Embodying Inclusion: A Plus-size Woman's Critical Autoethnography of Ethically and Equitably Responsive Communication

Abstract

Public space is organized around a standard body that is rarely announced and seldom examined. This autoethnographic study examines how I, a plus-size Filipino woman, experience inclusion and exclusion across public, civic, safety, transportation, and consumption spaces, and theorizes a critical body proxemics from those experiences. Drawing on reflexive journals, photovoice images read through the SHOWED protocol, and a body map titled Spaces That (Do Not) Fit, the study analyzes eight encounters: a polling precinct chair during the 2025 Philippine midterm elections, life jackets aboard an inter-island vessel, the purchase of a higher-class airline seat, a grocery errand read as a single communicative event, refusal of carriage on ordinary public transport, a licensure examination administered in elementary-school armchairs, a plus-size retail district observed in Bangkok, and a clinical consultation in which the available blood pressure cuff did not fit. A personal history of the vocabularies applied to my body situates these encounters and shows that the meanings attached to body size are historically produced rather than natural. The findings show that inclusion and exclusion are relational and simultaneous rather than binary. I participated in every activity attempted, yet participation carried material, communicative, affective, and economic burdens traceable to the relation between my body and standardized infrastructure. Three analytic categories organize these encounters, namely invisibilization, structural exclusion, and accommodation with residue, from which the subtypes costed accommodation, anticipatory self-exclusion, capacity-denominated exclusion, adjudicated accommodation, and nominal accommodation emerged. Repeated misfitting produced embodied spatial vigilance, an anticipatory labor of measuring space before entering it. The study advances critical body proxemics as an extension of proxemic theory, holding that spatial meaning remains indeterminate until the occupying body is specified, and articulates it through eight propositions. It concludes that ethically and equitably responsive communication requires congruence between institutional discourse and material practice, and recommends anticipatory inclusion in public procurement, transport regulation, design standards, and institutional communication.