Fat and proud: body acceptance and self-advocacy

¶ … women in the Fat and Proud You-Tube videos worked their way through the seven stages of a deviant career in this documentary. We will discuss some of their strategies for managing fatness as a master status. The author will also discuss how successful they are in those strategies. Also, we will consider some other mainstream television programming from the United States series the Born Loser featuring overweight contestants/participants. Further, we will see how these programs are different or similar to the Fat and Proud videos in terms of what the participants are doing with their status as fat.

As in our text, obese people look around themselves for look in order to determine their weight status as well as that of those in their social circles around them. This is the stage of identity development. While many people engage in deviate behavior (in this case over-eating), they have not yet been labeled as being deviant. In this case, the deviance is secret and when exposed, a negative, abstract label is attached to the person. They do not take on the connotations immediately, but rather enter a pathway that has seven stages. These include the following

1) Getting Caught & Publicly Identified

2) Retrospective Interpretation

3) Spoiled Identity

4) Exclusion

5) Inclusion

6) Treated Differently

7) Internalization of the Label (Adler & Adler, 2012, 247-249).

In the videos, the women have moved through the first phases and are now at stage seven. However, what they are engaged is an attempt to change their master status (how they are perceived). In this way, they are also attempting to take on auxiliary traits that will make it easier to deal with this label and turn things around in their favor (ibid., 249-251).

In the first video segment, Linda Coke is trying to change this with her Big Girls parties as a way of changing the master status of fat women. Given the response from the women involved, it would seem that the strategy is successful. It is a direct attack upon the bad body image of the women who do not have the ability to go out to a club in any other fashion ("Fat and proud, part 1" 2010). The big women dance class in part 2 of the video series is similar in that it is providing socialization, but it adds to the mental image of the women by attacking the stereotype that fat women can not be fit. This is also similar with the kiss-a-gram job of Mandy George, except it also attacks the idea that fat women can not be sexy ("Fat and proud, part 2" 2010). Joan Moorley of Big People U.K. Is to change the master status of fat people in a more academic way by discussing the issue with groups of students. She is trying to alter the perception of the surrounding society that fat people are lazy slobs, However, she has to be careful not to excuse medically dangerous obesity ("Fat and proud, part 3" 2010). In part 4 of the video, Mandy tries to use the kiss-a-gram to change the master status (successfully) of her aunt Elsa as a fat person by bringing her along to a job. This is also the case with women who are fat going on a skating night. This attacks the idea successfully that fat people can be fit ("Fat and proud, part 4" 2010). The fat calendar memorializes that change in master status permanently with a calendar shoot, so it does so successfully in a permanent fashion ("Fat and proud, part 5" 2010.