Stereotype Application at the Intersection of Body Shape, Gender/Sex, and Sexual Orientation

ABSTRACT

Though much work has examined how sexual orientation and body shape are jointly constituted, less has examined the joint perception of body shape, gender/sex, and sexuality. We draw upon multifarious person perception approaches to examine how personality and sexuality-related traits are attributed to bodies of varying shape (skinny, average, fat) when presented with differing social identities along the axes of gender/sex (male, female) and sexual orientation (heterosexual, lesbian/gay). In a sample of 991 participants, we found robust evidence that trait application varied by both body shape and sexual orientation. Further, supporting our hypotheses, we found that gay male bodies were perceived as more feminine than heterosexual male bodies, and skinny male bodies were perceived as more feminine than other body shapes. Supporting additional hypothesizing, lesbian female bodies were perceived as more masculine than heterosexual female bodies, and fat female bodies were perceived as the most masculine across sexual orientations. Partially supporting our hypotheses, we found that average bodies were perceived as the most typical for all identities; further, bodies perceived as less typical of their social identity category were perceived as experiencing heightened prejudice on the basis of body shape.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes

¹ We use the terms “fat” and “fatness” in keeping with fat studies scholarship, which rejects the use of terms such as “obesity” and “overweight” in favor of fat as a descriptive term for larger bodies. However, we use obesity where necessary to stay true to source material.

² We use “body shape” as a reference to the fatness of bodies, opting for the terminology of shape rather than weight or size given that (1) weight is a discrete and specific measure which humans are not particularly apt at perceiving accurately and (2) size might refer also to height or proportion (see also, Oswald et al., 2020).

³ We use the terminology of “gender/sex” (see, van Anders, 2015) to refer to the jointly constituted identities of our target stimuli both as inherently sexed bodies (developed in a program which models bodies based on biological sex) and as gendered persons with whole identities intertwined with their sexed bodies. We refer to bodies as “male” or “female,” but use “men/man” or “women/woman” to refer to social identities. We recognize that gender and gender/sex identities can and do branch from sex, but in the current work we assign all male bodies identities of “man/men” and all female bodies identities of “woman/women.”

⁴ As required by our IRB, the survey was anonymous and information regarding recruitment locations for each participant was not gathered. It is unknown where most of the successful participant acquisition took place; therefore, the composition of our sample as it relates to recruitment locale is uncertain.

⁵ Trolling was defined as a series of two or more responses that appeared insincere. For instance, ages that were unbelievable or sexual orientation categories that do not exist.

⁶ Participants were randomly assigned to conditions as follows: skinny heterosexual male (n = 97); average heterosexual male (n = 66); fat heterosexual male (n = 90); skinny gay male (n = 73); average gay male (n = 67); fat gay male (n = 83); skinny heterosexual female (n = 81); average heterosexual female (n = 100); fat heterosexual female (n = 85); skinny lesbian female (n = 83); average lesbian female (n = 95); fat lesbian female (n = 71).

⁷ Although we categorized “dominant” as a positive trait eliciting sub-traits associated with confidence, decisiveness, and assertiveness, we acknowledge this trait may also include negative characteristics such as aggression or disagreeableness. It is unknown whether participants in the current study interpreted “dominant” as a mostly positive, negative, or neutral trait.

⁸ We used Raubenheimer’s (2004) cutoff criteria for loadings above 0.4 on the central dimension and all other loadings below 0.25.

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Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article