Out of Touch, Out of Time: Older Queer Women’s Engagement with Fat Acceptance Movements

• In Event: 545 - Section on Body and Embodiment Paper Session. Embodiment and Social Movements

Abstract

This paper explores how queer women in particular understand and construct meanings around their body size in the context of individual and community norms and identities. I ask two intertwined questions: How do queer women of size over 40 think about their bodies and body size? And, what community, cultural and medical norms or body ideals influence their perceptions and experiences? I first provide some context for this qualitative analysis, including a description of the queer women’s health program from which I drew my 31 interview participants in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this paper, I argue that older queer women navigate tensions between body ideals and community ideals in and through their experiences of body size. Women’s embodied experiences of fatness, chronic pain and weight-loss and weight-gain shifted in tandem with their experience of interactions with other queer women, as well as their ideas about what the bodies and body ideals should be in “the lesbian community”. Further, I argue that the aspirational goals of “health” and its associated body size are shaped by normative social ideas with public health roots and queer community norms about body size acceptance. I conclude by discussing the sociological and public health implications of this work. That is, if body norms and ideals are embedded and embodied in actual communities and navigated through the ongoing formation and configuration of communities, interventions must be peer-led and community-based to effectively shift behaviors, norms and expectations around weight-loss and healthy living in fat bodies.

Author

• Natalie Ingraham, University of California at San Francisco