Deny, Reassure, and Deflect: Evidence and Implications of Forms and Norms of Fat Talk

Abstract

Fat talk is a conversational interaction recognized through comments like “Does this make me look fat?” In the US, based on psychological lab-based investigations, fat talk is defined as highly damaging for women and actively targeted for various interventions. Using a discourse completion task (DCT), we present normative responses ( N = 313) to fat talk prompts testing women’s fat talk patterns across diverse languages and socio-cultural contexts. Based on replies from the DCT deployed in seven countries, we find that the normative response in all sites is always denial (“No, you aren’t!”) and often followed by additional reassurance (“you look good”). The consistency of findings suggests fat talk is an emergent global conversational form with shared, recognized rules among casual acquaintances. The normative denial response suggests positive functions where interactional fat talk reaffirms and reassures peer affiliation and membership. Ultimately, we suggest that fat talk may serve as a mundane rejection of everyday fatphobia; interventions posing fat talk as always harmful may simply reaffirm experiences of fat stigma by attempting to restrict the interpretation to only negative.