Revolting bodies? The on-line negotiation of fat subjectivity

• Main Author: LeBesco, Kathleen
• Language: ENG
• Published: ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst 1998
• Subjects: Communication|Mass media|Womens studies|Cultural anthropology
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9909180

The dissertation investigates the embodied experience of fatness in spaces between subjectivity and subjection on one Internet newsgroup and one listserve. Literature on identity politics, computer-mediated communication, and the social construction of the body is reviewed as it relates to the possibility of individuals with shared characteristics and/or interests utilizing technology to transform meanings for their corporeal experience. Using the methods of critical ethnography, I provide an interpretation of the ways in which site participants fluidly invoke and reject dominant meanings for the fat body within their project of resignifying fat bodies. Emergent themes include narratives of personal fat experience, comparisons of fit within cyberspace and "real" space, discussions of the pleasures and pains of fat bodies, attempts at guarding borders of identity and community, explorations of the mutual constitution of identities and oppressions, and finally, strategies for reconceptualizing fat.