Why Plus Size Women Feel the Need to Justify Their Right to Take Up Space

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 3: Gender and the Body

Abstract

Plus-size women are routinely subjected to social, institutional, and interpersonal pressures that frame their bodies as excessive, undisciplined, and undeserving of space. From healthcare settings and workplaces to public transportation, dating, and media representation, fat women are repeatedly positioned as needing to justify their physical presence, moral worth, and social legitimacy. Weight of the World: Why Do Plus Size Women Feel the Need to Justify Their Right to Take Up Space examines how these pressures are produced, internalized, and resisted within a deeply fatphobic and gendered social landscape.

Grounded in Fat Studies, feminist theory, and intersectional sociology, this project challenges dominant narratives that treat fatness as an individual health failure rather than a site of structural inequality. Drawing on scholarship that links anti-fat bias to systems of sexism, ableism, racism, and capitalism, the study situates fat women’s experiences within broader regimes of surveillance, discipline, and moral judgment. While mainstream body positivity discourse has gained visibility, this research demonstrates that such frameworks often fail to address the institutional and structural dimensions of fat oppression.

Methodologically, the thesis employs a qualitative research design using semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 self-identified plus-size women (U.S. size 14 and above). Interviews explore the personal experiences these women have had with the topics I address in the Introduction to Fat Studies curriculum I have written. The thesis explores fat women's experiences in public and private spaces, encounters with medical and workplace discrimination, media representation, dating and sexuality, internalized fatphobia, and strategies of coping and resistance.

By centering fat women’s voices, this research highlights how the need to justify taking up space is not an individual insecurity but a rational response to systemic devaluation. Ultimately, the study argues for recognizing fatphobia as a legitimate axis of inequality and for reclaiming fat embodiment as a site of knowledge, agency, and belonging.

Author

• Susan Garlington, Southern Connecticut State University