Description: The result of a study that followed hundreds of teen-age girls for three years, this book brings to light the subtleties, complexities, and realities of girls' ideas about their shapes, eating habits, and physical ideals. 10 tables.
Brief description: Mimi Nichter is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona.
Review Quotes: [In] Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say about Dieting, the alleged silence of girls is penetrated by adults asking relevant, open-ended questions that play to the characteristic self-centeredness of the adolescent years... Nichter's careful listening confirmed the contemporary generation's preoccupations with 'body projects.' But it also penetrated beneath all the dissatisfaction and frustration to determine if young girls really were dieting, and what purposes 'fat talk' actually serves. The answer is that dieting is neither consistent nor extreme among teenagers, and that fat talk is a form of ritualistic speech used by girls as an idiom of distress, a call for support, a marker of group affiliation, and a way of establishing honesty, vulnerability, and humility... Nichter's insight that fat talk is actually part of a larger pattern of female self-deprecation is important.--Joan Jacobs Brumberg "Chronicle of Higher Education" (11/24/2000 12:00:00 AM)