Abstract
Schooled on Fat by Nicole Taylor is an ethnographic account of teenaged boys and girls negotiating their daily lives against a backdrop of countless media-driven messages that obesity is one of the leading health concerns for individuals today. Taylor, an anthropologist, notes that much of our knowledge about the effects of obesity is generated from a typically quantitative, biomedical perspective. Taylor argues it is necessary to look at the issue from the ground up, using qualitative methods to truly understand what teenagers are taking from the often contradictory messages about obesity and its management. Taylor’s work is a refreshing and much needed insight into how the dominant discourse surrounding obesity – and the implicit ever-looming threat of chronic disease that excess weight is thought to embody – is affecting young people at a micro level.
Focusing on four key areas – gender embodiment, attitudes and beliefs about obesity, teen perception about and participation in exercise, and food in the school environment – Taylor explores the effect popular understandings of excess body fat have on the everyday lives of teens. She examines the consequences and influences the dominant obesity message has on how young people embody gender, negotiate body image, and attempt to conform to an impossible ideal body type at an extremely vulnerable time as their adult identities are forming.
This book is based on nine months of ethnographic research conducted by Taylor as she immersed herself into the daily routines of an Arizona high school in 2003. Taylor leads the reader through the often tumultuous and confusing world of being a teen in the current fat-phobic cultural climate of Western society as she sits in on classes, eats lunch, and participates in physical education classes alongside the students she is observing. The abstract meanings that are embedded in obesity-related health narratives are made personal by the voices of the 50 teenage boys and girls she interviews.
Throughout the work Taylor draws on multiple disciplines such as sociology, psychology and anthropology to skilfully explore the rich narratives drawn from interviews with her young participants. Beginning each chapter with a descriptive vignette, Taylor’s sensitive rendering of her participants’ personal experience allows the reader to feel connected to the participant whose narrative sets the scene for the subject matter for the chapter.
Taylor’s research illustrates that the popular understanding of fatness as a potential disease is being distorted at this level. Taylor draws the conclusion that teens are receiving and internalising the message that being thin is better than being fat. However, the message is being interpreted as a way to improve their bodies in order to gain intrinsic notions of respect, positive attention, and a reduction in weight stigma rather than an improvement in their personal health. The message itself is creating a detrimental effect of its own, often manifesting in eating disorders, anxiety and depression, body dissatisfaction, and low self-esteem. Fear of becoming fat is also encouraging bullying, and exclusionary and isolating behaviour in schools (pp. 58–87).
While the fieldwork for this study was carried out in 2003, Taylor addresses current trends in the American school system and laws which have been introduced to support a healthier food environment in schools. Attentive to the huge pressures on schools and teachers to manage an ever-increasing amount of social education, Taylor recommends incorporating what she calls ‘media literacy’ (p. 151) into regular classes. She shares an example of her husband, a high school English teacher, using a section of her book to critically discuss the effects of weight stigma.
One of Taylor’s recommendations is to raise awareness around what ‘real, healthy bodies look like’ (p. 56), citing the work of a number of scholars critical of the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ and some of her participants also refer to the contradictory nature of obesity narratives prevalent in popular media. However, she never truly engages with, or challenges these notions. Other than a rather casual aside to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) (p. 7), Taylor makes no further reference to fat acceptance, or a Health At Every Size (HAES) approach, being valid alternatives to more traditional notions of weight-reduction for teens to cope with society’s social pressure for bodies to conform to a smaller body mass.
In her preface Taylor describes herself as a ‘linguistic anthropologist’ (p. xi), asserting that the use of language is vital to our perceptions of body image and obesity. With this claim in mind, Taylor’s uncritical use of ‘obesity’-related terms, mixed with her use of ‘fat’ words, is jarring to my Fat Studies-trained ears. Fat Studies’ authors position the fat body as merely a different way of being, one which occurs on a continuum of varying body size, rather than being an indicator of ill-health. Furthermore, Fat Studies literature typically rejects medicalised terminology, such as ‘obesity’, in favour of using ‘fat’ to describe large bodies to lessen the often institutionalised stigma the term normally engenders.
In addition, from a sociological perspective I feel Taylor’s work could have benefited from a deeper exploration of fatness with regard to critical intersections that exert other societal pressures, such as being a person of colour, identifying as LGBTQ+ and so forth. Despite the book’s focus on gender – and that these personal features are often introduced as part of the vignette of an individual participant – the influence of the intersecting elements such as those mentioned above are not sufficiently explored. The reader is left wanting more analysis of her observations, and how this work could meaningfully contribute to the conversation around weight stigma, body image, and personal identity, particularly for young people.
Regardless of these limitations, this book will have a ready audience in Gender Studies courses, and could be included in high school libraries for teens to readily access narratives of their peers about body size. It is a unique piece of work and, like Taylor, I fervently believe more work on fatness and its social effects must begin from the ground up.