ABSTRACT
Words about weight-related issues, like bodies, take many shapes and forms. Big Joe, quoted immediately before Chapter 1, challenged those who condemned ‘fat people’, though there are obviously other types of account. Consider some other men’s talk:
I suppose I’m slightly overweight with what some people call a beer belly. I call it my lorry driver’s belly. Because at the end of the day I’m sat down an awful lot of the time and if you look at lorry drivers they do tend to have a [pats his stomach] paunch. (Howard)
[Laughing] I always like the food that makes you fat. (Arthur)
People nowadays are trying to blame McDonald’s, KFC and all that for obesity. And people are now starting to sue them in America for fast-food being available, that’s made them fat, as far as they’re concerned. Hang on a second. Who twisted their arm and shoved the food down their throat? They did. So why blame somebody for providing you with something if you get fat? It’s not their fault. It’s your fault. (Jim)
It’s all in your genes. You’re meant to be the way you are. It wouldn’t do for us all to be the same. It wouldn’t. (Freddy)
Sociologists underscore the importance of words or accounts in question situations (Hunter 1984, Scott and Lyman 1968). Accounts are ‘aligning actions’ (Stokes and Hewitt 1976), or socially derived vocabularies, that are intended to bridge gaps between (in)actions and expectations. Accounts include written words (Orbuch 1997) and they need not always be vocalized, instead taking the form of ‘linguistic explanations that arise in an actor’s “mind” when he questions his own behavior’ (Scott and Lyman 1968: 46-7). Independent of their truth-value, accounts have pragmatic, therapeutic, explanatory and other functions (Burnett 1991). They may bolster social identities while drawing from, reproducing and possibly subverting dominant understandings. In this chapter I will typify and evaluate different weight-
related accounts. Drawing from published studies, the media, online research, fat activism and men’s talk, I will consider ways of accounting for and orienting to bodies that medicine might label overweight or worse.
