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116 6 • FRAMING FAT BODIES Since the second-wave feminist movement, gender scholars have written about the deleterious effects of cultural beauty ideals (Bartky 1990; Bordo 2003; Hesse-Biber 1996; Wolf 1991). They have documented the harmful effects of these ideals on both the psyche and the material body and shown how preoccupation with the thin ideal has stymied women’s social advancement (Wolf 1991; Zones 1997). These findings have also elicited an ongoing debate about the relationship between cultural structure and women’s agency (Davis 1991). While this scholarship has uncovered important knowledge of cultural body norms and their effects, it has failed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between body ideals and social actors. Feminist cultural analyses of body ideals typically focus on a single discourse; in this case, what we refer to as the aesthetic frame. This singular focus limits a full understanding of cultural body ideals and the relationship between individuals and culture. For this reason, Framing Fat lays out multiple competing cultural logics on the fat body. Framing Fat maps the contested field of fat, showing how the fat body is not justaboutanaestheticidealbutalsoaboutahealthidealandhowissuesofchoice and responsibility and discrimination are central to these constructions. Despite the existence of numerous players in this field, we have examined four sets of cultural producers. We selected these cultural producers because of their visibility, prominence, and accessibility. All of these producers’ cultural artifacts are publicly available, thereby enabling a systematic and replicable analysis. We make no claims about the substantive representativeness of each producer, although we maintain that each receives both direct and indirect reinforcement from cultural supporters. The fashion-beauty complex promulgates the aesthetic frame through the industries of the cosmetics, fashion, and weight-loss industries ; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) promotes the health frame with endorsements by public health officials, weight-loss surgeons, Framing Fat Bodies 117 and health practitioners; the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) pushes the choice and responsibility frame with the help of other food and beverage groups; and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) gives voice to the social justice frame with the backing of fat studies scholars and other fat acceptance groups in the United States and abroad. None of these frames, as we have seen, is always consistent; they all, at times, exhibit internal contradictions. Nevertheless, each tells a rather coherent story. Like others before us (Guthman and DePuis 2006), we acknowledge that public meanings about fat are complex. We understand that these four frames by no means tell an exhaustive story. Our goal in Framing Fat is to uncover these four stories with as much breadth, depth, and nuance as space affords and, through them, illuminate the constructed nature of the fat body. While historians and anthropologists shed light on this construction by looking historically and cross-culturally at dynamic meanings about the body, we focus primarily on how four cultural discourses play out today in the public sphere. Our analysis is certainly not the first to deconstruct competing meanings about the fat body. We build on the seminal work of others who have examined various perspectives on obesity causation, blame, and intervention (Campos 2004; Gaesser 2002; Gard and Wright 2005; Moffat 2010; Rich and Evans 2005; Smith 2009). We stand on the shoulders of scholars who have investigated the media’s framing of the “obesity epidemic” (Boero 2007; Campos et al. 2006; Holland 2011; Saguy and Almeling 2008). We are further indebted to the growing field of critical obesity studies that has laid out a foundation for destabilizing so-called truths about the fat body (Gard 2009; Monaghan 2008; Murray 2008). Our goal in Framing Fat is to continue this destabilization by exposing how, under closer scrutiny, commonly held beliefs about the fat body constitute a complex landscape of claims put forth by a diverse range of claims makers. In this concluding chapter, we bring together the four frames and address a lingering question: What are the implications of these various approaches? We begin with a summary of all four frames, and as promised, we provide for illustrative and pedagogical purposes the framing matrix in tabular form (see table 6.1). After recapping the resonance that we have documented in previous pages, we attempt to make sense of the observed resonance of frames, in particular why key aspects of the aesthetic, health, and choice and responsibility frames resonate , yet the social justice frame engenders limited support. This discussion includes an exploration of the salience...

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