Fat talk

A citizen sociolinguistic approach

Bibliographic Data

ID3606543
AuthorsCindi L Sturtzsreetharan (0000-0001-7528-8991, School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University Tempe Arizona, corresponding author), Gina Agostini (0000-0002-4403-2253, School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University Tempe Arizona), Alexandra Brewis (0000-0003-3769-4205, Arizona State University), Alexandra A Brewis (School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University Tempe Arizona), A Wutich (0000-0003-4164-1632, School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University Tempe Arizona)
Year2019
Volume23
Issue3
Pages263-283
Publication date2019-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Sociolinguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1360-6441 • E-ISSN: 1467-9841
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/josl.12342
OpenAlexW2938461173
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited58

Fat talk, or self-disparaging talk about the body, is common among US women and increasingly reported for men. Despite its commonality, this unique genre of talk is difficult to access using traditional sociolinguistic methods both because it is brief and because it arises spontaneously in casual conversation. Here we present a new method of data collection accomplished by collaborating with citizen sociolinguists to collect spontaneous fat talk in public spaces. We compare fat talk exchanges captured by citizen sociolinguists against those collected in a vignette-based discourse completion task. Our results show redundancy both in how fat talk is initiated and in the manner of the reply across both forms of data collection. However, the citizen sociolinguistic method produced greater variety in fat talk utterances, was less methodologically taxing, and revealed that fat talk occurs differently in same-sex interactions than mixed-sex ones

Casual · Conversation · Linguistics · Political science · Sociolinguistics · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Vignette · Communication · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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