Body Image Models among Low‐income African American Mothers and Daughters in the Southeast United States

Abstract

Obesity among low-income African American women has been studied using the concepts of both satisfaction and acceptance. The satisfaction frame suggests greater satisfaction with their bodies than their white counterparts, irrespective of size. The acceptance frame suggests that alternative aesthetics serve as resistance against intersectional marginalization. Yet, while these women accept their body size in defiance of thinness ideals, they may not be satisfied. We describe cultural models of body image among mothers and daughters in Alabama. We found that respectability, material consumption, and parental support were important factors determining positive body image, exceeding descriptions of physical features. We further found that those expressing greater body dissatisfaction emphasized respectability, whereas those with less dissatisfaction assigned importance to consumerism and physical form. These findings suggest divergences between biomedical messaging and lived experience. They also challenge uncritical or universalist applications of these frames when interpreting African American women's perceptions of their own bodies.

Living Unembodiment: Physicality and Body/Self Discontinuity Among African American Adolescent Girls

“…It affirms disparity as the result of complex, dynamic, historically and contextually informed biocultural interactions—neither entirely structural nor entirely individual—rather than as the stock by‐product of a hegemonic otherness. It confirms the diversity of perspectives concerning bodily appearance and performance within African American social worlds documented in other disciplines (Townsend‐Gilkes 2004; Pinn 2010) and is just beginning to be documented in medical anthropology (Thomas and DeCaro 2017) and public health (McClure and Loux 2018).…”

Maternal perceptions of infant's body weight and childhood obesity in South Africa: A qualitative study in Soweto

“…Such an identitarian closure faced with acculturation processes has already been identified, as observed in African migrants living in Europe (Luque et al, 2006). Thus, Thomas and DeCaro (2018) found in African Americans that the so‐called ‘traditional’ perceptions commonly valuing behavioural attributes of beauty (like respectability, social status and appropriate behaviour) were associated with a greater body size acceptance. As a sign of cultural resistance, body weight norms valuing thinness in the context of a globalization of modern lifestyle, can be contradicted by an acceptance of larger bodies in African populations in particular, especially because biomedical norms can also be interpreted as underlying biopolitics of body stigmatizing all fatness traits of the body (Greenhalgh, 2012).…”

Acordo entre o peso corporal, percepção materna e estado de peso em crianças

“…Previous studies show that parents tend not to recognize excess weight in their children (Almoosawi et al, 2016;Yalçin, Serdaroglu, & Ince, 2016) being that, in most cases, they underestimate their body size. This difficulty in recognizing the real size of their children's bodies can be attributed to several factors, such as the level of education (Yalçin et al, 2016), maternal dissatisfaction with their own bodies (Thomas & De Caro, 2018) idealization of aesthetic standards (Heidelberger & Smith, 2016) influence of the media (Heidelberger & Smith, 2016), maternal eating behaviors (Almoosawi et al, 2016), and maternal body weight (Yalçin et al, 2016), among others.…”

“…The development of body image occurs through a continuous process, however, it begins in childhood, since concerns about the search for an ideal body have been evidenced in children from the age of three (Paxton, & Damiano, 2017;Tremblay, Lovsin, Zecevic, & Larivière, 2011). This concern with fitting into specific body patterns, thin for women (Wertheim, & Paxton, 2009), and muscularly defined for men (Ricciardelli, & McCabe, 2011) as well as, the mental construction of one's own body image, may be the result of the influence of the media (Chang, Li, Loh, & Chua, 2019), of concern and dissatisfaction with Research, Society and Development, v. 9, n. 8, e529985834, 2020 (CC BY 4.0) | ISSN 2525-3409 | DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.33448/rsd-v9i8.5834 the body image arising from parents (Thomas, & De Caro, 2018) or even, of the parents' misperception about their children's actual body size (Chen et al, 2014).…”