“Oh, My God, I Hate You:” The Felt Experience of Being Othered for Being Thin

Abstract

It is universally held among researchers and social critics that a thin ideal dominates current cultural conceptions of what is attractive, especially for women. Using interviews with eighteen women and men, this paper investigates an apparent paradox: how thin people negotiate a landscape where the attention they receive because of their thinness distresses them. Results indicate that thin people are often the target of unwanted comments about their size, comments produce an unpleasant state of self-consciousness, and the expectation of unwanted social interaction will motivate thin individuals to avoid certain social situations. Results are interpreted in terms of thinness being a hypervisible condition that produces a breakdown of norms regarding civil inattention toward thinness and produces the experience of being othered by social perceivers.

When Family Don’t Acknowledge: A Hermeneutic Study of the Experience of Kinship Stigma in Community-Dwelling People With Inflammatory Bowel Disease

“…Failing to acknowledge evidence of, or adjustments needed because of illness is stigmatizing because it labels people as Other and, therefore, different from the norm (Canales, 2000). Being Other implies that the person is “less than”—less valued, less worthy (Beggan & DeAngelis, 2015; Imafidon, 2017). Goffman explains that when we realize that the person before us has an attribute that marks them as Other, they are “thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (Goffman, 1963, p. 12).…”

The lived experience of working with people with eating disorders: A meta‐ethnography

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