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Heightism and the Cultural “Staturization” of Identities, Gender, and Sexuality From Amazon Warriors to Hobbits: Heightism and the Cultural “Staturization” of Identities, Gender, and Sexuality By Copyright 2015 Jane M. Webb Submitted to the graduate degree program in Sociology and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Chairperson Brian Donovan Robert Antonio David Ekerdt Joane Nagel Sherrie Tucker Date Defended: November 12, 2015 ii The Dissertation Committee for Jane M. Webb certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: From Amazon Warriors to Hobbits: Heightism and the Cultural “Staturization” of Identities, Gender, and Sexuality Chairperson Brian Donovan Date approved: November 12, 2015 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the social processes of “staturization,” or the cultural aspect of human height, and marginalization that comprise heightism, or discrimination based on height. The symbolic meanings of height create social categories and organize multiple aspects of social life such as gender, sexuality, the economy, culture, identities, and interactions. This project reveals further dimensions of general research on human height, gender inequality, stigma, and symbolic boundaries missed by excluding the cultural meanings of human stature. Using interviews with 63 very short and very tall women and men, this dissertation describes the cultural logic of staturization as part of the daily experiences of the tall and short. Non-normally statured persons understand their difference as they try to use or adapt standardized material culture, including mass-produced material culture and the built environment, and encounter non- material culture that defines and reinforces our ideas about tallness and shortness. The interactional salience of height includes others’ constant comments about height that accumulate into “microaggressions” that ostracize the short and tall. This dissertation also examines the staturized habitus includes lines of action, or strategies for coping with staturization, and internalized dispositions, as the temperaments of short and tall women and men reflect their responses to the different expectations for tall and short people. Furthermore, the taller-man norm, the “personal preference” for taller men and shorter women, is a fundamental organizing principal of sexuality that naturalizes gender by individualizing the choice to have conforming relationships. Staturized gender includes different processes of bodily capital allocation for tall men, short men, tall women, and short women that result in typologies of gender and sexuality for each. Like other forms of inequality, heightism contains a social logic of discrimination, privilege, and naturalized distinctions between social categories of persons. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is indebted to intellectual conversations with the faculty and fellow graduate students in the Department of Sociology. I would like to thank my adviser, Brian Donovan, for his immediate support of this project and his invaluable feedback throughout my graduate education. He has made me a better thinker and writer. My committee members also shaped how I thought about this research, and I would like to thank Robert Antonio, David Ekerdt, Christopher Forth, Joane Nagel, and Sherrie Tucker. Any academic work is indebted to the support of loved ones. My parents and grandparents have provided help and assistance whenever they could, and this dissertation would not be complete without their encouragement. I am deeply grateful to my husband, Chris Armstrong, who sees a version of me I can only hope to fulfill. This dissertation would not be complete without his labor and his love. Finally, I thank my daughter, Rose, who spent the first two years of her life napping to the sound of keyboard strikes. For Chris v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPER 1. INTRODUCTION – STATURIZATION AND HEIGHTISM: SOCIAL MEANING-MAKING PROCESSES AND THE BODY………………………………...1 A Social Process of Marginalization: Heightism and the “Staturization” of Culture…4 Research Methods……………………………………………………………………..9 Narrating Height: The (Researcher’s) Body in Interviews……………………………12 Chapter Outline………………………………………………………………………..17 CHAPTER 2. DEFINING “NORMAL”: GENDER, STIGMA, AND BOUNDARIES……...21 Researching Height…………………………………………………………………....23 Naturalized Difference: Gender Inequality……………………………………………27 Stigmatized Bodies…………………………………………………………………….35 Boundaries between Bodies…………………………………………………………....47 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..54 CHAPTER 3. THE STATURIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE: THE SYMBOLIC MEANINGS OF HEIGHT………………………………………………………………...57 We Don’t Carry That Size: Mass-Production and Staturized Boundaries…………….59 Tall Men at Work: Height and Professionalism……………………………………….69 “Head and Shoulders Above the Rest”: Staturized Language and Expectations of Tallness and Shortness………………..……………………………………………75 People as Punchlines: Humor and Heightism………………………………………….80 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..83 CHAPTER 4. THE STATURIZED SELF: MICROAGGRESSIONS AND THE HABITUS..85 “Do You Play Basketball?”: Staturized Microaggressions…………………………….89 The Staturized Habitus…………………………………………………………………100 “The Tall and Silent Type”: Internalized Dispositions of Tall and Short Women and Men………………………………………………………………………………...108 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..116 CHAPTER 5. HEIGHTIST IMAGERY OF DESIRE: STATURIZED TYPOLOGIES OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY…………………………………………………………….119 “Looking Up Into His Eyes”: Preferring the Taller-Man Norm……………………….122 (Not) Picking Him Up: Short Men in the “Friend Zone” ……………………………..131 “Tall, Dark, and Handsome”: The Embodiment of Hegemonic Masculinity………….136 “Short And Sweet” Women: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Women’s Shortness……………………………………………………………………………138 Napoleon and the Fifty-Foot Woman: Degendering Short Men and Tall Women…….144 Amazon Warriors: Fetishization and Contexts of Power for Tall Women…………….150 Freaks and Oafs: The Threat of Strangeness for Tall and Short Men and Women…….156 Conclusion…...…………………………………………………………………………163 CHAPTER 6. HEIGHTISM AND EMBODIED INEQUALITY……………...………………165 Andrea and John: Defying the Taller-Man Norm………………………………………166 vi Mapping Staturization and Challenging Heightism………………..…………………..170 Future Research………………………………………………………………………...173 APPENDIX: INTERVIEW GUIDE…...……………………………………………………….176 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………..…..179 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION STATURIZATION AND HEIGHTISM: SOCIAL MEANING-MAKING PROCESSES AND THE BODY “I wouldn’t say that my height has changed my life for the worse. It’s changed my life for the difference.” –Amber, 5’ Whether height affected their careers, relationships, or childhoods, the tallest and shortest women and men know their stature has a profound influence on their lives. Some have stories of squelched career dreams, such as Amber, 5’, who longed to be a helicopter pilot until she discovered military height requirements barred her from such an occupation. Others describe how height factors in relationship choices, daily lives, and identity formation. Tiffany, 4’11”, who said, “I’ve always identify myself as the short girl. My nickname in high school was Strawberry Shortcake because I had strawberry blonde hair. It’s just who I am. It’s the way I’ve always been.” Throughout the sixty-plus interviews I conducted about height and identity, I asked my research participants to tell me their earliest memory of being tall or short. Many recalled the exact moments they learned that they were extremely tall or short: hearing grandparents’ remarks about cousins’ growth spurts, returning to school several inches taller than their classmates, buying clothes in the children’s department long after peers graduated to juniors’, hitting their heads on overhangs previously out of the way. Others struggled to point to a specific instance when they developed an awareness of their height because they always remembered being different. My earliest memory of being tall was at an amusement park game where the employee guessed players’ weights, heights, or ages—winners who stumped the guesser received a stuffed bear. I begged my parents to play, promising that their two dollars would not be wasted because the woman holding the microphone would never correctly guess my age. “Five years old,” she 2 announced. “No,” I happily replied, “I’m three.” I also remember the park employee’s disbelief as my parents insisted she was wrong while I collected my prize. Already vastly taller than my peers, I knew even at three years old that my height shaped how others perceived me. I was already a six-foot-tall female by the end of middle school, and I grew to 6’3” by the time I was a 16 year-old high school sophomore. Before I had the language of sociology to articulate my experience, my height allowed me to see how we made meanings about gender and difference in social interactions and the larger culture. These observations inspired the sociological investigation of tallness and shortness that is the focus of this dissertation. We experience society as embodied individuals as our bodies influence culture and culture shapes our physical bodies and our understandings of them. Research on the body examines how cultural meanings emerge from the construction of the biological features of the body. Social constructionist conceptions of “the body” emphasize the cultural inscription of bodies and the materiality of bodies, which together express the appropriate or legitimated gender through
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