Theorising Fatness as an Ordering Issue: A Conceptual Framework for Analysing the Construction of Fatness as Disorder

Abstract

Previous research has both implicitly and explicitly discussed, and partly shown, that fatness can be viewed as an ordering issue. In Western countries, fat bodies are constructed as deviant and as disorder, while thin bodies are constructed as normal and in order. In line with Mary Douglas’s and Judith Butler’s theorisation around separating and purifying/subsuming processes, this article develops previous theorisations around fatness and social order. Two analytical concepts for understanding processes for ordering people based on body size are suggested. Both processes aim at preserving the social order but differ in how this is achieved. The first, maintaining order, refers to the processes that maintain separation between thinness and fatness and preserve social order. The second, putting in order, refers to the processes aiming to subsume fat bodies into social order and covers various activities for weight loss. Together, these concepts allow analysis of fatness as an ordering issue.

Introduction

In Western societies, the thin body is generally associated with health, beauty and a range of other positive morally informed traits, such as discipline, self-control and willpower (Lupton, 2018). The fat body, however, is constructed as an unhealthy and morally failing body, a body without willpower and individual mastering (Lupton, 2018; Mayes, 2016), a physical proof of lack of self-discipline and lost control over the balance between energy-in and energy-out of the body (Ekman, 2018). The construction of fatness as a moral blemish is linked with personal responsibility, individual choice and the blaming-the-individual approach to fatness (Harjunen, 2017; Mayes, 2016; Thomson, 2009). Fat people are more or less obligated to engage in practices of losing weight to normalise their bodies and embody health (Ekman, 2018; Rich and Evans, 2005).

The combination of the supposed individual failure and the high value attached to a non-fat body in Western societies transforms fatness from a mere physical property to a stigmatised body open to adverse social effects (Harjunen, 2017; Puhl and Heuer, 2009). Intersectional analysis (Prohaska and Gailey, 2019) suggests that different groups and subgroups are affected differently by the stigma of a fat body. An obvious example is that women are more affected than men (Fikkan and Routblum, 2011), to the extent that fatness is often framed as a gender issue (e.g. Murray, 2008b; Saguy, 2012). Fatness has also been analysed and theorised as a racialised matter (e.g. Strings, 2020a, 2020b). For example, resistance towards the Euro-American ideals of beauty and health, and increased resilience to fatphobic stigmatisation, have been identified among individuals with a strong African identification in the United States (Patton, 2006).

In addition, it has been widely demonstrated that stigmatisation, fatphobia, anti-fat attitudes and discriminating actions towards fat people are highly systematised in Western societies (e.g. Campos, 2004; Farrell, 2011). Fatness is therefore often and for good reasons theorised in terms of fat oppression, systematised inequalities and discrediting discursive patterns (e.g. Eller, 2014; Murray, 2008b; Rogge et al., 2004). This article is positioned within the inter-disciplinary and critically informed field of research called critical fat studies or fat studies. Critical fat scholars strive to release fatness from its medical hegemony and to challenge assumptions, stereotypes, and stigmatisation by treating fatness as shaped by social and cultural processes (Cooper, 2010).

To understand social and cultural processes that make fatness bad and into a problem, fatness has been explored as a socially constructed ordering issue. British cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas’s (2002) theory of order and disorder, purity and dirt inspired Kathleen LeBesco (2004) to elaborate around fat bodies as pollution and disorder within modern Western societies. In line with Douglas’s reasoning, LeBesco claims that the division between order and disorder is culturally specific and socially created. ‘By making fat bodies “dirty”, and “normal” or slender bodies “pure” we have order’ (LeBesco, 2004: 24). In other words, thin bodies equal order, and fat bodies equal disorder. According to LeBesco’s reasoning, social order is created when fat bodies are made into dirt and thin bodies are made pure. Through ordering processes, fat bodies are distinguished from thin and ‘normal’ bodies, and hence considered disordered.

In her analysis, LeBesco (2004) argues that fat and dirt are linked by political reasons. The ‘dirt-making’ of fat is explored as part of the oppression of fat people. Although LeBesco (2004) explores fatness as an ordering issue, the underlying ordering processes are not fully theorised. This article aims for such theorisation by suggesting two analytical concepts for understanding fatness as an ordering issue in the Western context: maintaining order and putting in order. Both processes aim at preserving the social order but differ in how this is achieved. Maintaining order refers to the separating activities that keep thinness and fatness apart and preserve social order. Putting in order covers the various activities and the effort of subsuming fat bodies into social order; in other words, making fat bodies thin and in order. These ordering processes are intertwined mechanisms and are managed, challenged and opposed in several ways by people. Thus, in addition to identifying those two distinct processes, this article highlights various ways in which those processes are made and sometimes received by persons marked as ‘fat’.

The proposed concepts are based on the analyses and synthesising of research, obtained in different Western contexts, that in some way treats fatness as a personally and socially constructed problem. To exemplify and clarify the reasoning of the proposed concepts, this study uses illustrations from interviews with fat people, observations in public settings, material from newspapers, and from British and American television and films. The included quotes from interviews, observations and newspapers are based on data obtained in Sweden. Even though most illustrative examples come from a Swedish setting, it is here argued that these examples are relevant in terms of considering fatness as an ordering issue in contemporary Western societies. This intention is in line with others (e.g. Gailey and Harjunen, 2019) who address that there is a shared Western lived experience in how fatness is understood.

By acknowledging fatness as a complex issue influenced by a spectrum of social structures and processes, Strings (2020a, 2020b) and others (e.g. Prohaska and Gailey, 2019) have shown that intersectional analysis adds important dimensions to any analysis of the experience of fatness. However, and for analytical stringency, this article devotes attention to dominant ordering processes based only on body size.

Social ordering based on body size includes all sizes (Ekman, 2012). In Western societies, both fat and extremely thin bodies are constructed as deviating from the acceptable sized body, and both are targeted by normalising practices. Fat and extremely thin bodies alike are far from disordered on equal terms. However, neither thin nor extremely thin people are constructed as moral failures like their fat counterparts (Lupton, 2018). Thin individuals are portrayed rather as embodying moral values, and extremely thin individuals as having exaggerated self-control and willpower (e.g. Bordo, 2003; Lupton, 2018). Hence, the opposite to fat people. In Western societies, fat bodies are undeniably constructed as disordered. By theorising fatness as an ordering issue, this article suggests a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of fatness as disorder.

Understanding Social Ordering of Fatness

The distinction between the ideal order and the actual order is significant for understanding the concepts of maintaining order and putting in order. The first refers to the utopia of a society where everybody is thin. The second, the actual order, refers to the actual situation – the fact that people have different body sizes. Thus, the actual order also includes disorder, fat bodies (and extremely thin bodies). Maintaining order and putting in order are ways to understand and explain how bodily variation of the actual order is managed, and how these processes relate to and reveal the vision of an ideal state. The ideal order is here referred to as the fundamental mechanism behind how the actual order is being managed. The actual order is, however, managed by the processes of maintaining order and putting in order – either by keeping thin/‘normal’ bodies separated from fat/deviant bodies or by attempts to incorporate all bodies in the ideal order.

The distinction between the ideal and the actual situation is essential in both Mary Douglas’s (2002) and Judith Butler’s (1999, 2004) theories, although they do not fully clarify it. Butler’s theorisation around norms and normativity considers idealistic ideas and the ideal order. The idealistic ideas are, in my interpretation of both theorists, always understood as influencing human interactions. Therefore, it is not surprising that idealistic ideas influence how people are ordered in terms of body size.

Historical and cross-cultural analysis has shown that idealistic ideas and preferences of body size differ in time and space. Two basic ideal positions are usually described: bodies should be thin, or bodies should be fat (e.g. Gremillion, 2005). Then again, body ideals are far from shared by everyone even in the same historical and cultural setting (e.g. Asbill, 2009). However, when referring to mainstream Euro-American body ideals, there is little doubt – bodies should be thin (but not too thin).

The idealisation of the thin/slim body can be understood as based on the idea of an ideal state – a society where everybody is thin (Ekman, 2012). This ideal order concerns that which is socially shared and what most people agree on as being the most valuable, but at the same time, it may be almost impossible to achieve (Seid, 1989). However, it is something people (especially women) strive towards (Bordo, 2003). The ideal order is therefore always a type of illusion; it is one possible vision of society, an unreachable utopia, where everybody has an ideal body size.

Douglas’s theory focuses particularly on the actual order, how we can understand the fact that societies contain both order and disorder, and how order and disorder are managed. Douglas clarifies her idea of social order and how it is created as follows:

For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, about and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. (Douglas, 2002: 5)

Douglas here expresses how disorder can be understood in diverse cultures and social circumstances by identifying ideas about ‘separating’ and ‘purifying’ as central. The influence of such ideas is explored in more detail throughout her work. Processes for separation refer to activities where order and disorder are kept apart by exaggerating difference, and she explores practices for keeping women and men apart as one way of exemplifying such activities.

Processes of purification refer to the activities of making disorder into order. Douglas (2002) expresses this when she (p. 168) writes: ‘. . . most pollutions have a very simple remedy for undoing their effects. There are rites of reversing, untying, burying, washing, erasing, fumigating and so on . . .’. If these thoughts are transformed in relation to fatness as disorder, weight loss can be understood as a rite of purification. Such an interpretation also frames weight loss as a rite for re-establishing social order.

Processes of separating and purifying can also be traced in Butler’s (1999, 2004) work on heteronormative ordering processes. Separating practices are discussed in Butler’s work in terms of dehumanisation, exclusion and punishment, while purifying processes (or more correctly, subsuming practices) are discussed in terms of incorporation, regulations and corrections (as surgical corrections of intersexed children, Butler, 1999, 2004). Douglas’s and Butler’s theorisation around separating and purifying/subsuming processes has nourished the development of the analytical categories explored in this article.

The terms ‘separating’ and ‘purifying’ refer to activities concerned with how social order is created but not explicitly to the analytical level of social ordering. Therefore, the concepts of maintaining order and putting in order introduced here serve the purpose of developing an analytical frame that allows us to study the processes for social ordering. The fact that the word order is explicitly used in the suggested terms reflects this ambition.

The terms ‘maintaining order’ and ‘putting in order’ also reflect an action-oriented view of social order. This is directly inspired by Butler’s theorisation of performativity and analysis of how normative structures are created, performed and challenged through practices. According to her reasoning, social order ‘is a kind of doing’ (Butler, 2004: author’s italics in quote). From such a perspective, social order is constructed from social interactions and is therefore in a constant state of becoming. Anselm Strauss (1993) argues in a similar manner that order is shaped through certain ongoing ordering activities. ‘Ordering is ongoing’ Strauss (1993: 261) writes. Such an understanding is consistent with the view of social order that pervades this article and influences the used terms ‘social ordering’ or ‘ordering’.

Maintaining Order

Maintaining order refers to activities that keep thinness and fatness apart, and has the function of maintaining and upholding order in the actual order. Social order, according to Douglas (2002), is established when dirt is separated from purity. She also refers to dirt as matters that cannot be included if a certain order is supposed to be maintained. As discussed earlier, fat bodies are constructed as dirt and disorder in modern Western societies (LeBesco, 2004) and Joyce Huff (2001) pinpoints that fatness is ‘matters out of place’. LeBesco (2004) has explicitly explored processes of separation by arguing that fat bodies are distinguished from thin ‘pure’ bodies by discursive patterns and discreditation actions towards fat people.

The concept of maintaining order is grounded in previous theorisation, and to exemplify the complexity of the processes that uphold and maintain social order, three analytical categories will be explored: excluding practices, different-making and threat-making. The first term refers to processes by which people are left out of social groupings or do not have full access to certain circumstances where others (in this case, those with thinner bodies) are included. The second term refers to processes by which people are made different based on a certain attribute, in this case fatness. The third term refers to processes that define persons as dangerous when fatness is not made in accordance with common understandings. Such processes display how people who do not fit easily within a specific social category disturb social order and are therefore constructed as a threat.

Excluding Practices

Processes of maintaining order are exemplified through excluding practices. The practices here referred to mean that a person is excluded from certain activities, settings and possibilities that others are included in or have access to. Two well-documented and strong forms of excluding practices are discrimination and bullying. Both occur in both private and public contexts, and can include sporadic discrediting comments, systematic bullying and more extensive social exclusion (Puhl and Heuer, 2009).

Excluding practices can be directly aimed and outspoken, explicit or indirect, subtle or more unintentional. They may involve direct verbal abuse from others, clearly stating that one is not welcome in certain social settings or circumstances. During an interview, a man in his 30s told the story of being called for a work interview, and on entering the room, he was greeted with ‘Hi, the position is already occupied’. This episode exemplifies implicitly communicated and directly aimed exclusion. Direct and intentional exclusion is also exemplified when the same man was disqualified from financial assistance from the social welfare system for not following the doctor’s orders of walking long distances three times a day. Exclusion from economical means can, as Sen (2000) writes, have a more pervasive effect on a person’s social life and thereby can lead to more extended social exclusion.

Excluding practices can also make themselves known in other more subtle ways. In an interview, a woman in her 50s described subtle exclusions as follows:

People do not say so much in words. It is more a matter of treatment; they distance themselves from you. As when they become quiet once you come [enter the room].

Such an exclusion is wordless, and it is marked with silence and subtle signals. Other wordless forms of exclusion are exemplified when fat people note that they have access to more social activities during periods when they have lost weight. For example, during an interview, another woman in her 50s explained how she was invited to parties when she was thinner and that the invitations stopped as soon as she became fat again. Weight loss, as she said sarcastically, had apparently made her ‘nicer’.

Other examples of subtle exclusion and limitations are when fat people face an examining (and judging) gaze from others when visiting McDonald’s or eating an ice cream in public. During an interview, a man in his late 50s explained what usually happened when he ordered something to eat in public. ‘You are studied from your feet and up and then down again and after that they look very closely at what I have ordered’. Such a gaze is not necessarily intended as excluding, yet it is often interpreted as such by the person exposed to it (Ekman, 2012; Zdrodowski, 1996). Research has demonstrated that it is common that fat people live in seclusion (e.g. Berg et al., 2005), and this exemplifies how individuals themselves reinforce and maintain order through self-exclusion. In the film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Bonnie, the mother, is visualised as living a life of seclusion. Bonnie, who is superfat, leaves her home only when she finds it necessary. Not all fat people live in such a comprehensive state of social isolation. It seems to be more common that fat people exclude themselves from certain situations and contexts which they perceive as particularly problematic. Activities such as swimming, dancing, going to the gym or eating out in public spaces are examples of activities that people may avoid because they perceive themselves as fat/deviant (Ekman, 2012).

The socio-material world can also exclude fat people. Experiences of socio-material exclusion are exemplified in the following excerpt from the chat room of the Swedish liberal morning newspaper Dagens Nyheter:

As fat individuals, we have problems travelling by public transport; car safety belts are not long enough; and cinemas, theatres and other venues have chairs that do not accommodate a fat person. Restaurants have seats that break when you sit in them, and they are often so tight that you cannot fit between the chair and the table. (Author’s translation of Åhman and Johnson, 2004)

Material things, such as seats and car seatbelts, tend to exclude fat people from travelling in a safe and comfortable way. Hence, material things exclude fat people from going to cinemas or theatres and to a certain extent from socially interacting with others. Material things also hinder fat people from eating in public where chairs are too tight or too weak (Hetrick and Attig, 2009; Zdrodowski, 1996). These examples pinpoint that parts of the material world are constructed based on the ideal order and a thinner body size; they are not based on the variety of body sizes that people actually have (the actual order). As material things exclude and limit the options for fat people, they also do their part in maintaining order.

Different-Making

Maintaining order is also done through so-called different-making, which refers to actions that make people who are already seen as different seem even more different. This is done by imposing onto an individual certain (in this case) negative characteristics associated with the particular social group/category to which the person is perceived to belong (see similarity with othering in Butler, otherness in Strings, 2020b). Such processes are in line with Douglas’s (2002) thoughts when she asserts that it is by exaggerating differences that social order is created.

Different-making can be divided into two interrelated processes: reduction and expansion. When someone has been classified and defined as fat, the individual then tends to be deprived of the possibility of being identified as a complex person with many psychological attributes and social roles/positions. Instead, he or she may be reduced to just one of their characteristics, in this case, the fat body. Such reductions can be experienced both in institutional and everyday life encounters (Ekman, 2012). In an interview, a woman in her 40s gave in a single statement a clear-cut picture of reduction: ‘Strangers do not see me, they only see my body’.

Once an individual is reduced to nothing more than their fat body, the person often becomes identified with prejudice and preconceptions associated with fatness and the fat body. This is in line with what Goffman (1990) notes about other forms of stigma, that discredited individuals are often labelled with characteristics associated with the social category they belong to. It is in this second step that the actual different-making is being shaped. Fat people are constructed as undisciplined, unmotivated, weak-willed, uncontrolled, impulsive, and less competent (Lupton, 2018; Puhl and Heuer, 2009), to name a few negative characteristics associated with fatness.

During an observation, a couple of years ago in a small Swedish town, two men standing in the queue for a hamburger bar made a joke about a fat person standing further ahead in the queue. One of the men said, ‘Look at that one. She probably eats all her meals here’, and the other one responded, ‘Definitely true. At least six double plus size meals a day’. They laughed and looked at the person behind them, smiling, as if they thought that person was equally amused by their joke. This episode exemplifies how a fat individual was made behaviourally different through the joint understanding of these men, reinforced as it was by their utterances. Searching for support by others, as the men did for their joke, confirms Samantha Murray’s suggestion that there is a collectively established ‘knowingness’ of fatness. Negative characteristics (representations/prejudice) construct a kind of empirically ungrounded but taken for granted and naturalised ‘knowingness’ about how fat people ‘are’ (Murray, 2008b). The taken for granted knowingness addressed here is that all fat persons eat enormous amounts of food. Such knowingness makes processes for different-making less grounded in empirical evidence and more part of a taken for granted cultural understanding of fatness.

Maintaining order by different-making is also exemplified when fat people are depicted negatively in television programmes and films (Himes and Thompson, 2007). In a TV series called ‘You Are What You Eat’, fat people are portrayed as plentiful eaters, or as lazy and sedentary. Fat characters are furthermore presented in popular media as stupid and fun, or as tragicomic and pathetic (Kunze, 2013). Such representations make fat people even more different as a social category, and they exemplify further the processes by which different-making works to separate fat bodies from the construction of ‘pure’ bodies.

Prejudice, preconceptions and representations show that fat people are not only kept apart through the discriminatory actions of other people but also through the ideas that other people have of them. In other words, maintaining order is done through both direct actions and by indirect actions spawned by the way that people think, and both have the same agenda – to ensure that fat people are kept separate from those who have thin bodies and to keep them in line – in order.

Threat-Making

Processes of threat-making entail separating fat from the thin/‘pure’ by constructing fat bodies as dangerous. These processes are intimately connected with fatphobia (Campos, 2004) and mean that fatness both disturbs and threatens normative structures and social order. The construction of fatness as threatening is exemplified when fat people are portrayed as horrific, repulsive and grotesque (Shieff, 2001), or as being more instinctive and animalistic (Kuppers, 2001), or as unhealthy and sick (Murray, 2008a). The construction of dangerous bodies was also addressed when Strings (2020a) explored how the black fat body is depicted as a threat to white supremacy and the normative whiteness.

According to Douglas (2002), those who threaten social order are often labelled as dangerous:

A polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which should not have been crossed, and this displacement unleashes danger for someone. (Douglas, 2002: 140)

When a person is crossing lines, as Douglas (2002) notes, they are endangering both themselves and others. The fat body is in itself often viewed as threatened by ill health, disease and premature death (Gard and Wright, 2005; LeBesco, 2011). The fat body is not only constructed as a threat to the individual; a person’s fat body can even be viewed as contagious and as a threat to others (e.g. Monaghan et al., 2010; Campos, 2004). Mayes (2016) argues in a similar way that fat bodies are constructed as a threat to the nation, and Rail et al. (2010) state that the medical attention to the supposed ‘obesity pandemic’ constructs fatness as a threat to global public health.

The released danger towards others is especially evident when the taken for granted ‘knowingness’ is not embodied by fat people. If fat people follow and embody the expectations of how they should be, according to the discrediting representations (lazy, stupid, pathetic, etc.) addressed before, they are doing their body size as predicted. However, when people embody alternative body images, they can be considered as threatening and therefore cause offence. This is exemplified in an article in the Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, where a retired chemist and pharmaceuticals director expressed his gratitude when a fat male comedian and actor stopped hosting a very popular entertainment show broadcast on Swedish TV:

Fat people give wrong signals. Others can think: ‘If he can be fat and is so famous and good in every way, I can also be that’, says CG Carpel [. . .] He notes that he has nothing against Peter Harryson as a person or as a host.

He is really excellent. However, he gives the signal that it is okay to be fat.

(Author’s translation, Hammarlund and Linder, 2005)

Mary Rogge et al. (2004) have shown that many people consider it to be acceptable to behave rudely and abusively towards fat people, and the statement made in the quote reveals that. This statement clearly expresses that fat bodies should be contained; disordered, dirty, unhealthy bodies should not be displayed in a positive light as this disturbs the conceived order.

As Douglas (2002) and Butler (1999, 2004) have noted, individuals who cannot be easily fitted within fixed social categories are especially dangerous. Harryson does not align his behaviour with the social representations or common caricatures of fatness, and this makes him a threat to others. If Harryson had shown remorse for his sinful body, had been a bad host, or had proved to be unwise or even stupid, he might not be viewed as dangerous and threatening. Fat people are not unusual on television, but what is unusual about Harryson is that he, as Carpel puts it, is ‘good in every way’ and is ‘really excellent’ as a host. Thus, by being popular, good and excellent, Harryson crossed the line. He disturbs not only the order but also the work of preserving it, simply because he does not fit with the stereotype: stupid and lazy. As long as people follow the expectations of how they should be or behave, they are corresponding to their position in the purity and dirt constellation correctly. However, when fat people, such as Harryson, to take Carpel’s example, show that they can be as good as slim people, perhaps even better, then they do not follow the rules of how social order is supposed to be maintained. Harryson is showing fluidity between order and disorder, and this in itself is an offence that seems to make him particularly dangerous.

Putting in Order

Putting in order refers to the processes aimed at subsuming fat bodies into social order and is directly aimed at making fat bodies thin. Practices to keep and make bodies thin have been discussed as an expression of neoliberalism and normalisation (e.g. Harjunen, 2017; Mayes, 2016; Sanders, 2017). For example, Murray (2008a, 2008b) has shown how medical attention to fatness, and the controlling, disciplining and regulating practices that involve fat bodies, are ways society pursues ‘normalisation’. The apparent attention towards weight loss practices is accordingly viewed as an effort to make fat bodies thinner, right and acceptable. The 60-billion-dollar diet and exercise industry is testimony to individuals’ desire to change their body composition through weight control practices (Williams, 2013). From an ordering perspective, such practices have the function of subsuming people into normality and putting them in order.

Putting in order is a collective endeavour of a more benevolent kind compared to what maintaining order entails. It is often done with the justification of doing good or doing the right thing since losing weight is viewed as an undisputed good (Herdon, 2008; Rich and Evans, 2005). Weight reduction methods are based on the idea of energy balance, meaning that body weight will be reduced if the body is supplied with less energy than it burns (Gard and Wright, 2005). In line with Douglas’s (2002) theory, weight reduction activities can be viewed as rites for purification. Fat bodies will become ‘pure’ and in order if they are slimmed through weight loss. Putting in order is therefore directly focused on preserving and actualising the ideal order; in other words, making people pure and in order. If the actual order was the same as the ideal order – that is, if all bodies were slim and in order – there would be no need to put fat bodies in order. It is the combination of people having different body sizes and the essential striving for ideal order that makes the processes of putting in order possible.

Two forms of putting in order will be discussed: weight control as an individual and collective matter and forced energy regulation by technologised bodies. Both processes refer to the techniques and practices of weight control, and are grounded in the notion of energy balance and fatness as a choice of lifestyle (Mayes, 2016) In other words, the fatness can and ought to be ‘cured’ by energy regulation (see Thomson, 2009). The processes within the first form require both individual and collective actions of weight control and mean that the persons, in a way, are free to control their eating. The second exemplifies a more forcible way of changing people’s eating behaviours. Together, they exemplify the complexity of processes aiming to subsume people into social order.

Weight Control as an Individual and Collective Matter

The primary responsibility for weight reduction/control among adults lies with the individual (LeBesco, 2011; Thomson, 2009), and weight reduction behaviours are pursued by individuals themselves. There is a plethora of diets and self-tracking devices that people can use to lose weight and to normalise their bodies (Sanders, 2017). Women’s aspirations to change their bodies, to be slim or slimmer, have been well noted for decades in Western societies (e.g. Bordo, 2003; Seid, 1989). Male weight concerns and weight control have also been noted both historically (Gilman, 2004) and in recent years (Gill, 2008).

During interviews with Swedish fat women and men, activities of losing weight were explained as grounded in an individual’s desire to fit in, to be accepted, to reduce bodily discomfort or to improve health. However, weight loss practices were also described as something other people have forced on them. One woman in her 40s expressed herself as follows: ‘Who was it that wanted me to lose weight? Not me, when it started. No! So, I think I have learned to want to lose weight’. The person behind this quote interpreted her desire to lose weight as something she had learned from her parents and as inherited, just like any other parental influence. Even if a person has learned to desire a slimmer body, the personal responsibility for losing weight is still located within themselves as individuals (Mayes, 2016; Thomson, 2009). However, there is also a clear collective responsibility, and this becomes especially clear when children experience themselves as forced into a diet or when family members try to influence an individual to change their behaviour (Ekman, 2012). In an interview, a woman described experiences of being hospitalised recurrently when growing up during the 1960s and 1970s. When asked to explain why she was hospitalised she said: ‘They [the personnel at the hospital] simply tried to starve me. They tried to make me lose weight by serving me large plates of grated carrots’. Another woman recalls hearing her parents asking the same questions at every meal to make her stop eating. ‘Are you full now? You ought to be full now? You must be full now?’

The collective responsibility for making fat bodies thin extends beyond people’s own aspirations, the concerns of their nearest and dearest, or the doctors’ and nurses’ professional opinion and work within the healthcare domain. For example, the WHO (2000) recommends that all societies, government, media and the food industry should work to combat obesity. The weight loss industry works not only to make fat bodies thin but also to make already thin bodies even thinner. Putting in order is also represented by the preventive measures directed at both people (Chambers and Wakley, 2002) and the environment (Swinburn et al., 1999). Preventive measures can be understood as a means to reduce the number of fat bodies that will need to be put in order in the future. In other words, these measures reflect a long-term perspective on how to put people in order.

The media have their share of responsibility by reporting about the prevalence and risks of fatness but also by writing about different diets and giving advice on how people may lose weight (Sandberg, 2004). Fat bodies visible on television are often subjects of weight reduction and control (Silk et al., 2011). Television shows that focus on weight loss have been explored in terms of surveillance and disciplinary power (Ritter, 2021) and as illustrations of a neoliberal culture (Ouellette and Hay, 2013). Prohaska and Gailey (2019) point out that television typically targets fat characters in what they call ‘makeover shows’ which ‘seek to “fix” fat people through weight loss’ (p. 4). Through makeover shows on television, such as Fat Camp, You Are What You Eat and The Biggest Loser, viewers can follow adolescents and adults in their struggle to lose weight. These television programmes expose the collectively and culturally established effort to strive towards the ideal order. Television programmes focusing on people’s struggle to lose weight involve surveillance and penalties. For example, in ‘The Biggest Loser’, individuals are thrown out of the competition for losing too little weight. Similarly, those who engage in excessive eating are caught and corrected by the programme host in the television series ‘You Are What You Eat’. Slimming of fat bodies as a kind of entertainment constitutes an arena for public punishment and condemnation, and praise of the successful. By analysing weight loss TV shows broadcasted in Finland and the United States, Ritter (2023) shows that people with transformed and slimmed bodies are depicted as successful and desirable.

To be in the process of becoming pure/thin through weight loss activities can give temporary acceptance. Those who do their best to correct their behaviours and change their bodies through weight control practices seem to be in a type of ‘free zone’, exempt from condemnation. By studying experiences among weight loss surgery patients, Throsby (2008) has shown that weight loss is framed as being ‘re-born’ or as finding the ‘real me’. This indicates that fatness is considered as a ‘life on hold’ and that fat bodies have ‘a thin person trapped inside’. LeBesco (2004) has discussed this in terms of fatness as an unfinished identity. Combating fatness through weight loss activities can therefore be understood as being in the process of becoming a ‘new’ and better person (Throsby, 2008) and a good citizen (LeBesco, 2011). This understanding is reflected by a woman in an interview when she said, ‘The only thing that could make me right and acceptable is if I lose weight’. Activities aiming to make people thin/thinner seem to be so important that a person can even experience weight loss as their only option for acceptance.

Forced Energy Regulation by Technologised Bodies

Processes of putting in order are also made visible through more compulsive practices aiming to subsume fat bodies into social order. Butler (1999, 2004) discussed how intersex children are subsumed into ‘normality’ through correctional and irreversible surgery. The practices analysed here are not directly correctional by surgery as in Butler’s example. Forced energy regulation by technologised bodies refers to practices targeting fat people’s eating behaviours.

In later years, medications and surgical procedures are options offered to fat people when diet and increased exercise do not make them thinner (Throsby, 2008). Medication and surgery for weight loss purposes mean that energy regulation is incorporated into the body itself and show that the fat body is not only pathologised and medicalised (Murray, 2008a) but also technologised (see Shilling, 2006). The technologisation of bodies is often intended to restore body function. Weight loss surgery and medication, however, target people’s behaviours by modifying body functions. Surgical procedures limit the body’s ability to consume and absorb food (Throsby, 2008) because the gastrointestinal system is made dysfunctional (Victorzon, 2008). Medications are other kinds of technologies that change the entire metabolism in sophisticated ways. Through surgery and medications, the fat body is made dysfunctional for one main purpose only: to make people thin and in order.

The body itself functions both as an instructor and supervisor when a person uses weight loss medications or undergoes a gastric operation. This phenomenon is especially evident when considering chronic side effects such as vomiting, diarrhoea or other intestinal and digestive problems experienced by those who undergo weight loss surgery (Buchwald et al., 2004). A woman in her 50s who had a gastric bypass performed, described her experiences in the following way:

Now, after the operation, I cannot eat chocolate because I get sick. [. . .] I get these dumping symptoms, which means that your blood pressure drops and blood sugar drops. I get abdominal pains and violent diarrhoea.

The side effects, here referred to as being sick, are so intense that they more or less force an individual not to eat certain foods. Throsby (2008) has shown that vomiting due to weight loss surgery is not treated as a complication or bodily dysfunction among those who undergo surgery and their doctors. It is rather seen as evidence that surgery is working as it should. Whether vomiting or diarrhoea are normalised and expected or referred to as being sick the side effects are, just as intended, leaving no other choice than to strictly regulate one’s food intake. The body itself both supervises and disciplines the person to change behaviours.

Obvious side effects to forcibly regulate fat people’s eating behaviours also prevail when it comes to medication. During an interview, a man in his late 50s said that he ‘crapped’ his pants if he ate fatty foods during the period when he was eating Xenical^® for weight-reducing purposes. These examples of technologised fat bodies show that energy regulation is more or less forced on a person and is an indication of how powerful the urge (force) for putting in order can be. Fat bodies are even made dysfunctional just to be subsumed into order.

Concluding Remarks

Two analytical concepts for analysing fatness as an ordering issue are presented here. ‘Maintaining order’ refers to activities and practices that keep thinness and fatness apart, and ‘putting in order’ refers to activities and practices aiming to make fat bodies thin (thinner). Both concepts refer to the processes aiming at preserving social order. The first refers to the processes of maintaining order in the actual order, and the other, putting in order, refers to subsuming processes to actualise the ideal order. Together, these concepts allow analysis of how fatness is made into disorder.

On an experiential level, is it notable that the processes explored here can be intertwined. For example, activities for putting in order can be experienced as distinguishing and separating (Ekman, 2012). A woman exemplifies this during an interview when she recalls being served special food in the dining room at school for weight reduction purposes. The kitchen staff’s intentions were to target weight loss and to put her in order, but in practice, their actions made her different from her peers. No one had to say it out loud. Getting special food at school drew clear demarcations between her disordered conduct and the other peers (who were not fat).

The strict focus on social ordering of fatness and body size employed in the article offers an alternative frame for understanding fatness compared to when it is often explored as a gendered or racialised issue or in terms of normative structures, discursive practices, inequalities, fat oppression or intersectional complexities. However, the analysis presented here is lacking in acknowledging variations, fluctuations and complexities. This becomes especially evident when researchers (e.g. Prohaska and Gailey, 2019) highlight analytical shortcomings when fatness is reduced to a matter of body size. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that the processes explored here are also influenced by ordering processes based on gender, race/ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation and other influential social structures. This means that intersectional analysis may add new insights into the processes of maintaining order and putting in order.

It is also worth noting that this article has left out analysis of agency, negotiations and counteractive actions. However, such processes have already been exemplified in previous research. For example, processes of maintaining order are negotiated through opposing actions, fat acceptance and alternative forms of identity creation (Asbill, 2009; LeBesco, 2004) while processes for putting in order are opposed when fat people stop dieting and quit striving for thinness (e.g. Ekman, 2012).

Exploring the suggested analytical categories as intertwined, in terms of negotiations and opposing actions, or by intersectional analysis is a possible way of developing, modifying or dismantling the analytical framework addressed in this article. Only further analysis can develop and evaluate the relevance and usefulness of this conceptual framework.