As the sociology of the body shows, morphologies participate in classification systems that naturalize social hierarchies. Thus, thinness appears as “bodily capital” for women and the middle classes in search of or defense of their position, while fatness functions as a stigma, referring to a “disease of the will”, a lack of discipline and disqualified lifestyles.
However, the rise of “body positivism” is helping to blur these hierarchies. Carried today mainly by online content creators, this movement promotes minoritized bodies and denounces fatphobia.
To what extent do these discourses of self-acceptance and criticism of dominant body norms coexist with the strong sensitivity to the remarks of others? To what extent does this sensitivity to the discourse of peers, relatives and medical staff come into tension with the limited legitimacy granted to these same others?
To answer this question, we rely on the exploitation of the first results of the quantitative survey “Grosseur en ligne”. This was administered to 850 individuals residing in mainland France confronted, for the vast majority, with discussions about their weight or body shape over the course of their lives.
Declared independence from judgments, incorporated vulnerability
Our results confirm a paradox already documented in our previous qualitative research: respondents overwhelmingly affirm that the only fully legitimate voice about their body is theirs, even more so among women (table 1). But, at the same time, they express a strong sensitivity to the comments of all the figures proposed, including those considered to be of little or no legitimacy (table 2).
This tension can be understood as the effect of a double process. On the one hand, the diffusion of discourses of self-acceptance and, more broadly, of a growing normativity of authenticity and self-expression online, encourages people to claim control over the definition of their body. On the other hand, the persistence of incorporated power relations gives parental, marital and medical words a strong symbolic effectiveness, including when their legitimacy is explicitly contested.
Gender differences reinforce this result: women are more socialized to think of themselves as judged by their appearance. But more of them are also equipping themselves with online resources to regain control over the story of their body. Men are less often the targets of explicit remarks about their weight. Our survey adds that they are less inclined to say they are affected by these potential remarks, and that they are less present in digital spaces where fatness is politicized.
The recurrence of comments about weight also plays a major role in the legitimacy granted to the doctor, as shown in the graph below.
To go further, it should be noted that executives and people with higher education are more likely to challenge the legitimacy of doctors. But they say they are more affected than others by the comments about their bodies coming from these people with strong symbolic capital. For their part, employees/workers more readily recognize the legitimacy of these same figures while saying they are less affected by their remarks.
Discursive autonomy is therefore both a value and an asset. We can more easily declare ourselves as the only legitimate person to express ourselves about our own body when we have the necessary resources to face the institutionalization of judgments (medical, professional, family).
Accepting fatness or accepting your fatness? Socially distributed receptions
The data on self-assignment invite us to distinguish the modalities of self-presentation based, at least in part, on belonging to different social categories. For example, students move away from pathologizing vocabulary (“obese”0.2%) and are found more in more committed English-speaking terminology (“small fat”, “plus size”), while a significant proportion of them define themselves as “normal” (28.8%). More concerned about the body “that should be”, managers and intermediate professions talk more “to have shapes” Or “to be overweight” (table 3).
Continually, people with the most cultural capital are also more likely to follow accounts that theorize fatphobia and to equip themselves with arguments to challenge the medicalization of weight. Above all, at the time of subscription, they are not attentive to the same elements. 17.9% of the most qualified explain that the fact that an influencer cites sources in their content is essential to obtain their support, compared to 3.8% of non-graduates.
“Body positivism” and online movements to combat fatphobia do not automatically produce a “democratization” of self-acceptance.
The survey also shows that more people with higher education qualifications respond that they sometimes have difficulty finding fat bodies. “pretty” (48.9% for holders of a Master’s degree or equivalent, compared to 11% for people without a diploma), which testifies to the persistence of the dominant aesthetic, even among those who criticize it or even fight it in theory.
At the other pole, employees, workers and less qualified people use the term“obesity”medically constructed, use activist labels less and appropriate less the scientific resources conveyed by influencers. They find themselves more locked into a pathologization of weight “which should be, but which they do not have”, poorly equipped to challenge the discourse of expertise while they maintain more conflictual relationships with medical authority.
The possibility of transforming stigma into a claimable identity is therefore unevenly distributed. In this sense, “body positivism” and online movements to combat fatphobia do not mechanically produce a “democratization” of self-acceptance: they seem to offer additional resources to those who already have capital to mobilize them, while others remain more assigned to an individualized and more irreversible experience of “weight problem”.
The ambivalence of digital spaces as places of resistance
The survey also allows us to nuance the image of socio-digital networks as simple amplifiers of violence or as frameworks for emancipation. On the one hand, they appear to be informed and protective social spaces: more than half of respondents use them to listen to people concerned and to learn about fatness, while a large majority join private groups, filter content, block or report aggressive accounts. A large part of the respondents explain that they build their own “filter bubble”, where exposure to symbolic violence is reduced and where the words of “experts by membership”, that is to say here content creators, are privileged.
It is between the promise of emancipation online and the persistence of material and symbolic constraints offline that the contemporary experience of fatness plays out.
On the other hand, these same networks represent devices for self-governance: men and women are distinguished by a much stronger desire among the former to begin a journey of weight loss, while the latter rather wish to succeed in accepting their own body:
Many respondents also described feeds “in tension” where “body positivist” content and fitness content, diets, “bodygoals” coexist, while the practices of retouching photos (showing oneself “to one’s advantage” on public profiles, modulating appearance according to the context – CV, dating applications, family) testify to a permanent adjustment of the visibility of oneself in the anticipated gaze of others. Once again, it is the women surveyed who say that they have already refrained from posting photos of themselves online than the men (51% compared to 41.4%).
In short, digital spaces certainly make it possible to recompose views, but this recomposition takes place on the basis of pre-existing inequalities: they offer opportunities for acceptance and resistance which are themselves crossed by gender and class relations. It is precisely in this in-between – between the promise of emancipation online and the persistence of material and symbolic constraints offline – that the contemporary experience of fatness plays out.
