Fat-calling: ascriptions of fatness that subordinate.

Calling someone fat is not only cruel and unkind—it also subordinates them. While the sharpest and most immediate harms of fatphobic bullying are emotional and psychological, these vary according to the resilience of the target. What one person can laugh off, another feels deeply, perhaps for years....

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Publicado en:Philosophical Studies Vol. 182; no. 2; pp. 655 - 678
Autor principal: Cousens, Chris
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Feb2025
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Fat-calling: ascriptions of fatness that subordinate.
      aug:
        au: Cousens, Chris
        affil: https://ror.org/00vtgdb53 Department of Philosophy), The University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
      su:
        Phobias
        Obesity
        Psychology
        Cognitive science
        Philosophy
      sug:
        subj:
          Phobias
          Obesity
          Psychology
          Cognitive science
          Philosophy
      keyword:
        Conversational score
        Discourse roles
        Fat talk
        Fatphobia
        Permissibility
        Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Psychology
        Subordination
      ab: Calling someone fat is not only cruel and unkind—it also subordinates them. While the sharpest and most immediate harms of fatphobic bullying are emotional and psychological, these vary according to the resilience of the target. What one person can laugh off, another feels deeply, perhaps for years. But 'fat-calling' does not only have individual harms—it also perpetuates a subordinating social structure ranking fat people as inferior. Despite recent work on obesity and fatphobia, the conversational dynamics of ascribing fatness to someone else (rather than oneself) are relatively unexplored, especially in philosophy. This paper argues that fat-calling assigns its target a subordinate discourse role, constraining their subsequent conversational behaviour and permitting further discriminatory behaviour from interlocutors. And these conversational norm-changes alter the initial permissibility conditions of future conversations to the detriment of fat people. This is not to say that fat-calling is morally equivalent to slurs and hate speech—but it does show that it leverages similar conversational mechanisms to entrench injustice.
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      doctype: Article
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    language: English
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