Episode 11 I’m so fat and so short: the fragmented body

If you were in a position to make a judgement about someone – in a job interview, for instance – would you take into account what their body looked like? One widespread societal message is that the uniqueness, the individuality, the ‘personhood’ of a person has nothing to do with what their body looks like. Why is the idea that the ‘person’ or the ‘self’ is separate from the body so prevalent in our society? In this episode I put forward three possible reasons:

We want to see the ‘self’ as rational and in control, and the body is not always something we can control. We want to see the ‘self’ as consistent over time. But the body sometimes changes dramatically in unexpected ways. We judge bodily characteristics as if our bodies were commodities – and we don’t want to judge ourselves that way.

I analyse a conversation in which a young woman named Rachel recounts her experiences working in the plus-sized department of a women’s fashion retail store. Here’s how Rachel describes typical customers:

These old ladies would come in and they’d be like ‘Ugh. I’m so fat and so short. I hate my clotes. I hate the fact that I have to shop in here. I don’t want to buy anything.

Rachel structures her account such that it is not individual women who are speaking, but a group of women united by shared bodily features: being women, being old, being fat. Notice that it’s OK to judge bodily features in a way that it’s not OK to judge a person for having those features. There’s a strong tendency to see the body as fragmented – divided up into parts, all of which can be separately judged.