From Amazon Warriors to Hobbits: Heightism and the Cultural “Staturization” of Identities, Gender, and Sexuality

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.