. Specifically, the hypervisibility of fat changes what it means to come out as a fat person, compared to what it means to come out as gay or lesbian. Third, this case leads us to question the importance of the distinction made in the literatures on stigma and on social movements between assimilationist strategies that stress sameness, on the one hand, and radical political strategies that emphasize difference, on the other. Finally, this case suggests that the extent to which a stigmatized trait is associated with membership in a social group—with its own practices, values, and norms—shapes what it means to “come out” as one who possesses that trait.

Gendered Homophobia and the Contradictions of Workplace Discrimination for Women in the Building Trades

Drawing on 63 interviews with a diverse sample of tradeswomen, this article examines how the cultural meanings of sexual orientation—as well as gender presentation, race, and body size—shapes the constraints that women face in the construction industry and the specific resistance strategies they develop. We argue that women’s presence in these male-dominated jobs threatens (1) notions of the work as inherently masculine and (2) a gender order that presumes the sexual subordination of women. Tradesmen neutralize the first threat by labeling tradeswomen as lesbians—and therefore not “real” women—and respond to the second by sexualizing straight and lesbian tradeswomen alike. In turn, tradeswomen develop individual resistance strategies, which are shaped by the intersections of their sexual identity, gender presentation, race, and body size. Finally, we show how tradesmen deploy homophobia to stymie collective action and solidarity by tradeswomen, gay or straight.

Culture and Law: Beyond a Paradigm of Cause and Effect

This article examines a variety of ways in which social scientists make cultural argument about the law, including (1) holding culture as the independent variable to explain variations in law, (2) taking law as an independent variable to explain culture, or (3) considering law as culture. The authors explore each general strategy and its advantages and disadvantages in turn and argue that the law as culture perspective is one of the most interesting recent developments in sociolegal thought.

Sex, Inequality, and Ethnography: Response to Erich Goode

Erich Goode (2002) has written about an ethnography he conducted and casual sex he engaged in among very fat female members of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). It is, according to him, “the story of a spectacularly failed research project.” He admits that his account of events that took place in the 1980s causes him “to wince and squirm in discomfort and embarrassment. I did that? I gasp. I said that? I ask. This is not me, I object.” Yet, he also says that, even now, “I find it difficult to conceptualize a strategy that would have enabled me to avoid the problems I blundered into.” He recounts in detail how he interviewed, observed, casually slept with (leaving out some details here), and generally treated poorly his research subjects. Yet his analysis of this group and their particular vulnerabilities, as well as his own desires and behavior within this context, is baffling in its superficiality. In what follows, I make two basic points. First, in asking whether Goode was wrong to sleep with his informants from an ethical perspective, I contend that, while sex between researchers and informants may not be categorically unacceptable, social researchers should not be sexual predators. I consider sexual predation to include at least two behaviors in which Goode admits engaging: targeting vulnerable populations and being less than fully forthcoming about his intentions. The evidence of vulnerability of those with whom Goode had sex is drawn from Goode’s own work as well as my own observation of NAAFA activities and interviews with NAAFA members. Goode himself provides evidence that he misled many women about his amorous intentions, which is the sole basis for my conclusions on that score. Second, in asking whether Goode’s sexual encounters with NAAFA members yielded or had the potential of producing any sociological insights, I contend that Goode provides little evidence to substantiate his claim that his sexual relations

Effects of competing news media frames of weight on antifat stigma, beliefs about weight and support for obesity-related public policies.

Objectives:In the popular news media, public health officials routinely emphasize the health risks of obesity and portray weight as under personal control. These messages may increase support for policies designed to reduce rates of obesity, but can also increase antifat stigma. Less often, the media cover ‘Health at Every Size’ or ‘Fat Rights’ perspectives that may have the opposite effects. We investigated how exposure to different ‘fat frames’ shifts attitudes about weight and support for obesity policies.Methods:Across four experiments (n=2187), people read constructed news articles framing fatness as negative (unhealthy, controllable, acceptable to stigmatize) or positive (healthy, uncontrollable, unacceptable to stigmatize).Results:Compared with people who read fat-positive frames, people who read fat-negative frames expressed more: belief in the health risks of being fat (d=0.95–1.22), belief weight is controllable (d=0.38–0.55), support for charging obese people more for health insurance (d=0.26–0.77), antifat prejudice (in three out of four experiments, d=0.28–0.39), willingness to discriminate against fat people (d=0.39–0.71) and less willingness to celebrate body size diversity (d=0.37–0.64). They were also less willing to say that women at the lower end of the obese range could be healthy at their weights. Effects on support for public policies, however, were generally small and/or nonsignificant. Compared with a control condition, exposure to fat-positive frames generally shifted attitudes more than fat-negative frames. In experiment 4, adding a message about the unacceptability of weight-based discrimination to unhealthy/controllable news articles only reduced antifat stigma on one of three measures compared with articles adding a discrimination-acceptable message.Conclusions:Exposure to different news frames of fat can shift beliefs about weight-related health risks and weight-based stigma. Shifting policy attitudes, however, is more challenging.

Sexual Harassment in the News: The United States and France

This article documents and accounts for important differences in press coverage of sexual harassment in the United States and France. Compared to French press coverage, American reporting on sexual harassment has been much more extensive and more likely to focus on domestic sexual harassment scandals involving political individuals or institutions. This is attributed largely to the American press greater reliance on business, greater journalistic freedom, stronger traditions of investigative journalism, as well as more inclusive legal definitions of sexual harassment. While silent on French scandals, due to global political realities, the French press has reported extensively on American sexual harassment scandals and has been more dismissive of the problems of sexual harassment and (American) feminist activists when reporting on the United States. This article further analyzes how each press has framed the problem of sexual harassment and how such framing varies by story and over time.

Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies

motives of individual migrants as ‘‘insignificant’’ (p. 40). This exploration of emigration and political development at multiple scales reflects the author’s thoroughness, but it calls into question the conclusions Moses himself advances about the appropriate level at which to consider migration’s effects. It also creates confusion about the author’s central project. In the midst of these somewhat obfuscating deliberations about scale and the definition of political development, the relationships of causality that the author seems fundamentally concerned with are lost. These relationships are most helpfully and insightfully examined in the more qualitative and historical portions of this book. While these sections can provide no cross-cutting and definitive answers about the causal relationship between emigration and political development, they raise important questions that can usefully be applied at multiple scales and in different contexts. These questions offer unique windows onto the ways that migration may nudge, or perhaps even shove, political processes in any given direction. These windows are helpful, however, only if we acknowledge their limitations; they allow us to see and contemplate only so much.