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"Physical-appearance-based bias"
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Un-shrink-ing : how to face fatphobia
\"The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it-from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled. For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not. Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates-how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of \"body reflexivity\"-a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fat Gay Men
To be fat in a thin-obsessed gay culture can be difficult. Despite affectionate in-group monikers for big gay men-chubs, bears, cubs-the anti-fat stigma that persists in American culture at large still haunts these individuals who often exist at the margins of gay communities. InFat Gay Men, Jason Whitesel delves into the world of Girth & Mirth, a nationally known social club dedicated to big gay men, illuminating the ways in which these men form identities and community in the face of adversity. In existence for over forty years, the club has long been a refuge and 'safe space' for such men. Both a partial insider as a gay man and an outsider to Girth & Mirth, Whitesel offers an insider's critique of the gay movement, questioning whether the social consequences of the failure to be height-weight proportionate should be so extreme in the gay community.
This book documents performances at club events and examines how participants use allusion and campy-queer behavior to reconfigure and reclaim their sullied body images, focusing on the numerous tensions of marginalization and dignity that big gay men experience and how they negotiate these tensions via their membership to a size-positive group. Based on ethnographic interviews and in-depth field notes from more than 100 events at bar nights, café klatches, restaurants, potlucks, holiday bashes, pool parties, movie nights, and weekend retreats, the book explores the woundedness that comes from being relegated to an inferior position in gay hierarchies, and yet celebrates how some gay men can reposition the shame of fat stigma through carnival, camp, and play. A compelling and rich narrative,Fat Gay Menprovides a rare glimpse into an unexplored dimension of weight and body image in American culture.
eBook
This book is cute
\"Information about why certain people, animals and things are considered \"cute\" and the scientific background, for children\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Embedded racism
Despite domestic constitutional provisions and international treaty promises, Japan has no law against racial discrimination. Consequently, businesses around Japan display 'Japanese Only' signs, denying entry to all 'foreigners' on sight. Employers and landlords routinely refuse jobs and apartments to foreign applicants. Japanese police racially profile 'foreign-looking' bystanders for invasive questioning on the street. Legislators, administrators, and pundits portray foreigners as a national security threat and call for their segregation and expulsion. Nevertheless, Japan's government and media claim there is no discrimination by race in Japan, therefore no laws are necessary. How does Japan resolve the cognitive dissonance of racial discrimination being unconstitutional yet not illegal? Embedded Racism carefully untangles Japanese society's complex narrative on race by analyzing two mutually-supportive levels of national identity maintenance. Starting with case studies of hundreds of individual 'Japanese Only' businesses, it carefully analyzes the construction of Japanese identity through legal structures, statute enforcement, public policy, and media messages. It reveals how the concept of a 'Japanese' has been racialized to the point where one must look 'Japanese' to be treated as one. The product of a quarter-century of research and fieldwork by a scholar living in Japan as a naturalized Japanese citizen, Embedded Racism offers an unprecedented perspective on Japan's deeply-entrenched, poorly-understood, and strenuously-unacknowledged discrimination as it affects people by physical appearance.
eBook
Bodies out of bounds : fatness and transgression
Since World War II, when the diet and fitness industries promoted mass obsession with weight and body shape, fat has been a dirty word. In the United States, fat is seen as repulsive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose. Bodies Out of Bounds challenges these dominant perceptions by examining social representations of the fat body. The contributors to this collection show that what counts as fat and how it is valued are far from universal; the variety of meanings attributed to body size in other times and places demonstrates that perceptions of corpulence are infused with cultural, historical, political, and economic biases. The exceptionally rich and engaging essays collected in this volume question discursive constructions of fatness while analyzing the politics and power of corpulence and addressing the absence of fat people in media representations of the body. The essays are widely interdisciplinary; they explore their subject with insight, originality, and humor. The contributors examine the intersections of fat with ethnicity, race, queerness, class, and minority cultures, as well as with historical variations in the signification of fat. They also consider ways in which \"objective\" medical and psychological discourses about fat people and food hide larger agendas. By illustrating how fat is a malleable construct that can be used to serve dominant economic and cultural interests, Bodies Out of Bounds stakes new claims for those whose body size does not adhere to society's confining standards.
eBook
Fat Shame
To be fat hasn't always occasioned the level of hysteria that this condition receives today and indeed was once considered an admirable trait. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture explores this arc, from veneration to shame, examining the historic roots of our contemporary anxiety about fatness. Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Amy Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Firmly in place by the time the diet industry began to flourish in the 1920s, the development of fat stigma was related not only to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period related to consumer excess, but, even more profoundly, to prevailing ideas about race, civilization and evolution. For 19th and early 20th century thinkers, fatness was a key marker of inferiority, of an uncivilized, barbaric, and primitive body. This idea--that fatness is a sign of a primitive person--endures today, fueling both our $60 billion war on fat and our cultural distress over the obesity epidemic. Farrell draws on a wide array of sources, including political cartoons, popular literature, postcards, advertisements, and physicians' manuals, to explore the link between our historic denigration of fatness and our contemporary concern over obesity. Her work sheds particular light on feminisms' fraught relationship to fatness. From the white suffragists of the early 20th century to contemporary public figures like Oprah Winfrey, Monica Lewinsky, and even the Obama family, Farrell explores the ways that those who seek to shed stigmatized identities--whether of gender, race, ethnicity or class--often take part in weight reduction schemes and fat mockery in order to validate themselves as civilized. In sharp contrast to these narratives of fat shame are the ideas of contemporary fat activists, whose articulation of a new vision of the body Farrell explores in depth. This book is significant for anyone concerned about the contemporary war on fat and the ways that notions of the civilized body continue to legitimate discrimination and cultural oppression.
eBook
Fat Rights
Author Interview on The Brian Lehrer Show America is a
weight-obsessed nation. Over the last decade, there's been an
explosion of concern in the U.S. about people getting fatter.
Plaintiffs are now filing lawsuits arguing that discrimination
against fat people should be illegal. Fat Rights
asks the first provocative questions that need to be raised about
adding weight to lists of currently protected traits like race,
gender, and disability. Is body fat an indicator of a character
flaw or of incompetence on the job? Does it pose risks or costs to
employers they should be allowed to evade? Or is it simply a
stigmatized difference that does not bear on the ability to perform
most jobs? Could we imagine fatness as part of workplace diversity?
Considering fat discrimination prompts us to rethink these basic
questions that lawyers, judges, and ordinary citizens ask before a
new trait begins to look suitable for antidiscrimination coverage.
Fat Rights draws on little-known legal cases
brought by fat citizens as well as significant lawsuits over other
forms of bodily difference (such as transgenderism), asking why the
boundaries of our antidiscrimination laws rest where they do.
Fatness, argues Kirkland, is both similar to and provocatively
different from other protected traits, raising long-standing
dilemmas in antidiscrimination law into stark relief. Though
options for defending difference may be scarce, Kirkland evaluates
the available strategies and proposes new ways of navigating this
new legal question. Fat Rights enters the fray of
the obesity debate from a new perspective: our inherited civil
rights tradition. The scope is broad, covering much more than just
weight discrimination and drawing the reader into the larger
context of antidiscrimination protections and how they can be
justified for a new group.
eBook
The Injustice of Appearance
\"It hurts to be beautiful\" is a cliche I grew up with. \"It hurts not to be beautiful\" is a truth I acquired on my own. But not until finishing the research that led to this Article did I begin to grasp the cumulative cost of our cultural preoccupation with appearance. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin concluded that when it came to beauty, \"[n]o excuse is needed for treating the subject in some detail.\" That is even truer today; our global investment in appearance totals over $200 billion a year. Yet when it comes to discrimination based on appearance, an excuse for discussion does seem necessary, particularly for a legal scholar. Given all the serious problems confronting women-rape, domestic violence, poverty, child care, unequal pay, violations of international human rights-why focus on looks? Most people believe that bias based on beauty is inconsequential, inevitable, or unobjectionable.This Article, by contrast, argues that discrimination based on appearance is a significant form of injustice, and one that the law should remedy.
Journal Article
The Other Jewish Question:Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity
Will appeal to readers interested in psychoanalysis, in Jewish studies, in cultural studies, and in the whole question of \"the body,\" which has been so intensely discussed in recent years. Maps the dissemination of and possible interrelationships among these corporeal signifiers in Germanophone cultures between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. Geller is known as a pioneer in Jewish studies, especially in its cultural studies mode.
eBook