Matter Weighs: Weight Matters! A Feminist Phenomenology of Body Weight

Abstract

If the body is indeed our way of being in the world, as the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty first claimed, then how is it different to be a fat body compared to a thin body? In which ways does weight affect embodied being in the world, and how does ‘weight’ intersect with other categories of difference, such as gender, race and class? In this thesis, the weighing body will be studied with the tools and insights offered by phenomenologies of the body, intersectional feminist theory and fat studies. An analysis of visual and verbal expressions of Fat Acceptance bloggers provides a deeper insight into lived experiences of fatness in a cultural context marked by the discourse of the 'obesity epidemic' and a 'tyranny of slenderness'.