Interpretive Frame
This essay examines the humiliation experienced by fat persons in the United States through the Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) cycle developed in my doctoral research. Rather than treating humiliation as a static event or internal emotional state, it situates humiliation as a recursive process of sensemaking shaped by power, recognition, and social construction.
Humiliation as a Lived Process, Not an Isolated Event
Much of the public conversation about fatness in the United States collapses lived experience into outcomes: lowered self-esteem, poor health behaviors, or psychological distress. My research demonstrates that such framings miss the essential phenomenon. Humiliation is not simply something that happens to fat persons; it is something they must continually make sense of within a social world that positions them as lesser.
In my dissertation, humiliation is distinguished from shame precisely because it is relational and power-based. Shame primarily involves self-evaluation; humiliation requires an external agent and a perceived injustice. Fat persons may feel shame, but the experiences that shape their lives are more accurately described as humiliation: being publicly diminished, excluded, or rendered invisible by individuals and institutions that hold greater social authority.
The EIR cycle offers a way to understand how these experiences do not end with the event itself but continue through interpretation and response, shaping future experiences in turn.
Experiences: Where Humiliation Occurs
The experiences reported by participants in my study were not extraordinary. They were mundane, repetitive, and socially sanctioned. Participants described humiliating encounters in medical offices, classrooms, workplaces, retail spaces, and interpersonal relationships. These experiences shared common features: public exposure, unequal power, and a denial of recognition.
Humiliation often occurred not through overt cruelty but through neglect, dismissal, or structural exclusion. Chairs that did not fit, medical equipment that could not accommodate their bodies, assumptions of laziness or incompetence—these were not isolated inconveniences. They were repeated signals that fat persons were not fully anticipated members of the social world.
Importantly, participants did not describe these experiences as neutral. They consistently interpreted them as unfair. This perception of injustice is central to humiliation and distinguishes it from embarrassment or shame. Fat persons did not believe they deserved to be treated this way; rather, they recognized these encounters as expressions of systemic bias operating through everyday interactions.
Interpretations: Making Meaning Under Conditions of Misrecognition
Experiences alone do not determine impact. The meanings fat persons make of those experiences are equally consequential. Participants engaged in active sensemaking as they attempted to understand what these humiliating encounters meant about themselves, others, and their place in the world.
Interpretations often revolved around belonging and safety. Participants asked, implicitly or explicitly: Where am I allowed to exist without being diminished? Repeated humiliations led many to interpret the social world as hostile or unpredictable. This did not necessarily result in internalized self-hatred; more often, it produced a heightened awareness of risk.
These interpretations were shaped by dominant cultural narratives that moralize body size. Within a fat-hating culture, humiliation is frequently reframed as correction: a lesson meant to motivate change. Participants were acutely aware of this narrative and often resisted it. Their interpretations did not simply absorb cultural messages; they negotiated, contested, and sometimes rejected them.
Here, social constructionism is essential. Fatness is not inherently humiliating. It becomes so through shared meanings that define certain bodies as problems. Participants’ interpretations reveal an ongoing struggle to make sense of themselves within a symbolic environment that denies them recognition.
Responses: Protection, Resistance, and Constraint
Responses to humiliation were neither uniform nor irrational. Participants’ responses represented adaptive strategies aimed at preserving dignity in the face of misrecognition. Avoidance emerged as a prominent response—not as pathology, but as protection.
Avoiding medical care, public spaces, or social situations was often interpreted by outsiders as lack of motivation or disengagement. Within the EIR framework, these responses are intelligible. They reduce exposure to further humiliation and preserve a sense of agency when recognition is unavailable.
Other responses included resistance: naming bias, challenging assumptions, or reclaiming the word fat as descriptive rather than pejorative. These acts functioned as attempts to reassert recognition and redefine the terms of social participation.
Yet responses also carried costs. Protective strategies could limit access to resources, relationships, and opportunities. The EIR cycle reveals how responses meant to safeguard dignity can inadvertently shape future experiences in constraining ways, reinforcing the very conditions that necessitated them.
The Recursive Nature of the EIR Cycle
A central finding of my research is that experiences, interpretations, and responses form a recursive loop. Responses shape future experiences, which generate new interpretations, leading to new responses. This cycle operates simultaneously at micro, meso, and macro levels.
For example, avoidance of medical care may lead to worsened health outcomes, which are then interpreted by institutions as confirmation of stereotypes about fat persons. These interpretations justify further neglect, reproducing humiliation at a systemic level. The cycle is not merely psychological; it is institutional and cultural.
Understanding humiliation through the EIR cycle shifts attention away from individual deficits and toward patterned interactions between persons and social systems.
Dignity, Recognition, and the Possibility of Disruption
The EIR cycle cannot be understood apart from dignity. In my dissertation, I argue that dignity is not merely inherent but socially constituted through recognition and respect Fat Persons Finding Meaning in …. Humiliation functions as a withdrawal of recognition, a denial of full membership in the human community.
Disrupting the EIR cycle, therefore, requires more than encouraging different responses from fat persons. It requires altering the conditions under which experiences are produced and interpreted. Without recognition, new responses simply generate new forms of adaptation to exclusion.
Recognition is not courtesy; it is a moral and relational necessity. Until fat persons are anticipated as full participants in social, institutional, and cultural life, humiliation will continue to be reproduced through ordinary interactions.
Conclusion: From Correction to Recognition
Viewing fatness through the EIR lens reveals humiliation as an ongoing process of sensemaking rather than a singular emotional reaction. Experiences of misrecognition generate interpretations about safety and belonging, which give rise to responses aimed at preserving dignity—responses that then shape future experiences.
This framework challenges dominant narratives that locate the problem within fat bodies or individual psychology. The problem lies in a social world that repeatedly withholds recognition while demanding adaptation.
If dignity is constituted through recognition, then the ethical task is not to correct fat persons but to reconstruct the relational and institutional conditions that deny them full participation. Only then can the EIR cycle be interrupted rather than endlessly repeated.
How to cite this article:
Green, R. K. (2025). Making sense of humiliation: Fatness, meaning, and the experiences-interpretations-responses cycle. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/making-sense-of-humiliation-fatness-meaning-and-the-experiences-interpretations-responses-cycle/
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