‘Healthy Weight’ at What Cost?                 ‘Bulimia’ and a Discourse of Weight Control

Burns, Maree; Gavey, Nicola

doi:10.1177/1359105304044039

Cited by 70 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(41 reference statements)

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“…Thus the prevailing view of fatness as an inevitable health risk cannot be taken as an axiomatic truth; the research results concerning the health problems associated with fatness are ambiguous, but this ambiguity is often dismissed (Gard & Wright, 2005). I use the term fatness in order to distinguish my stance from objectivist (often medical) studies treating fatness and its problem status as a fact (see also Burns & Gavey, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The fat child—a sign of ‘bad’ motherhood? An analysis of explanations for children's fatness on a Finnish website

Kokkonen

2009

Community & Applied Soc Psy

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Children's fatness has become a central concern worldwide, Finland included. In Finland, fatness is mainly discussed from the biomedical viewpoint as a considerable health risk resulting from individual ways of life. In the case of childhood fatness, it is the parents that are mainly held responsible for its prevention and treatment. It has been widely noted that fat people are often blamed for such things as laziness and lack of self-control. As regards fat children, however, the role and possible blaming of parents has received less scholarly attention. This paper examines the ways children's fatness is explained in an anonymous Finnish Internet discussion, focusing especially on the ways parents are depicted as causing their child's fatness and as possibly blameworthy for this. A discourse analysis revealed that parents were mainly viewed as the primary cause of the child's fatness and were negatively constructed as having 'lousy' characters, being unable to create an 'adequate' emotional bond with their child, or as otherwise engaging in 'faulty' child-rearing practices. Significantly, the latter two constructions included notions similar to the psychological expert notions of parenthood. All three constructions of parents were also gendered, being either implicitly or explicitly equated with the mother. Children's fatness was also explained, and parents' primary role thus questioned or mitigated, by reference to some other factors, such as genes. These explanations, however, did not seem to hold their ground in the discussion. The occurrence and implications of these explanations is discussed.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The fat child—a sign of ‘bad’ motherhood? An analysis of explanations for children's fatness on a Finnish website

Kokkonen

2009

Community & Applied Soc Psy

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“…They re-produce the commonsensical "truth" that thinness and weight-loss are inherently good and thus occlude their potential detrimental effects not only of fat-phobic discrimination but also of, for example, malnutrition, reduced bone density (Aphramor 2008), deterioration in mental health (Kiefer et al 2000) and disordered eating practices (e.g. Bordo 1993, Austin 1999, Burns, Gavey 2004, Rich and Evans 2005, Wooley and Garner 1994. As Burns and Gavey (2008) assert the discourses that construct any weight gain as potentially dangerous and weight-loss as always healthy also produce a rationale that allows for problematic dietary practices like purging to be constructed as healthy.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding The ‘Too Fat’ Body and the ‘Too Thin’ Body: A Critical Psychological Perspective

Tischner

Malson

2012

Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Appearance

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“…Griffiths, 2001;Larsson, Loewenthal, & Brooks, 2012;Moore & Rae, 2009;Stevens & Harper, 2007), and how discourses shape the experiences and views of clients and patients (e.g. Burns & Gavey, 2004;Kelly, Holttum, Evans, & Shepherd, 2012;Swann & Ussher, 1995).…”

Section: Discourse Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Therapy talk and talk about therapy : Client-identified important events in psychotherapy

Viklund¹

2014

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Capturing and studying the moments in psychotherapy that clients find most important can help us understand more about how psychotherapy works, what the curative ingredients are, and by what processes they are mediated. Qualitative research in this area has, so far, mainly focused on describing, and categorizing clients' experiences of important factors and events. The methods employed to analyse the data have been rather limited in variation and are usually based on a realist epistemology, according to which data are basically treated as reflections of the clients' actual experiences. This entails a risk of overlooking and obscuring other aspects of therapy and the therapy process that are equally important to explore, for example the microprocesses of interaction within important events, or how clients' accounts of their experiences are shaped and limited by the context in which they are produced. The overall aim of this licentiate thesis was to explore client-identified important events in psychotherapy with a focus on studying therapy talk and talk about therapy from a social constructionist point of view, which would allow a closer exploration of the understudied areas mentioned above.In Study I, Conversation Analysis was used to explore the interaction taking place between seven client-therapist dyads in 16 client-identified important events collected from their third sessions. The analysis identified that 12 of the events contained clients' expressions of disagreement. Three different ways that the therapists handled the disagreement were discerned: The first, and most common, way was to orient to the client's cues of disagreement by inviting the client to elaborate on his or her point of view and to establish a shared understanding acceptable to both participants. The second way was to orient to the client's disagreement cues but define the therapist's own point view as more relevant than the client's, and the third way was a single case in which the therapist did not in any way orient to the client's disagreement cues.In Study II, two qualitative methods based on different epistemologies were used to analyse the same set of eight clients' accounts of 18 important events. The aim was to first identify what types of events clients describe as important, and then explore how their accounts of these events were contextually shaped and organized, and the consequences of this. The first analysis, a content analysis, yielded descriptions of five different types of events, which were similar to the ones found in previous research on important events. The second analysis, a discourse analysis, demonstrated how clients' accounts were not only influenced by the participants' ability to accurately remember and report their experience, but also by what was sayable within the context of the research interview. In conclusion, the two studies demonstrate how qualitative methods based on a socialconstructive perspective can contribute to our understanding of clientidentified important events by highlighting and ...

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‘Healthy Weight’ at What Cost? ‘Bulimia’ and a Discourse of Weight Control

Cited by 70 publications

References 43 publications

The fat child—a sign of ‘bad’ motherhood? An analysis of explanations for children's fatness on a Finnish website

The fat child—a sign of ‘bad’ motherhood? An analysis of explanations for children's fatness on a Finnish website

Understanding The ‘Too Fat’ Body and the ‘Too Thin’ Body: A Critical Psychological Perspective

Therapy talk and talk about therapy : Client-identified important events in psychotherapy

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