Schooled on Fat: What Teens Tell Us about Gender, Body Image, and Obesity

Winner of the Reader Views Literary Award, Societal Issues and the Reviewers Choice Best Non-fiction Book of the Year, Specialty Awards, Schooled on Fat explores how body image, social status, fat stigma and teasing, food consumption behaviors, and exercise practices intersect in the daily lives of adolescent girls and boys. Based on nine months of fieldwork at a high school located near Tucson, Arizona, the book draws on social, linguistic, and theoretical contexts to illustrate how teens navigate the fraught realities of body image within a high school culture that reinforced widespread beliefs about body size as a matter of personal responsibility while offering limited opportunity to exercise and an abundance of fattening junk foods. Taylor also traces policy efforts to illustrate where we are as a nation in addressing childhood obesity and offers practical strategies schools and parents can use to promote teen wellness. This book is ideal for courses on the body, fat studies, gender studies, language and culture, school culture and policy, public ethnography, deviance, and youth culture.