Grassezza e obesità nei giornali italiani: una questione di rappresentazioni

Our contemporary society still sees the fat body as a problematic issue. This refusal originated as a racist control practice and developed as an esthetical and medical problem, resulting in the stigmatization and discrimination of this marginalized social group. Drawing on a corpus of about 157,000 words, the present study aims to shed light on how journalistic language might play a role in reinforcing prejudices towards fat people and, consequently, their stigmatization. The corpus contains 305 articles on fatness and/or obesity that were taken from six Italian newspapers representing different political leanings. The analysis is based on three main research questions: which frames are used to represent fat people in Italian newspapers? Do women get a particular treatment when talked about in relation to fatness/obesity? Do the articles employ any stigmatizing discourse strategies? Results show particular emphasis on the medical aspects of fatness/obesity, in terms of consequences on fat people’s health due to their lifestyle choices, with little to no consideration of societal responsibility around weight stigma. There is also evidence of women being talked about more than men in connection with this topic, especially with regards to their duty to appear in a certain way and their responsibility as mothers. Furthermore, articles display a vast amount of stigmatizing discourses, that go from offensive referential and predicational strategies, to an explicit mockery of fat people. In conclusion, the journalistic discourses on fatness/obesity analyzed in the present study show problematic traits possibly affecting fat people’s quality of life and should be examined more extensively as to establish a generalizing pattern by taking a larger set of data into account.