Social construction of obesity and its impacts.

Abstract

This paper covers the idea of obesity and how obese persons feel powerless and alienated from society due to their obesity. I realized that weight discrimination could be as common as racial discrimination and it is a social problem that requires our understanding. Obesity is often associated with negative traits, is portrayed as an undesirable body image and as a disease. Through several in depth interviews with obese persons and from my research on social scientific literature on obesity, I hypothesize that weight discrimination is related to how and what ways the knowledge of obesity is constructed by the media, society and medical institutions, and how this manifests into social stigma and a loss of power experienced by obese persons.