Empowerment as a Response to Stigma

Erving Goffman, in his now seminal work, Stigma: Notes of Management of Spoiled Identity, asserted that persons who are discredited through social stigma find ways of coping with that status. These methods have a single thing in common -- none of them change the stigma. This is because in order for stigma to change, the people holding the discrediting ideas about the status must change their attitudes and their behaviors.

This does not mean, however, that understanding these coping mechanism is not important. And the relationship between those who hold stigmatizing views and those who suffer from a "spoiled" social identity is more complex than often represented.

A new study, The Role of the Fatosphere in Fat Adults' Responses to Obesity Stigma: A Model of Empowerment Without a Focus on Weight Loss in the online journal, Qualitative Health Research explores blogging as a method of coping with fat stigma.

By way of background, blogging about fat acceptance has been around almost as long as blogging. I personally started blogging in 2001 when a friend set me up and created FattyPatties. What started as a "joint" blog ended up with me pretty much sharing my life's events on a semi-regular basis with my thoughts on being fat and fat acceptance thrown in often. Much of the writing I did on FattyPatties became the basis for Taking Up Space. I was one of the 44 bloggers who were interviewed for this study.

There is a lot that could be said about this study. It certainly is original research in that few have even asked fat people what their lives are like. Most studies about fat, fatness and even fat acceptance have centered around the effect of weight on health. Most of that research assumed the same stigmatizing assumptions that the general public has about being fat. So in that body of literature, this study is refreshing and rare.



But as a sociologist, I was also interested in this concept of empowerment in face of stigma. The dilemma for most stigmatized people is that they have little control over their social identities. Stigma "spoils" social identity because it prevents the stigmatized person from impression management. No matter what a stigmatized person does, their actions are interpreted through the stigma.

I've experienced this myself often. People are "shocked" to find out that I am smart, educated, articulate and so forth. The first impression I give is fat and all the negative things that go with it. I am praised for "bravery" when I'm simply being myself and accepting myself. And, for those who do not take the time to get to know me, I am dismissed as lazy, obsessed or defensive because I have the audacity to not fit the stereotype and to be educated about it. In short, if I deviate from the expectation of being lazy, jolly, stupid, ugly, etc., it is noted. Even those who like me do so through the lenses of the stigma as they are surprised at finding me not those things.

That is why stigma doesn't change because I don't fit the bill. All of my efforts are about my behavior and thinking, not the one who stigmatizes. I have no doubt that knowing me may change the minds and hearts of a few people, if they are open to the change. But it is they who change. Not me.

Still, it can be said that those of us who have publicly talked about our plight might be influencing those hearts and minds and empowering ourselves in the process. I find this an interesting question and one that goes beyond Goffman's theory and most of what's been written about stigma since Goffman.

Empowerment is a difficult concept sociologically. Generally, it has been psychological in nature. Basically, it has been constructed as a sense of personal identity that rises above or beyond one's social identity. From a sociological point-of-view, empowerment may not change group dynamics that much and could be seen as problematic because it can be used to ignore social dynamics. In other words, if I feel empowered but the power dynamics have not really changed, am I just reinforcing those dynamics instead of changing them?

But blogging is a different aspect of this empowerment. Blogging is social. Blogging is creating the possibility of changing the dynamic. And blogging can be a form of organizing into groups of resistance to power.

I share a portion of our book with my Soc 101 students and ask questions about stigma management in relationship to the excerpt. One of the questions is about what the author (me) can do about the fat stigma? The answer I'm looking for is "nothing" because a stigmatized person is not the one who can change it. But I often give partial credit for another answer that comes up frequently: the author is changing the stigma by challenging it, writing about it and living differently.

I like the process identified in this research. It rings true to me personally. I had several crisis moments that led me to empowerment. But I think that there is another stage that bloggers move to as it were and that is challenging power structures. In a way my movement of my writing from FattyPatties to the book to now blogging for Psychology Today is an example of that transformation from a personal experience to an empowered experience to someone who challenges the forces that set up the stigma in the first place.

Of course, glance at the comments and you can see that I still am stigmatized in writing about fatism. But with the new media and the ability to be "out" in much more public ways, perhaps it is time to expand Goffman's ideas and challenge the concept that the discredited cannot find a voice in social discourse. It is, of course, a complex question.