Obesity and food in working classes: An approach to the female body

Lhuissier, Anne; Regnier, Faustine

Obesity and food in working classes: An approach to the female body

Autores

Descripción

Obesity does not concern all social classes equally; the most exposed ones are women from the working classes (16% of obese women among employees), who also belong to groups where average corpulence (frame 1) is the highest and where attention to the body (desire to lose weight, weighing frequency, practice of a sport) is the lowest. Even so, they are not cut off from the dominant body standards. A survey on working-class obese women -ex manual workers- shows that attention to the body and weight increases with proximity to the middle classes and the working world, and decreases as these women’s situation becomes precarious, turning into a medical imperative.