Feminist Yaklaşımla Kadınların Diyet Yapma ve Kilo Verme Deneyimleri Üzerine Nitel Bir Araştırma

Abstract

Today, women's relationships with their bodies are quite complex. Since this relationship is established under the influence of the capitalist patriarchal social structure; many women want to lose weight and strive to lose weight in order to resemble the thin ideal created by the system. The purpose of this research is to understand women's weight loss experiences from a feminist interpretive perspective and to discuss the effects of capitalist patriarchal tools on weight loss motivation. The participants of this research are 11 women who have weight loss experience. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the participants who were reached using the snowball sampling method, and the women were given the opportunity to share their experiences by giving them a say about their body weight. The findings obtained from the participants' experiences were examined under four themes titled 'Society's Body, The Perception That Those Who Are Thin Are Healthy, Ups and Downs in the Weight Loss Process, and Fighting Willpower: Discipline, Stability, and Struggle'. The findings of the research reveal that women want to lose weight due to the influence of structures such as capitalist patriarchal beauty standards, thinness pressure, and diet culture. It was understood that the women who participated in the study entered a cycle of weight gain and loss at many points in their lives due to the pressure to be thin, and their relationship with food was damaged. It was understood that women's motivation to lose weight and their weight loss experiences bear traces of the objectification culture they live in, self-objectification, and internalized fatphobia dynamics. The experiences of the participants revealed that women, whose visibility in the public sphere has increased, are reduced to bodies and imprisoned in their bodies, and that women who are not thin are described as 'willless', 'unhealthy', 'ugly' and 'sick' in a culture focused on appearance and 'feeling good'.