1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910808454003321

Autore

Backstrom Laura

Titolo

Weighty Problems : Embodied Inequality at a Children's Weight Loss Camp / / Laura Backstrom

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Brunswick, NJ : , : Rutgers University Press, , [2019]

©2019

ISBN

0-8135-9915-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (159 pages)

Disciplina

618.92/398

Soggetti

Obesity in children - Psychological aspects

Weight loss - Psychological aspects

Body image in children

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- 1. Embodied Inequality, Childhood Obesity, and the "Problem Child" -- 2. Studying Camp Odyssey -- 3. Learning Embodied Inequality through Social Comparisons -- 4. "It's Not a Fat Camp": The Decision to Attend Camp -- 5. "They Were Born Lucky": Weight Attribution among the Campers -- 6. Change Your Body, Change Yourself: Camp Resocialization -- 7. The Benefits of Weight Loss Camp . . . and the Dark Side -- 8. Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

Many parents, teachers, and doctors believe that childhood obesity is a social problem that needs to be solved. Yet, missing from debates over what caused the rise in childhood obesity and how to fix it are the children themselves. By investigating how contemporary cultural discourses of childhood obesity are experienced by children, Laura Backstrom illustrates how deeply fat stigma is internalized during the early socialization experiences of children. Weighty Problems details processes of embodied inequality: how the children came to recognize inequalities related to their body size, how they explained the causes of those differences, how they responded to micro-level injustices in their lives, and how their participation in a weight loss program impacted their developing self-image. The book finds that embodied inequality is



constructed and negotiated through a number of interactional processes including resocialization, stigma management, social comparisons, and attribution.