“This is an introduction to Fat Studies that is so much more than the

basics. Friedman deftly weaves together the multiple histories and

theories that are shaping Fat Studies today. The result is intersectional
and accessible but never simple. It will be an invaluable touchstone for
the field.”
Francis Ray White, University of Westminster

“Fat Studies: The Basics brilliantly unpacks the complexities of fatness

across social, cultural, and political facets of life. The book highlights
the impact of fatness within healthcare and how media representation
curates our perceptions of the body, revealing how dominant systems
take up fatness and create inequities in all aspects of our lives. Each
chapter evokes a thoughtful process to rethink the biases and
assumptions that permeate our understanding of fatness, and encoura­
ges us to enter our everyday lives with a more nuanced understanding
of inclusion, access, and body diversities.”
Sonia Meerai, Assistant Professor, Laurentian University

“This accessible little primer dives into the biggest ideas emerging
from Fat Studies today, debunking myths and exploring the rich his­
tory and realities of fat lives. A must-read for anyone interested in
social justice and body politics!”
Carla Rice, Professor and Research Chair in Feminist Studies and
Social Practice, University of Guelph
 FAT STUDIES

THE BASICS

Fat Studies: The Basics introduces the reading of fat bodies and the
ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas
about fat people, their lives, and choices.
Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is
a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order
to understand this field, the book also explores its intersections with
race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, migration and
beyond. In addition to thinking through terminology and history, this
book will aim to unpack three key myths which often guide Fat
Studies, showing that:

1 fat is a meaningful site of oppression intersected with other

forms of discrimination and hatred;
2 to be fat is not a choice (but also that a discussion of choice is
itself problematic); and
3 fat cannot be unambiguously correlated with a lack of health.

Fat Studies: The Basics is a lively and accessible foundation for students
of Gender Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Media Studies, as well
as anyone interested in learning more about this emergent field.

May Friedman is a Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University,

Canada. Her research explores Fat Studies and unstable identities.
T h e Ba s i c s

The Basics is a highly successful series of accessible guidebooks

which provide an overview of the fundamental principles of a
subject area in a jargon-free and undaunting format.
Intended for students approaching a subject for the first time, the
books both introduce the essentials of a subject and provide an ideal
springboard for further study. With over 50 titles spanning subjects
from artificial intelligence (AI) to women’s studies, The Basics are an
ideal starting point for students seeking to understand a subject area.
Each text comes with recommendations for further study and
gradually introduces the complexities and nuances within a subject.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF REPRODUCTION
SALLIE HAN AND CECÍLIA TOMORI

SCIENCE COMMUNICATION
MASSIMIANO BUCCHI AND BRIAN TRENCH

PROJECTION DESIGN
DAVIN E. GADDY

ETHNOGRAPHY
SUSAN WARDELL

BAYESIAN STATISTICS
THOMAS J. FAULKENBERRY

FAT STUDIES
MAY FRIEDMAN

PROPAGANDA
NATHAN CRICK

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.

com/The-Basics/book-series/B
FAT STUDIES
T H E BA S I C S

M a y F r ie d m a n
Designed cover image: FlashMovie, Getty Images
First published 2025
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2025 May Friedman
The right of May Friedman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-88810-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-87941-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-53977-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
To all the Fat Studies students over the years who have
blown my mind with your vulnerability and wisdom.
This is for you.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements x

1 Introduction 1
2 How Fat Hurts 24
3 Choosing Fat? 41
4 Toward Death and Debility? 61
5 Fat and Popular Culture 81
6 Intersecting Fat 103
7 Fat Activisms and Fat Revolution 126

Index 137
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I swore I would never write another sole-authored book—too

clunky, too many words to hold in my mind at once. The
opportunity to write this book occurred unexpectedly after I
taught my course Fat Studies and Fat Activisms at Toronto
Metropolitan University in 2024. The cohort of students was so
astonishing and that course stands out as one of the best teaching
experiences I have ever had. If I had been approached at any
other time I think I would have said no to writing a book about
Fat Studies (a terrifying undertaking for so many reasons!) but the
courage of those students wouldn’t let me go—and here we are.
First and foremost, my thanks goes to that group.
To my work family, especially JP—I wouldn’t be standing
without you and I owe you more than I can possibly convey. To
my friend family, especially Marcia, Emma, Emily, Anna and
Rachelle—you keep me going when it feels impossible. To my
family, you are my reason for breathing. Sabrina and Danni—
thank you for being our family, and Sab, thanks for being on so
much of this journey with me and ahead of me. Dan, Noah,
Molly, Izzy and Sasha—I will never stop being grateful for the
lessons you teach me. I can’t believe that this is my life.
 1

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION
As a species, we are characterized most of all by our variability.
While all humans share the majority of our DNA in common, we
come in a huge range of presentations: different skin tones, hair
textures, facial features, heights and, of course, weights (National
Human Genome Research Institute). While we are defined by our
differences, not all of the ways in which we differ are treated
equally. Some are treated as benign—for example, left-handedness.
Others, such as gender identity or sexuality, are ascribed systems of
meaning and political decision making.
Fatness is one form of human physical variation that is loaded with
meaning. While fat people have always existed, and continue to exist
in every known human society, associations with fat have varied across
time and place. That said, fat people have been noteworthy for much
of human history and are given particular attention in the present day.
This book will look at the lives of fat people, past and present, to
try to understand how fatness is experienced and storied. This book
will consider fat lives, and also the theories about them, which are
now becoming grouped together into a discipline known as Fat
Studies, an emergent field that considers body size as a site of dis­
crimination and oppression and explores the variables of fat life.

FAT VS. FAT STUDIES: THINKING FATLY

While this book is officially about the study of fat—Fat Studies—it
is impossible to think about fat theory without thinking about fat

DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773-1
2 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

life. This book will aim to debunk many of the key ideas that are
commonly held about fat people—which is a central aim of Fat
Studies scholarship—and also explore the specificity of particular
fat lives. As a result, at points this book may seem like it’s more
about “Fat: The Basics” than about the particularities of fat scho­
larship, but at this stage, much of the theoretical work continues to
be enmeshed with fat activism and the drive for fat liberation, so
the overlaps will exist throughout the book, as they do in life.
Examining fat life is itself a theoretical undertaking that can truly
re-program our way of thinking. While the focus of this book will
be on unpacking fatness specifically, thinking about fat can also help
us understand more about the world more broadly. For example,
themes of citizenship, personal responsibility, health, religiosity, race
and gender are all threaded through our understanding of fat lives
and the rules, policies and laws that attempt to govern them.
This chapter is framed by the following questions:

� Why do we use the word “fat”?

� What are the histories of fat activism?
� What is “Fat Studies”?

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “FAT”?

While “fat” is just a word to describe a way of being or a
substance, the word is far from neutral. Instead, fat people have,
historically and into the present, been viewed negatively. Fat folks
are assumed to be lazy. Fat is associated with a lack of hygiene and
self-care. Fat people may be seen as sexless or, in opposition, as
oversexualized, especially with regard to fat women. Fat people are
assumed to be ugly, with many popular representations of the fat
love interest as the butt of a joke. Most of all, fat people are seen as
gross—people who violate the social contract to be neat, tidy and
contained. Much of our societal concern with fat people is rooted
in this visceral “ick” that we’ve been taught to associate with fat
people. We may even feel this disgust with our own fat bodies, or
with people we otherwise love. The relationship between fat,
shame and disgust is hard to unpack but is essential to an under­
standing of fat life and Fat Studies, because so much of the reaction
to fatness is coming from this embodied ick.
 INTRODUCTION 3

Of course, while all of these associations are placed on fat

people, they are simply untrue. Fat people come in the same range
of embodiments and experiences as any other group—there are fat
people who smell delightful and some who don’t like to bathe.
There are fat people with deep commitments to time management
and others who struggle with procrastination. Ascribing any char­
acteristics to a whole group of people is the essence of stereotype
and should be viewed with great caution. Unfortunately, this cau­
tion is often ignored in thinking about fat people where the
assumption that the stereotypes are rooted in reality is greatly taken
for granted. (This is especially true in overwrought concerns about
fat people’s assumed poor health, something that will be taken up
in greater detail in Chapter 4.)
This initial chapter will lay the groundwork for the rest of the
book. We begin with issues of terminology, considering first and
foremost the choice to centre the word “fat” and the complex
messages which that word contains. This chapter will explore his­
tories of the body and the ways that body policing is held in rela­
tion to colonialism and racism, laying a groundwork for the
current state of fat stigma. The chapter will then move to a con­
sideration of fat activism, including acknowledgment of formal and
informal attempts to counter fat hatred and centre fat experiences.
Particular attention will be paid to the ways that the seeds of fat
reclamation originated with Black feminist thought. Finally, the
chapter will examine the field of Fat Studies and consider how this
academic approach to fat stigma and fat activism has come together
in the last 15–20 years and how its approach may be fruitful in
thinking through many different areas of privilege and oppression.

A NOTE OF CAUTION
It is tempting to dismiss all the “old” and “wrong” ideas about fat
and replace them with new, enlightened ways of knowing about
fatness. To replace one set of set beliefs with another, however, is
contrary to the spirit of Fat Studies, which seeks, above all, to
allow imperfection, improvisation and debate. There is no right
way to feel about fat—your own or anyone else’s. We live in
societies that have a lot of opinions about fat people and it is
therefore very difficult to feel neutral about fat lives and fat bodies.
4 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Prioritize your own wellness and consider this book as an invita­

tion to join a conversation, not to foreground a new “correct” way
to think and live. Exposing the deeply held belief systems that may
inform your personal and political relationship with fat can be
uncomfortable, but can also be very exciting!
Fat Studies is still willing itself into being—with every year there
are more publications, public events, activist encounters and private
and public moments that are growing the project of Fat Studies, fat
activism and public fat life more broadly. As a result, this is a
dynamic and flowing movement. This book aims to begin to shut
down stereotypical and dangerous perceptions of fat people and to
allow for a range of possible alternatives to emerge. The book will
help you understand both what Fat Studies is and what it has
emerged in response to, but when the book is finished, Fat Studies,
and the many different, intersected and complicated lives of fat
people, will carry on, so consider this “The Basics—For Now”, with
room to participate in an ongoing and never-ending conversation.
While the unstable nature of Fat Studies can be frustrating,
especially to folks who want to get a beginners’ understanding of
the field, it is also consistent with the political approach to fat life
which craves a multiplicity of views and lived experiences. There
are so very many ways to live and Fat Studies and fat activisms
aim, at their best, to avoid proscriptive notions of a “right way”.
In this respect, it can be tempting to see Fat Studies as merely
oppositional, rather than having an essential characteristic of its
own. While this is a dynamic space, however, the overall com­
mitment to love, beauty, discussion and debate, and the revelling
in self-expression and joy, are definitional to the fat project and
these are themes which will be explored in greater detail over the
course of the book.

� As you read this book, it may be helpful to consider your own

relationship to fat.
� What are your stories about fat people and fat bodies?
� How old were you when you learned about the concept of fat­
ness? What people and systems taught you?
� What is your personal relationship to fat?
 INTRODUCTION 5

Fat is deeply societal and political, but it’s also very personal.
Our understanding of fashion, culture, health, society and beyond
are all informed by how we feel about our own bodies and those
of the people around us. If concepts in this book are new, consider
why you may not have encountered them elsewhere. If they pro­
voke feelings of distress or doubt, consider thinking through that
discomfort and questioning where these feelings began.

WHY DO WE USE THE WORD “FAT”?

Words matter. They allow us to explain how we exist in the
world, albeit imperfectly. They are a tool to describe our envir­
onments. Words can be tremendously empowering, but they can
also do enormous harm. In the realm of thinking about people
who are larger, the words we use are very important.
The choice to use the word “fat” is deliberate and has a long
history. Because fat is often seen as a mean-spirited word, many
euphemisms are often used in its place: curvy, fluffy, plus-size,
ample, big-boned. While the desire to avoid hurting people’s
feelings—or contributing to our own humiliation—makes a lot of
sense, ultimately the retreat to these alternate words says a lot
about how much we have soaked the word fat with poison. We
do not, for example, come up with complicated alternatives to
calling someone double-jointed. We readily refer to people as
tall—but might pause before using the word “short”, especially to
describe someone male-identified, knowing that there are social
complications to living as a shorter man. Our fear of particular
words gives them power.
At the same time that the word fat may feel weird or mean in
our mouths, other words have gained currency. As we increasingly
live in a world that is governed by science and health discourses,
fatness has stopped describing a general range of possible bodies
and has come to live at fixed points that are termed “overweight”
and “obese”. These terms draw from the Body Mass Index which
suggests that BMI over 25 is overweight and over 30 is obese.
(People with a BMI over 50 are considered, medically, “super
morbidly obese”.) While this book will delve into the problems
with BMI more thoroughly in Chapter 4, its origins are far from
pure. BMI was invented as a crude marker for describing human
6 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

size, and its capacity as a diagnostic and organizational tool overlooks

most sites of human diversity including gender, race, ethnicity, class
and beyond. It’s not by mistake that the person who invented the first
tool that led to BMI, Adolphe Quetelet, was a famous eugenicist who
sought to organize humans into many different categories for the
purposes of understanding who was worthy and unworthy (Jacobs
2023; Strings 2023).

� Do you use the word fat to refer to yourself? Why or why not?
� Would you use that word to describe someone else?
� How does the word “fat” feel to you when you think about
using it in everyday life?

BMI markers—those “o” words—suggest that there are fixed

and reliable outcomes that occur at set points in the BMI scale, but
this is not true—there is huge variability across all sizes in terms of
health conditions, mobility, flexibility, etc. There are other pro­
blems: “overweight” automatically suggests that there is a fixed
normal weight for all humans that, somehow, two-thirds of North
Americans are “over” (Jacobs 2023). “Obese” has come to stand in
for even more shaming characteristics than the word fat—obese
people are automatically assumed to be lazy and reckless, on a one
way trip toward death. Yet the third of North Americans who are
obese come in a range of health manifestations, employment sta­
tuses and human experiences. These words aim to flatten fat
experiences and suggest that there is a one-directional correlation
between being bigger and being worse. (This, despite the fact of
several large scale studies that found that the lowest mortality rate is
for people in the “overweight” BMI category (Flegal 2021)).
Fat, by contrast, is a loose descriptor. What is fat in figure skating
might be average or small in chef school. While it is essential to
think about our different experiences across the fat continuum, and
to acknowledge that the level of mistreatment and distrust that is
aimed at people does grow with bigger sizes, ultimately the word
“fat” seeks to let us describe ourselves and our own bodies. A fat
body can be many different things—some of them delicious and
others that we may continue to struggle with in the face of rampant
 INTRODUCTION 7

fatphobia. Fat activists may revel in the body’s unruliness, the ample
dripping folds and bulges. But ultimately, fat is a word that is
increasingly re-imagined:

In fat studies, there is respect for the political project of reclaiming

the word fat, both as the preferred neutral adjective (i.e., short/tall,
young/old, fat/thin) and also as a preferred term of political identity.
There is nothing negative or rude in the word fat unless someone
makes the effort to put it there; using the word fat as a descriptor
(not a discriminator) can help dispel prejudice. Seemingly well-
meaning euphemisms like “heavy,” “plump,” “husky,” and so forth
put a falsely positive spin on a negative view of fatness.
(Wann 2009, xii)

For many reasons, then, fat activism has leaned into the word fat
and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Fat Studies has done the same. While
there are euphemisms for other fields that are adjacent to Fat Stu­
dies—Critical Weight Studies, for example—many of these tip
into fat shaming or pathologizing discourses and further, aim to
seek legitimacy. It is uncomfortable to use the word fat, and it is
disruptive to suggest that fat could be worthy of academic study. It
is precisely the tension of this discomfort that Fat Studies wants to
explore and expose. Doing so allows us to consider all sorts of rule
systems that force us to be compliant and obedient and to question
who they serve. If we can lose our shame about the word fat,
about our own fat, what can we let go of next?
To read this book you don’t need to already feel comfortable
with the word fat, or even with the fact of fat. But hopefully this
book will provoke you to begin to unpack when and how that
word came to assume so much power and what would need to
happen for it to become a neutral way of describing some bodies
and experiences, or, perhaps even a site of pride.

Who gets to use which words? I often say to others: I get to call
myself fat but I don’t get to decide what you want to be called.
Because words are so powerful, and because fat is still largely
understood as an unkind word to apply to someone, caution still
needs to be exercised in using it. It’s a word that many of us have
8 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

come to understand as beautiful, but nonetheless, describing others

around you as “fat” without consent can still cause harm. That said:
don’t use “obese” and “overweight” instead! If you don’t have a
reason to describe someone’s body, just don’t. And if you do have a
good reason, focus in on what you actually want to know: “What size
shirt should I order you?” “Are you comfortable in that chair or would
you prefer this one?” Fat people are very used to their fat being
hypervisible in public space but also ignored for fear of embarrass­
ment. Please acknowledge our size when it matters (when reaching
for the right sized blood pressure cuff, for example)—and leave us
alone otherwise.

HISTORIES OF THE BODY

There are many different ways that the body has been theorized
over time. In Western philosophy, Enlightenment mind–body
dualism suggests that body and mind are fundamentally separate.
Other philosophies, notably those of Michel Foucault, note a
greater congruency between body and mind, suggesting that the
body, and its context, matter to how we understand our funda­
mental selves. No matter which approach we take, we cannot
divorce ourselves from our bodies –they are what make us, us.
Some of us many be deeply aligned with our bodies and feel them
as a natural extension of ourselves, there to do our bidding. Others
may feel quite disconnected from our bodies and their functions.
In the context of identity politics, bodies are deeply present. It is
impossible, for example, to consider a politics of disability without
considering the body and what are considered to be “normal” or
normative functions. Likewise, theories and politics around queer
and trans lives deeply implicate the body and what it does in spe­
cific places and times. This may have to do with the specifics of
sexuality or genitalia, for example, but extends beyond these
realms into other ways of being, dressing, presenting or existing in
space. These ideas are also present when we think about race:
while it is a crude explanation of racism to merely suggest that
bodies of different colours experience public space and life differ­
ently, it is also a reality that is rooted in the specific corporeal
experiences of embodiment.
 INTRODUCTION 9

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, in the realm of fat, the body is

also important, in both contemporary and historical settings.
While fat bodies have always existed, the symbolism which has
been applied to them has been variable. In many different socie­
ties over time, fatness has symbolized wealth and health. As such,
fat was synonymous with desirability and an enviable life. At the
same time, in many different traditions, “excess” (a variable and
inconsistently marked size) was associated with greed, a lack of
self-control and presumed laziness (Hill 2011). While the bench­
marks of “right” size vary across place and time, there is still a
sanction placed on bodies that are considered, by some measure,
to be “too” large. This appears to be true across every place and
time. Further, specific intersections change the model for ideal
body type: in different eras, fat was related to fecundity and
appreciated in female identified bodies; in other eras such as today
in many Western cultures, fat is viewed as inconsistent with
healthy fertility and policed accordingly.

Fat is a “floating signifier”: It’s hard to figure out what the “right”
size “should” be because it’s not actually real. Ultimately, each body
has its own relationship with weight and other characteristics and
there is no universal correct size or shape (or race or hair texture or
boob shape or running speed).

The fat body has often been associated with the grotesque
(Bakhtin 1968). Abject theory, drawing from the work of Julia
Kristeva (1982), considers the ways that the body’s workings are
seen as somehow disgusting and unseemly as opposed to the higher
workings of the mind.
An over-emphasis on the body as dripping, leaking or otherwise
behaving in uncontained ways is often held alongside bodies of
size, but other “different” bodies have had similar critiques levied
at them. For example, bodies that operate outside of usual expec­
tations because of disability and illness are often seen as broken or
deficient; especially when the bodies’ inner workings are revealed,
such as with –ostomies or limb stumps, revulsion may follow.
Kathleen LeBesco signals the inclination toward disgust in her
10 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

book Revolting Bodies (2003), suggesting that the very bodies that
invite scorn can also be rebellious and steer us toward alternate
futures. Perhaps this orientation toward reclamation and revolt is
part of the deep connections between fat activism and Black fem­
inist thought. Before Fat Studies was a field of study, scholars like
Audre Lorde and bell hooks were considering the ways that dis­
obedient flesh both frightened and rebelled against systems of
power. Sabrina Strings’ wonderful book Fearing the Black Body: The
Racial Origins of Fatphobia (2019) considers the ways that funda­
mentally, a fear of fat stems from racist logics. The co-evolution of
scientific thinking about race and size were dependent on one
another and fundamentally shared a privileging of white, male,
contained and disciplined flesh.

Fat bodies are often ignored—there are no clothes, seats don’t fit,
physical and public space seems to suggest fat people don’t (or
shouldn’t) exist. At the same time, fat bodies are also hyper-present
as examples of disruption and disturbance. For example, a staple in
18th- and 19th-century freak shows was the presentation of people
who were of extremely large size. These bodies were viewed as
remarkable but also as monstrous.

In the current moment the racial origins of fatphobia are all

too present. In an era where explicit racism by health care
providers, for example, is against codes of ethics, pointing out
that someone is fat and demanding body management such as
weight loss may be a new way to regulate specific (often racia­
lized and Indigenous) bodies. If, as we will explore in the next
chapters, weight loss is an impossible goal, then prescribing it as
therapy is simply cruelty. This cruelty especially targets Black,
Indigenous and other people of colour using age-old arguments
grounded in white supremacy and colonialism: that only an
effort-filled life is worthy and deserving. The irony that most
wealth is achieved by generations of theft is erased here in
favour of an analysis that talks about “hard work” while over­
looking the labour of the hardest workers.
 INTRODUCTION 11

Many different texts take up the story of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi

woman who was “discovered” by white colonial settlers who subse­
quently put her on display around the world as an example of a
remarkable and flawed body. The specific focus was on the size of
the most sexual parts of Baartman’s body, specifically her large
bottom and genitalia. The fetishization and brutalization of this
woman continued after her death when parts of her body continued
to travel around the world for public display. For more information
see Strings 2019.

The focus on individual success, numeric indicators and linear

expectations of effort and achievement, are all deeply embedded in
colonial frameworks. The notion of policing one’s own body and
divorcing it from its natural workings—not to mention its relation­
ship with the environment and ecosystems beyond the body—is a
terrible theft. Left to our own devices, we might consider the possi­
bility that bodies grow dynamically and inconsistently, like the fruit
on our trees. We might detect that in the animal world there is deep
variability within the same species. Instead, we have entered the
Barbie Factory where each of us should vary only slightly from the
original idealized mold.
“Barbie” was originally designed by Ruth Handler as a doll
named after her young daughter. The doll varied greatly from most
dolls of the time which were meant to look like babies. Instead,
Barbie emerged as a busty babe whose sexuality was only limited
by her lack of genitalia. Early feminists remarked on the impossi­
bility of Barbie’s physique: were she formed at the size of an
average person she would be incapable of standing or walking:

We know that if Barbie were real, she would have impossible physical
dimensions. She would break in half if she bent over because her
bust is too large to be supported by the size of her waist, not to
mention her tiny, perpetually pointed feet. And she doesn’t have
enough fat on her body to menstruate. For this image to be the
standard of beauty is problematic, because it sets an impossible and
unhealthy ideal.
(McCoy 2023, para. 12)
12 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Unfortunately, one of the insidious impacts of colonialism is the

spread of logics, objects and markets. Diet culture, weight loss
supplements, low calorie food and an insistence on a specific ver­
sion of “health”, create and proliferate a culture that suggests that
individual responsibility is the only predictor of success; and like­
wise that any challenges come from individual failures.
Logics of the body have varied across geographies and time
frames, and into the present day the self-help and responsibility
focus continues to morph and shift. While the last decade has seen
an uptick in the language of body positivity and self-care, both
ensure that the onus is still on the individual to expend significant
physical, financial and mental resources on ensuring that the self or
the body is not only maintained, but also now, loved. The body at
rest is an affront to capitalism and as a result, the fat body, which is
stereotypically seen as the epitome of stillness, becomes the site of
total scorn and rage.

FAT ACTIVISM
As can be seen above, for as long as there have been people, there
have been fat people. And for as long as there have been fat people,
there has been some form of fatphobia, even if the target size and
scope of the scorn has varied across time and place. Importantly,
however, while there is a lot of internalized shame and pain among
fat folks, there has equally always been a spirit of resistance. It is
impossible to understand fat life, then, without thinking through fat
activism. Fat activism means a lot of different things and, the same
way that fatphobia shape-shifts across spaces and eras, similarly,
resistance to fat hatred has occurred in a range of forms.

Charlotte Cooper’s book Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement

(2016) examines many different waves of fat activism, including
“proxies” for fat activism that focus on fat adjacent ideas or fields.
Importantly, Cooper locates civil rights organizations such as the
National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and the Fat
Underground, but also focuses on “ambiguous fat activism”, fat
research, fat community and other less obvious sites of activist
engagement. For many under-recognized and under-theorized
 INTRODUCTION 13

peoples, simply existing in public space is a key site of resistance.

Fat people are expected to change, or disappear, and the fact that
so many have failed to do so is, in and of itself, activism.

Often, the canonical story about fat activism frames it as a social

movement that arose alongside feminist organizing in the 1960s
and 1970s and coalesced into formal organizational structures such
as NAAFA and its more radical offshoot, the Fat Underground
(FU). Some of the formal activism around fat oppression was
informed intersectionally by feminist and especially queer engage­
ment. Many sources point to the 1983 publication of the collec­
tion Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression as a
pivotal moment for fat organizing. Unfortunately, as Farrell details,

this origin story also constitutes a serious problem. Even with the caveat
that often precedes its telling (“this is only one of the stories”) the fre­
quency with which this origin story is repeated means it is becoming
more entrenched, situating fat activism as a largely US, white, lesbian
movement. Its repetition flattens fat, erasing complexity and contra­
diction, ignoring other voices, many of whom do not necessarily see fat
as the crisis area, but rather as one crisis area out of many.
(2020, 31)

The focus on this canonical story of fat activism creates an idealized

view of activist practice that discounts the ways that many different
forms of resistance have been lived by lots of people over time. The
specific resistance that lives in organized protest, spectacle, writing
and the engagement with public space is not always available to
everyone, and doesn’t encompass the wide range of practices that
reflect resistance and resurgence. Fat Studies seeks to document the
range of possible ways that fat people have resisted and sought fat
joy in the face of fat hatred.
While the language of body positivity and self-love has come
into ascendency in the last decade, there has always been resistance
around the policing of the body. This is especially true for bodies
that live in the intersections of multiple types of sanction and
containment. For example, there has been overlap between dis­
ability activism and fat activism (and of course, there are many
14 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

people who are fat and disabled who advocate for both simulta­
neously). Suggesting a hierarchy of good or bad bodies works
against many people who are not fat or who are identified outside
of their fatness. By framing an analysis that welcomes a range of
bodies and abilities, and refusing the logic of “good” and “bad”
bodies, fat activism and disability activism align.
Civil rights organizing around race has been essential to fat
activism. In the modern era, many of the strongest voices speak­
ing back against the privileging of smaller bodies were Black
women. Audre Lorde, for example, in her Cancer Journals (first
published 1980), responded to the pathologizing of her body as a
larger Black lesbian with a cancer diagnosis—it is impossible to
see Lorde’s advocacy without exploring all of these identities and
struggles as interconnected. Strings (2019) points to the historic
demonization of Black bodies as the origin story for fatphobia—
but as fat Black hatred took root in colonial spaces, it was always
accompanied by resistance. Fat Black women, as Shaw writes,
“embody disobedience” (2006). Black author, activist, academic
and politician Dr. Jill Andrew brings in this framing in her
advocacy to end weight and size-based discrimination through
human rights frameworks. Andrew writes that,

Fat bodies are framed as uncanny, excessive, and literally bursting out
of bounds … Similar to the framing of Black bodies, fat bodies have
been socially constructed as out of control, lacking self-determination,
and are often painted as an unhealthy menace to health care.
(2020, 223)

Like many other lessons learned from Black folks, especially

Black women, the origins of resistance are often whitened up
and divorced from their origins. Radical organizing around size,
race and ability becomes sanitized and repackaged as body
positivity or self-love and the political potential of these move­
ments is reduced to an individual desire for a bubble bath or a
low cut shirt. While it is tempting to see this removal as inno­
cently misguided, it allows for a focus that continues the same
theme that is embedded in diet culture: a focus on changing the
self instead of changing the world.
 INTRODUCTION 15

Sonya Renee Taylor’s groundbreaking work The Body Is Not an

Apology explores the power of radical self-love. Taylor suggests that:

Radical self-love is deeper, wider, and more expansive than

anything we would call self-confidence or self-esteem. It is juicer
than self-acceptance. Including the word radical offers us a self-love
that is the root or origin of our relationship to ourselves … Using the
term radical elevates the reality that our society requires a drastic
political, economic, and social reformation in the ways in which we
deal with bodies and body difference.
(2018, 6)

Taylor reminds us that we love ourselves in order to love one

another and demand a better and more just world.

Sometimes, just being alive is a form of resistance. Being alive and

enjoying that life is especially powerful for fat people who have been
taught to apologize and shrink their lives at every turn. There is a
specific form of activism that can be seen in fat gatherings, especially
those that celebrate the body. Fat swims, fat beach days, fat clothing
swaps are all ways that fat people gather unapologetically and both
find joy and build community. While on the face of it these actions
may seem minor, they have a huge impact on fat people especially for
folks who are only recently coming into fat awareness.

Like all forms of activism, there isn’t a singular, unitary pathway to

being a fat activist. Indeed, the suggestion of a narrow way forward
replicates the exact problems that fat activism seeks to eradicate. We
should not believe that there is a single way to look or live. We want
there to be variation and respect across difference. As a result, there
needs to be respect for a range of different activist practices and
comfort levels.
Recently, I taught a class in which I bemoaned the recent rise of
weight control drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic. As I looked
around the room at my 50 students, however, I realized that it was
almost a statistical certainty that people in the class were currently
taking these medications. Without a doubt all people in the room,
16 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

myself included, were navigating some sort of body management

practices. To lead with the idea of a perfect way of being a fat
activist is to reproduce the same narrow thinking we seek to rebut.
Instead, we need to have a huge and expansive toolbox that makes
room for all of our incredible skills and capacities but also our
varying vulnerabilities and comfort levels. In addition, this toolkit
needs to recognize that our proximity to risk—of derision, of
medical mismanagement, of child welfare involvement, of legal
enforcement—is not equal across all fat bodies.

FAT ACTIVISM AND THE ARTS

For many fat activists, multi-sensory and artistic approaches respond to
some of the need for better fat representation. The movement is filled
with dance, poetry, artwork, photography and other resplendent
offerings. There are more avenues of fat activist art than could possibly
be mentioned in this text box, but here are two to get you started:

Photographer and visual artist Shoog McDaniel captures fat bodies in

a range of ways, including often in nature. McDaniel’s work often
brings together multiple fatties and celebrates the parts of fat aes­
thetics that are most often the most hated—showcasing cellulite,
capturing fat bodies jiggling underwater and displaying ample rolls
layered upon one another. This work is radical in its insistence on
uncontained fat bodies—as opposed to the inclusion of “plus size”
models who look largely like mainstream models just sized up a tad.
The work is explicitly political and makes what is meant to be viewed as
ugly, beautiful. In addition, much of McDaniel’s visual art insists on the
need to take up space and refuse to withdraw from the public gaze.
More info can be found here: http://shoogmcdaniel.com/about.
Academic and artist Allyson Mitchell uses textile, visual art, video,
photography and many other formats to celebrate fat life. Much of
Mitchell’s work is in creating “happenings”; for example, through
now defunct fat activist collective Pretty Porky and Pissed Off, or the
recent Kill Joy’s Kastle. These events are meant to be provocative but
also playful, and foreground fat, queer joy. Mitchell also uses craft, so
often scorned as “women’s” art, to explore the textures and layers of
fat life. For more information go to: http://allysonmitchell.com.
 INTRODUCTION 17

FAT STUDIES AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

As with other identity-based academic fields such as Women’s
Studies, Black Studies and Sexuality Studies, Fat Studies grew
directly out of activism. While theorizing about fatness has occur­
red for many years, often in the context of Women’s Studies or
Gender Studies courses, the more formal entrenchment of Fat
Studies as a field is more recent.
In 2009 two key collections were published. In England, Fat
Studies in the UK was published by Raw Nerve books. Simulta­
neously, The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and
Sandra Solovay, was published by New York University Press.
While other books on fat life had been published in the years
prior, the two anthologies represented a key moment in the
bringing together of Fat Studies and the use of that title for the
emergent field that explores size discrimination and weight accep­
tance. In 2012, the academic journal Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Body Weight and Society was launched with Rothblum as
Editor in Chief. This further solidified the field and led to a greater
degree of legitimacy for the discipline. In the inaugural issue
Rothblum wrote that “Fat studies scholars ask why we oppress
people who are fat and who benefits from that oppression. In that
regard, fat studies is similar to academic disciplines that focus on
race, ethnicity, gender, or age” (Rothblum 2012, 3)
As a field, Fat Studies draws from identity politics movements that
foreground specific embodiments as both worthy of study and also
often underrepresented or overlooked. Though fat organizing and
resistance is as old as humanity, the shift toward discourses of health,
and specifically the rise in fears around obesity since the beginning
of the 21st century have contributed to greater analysis of fat bodies
and, as a result, new manifestations of fat hatred. Simultaneously,
racist discourses rooted in the need for self-regulation are well served
by the fat witch hunt: fat hate is often poorly disguised racism. It is
unsurprisingly, then, that Fat Studies began to emerge in response to
these trends. While the field of Fat Studies still receives scorn from
more conservative circles, it has gained traction and its existence is
no longer new and surprising.
The academic study of fat is desperately important, especially
since so much fat hatred is driven by scientific and expert driven
18 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

discourses: all the arts based and joy filled approaches in the world
can’t speak back in the face of what is deemed to be scientific
certainty. That said, academia is not an accessible space and the
moving of fat resistance into the ivory tower has entrenched some
degree of elitism into Fat Studies and has contributed to the side­
lining of specific fat experiences. As an academic field, Fat Studies
has continued the “official” retelling of fat resistance and as a result
is not as wide ranging as a truly liberatory field needs to be. The
introduction to the 2020 anthology Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies,
Intersectionality and Social Justice names this concern:

Normative expectations have a habit of creeping into critical studies.

Even the progressive field of Fat Studies has sometimes failed to treat
gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, indigeneity, citizenship, age,
geography and ability to full analysis. The normative subject of the
field still tends to be a young(ish), white, cisgender woman, and
typically one who is from the Global North. Fat activist spaces, too,
tend to materialize as white, middle-class spaces. Like other fields
and activisms invested in counter-hegemonic culture-building, Fat
Studies and politics run the risk of erring on the side of sameness at
the expense of difference.
(Rinaldi et al. 2020, 2)

Collections such as Thickening Fat seek to rectify this imbalance,

and indeed, the discussion about the need for greater diversity and
intersectionality is present in a wide range of Fat Studies spaces.
The field continues to grow and shift in response to its many
contributors and, as a relatively young field, has room to evolve
more nimbly than its older counterparts. While Fat Studies is far
from perfect, many of its manifestations in classrooms and texts aim
to respond to concerns about marginalization, and to foreground
diversity.

FAT IN THE CLASSROOM

While thinking through fat liberation has been a part of courses for
many years, especially in the context of Women- and Gender
Studies classrooms, in the last decade, dedicated Fat Studies courses
have begun to sprung up in a range of post-secondary institutions.
 INTRODUCTION 19

Many begin as special topics courses without a permanent course

code. That said, Fat Studies courses have begun to be permanently
on the list of electives (i.e. non required courses that aren’t always
offered) in a few places.

Some of my motivation in writing this book comes from teaching an

open elective at my university on the topic of Fat Studies and Fat
Activisms. This course is offered through the School of Social Work
and takes up many of the same themes which inform this book. I’m
always struck by how overwhelmed and engaged students are in this
course, how much they name wishing that they could think about
themes and ideas from Fat Studies in other parts of their academic
and non-academic lives. The course is, quite frankly, humbling: stu­
dents of all sizes and crossing every other identity category, show up
and confront deeply held beliefs and hold space for one another to
find different answers. It has been the most rewarding teaching I
have ever done.

Fat Studies courses are an easy target for critiques of identity-

based and social justice oriented education. Right wing responses
generally point to the field as self-indulgent and encouraging of
obesity (the latter might be accurate!). Progressive critiques point,
justifiably, to the ways that uncritical responses to fat and body
acceptance can maintain tropes of whiteness and self-discipline
without actually providing structural critiques. Teaching Fat Stu­
dies can be exhausting in the face of all this criticism! That said,
Fat Studies in the classroom makes a huge contribution. Students
not only learn about the specificities of fat hatred and fat activism,
but also are taught to cultivate scepticism about widely held
beliefs that span many different parts of society. Fat Studies allows
for an analysis of the interplay of policy and people as well as the
many different ways that populations can be regulated, often
through what seem to be our own “innocent” choices. As a
result, the application of the skills gained in Fat Studies courses
can allow students to become critical thinkers in ways that may
extend to a range of other settings.
20 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

The political, of course, is always personal. I am astonished by

how often students have commented about wishing that their
mothers could learn about Fat Studies, in order to both change
their relationships with one another, but also to heal mothers’ own
painful relationships to their own bodies. Fat Studies students learn
to be critical and to question their own body management prac­
tices (all the things we all do, no matter how woke, to regulate our
bodies in public space). This systems-level understanding, however,
can result in tears and revelations, connections and breakthroughs.
The class comes together as a community and every week there
has been a feeling that we are uncovering something revolutionary.
While teaching Fat Studies is inspiring, there is also validity to
the concerns about Fat Studies as a field. The most valid critique is
that it is completely counterintuitive to teach about how we need
to move away from striving for personal perfection within a colo­
nial academic setting that makes students work for a grade. It’s not
a perfect field and these are not perfect classes. In sitting with such
tender content, we may hurt one another, we may be more vul­
nerable than we can afford (instructors included!). That said, there
is a lot of magic accomplished in these spaces.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
As a relatively young field Fat Studies has only begun to scratch the
surface of thinking through the body in space. Drawing from prior
theorization of the body has allowed for a range of robust scholar­
ship but there are so many fat populations and fat experiences that
have not yet entered into formal scholarship and so many different
bodies that are still under-represented or excluded. As with many
identity based fields, Fat Studies can sometimes be overly populated
by bodies that are the most normative: smaller, whiter, and overall
less threatening to academic systems. It remains to be seen whether
these bodies and these scholarships will blast open the fences of
academia for more and more exceptionalities to enter, or whether
they will close the gate behind them. In truth, it will likely be some
combination of both. Future work in Fat Studies can learn from
some of the pitfalls of, for example, second wave feminism, in order
to create as expansive a tent of knowledge and learning as possible.
There are so many possibilities and opportunities ahead!
 INTRODUCTION 21

Who are Fat Studies scholars? Because there is no formal academic

department of Fat Studies anywhere in the world as of this writing,
Fat Studies scholars are housed in a wide range of disciplines
including Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies,
Sociology, Social Work, and beyond. More and more emerging
scholars are using Fat Studies as a theoretical and methodological
framework for their work, so the field continues to grow and spread
into many different academic spaces.

WHAT NEXT
At this point you’ve learned about why we might use the word fat,
how bodies have been framed over space and time, and how fat
activism has morphed into Fat Studies both formally and informally.
Yet our understanding of Fat Studies is incomplete without a bigger
understanding of the many different facets of weight stigma and
fatphobia. In order to understand Fat Studies as a legitimate field, fat
people must be understood as a distinct population with unique and
important challenges and strengths. This is tricky, because of course
fat life, like any other identity grouping, is varied and inconsistent.
That said, moving along now we’ll consider some of the costs of
fatness and the ways that living while fat, though enormously vari­
able, can nonetheless be seen as a meaningful site of identity worthy
of discussion and response.

FURTHER READING
Cooper, Charlotte. Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement. HammerOn
Press, 2016.
Farrell, Amy Erdman. “Thickening Fat and the Problem of Historiography.”
Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice, edited by May
Friedman, Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 29–39.
Meleo-Erwin, Zoe. “Queering the Linkages and Divergences: The Relation­
ship Between Fatness and Disability and the Hope for a Livable World.”
Queering Fat Embodiment, edited by Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha
Murray, Routledge, 2014, pp. 97–114.
Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New
York University Press, 2019.
22 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

WORKS CITED
Andrew, Jill. “Introduction.” Body Stories: In and Out and With and Through Fat,
edited by Jill Andrew and May Friedman, Demeter Press, 2020, pp. 13–19.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. 1968. Indiana University Press, 1984.
Farrell, Amy Erdman. “Thickening Fat and the Problem of Historiography.”
Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice, edited by May
Friedman, Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 29–39.
Flegal, Katherine M. “The Obesity Wars and the Education of a Researcher: A
Personal Account.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, vol. 67, 2021, pp. 75–79.
Friedman, May, and Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, editors. Thickening Fat: Fat
Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice, Routledge, 2020.
Hill, Susan E. Eating to Excess: The Meaning of Gluttony and the Fat Body in the
Ancient World, Praeger, 2011.
Jacobs, Alexander E. “How Body Mass Index Compromises Care of Patients
with Disabilities.” AMA Journal of Ethics, vol. 25, no. 7, 2023, pp. 545–549.
Kaloski Naylor, Ann, and Corinna G. Tomrley, editors. Fat Studies in the UK,
Raw Nerve Books, 2009.
Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection.” Powers of Horror, Columbia Uni­
versity Press, 1982, pp. 2–6.
LeBesco, Kathleen. Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, Uni­
versity of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
Lorde, Audre. “The Cancer Journals.” Disability Journals, edited by G. Thomas
Couser and Susannah B. Mintz, Macmillan Reference USA, 2019, pp.
110–114.
McCoy, Heath. “For Better and For Worse: Feminist Scholars Weigh In on
Barbie’s Legacy.” UCalgary News, https://ucalgary.ca/news/better-a
nd-worse-feminist-scholars-weigh-barbies-legacy, 2023.
McDaniel, Shoog. “Shoog McDaniel.” http://shoogmcdaniel.com/about.
Mitchell, Allyson. http://allysonmitchell.com.
National Human Genome Research Institute. “Genetics vs. Genomics Fact Sheet.”
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Genetics-vs-Genomics.
Rinaldi, Jen, and Carla Rice and May Friedman. “Introduction.” Thickening
Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman,
Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 1–11.
Rothblum, Esther D. “Why a Journal on Fat Studies?” Fat Studies: An Inter­
disciplinary Journal of Weight and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, 3–5.
Schoenfielder, Lisa, and Barb Wieser, editors. Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings
by Women on Fat Oppression, Aunt Lute Books, 1983.
Shaw, Andrea E. The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly
Political Bodies, Lexington Books, 2006.
 INTRODUCTION 23
Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, New
York University Press, 2019.
Strings, Sabrina. “How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment
and Racializes Fat Phobia.” AMA Journal of Ethics, vol. 25, no. 7, 2023,
pp. 535–539.
Taylor, Sonya Renee. The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love,
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018.
Wann, Marilyn. “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution.” The
Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, New
York University Press, 2009, pp. ix–xx.
 2

HOW FAT HURTS

INTRODUCTION
In the first chapter we explored issues of language and the different
histories of the fat body and fat activism that bring us to the present
day. There are critiques of fat activist practices from both con­
servative and progressive points of view. For many people, fat
activism is seen as a huge indulgence—the most ridiculous example
of equity and diversity initiatives gone wild. Why, detractors argue,
should we worry about fat people when they are responsible for
their own discomfort? Arguing from the perspective of social jus­
tice, there are concerns, sometimes valid, that centring fatness takes
away from more “important” concerns such as racism. At the heart
of these concerns, however, is a perspective that suggests that fat
people don’t truly suffer in ways that are similar to other sites of
oppression. Drawing from Fat Studies scholarship, this chapter
seeks to explain some of the impacts of living in a fat body and the
ways that the structural oppression of fat folks—the systems that go
beyond interpersonal insults—is embedded in day to day life, and
from birth to death.
This chapter is framed by the following questions:

� What are the social consequences of living in a fat body?

� How do different intersections impact fat lives?
� How do different life stages change the experiences of fat life?

This chapter begins by explaining the ways that fat is a significant

and measurable site of oppression. Exploring the consequences of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773-2
 HOW FAT HURTS 25

fat stigma from cradle to grave, the chapter will aim to consider
many of the different ways that fat hatred and the exclusion of fat
life occur. The chapter will take an intersectional focus, consider­
ing the ways that fat oppression is similar to, different from, and
works with other identities and embodiments, themes that will be
taken up more completely in Chapter 6.

FAT STIGMA: HOW DO FAT PEOPLE EXPERIENCE

THE WORLD?
Fat people are the butt of the joke and even in politically correct
settings are permitted to be the punchline. Fat stigma is so deeply
embedded that sometimes a fat person needs only to appear for
people to sneer or laugh. In common with many other sites of
oppression, however, fat hatred is not merely the same as rudeness
and can’t be fixed by people being nicer. Rather, fatphobia is
replicated and amplified in social structures that impact every area
of people’s lives. Living in a fat hating world teaches us that to be
fat is bad and that we must be ashamed if we are fat and that we
must avoid fat at all costs if this is not yet our reality. Fat is also an
additive identity— the other social locations in a person’s life
intersect and interlock with fat.
Fat people experience the world as emotionally hostile. To be fat,
while common, is to transgress the social contract. There is judg­
ment and shame in every interaction. All food choices are observed
and policed, from eating in public to consulting with a nutritionist
for food related health concerns. “Health trolling”, the phenom­
enon of bystanders heckling because they are “just concerned
about your health” is on the rise. Beginning in childhood, parents
may feel pressure to monitor children’s bodies, physical activity,
size and shape, in the name of both health and aesthetics.
Fat people experience the world as physically uncomfortable. Public
spaces are not designed with fat bodies in mind, even though many
people are fat. Public transportation, school seating and medical
equipment not only pinch people’s bodies—they convey the ways
that bigger bodies are fundamentally wrong and that they should
be excluded from public space. Fat people’s needs are viewed as
irrelevant to planning decisions. Owen terms this “spatial dis­
crimination”, the ways that the orientation of literal space works
26 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

against fat folks (2012). They suggest that the arrangement of

physical space ensures that fat people experience non-stop micro-
aggressions that serve to remind people not only to stay home, but
ideally, not to exist. Owen writes:

From the moment a fat person awakes in the morning, s/he is

reminded of living fatly in a thin-centric world. Shower stalls in which
we have to stand sideways (baths are rarely an option); towels that
won’t fasten around our waists or chests; disproportionately expen­
sive or ill-fitting jewelry, belts, shoes, and clothing; narrow doorways,
hallways, aisles and bathrooms; too-tiny and/or molded plastic seats
in buses and on subway trains; narrow, flimsy, or armed office, lawn,
theater, airplane, restaurant, and dining room seating; weight limits
on exercise equipment; hospital gowns, blood pressure cuffs, MRIs,
life jackets, seatbelts, and other health or safety devices that simply
don’t fit: all are constant reminders that fat persons don’t fit, that our
most basic needs, desires, and safety therefore matter less.
(2012, 294)

Fat activist academic T. J. Stewart puts the following disclaimer on

his course outlines to make transparent the many ways that campus
life is forbidding to bigger students:

Fat Students & Students of Size: The reality is that many campus
buildings and structures are either out of date and/or they have
furniture or classroom structures that are not friendly or conducive
for fat people or people of size. I always do my best to mitigate
these issues but may not always be successful. At any time if you
find yourself experiencing discomfort (physical or otherwise) par­
ticularly related to body-size as a result of fatphobic, anti-fat, or
sizeist structures please let me know immediately. I will work with
you on a solution or accommodations including finding suitable
furniture, requesting a classroom change, or another alternative—
so that you can have a better learning environment.

This statement led to a bigger research project by Stewart and

others that sought to document the interrelated limitations of cam­
puses for fat students (Stewart 2018).
 HOW FAT HURTS 27

Fat people experience internalized fatphobia. The extent to which

“fat” is equated with “bad” is deeply engrained. While infants do
not know to scorn their delicious rolls, by age five fatter children
experience bullying and thinner children know to view fat young
people as problematic or intrinsically flawed. Furthermore, it is
nearly impossible to be fat without seeking to eliminate fat—the
vast majority of fat people (and thin people) are engaged in some
type of body management practice (diet or exercise or surgery or
some combination). It is hard to love a body you are trying to
erase. The deep shame many fat people experience is caused by
fatphobia, but it also allows fatphobic beliefs to be maintained
because, so often, folks are too embarrassed and humiliated to ask
for their fat bodies to be treated with dignity and affection. Ironi­
cally, pervasive stigma and hostility contribute to stress, which can
cause a host of health concerns, concerns for which fat people, of
course, are blamed.

WHAT DO WE CALL WHAT FAT PEOPLE EXPERIENCE?

You may have noticed that there is a range of different terms that are
applied to the oppressive experiences faced by fat folks. Many of these
terms are used interchangeably in this book, but while the terms have
common threads, there are specific differences between them.
Sometimes the discrimination against larger bodies is termed size­
ism, reflecting the hierarchy in which particular sizes are viewed as
more powerful and advantageous than others. Similarly, weight stigma
explores the specific personal and institutional impacts of living in a
larger body; so do anti-fat and anti-fat bias. These terms are mean­
ingful in terms of engaging with systems and frameworks that draw
on rights discourses and require specific mapping of experiences in
order to convey discrimination. That said, these terms do not always
acknowledge the breadth of experiences of both fat people and
people who have any kind of relationship with fat (used to be fat,
loving people who are fat, secretly hating your boss that is fat,
questioning why you are so very worried about getting fat).
Fatphobia is a commonly used term, and what is beneficial about
this term is that it acknowledges the extent to which the fear of fat
may impact people of all sizes. In a world that is profoundly dis­
respectful and judgmental of fat people, avoiding fat becomes a
28 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

society-wide concern. In common with other oppressive systems

that use the language of “phobia” (homophobia and transphobia
for example), the term reflects the deep disgust and fear of specific
bodies and practices which characterize much of the common dis­
course around fat people and fatness generally.
I think about my grade school kids. We live in an urban
centre where diversity is celebrated and, while there is
obviously much unchecked racism, homophobia and transpho­
bia and ableism in the classroom, at least the talk is “talked”
about many human differences. The classroom is, however,
oddly silent on the topic of fat, apart from the odd fat joke
made by a child which doesn’t get corrected. I realize that these
sweet kids mostly celebrate their differences, do not fear coming
out as queer or trans, proudly acknowledge their neurodiver­
gence. I feel that if students knew they were going to grow up
to be fat, however, they wouldn’t have the same reaction. It’s
impossible to know, but given the ways they have encountered
fat (obesity prevention in the health unit, fat villains in all their
novels, lectures about fruit) this possible future stands apart from
many others as a unique site of fear and revulsion. How does
this affect all the kids in the class? What about the ones that are
already larger than their peers?

Are you afraid of fat? Sometimes in public talks or classes I get

challenged about whether fatphobia is in fact all around us. I will
ask people of all sizes: “How would you feel if you gained 100 lbs
from wherever you are now?” It turns out that, with very few excep­
tions, most people are deeply uncomfortable with the thought of a
body that is substantially larger than present, no matter what size
they currently are. Furthermore, if I amend the question and ask
how folks would feel if they were 20–30 lbs lighter, most people
admit that this would be welcome, even if they have already
embraced fat activism as part of their lives. Consider asking yourself
both questions and then reflect on what your response may reveal
about your beliefs. If your first concern is about your health, perhaps
reflect on where that belief was learned as well.
 HOW FAT HURTS 29

Sometimes we use the language of fat hatred. Given the over­

whelming prevalence of language of “obesity epidemic”, and the
extent to which fat people have been blamed for moral disorder,
impacts on public safety, and burdening the health care system,
among so many other ills, it doesn’t seem hyperbolic to suggest
that “hatred” is the right word.
More recently, some scholars in Fat Studies have used the term
fatmisia:

Fatmisia … is prejudice plus power; anyone of any weight or body type

can have/exhibit size-based prejudice, but in North America and across
the globe, thin people have the institutional power, therefore fatmisia is
a systematized discrimination or antagonism directed against fat
bodies/people based on the belief that thinness is superior.
(Simmons University Library 2024)

Fatmisia links the hatred of fat people and fear of fat to larger
institutional structures such as capitalism and patriarchy. As such,
this term reflects the pervasiveness of anti-fatness and the ways it is
deeply embedded in every possible aspect of human life. This
embeddedness is explored further below as we examine the
impacts of fatness across the lifespan.
All of these terms are useful and all help describe the life experi­
ences of fat people and of all people in a fat hating society. There is
specific impact from using particular words and most Fat Studies
scholars use many of these different words throughout their writing.

MEASURING THE IMPACTS OF FAT LIFE

It’s a hard world for anyone in a body bigger than what is accepted
as “normal”. These impacts start young and influence every stage
of life as well as a range of different contexts. For example, before
we are born, the fetal environment may be scrutinized for “obe­
sogenic” influences, with the uterus we grow in already being
viewed with suspicion. Concern about size and perceived health
implications are offered throughout pregnancy, not only in the
context of health care but also often by concerned bystanders see­
mingly trained in eyeballing a perfect bump. Once we emerge, the
fact that the pre-birth environment matters is conveniently erased
30 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

and we are immediately entered into a weight conscious matrix—

that the first “facts” that are offered about a new human are most
often sex designation and weight speaks volumes about our values
as a society and our passion for fixed systems of description and
measurement. As tiny infants we are expected to gain weight and
there is concern if we fail to do so, for perhaps the only time in
our lives. By the time we are toddlers, living outside of the bell
curve of the pediatric growth charts is suspicious and alarming,
despite the fact that these charts are not only organized by sex at
birth but also based on samples that are not at all representative of
human diversity (Sandler 2021).
Body self-consciousness begins very early in life. Children as young
as five express discomfort with bigger bodies and are aware of avoid­
ing specific foods to attempt to change shape (Tatangelo et al. 2016).
Research asking young children to pick playmates from a range of
non-normative physicalities routinely finds that they pick fatter chil­
dren last (Kornilaki 2014). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, bullying of
fat children is overwhelming, conspicuous, and largely unaddressed
(Weinstock and Krehbiel 2009; Wei and DiSanto 2011). Despite a
climate that is increasingly attentive (at least theoretically) to mental
health concerns and bullying, fatness remains an easy target. The
relationship between fat and shame means that adults are reluctant to
acknowledge that fat kids are hypervisible, so uncomfortable social
interactions can be overlooked or underestimated. Unfortunately,
adults are not exempt from fatphobic views so they may also feel less
warmly toward fatter kids and/or make judgments of their parents. As
with all other areas of stigma, living within an oppressive system has
impacts on school performance, mental health and self-esteem. Fat
kids may be too self-conscious to participate in sports teams or
other sites of joyful movement (Flores Aguilar et al. 2020), ironi­
cally leading to “confirmation” that fatter people do not want to
move. Fat kids are singled out for diet and exercise advice more
than their peers—effectively all eyes are on fat kids, but, in contrast
to other identities, there is no pride or alliance to provide support.
Fat kids are thus both horribly overexposed to scrutiny and
simultaneously ignored.
By puberty the message that fat is always terrible and wrong has
become obvious, just in time for many kids who were smaller to
plump up in anticipation of coming body changes. These impacts
 HOW FAT HURTS 31

can be especially debilitating to trans or non-binary kids for whom

puberty can be particularly overwhelming. Puberty can be, even
for cisgender kids, a time where the body feels out of control, and
the impact of added weight can cause emotional upheaval. Many
young teens engage in body changing practices, including dieting
or other food restriction or punitive exercising (Tanner 2023). The
fearmongering about the “obesity epidemic” (explored further in
Chapter 4) also ensures that medical practitioners are echoing the
message of increased weight as both a body failure and also a fail­
ure of will. While health is the suggested goal of these messages,
medical interventions into weight management in younger people
have resulted in a much greater incidence of eating disorders.
Registered dietician and author of Unapologetic Eating, Alissa
Rumsey states that

A child is 242 times more likely to have an eating disorder than they
are to have type 2 diabetes. Yet the vast majority of our public health
education is spent warning parents (and kids) about “childhood obe­
sity”. Why? Fatphobia, not health. If you took a sample of 100,000
children, only 12 would have type 2 diabetes … but 2,900 would meet
the criteria for an eating disorder. By 9 years old, 50% of girls have
dieted or restricted their food intake in some way.
(Rumsey 2021)

If the majority of our health messages warn parents about “child­

hood obesity”, we should be questioning what is happening. This
messaging has led to a generation of dieters and is a sign that diet­
ing is not really about health: in so many ways, diets actually make
us unhealthy: physically, mentally and emotionally. Further, yo-yo
dieting and other dramatic interventions can have lifelong impacts
on metabolism, ironically harming overall physical health while
also having impacts on mood and emotional wellness.

Strong4Life is a public health campaign put out by the state of

Georgia. In 2011 the campaign featured billboards with photographs
of fat young people with phrases such as “Warning: It’s hard to be a
little girl when you’re not” and “My fat may be funny to you but it’s
killing me.” Notably, many of the young people in the photos were
32 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

kids of colour. In response, fat activists led by Marilyn Wann began

the “I Stand Against Weight Bullying” campaign which sought to
buy billboards and replicate the style of the images but to offer fat
affirming phrases such as “I STAND against harming fat children.
Hate ≠ health.” The counter-campaign was itself somewhat con­
troversial, tending initially to focus on white women’s images and
affiliating itself with Health At Every Size (in some respects, a pro­
blematic movement, to be discussed in the coming chapters).
Nonetheless, this grass roots response was a meaningful moment
in the history of both fat hatred and fat activism.

By adolescence young people are very aware of the hierarchy of

acceptable bodies. Pride movements around sexuality and gender
identity may build community and enhance well being; identity
based activism around race and ethnicity place joy alongside experi­
ences of racism and exclusion. For fat people, however, there may
be no pride, no joy, and often, at younger ages, little access to acti­
vism or community. Fat adolescents are often excluded from dating
and relationships (though assumptions of oversexualization may lead
to fat young adults, especially those who are identified as female,
being sexually harassed). Teachers may knowingly or unknowingly
penalize fat students, falling into assumptions of laziness (Dian and
Triventi 2021). Fat students may be less likely to be admitted to
post-secondary education or offered scholarships.
By adulthood the penalties for fatness have become evident and
extend throughout all aspects of life. Fat people are less likely to be
hired and are overlooked for promotion (Flint et al. 2016). Fat
people, who have often been doubted since childhood, may also
lack the confidence to ask for what they need, in work and else­
where in life. The saturation of shame in fat life can make it very
hard to lead with confidence, especially when fat coincides with
other experiences of marginalization. While this is not true for
every single fat person, even people who are, for example, very
confident in dating situations may still experience fat shame at
doctors’ offices.
Speaking of doctors’ offices: they are not designed with fat people
in mind, emotionally or physically. Doctors have been trained to be
scrupulous about letting people know they’re fat (as though fat
 HOW FAT HURTS 33

people do not have access to mirrors?) and that fat is dangerous and
deadly. As a result, fat people recount that virtually every doctor’s visit
for any reason is met with the suggestion of weight loss (Borisova and
Stockelova 2024). Beyond the suggestion to lose weight, many fat
people are met with explicit hostility in medical settings, some of
which may verge on malpractice. Fat people with uteruses and/or
breasts, for example, are offered Pap smears and mammograms less
frequently than thinner people (Wee et al. 2000), resulting in less
prevention for cancers. Accurate equipment (bigger blood pressure
cuffs, longer needles, adequately sized MRI and CAT scanners) may
not be available or offered, resulting in a lower quality of care, all of
which is seen solely as the fault of the fat person.
In later life fat may be protective: for people over 55 “both
overweight and obesity confer a significant decreased risk of mor­
tality” (quoted in Bacon and Aphramor 2011, 2). Despite this, the
onslaught of fat shaming and blaming discourses never ends. It is
often acknowledged that thinness requires money—for healthy
food, for gym memberships, for the leisure time required to engage
in body maintenance—but fatness may also simply lead to poverty
because of the more limited educational options, career possibilities
and lack of confidence that fat people may experience. As a result,
fat people are poorer, which makes retirement harder to achieve
and may contribute to the many poorer health outcomes of low
income. As all people grow older, physical health may become
more complicated. For fat people, this inevitable shift is attributed
to their fatness, so instead of just living in an older body, they are
continuously treated as though they are in defective bodies.
Even at the end of life fat bodies continue to lack respect. Bigger
coffins are more expensive and may be difficult to source. Not all
crematoria have the capacity to care for supersized bodies. Our
death systems, like those throughout our lives, are designed with
specific bodies in mind, but these specificities do not acknowledge
the range of embodiments that actually exist.

Where do we learn that fat is bad? Virtually every representation of a

larger person in popular culture suggests that, at best, fat characters
are lovable but messy (Winnie the Pooh) and at worst, disgusting
and hateful (Dudley Dursley). Fat characters exist only to set up a
34 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

redemption arc (Fat Monica on the sitcom Friends) or as the punch-

line to a joke about an unattractive blind date. Fat Americans are
shown as so damaged that they must look outside the country for
love (in the context of 90-Day Fiancé, insulting both fat and foreign
experiences all at once!). Fat people are, by definition, miserable (This
Is Us), unwell (My Mad, Fat Diary) and stupid (Homer Simpson).
These ideas will be taken up in greater detail in Chapter 5.
Trying to find a fat character who is unremarkable, whose char­
acter traits are not predetermined by their size, is virtually impos­
sible outside of explicitly fat activist media. Fat forward pop culture
is amazing—shows such as Shrill or books such as The Accidental
Pinup series—but such offerings are often preaching to the choir
and are drowned out by the deluge of fatphobic offerings every­
where else. We make this media because of our biases but we also
learn those biases from this media, thus ensuring that the negative
associations with fat are maintained.

FAT AT THE INTERSECTIONS

The general trajectory for fat life is deeply challenging. While the
challenges are all around us, the specifics of how fat people
experience the world are informed by many other contexts and
experiences. The specific messaging around fat is amplified in
regard to particular identities and connections. While these themes
will be taken up in more detail in Chapter 6, it is impossible to
acknowledge the impacts of fat hatred without considering how it
connects with other forms of oppression.
It’s important to note that all fat bodies live intersectionally—no
one is fat and nothing else. Identity analyses can be somewhat
crude tools for understanding human experiences but specific
identities can result in different structural experiences. Looking at a
few of these experiences can remind us of the tremendous varia­
bility of fat life and also the alchemy of fatphobia as it mixes with
other injustices.
In the realm of gender, fat life can be quite different for people
who are male or female identified, and different again for folks
who live outside of the binary. Fat women are hypersexualized or
invisibilized from sexual expectations—either seen as insatiable or
 HOW FAT HURTS 35

unlovable. The aesthetics of size are especially punishing to fat girls

and women who are expected to disappear. Weight is deeply
important, but so is shape—fat women must be cellulite and
stretchmark free, with all curves being smooth and elevated. While
standards have shifted in popular culture toward desire for thicker
thighs and larger bums, overall there is still a very narrow realm of
acceptability for women’s body shape (Fikkan and Rothblum 2012).
Men’s bodies may escape some of the punishment that is placed
on women’s bodies, though as the conversation increasingly high­
lights health instead of appearance (even though it is all about
appearance), all people are expected to self-regulate at all times.
That said, there is a wider range of normal for male-identified
bodies. With that in mind, however, men may also be desexualized
by flesh seen as excessive. Non-athletic men are seen as weak or
effeminate, failing at the task of manliness by allowing rolls that
may resemble more stereotypically feminine flesh.
While an androgynous aesthetic is increasingly seen as desir­
able, interestingly, this look is also framed around thinness. Most
of the gender neutral clothing available for purchase is made in a
narrow size range, and the popular culture version of non-binary
life is often associated with a slim, flat body. Furthermore, the
specifics of fat placement can gender bodies (though in very
inconsistent ways—fat rolls may make a body more or less femi­
nine or masculine depending on context and community opi­
nions). For trans and non-binary folks the body may feel even
more fraught, and controlling appearance and public reading of
the body can be overwhelming (White 2014). Adding the chaos
of fat to the mix can contribute to distress internally, but also to
bullying and violence externally.
Across all intersections, fat can sometimes be easy to hate and
mock. We live in a toxic and difficult world with a lot of hateful
messages about difference, so arguably we have all taken on some
degree of internalized racism, sexism, etc. If we have learned that it
is impolite to express these views we may allow them to emerge in
the context of fat hatred, which is still largely permissible, as a
proxy for other forms of hatred. In other words, middle schoolers
may bully the fat trans kid because they are fat, but also as a means
of expressing their (unacceptable) transphobia. This can make it
36 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

very hard to name oppressive behaviours because they are occur­

ring in the in-between of different identity markers.

Even as we talk about microaggressions and aim to figure out how

to hold space for kindness, so much of our experience of hatred—
across all identities—occurs in the blurry middle ground of how we
feel in the world. The world is filled with unbelongings—in fact
there are almost as many ways to be a wrong person as there are
people! We are constantly facing scrutiny and judgment and we
may not always know why. We may also not know why we judge
others: is the vague feeling of being grossed out that we get due to
someone’s size or the way they chew their food? Are we thrown off
by a mismatch between ours and someone else’s neurodi­
vergences or is something more insidious at play? Only deep
reflection can help us unpack the variety of poisons we’ve inges­
ted. In the realm of fatphobia and especially where it bumps into
other identities—as it does with virtually everyone—the hidden
nature of fat shame and blame can make it even harder to untan­
gle what is going on in any given interaction. As a result, fat folks
may swallow a particularly large dose of unpleasantness, unwilling
to call out racism because it is cloaked in fat shame, turning on
themselves and their gender presentation because it’s also related
to their fat flesh. In the felt state, this in betweenness can be truly
devastating.

Fat Studies theorizes connections between fat and disability.

Authors have asked whether fat can be understood as a disability
and, by the same token, the emphasis on fat as natural variation
resists (some of) the language of disability. Nonetheless, when dis­
ability and fat co-occur, the language and treatment of fat people
can be uniquely toxic. Fat people with mobility differences can be
assumed to be the cause of their own difference; fat people with
mental health differences are more easily understood as lazy or
“crazy”. While the over-valorization of people with disabilities is a
real problem, the lack of any generosity toward fat bodies may
result in the opposite effect: fat people with disabilities who are
unworthy of anything other than scorn.
 HOW FAT HURTS 37

There are specific and insidious components to fat hatred toward

Black, Indigenous and other people of colour. As explored briefly
in Chapter 1, much of the contemporary face of fatphobia was
birthed by colonization. The focus on weights and measures, the
necessity for self-governance, the reification of a specific view of
normalcy—these are all colonial structures. The overwhelming
abuse and degradation of Indigenous people and communities
included focusing on bodies as wrong, and on mocking and erasing
traditional food and body practices. Into the present, one of the
ways that Indigenous populations continue to be policed is in the
over concern about diabetes. There is much funded research about
obesity prevention in Indigenous populations in Canada, for
example (Robinson 2020), but much less attention paid to how to
support reparations for the overwhelming and unending impacts of
colonization.
For Black communities, there is a similar fixation on health
conditions such as heart disease, hypertension and diabetes—all
conditions that are correlated with stressors caused by racism—but
little support in maintaining livable lives (Roberts 2010). Fatphobia
toward communities of colour is often a new face of racism that
allows for the scrutiny of and vigilance toward folks of colour with
a new judgmental frame: laziness due to fat replaces judgment due
to colour. It is not by accident that some of the most offensive
racist beliefs are similar to the stereotypes about fat people. Stoll
writes that, “When it comes to race, fatphobia, which has always
been intimately connected with the historical development of
whiteness in the United States, is often used as a way to mask overt
racism in the name of ‘health’”. (2019, 9) These judgments have
deadly consequences: while there is an attempt to address explicit
racism in healthcare, fatphobia allows for shaming and judgment of
people of colour to continue; bigger Black kids may face even
more punitive and shaming interactions in school settings; and, as
Mollow displays, police violence against bigger Black bodies is not
only occurring, but may then be storied as the fault of the victims
themselves as a result of being Black and fat (2017).
This analysis isn’t meant to offer a hierarchy of oppressions
where, if you eat at the oppression buffet and your plate is more
full you are therefore more pathetic. Rather, by exploring the
specificity of some combinations of fat possibilities, we can
38 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

consider the widest range of experiences and remember that fat

phobia is a shapeshifter: it can be executed in innumerable different
ways and exploits both personal and structural vulnerabilities.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

It would be impossible to effectively list the many different con­
sequences of fat life in contemporary societies. This chapter is not
meant to be a definitive account of fat oppression but rather to
note that fat hatred is worthy of our attention. In the quest for
justice, fatphobia creates enough terrible consequences that it
requires a commitment to its dismantling, a deep awareness of, and
response to, the overwhelming scope of fat shame and hatred.
Alongside the many challenges to fat life it is deeply important to
recognize the existence of fat pride, fat community, fat art, fat joy! Fat
activist spaces reclaim fatness; many fat people revel in their ample
bodies and do not see them as sites of misery and harm. This chapter
seeks to articulate some of the difficulties fat people face, but no fat
life is singular—we experience hate but also love; experience pain,
but also joy. The reclamation of the word fat is partially an attempt to
wrestle both the words and experiences of fat life from a narrative that
is only about suffering. While it is important that this book—and the
project of Fat Studies more broadly—acknowledges the many strands
of fatphobia, it is equally important that these experiences are never
viewed in isolation.
As previously discussed, Fat Studies and fat activism receive cri­
tiques from both progressive and conservative sources. The general
consensus is that to think about fat is a self-indulgence, that fat
hatred isn’t really that bad and that to combat fat oppression steals
resources from issues that really matter. Hopefully this chapter has
begun to flesh out the many ways that fatphobia and fat hatred
matter, the impacts across people’s lives and interlocking with
many other oppressions. Of course, the major reason why the
many impacts of fat hatred do not persuade people from both right
and left is because of one of the abiding myths about fat that Fat
Studies seeks to debunk: that fat, unlike other identities and con­
ditions, is fundamentally a choice and that, if fat folks don’t want
to be treated poorly, they should choose not to be fat. It is this
myth, then, that we turn to in Chapter 3.
 HOW FAT HURTS 39

FURTHER READING
Owens, Lesleigh. “Living Fat in a Thin-Centric World: Effects of Spatial
Discrimination on Fat Bodies and Selves.” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 22,
no. 3, 2012, pp. 290–306.
Stoll, Laurie C. “Fat Is a Social Justice Issue, too.” Humanity & Society, vol. 43,
no. 4, 2019, pp. 421–441.
Wann, Marilyn. “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution.” The
Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, New
York University Press, 2009, pp. ix–xx.

WORKS CITED
Bacon, Lindo, and Lucy Aphramor. “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence
for a Paradigm Shift.” Nutrition Journal, vol. 10, no. 9, 2011, pp. 1–13.
Borisova, Varvara and Tereza Stockelova. “This Doctor Knows Shit about
You, but the First Thing He Says Is ‘You Need to Lose Some Weight’:
Anti-Fat Bias and the Contradictory Effects of Fat Medicalization in Czech
Healthcare.” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Weight and Society,
2024, pp. 1–19. DOI: doi:10.1080/21604851.2024.2381920.
Dian, Mona, and Moris Triventi. “The Weight of School Grades: Evidence of
Biased Teachers’ Evaluations against Overweight Students in Germany.”
PLoS ONE, vol. 16, no. 2, 2021.
Fikkan, Janna L., and Esther D. Rothblum. “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring
the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias.” Sex Roles, vol. 66, 2012, pp. 575–592.
Flint, Stuart W., Martin Čadek, Sonia C. Codreanu, Vanja Ivić, Colene
Zomer, and Amalia Gomoiu. “Obesity Discrimination in the Recruitment
Process: ‘You’re Not Hired!’” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, 2016.
Flores Aguilar, G., M. Prat Grau, C. Ventura Vall-Llovera, and X. Ríos Sisó. “‘I
Was Always Made Fun of for Being Fat’: First-Hand Accounts of Bullying in
Children’s Football.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, vol. 26, no. 6,
2020, pp. 549–561.
Kornilaki, Ekaterina N. “Obesity Bias in Preschool Children.” Hellenic Journal
of Psychology, vol. 11, 2014, pp. 26–46.
Mollow, Anna. “Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies.”
African American Review, vol. 50, no. 2, 2017, pp. 105–121.
Owens, Lesleigh. “Living Fat in a Thin-Centric World: Effects of Spatial
Discrimination on Fat Bodies and Selves.” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 22,
no. 3, 2012, pp. 290–306.
Roberts, Dorothy. “The Social Immorality of Health in the Gene Age: Race,
Disability and Inequality.” Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality,
edited by Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland, NYU Press, 2010, pp. 61–71.
40 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Robinson, Margaret, “The Big Colonial Bones of Indigenous North Amer­

ica’s ‘Obesity Epidemic.’” Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and
Social Justice, edited by May Friedman, Carla Rice, and Jen Rinaldi, Rou­
tledge, 2020, pp. 29–39.
Rumsey, Alissa. [@alissarumseyRD]. Instagram, February 17, 2021a, https://
www.instagram.com/p/CLZR4K_noeg/?igshid=14ek0g5zmbxwj&img_
index=2.
Rumsey, Alissa. Unapologetic Eating: Make Peace with Food & Transform Your
Life, Victory Belt Publishing, 2021b.
Sanders, Rachel. “The Color of Fat: Racializing Obesity, Recuperating
Whiteness, and Reproducing Injustice.” Politics, Groups, and Identities, vol. 7,
no. 2, 2019, pp. 287–304.
Sandler, Austin. “The Legacy of a Standard of Normality in Child Nutrition
Research.” SSM – Population Health, vol. 15, 2021, pp. 1–9.
Simmons University Library. “Anti-Oppression: Anti-fatmisia.” 2024. https://
simmons.libguides.com/anti-oppression/anti-fatmisia.
Stoll, Laurie C. “Fat Is a Social Justice Issue, Too.” Humanity & Society, vol. 43,
no. 4, 2019, pp. 421–441.
Stewart, Terah J. “About Fat Campus.” About Campus: Enriching the Student
Learning Experience, vol. 23, no. 4, 2018, pp. 31–34.
Stewart, Terah J. “Course Outlines”. Iowa State University, n.d.
Tanner, Anna B. “Unique Considerations for the Medical Care of Restrictive
Eating Disorders in Children and Young Adolescents.” Journal of Eating
Disorders, vol. 11, no. 33, 2023.
Tatangelo, Gemma, and Marita McCabe, David Mellor, and Alex Mealey. “A
Systematic Review of Body Dissatisfaction and Sociocultural Messages
Related to the Body among Preschool Children.” Body Image, vol. 18,
2016, pp. 86–95.
Wee, Christina C., Ellen P. McCarthy, Roger B. Davis, and Russell S. Phillips.
“Screening for Cervical and Breast Cancer: Is Obesity an Unrecognized
Barrier to Preventive Care?” Annals of Internal Medicine, vol. 132, no. 9, 2000,
pp. 697–704.
Wei, Su, and Aurelia Di Santo. “Preschool Children’s Perceptions of Overweight
Peers.” Journal of Early Childhood Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 2012, pp. 19–31.
Weinstock, Jacqueline, and Michelle Krehbiel. “Fat Youth as Common Tar­
gets for Bullying.” The Fat Studies Reader edited by Esther Rothblum and
Sondra Solovay, New York University Press, 2009, pp. 120–126.
White, Francis R. “Fat/Trans: Queering the Activist Body.” Fat Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Weight and Society, vol. 3, no. 2, 2014, pp. 86–100.
 3

CHOOSING FAT?

INTRODUCTION
If, as the previous chapter asserts, living in a fat body is hard, this
chapter seeks to look at the origins of fatness: how it arrives on the
body and what may be done to remove it. In the popular imagi­
nation, fat is seen as entirely due to personal choices and, as a
result, as a self-inflicted site of stigma. This chapter seeks to trouble
that assumption by considering the many different inputs which
result in fatter or thinner bodies. Acknowledging that fat is com­
plicated and arrives and leaves for many reasons, however, can
merely shift the tone from scorn toward pity. Instead, this chapter
will trouble the notion of “choice” in the first place, suggesting
that no matter why given bodies are fat, they never deserve scorn,
pity or stigma. The overwhelming impact of the weight loss
industry in the modern era is key to this discussion and will be
explored in some detail.
This chapter is framed by the following questions:

� Is being fat a choice?

� What are the consequences of thinking about fat as a choice?
� What is the role of the weight loss industry in framing the idea
of choice?

It is impossible to consider size as a site of oppression without

delving into the issue of choice. Why are fat people fat? Why are
we, as a species, fatter than we used to be, especially in North
America? What are the different personal and social reasons why

DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773-3
42 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

bodies might assume the range of shapes that they have? Of course,
we tend not to ask these questions about natural variations that are
seen as relatively neutral, such as height, or even those that are
charged but seen as unambiguously genetic, such as race. So many
of the nasty traits associated with fat are attached to this idea of
choice and bigger issues of how we believe all people should act to
be functional members of society. In a modernist society we are
committed to the idea of self-determination. Our values and our
policies are guided by ideas such as “pulling ourselves up by our
bootstraps” or “faking it until we make it”. It is therefore unsur­
prising that most societies in the so-called developed world are
informed by rampant workaholism, eating distress, crises of anxiety
and stress and enormous disparities in social class. We may be
faking it, but we certainly aren’t making it. Some of the anxiety
around self-determination—as opposed to structural analyses such
as looking at the social determinants of health—results in the
demonization of fat people. To uncouple fat from choice, how­
ever, does nothing to address the major anxieties which underpin
our collective commitment to choice, our beliefs that we can and
should control the outcomes of all aspects of our lives. This chapter
will aim to consider some of the ways that fat may or may not be a
choice, but will also seek to question whether asking about choice
is fruitful, or may be harmful in and of itself.

IS FAT A CHOICE? MAYBE “YES”?

The common sense understanding of fat is found in the popular
notion of “calories in, calories out”. In other words, fat is seen as
simple and universal: all bodies work the same way, and burn fuel
at the same rate. To reduce size, simply burn more fuel than you
are consuming. This belief suggests that changing food habits
(whether they are called diets or “lifestyles”), paired with attention
to exercise, can transform a body.
As most people of all sizes know, this belief system may be true
in the shortest term—diets can result in rapid short-term weight
loss, and changing to different exercise regimes may reduce fat and
also change shape and re-arrange muscle mass. That said, bodies
work in a range of different ways, burning fuel in different con­
figurations. As will be considered below, not all bodies are able to
 CHOOSING FAT? 43

move in the same ways, for a range of different physical and social
reasons. Our metabolisms are variable and dependent on genetics
and environment. Furthermore, the short term changes to our
body’s function can sometimes result in longer term difficulties with
burning calories—dieting can actually slow down our metabolisms.
The mainstream belief, however, is that while some people may
need to work harder than others, fundamentally, with sufficient
willpower, all bodies can change. This issue is less about fat than it
is about control: our societal commitment to control is rooted in
colonization and white supremacy. Joy is seen as suspicious and all
aspects of life—bodies, but also parenting, hobbies, movement—
require labour and intensity. This is a very exhausting way to live,
in which leisure is punished and even “self-care” is weaponized
into work.
All bodies change over the course of the lifespan. Ideally, we
grow as young people and illness, reproduction, environment, and
many other factors change our shape and size. Our bodies are
deeply mutable but on the whole, not within our control, and
when we aim to control them anyway, we often do so in ways
that present challenges to our physical and emotional health.

Of course, there are some people for whom willpower—of some

description—is sufficient to ensure a reduction in size. While not all
bodies can ever achieve thinness, some people are able to—or
unable not to—control eating to an extent that can result in thin­
ness, sometimes to the point of starvation. The hyper control of
extreme eating distress, however, cannot be said to be a health-
seeking behaviour. This is, unsurprisingly, the predictable outcome
of a non-stop focus on numbers in a climate that valorizes control:
counting of calories and minutes of exercise and over-vigilance
about the body’s functions is a distorted form of control. Where
does dieting become eating distress? We tend to pathologize people
who are struggling with extreme eating distress, but applaud very
similar or the same behaviours when they don’t immediately lead to
dire physical outcomes. If we take up this view, then perhaps fat is a
choice, but the “ability” to control fat comes at an overwhelming
cost.
44 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

IS FAT A CHOICE? PERHAPS NOT

The overwhelming belief that our bodies are within our control is
so widely held and so deeply rooted that it is astonishingly difficult
to unseat. Often when I speak about fat as a natural variation
outside of our control, I feel like I am suggesting the earth is flat.
Despite the pervasiveness of this belief, however, it does not
withstand closer attention. Below, I discuss some of the reasons
why it may be an error to think of fat as something people can
control or choose:

� Fatness is, like most things, overwhelmingly multifactorial.

Everyone knows anecdotally about the thin friend who eats
more than everyone else and the fat person who seems to live
on celery and stays fat. On the whole, attempts to achieve
thinness where it does not naturally exist overwhelmingly fail.
Given the abundance of evidence on how poorly fat people
are treated, if there were a way for fat people to become thin,
there would be no more fat people. Unfortunately, the truth
of the matter is much more complicated.
� Diets almost always fail. Whether they are fad diets such as
grapefruit and cottage cheese, or informed by the “science” of
calories in, calories out, on the whole our bodies want to stay
at their set point (Hall and Guo 2017) rather than transform­
ing by our will. While many claims are made about the effi­
cacy of various diets, 95% of people who diet regain the
weight—and often more—within five years (Mann and
Tomiyana 2007). Part of the reason that the weight loss
industry is so very lucrative is that there is no form of reliable
long term weight loss.
� On the whole, people who diet end up yo-yo dieting, with
thousands of pounds lost and gained over a lifetime. The
metabolic implications of radically see-sawing between styles
of eating are not fully understood, but scholars surmise that a
body that is put into starvation mode may compensate by
holding stubbornly to weight in the face of future diet
attempts (Garvey 2022). Many of the health conditions asso­
ciated with high weight may be due to the strain on bodies of
constant changes in input.
 CHOOSING FAT? 45

� Our bodies want to eat! Cotugna and Mallick (2010) designed a

study for nutrition and dietician students, who are often notor­
iously fatphobic, measuring their feelings about fat people before
and after engaging in a low calorie diet. Many of the students
failed to complete the diet, citing that they were too hungry to
continue. Importantly, the level of disdain and judgment of fat
people was greatly lessened after students actually attempted to
take on the intervention they were prescribing.

The Biggest Loser. In “After the After: The Biggest Loser and Post-
makeover Narrative Trajectories in Digital Media” Margaret Hass
(2016) explores the impacts of the popular weight loss reality TV
show The Biggest Loser (2016). Running for 17 years in its original
incarnation, this show pits fat people against each other through
punishing challenges related to food and movement, and makes
fatness a spectacle. Participants usually reveal a tragic back story
that has led to their indefensible lifestyle choices. Despite this focus
on pathos, the show ultimate measures success solely by numeric
criteria, with the maximum pounds lost ensuring victory. Past parti­
cipants of the show, however, have come forward to discuss the
long term impacts on their physical and mental health as a result of
the sustained trauma of starvation and punitive exercise. What is
the impact of a show like this, that runs across generations of
families, on our story about fat, willpower, resilience and trauma?

� Recently, there has been a huge increase in bariatric surgery,

appetite management through stomach size reduction. These
surgeries come with a host of risks but are often met with rapid
weight loss in the period of time following the operation. Even
this intervention, however, does not reliably predict long term
weight loss though it may predict other health challenges
(Garvey 2022).
� Part of the reason why diets fail is that weight is over­
whelmingly genetic. Our body composition is largely pre­
dicted by our biological origins and much less by what we do.
We understand this about other physical conditions such as
height—deprivation or other situational factors can cause us to
46 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

be more or less tall than our genetic blueprint, but on the

whole, children of short parents are unlikely to be professional
basketball players. If we all ate the same food and moved
precisely the same ways in childhood, we would all end up
with different heights. Why is it so hard to believe that the
same is true of weight? We understand that our affinities, our
talents, our intelligence, our capacities are effected by both
nature and nurture: why are so we unwilling to consider the
impact of nature on weight? Molecular geneticist Jeffrey
Friedman (2004) writes,

The commonly held belief that obese individuals can ameliorate their
condition by simply deciding to eat less and exercise more is at odds
with compelling scientific evidence indicating that the propensity to
obesity is, to a significant extent, genetically determined. The herit­
ability of obesity is equivalent to that of height and greater than that
of almost every other condition that has been studied—greater than
for schizophrenia, greater than for breast cancer, greater than for
heart disease and so on. Although environmental factors contribute
to changes in the incidence of obesity over time, individual differ­
ences in weight are largely attributable to genetic factors. So,
although the current environment, in which almost everyone has
essentially unlimited access to calories, can account for an average
weight gain of 7–10 pounds over the past decade in the United
States, it is genetics and not the environment that accounts for a
large proportion of the marked differences in individual body weight
in our population today.
(2004, 563)

� Some of the origins of our genetic destiny occur before we are

even born. The uterine environment in which we grow can
impact our future size and shape, a concept known as “epi­
genetics” (Parker 2014). Unfortunately, instead of reminding
us how many different factors go into our body composition,
these ideas are used solely to police pregnant people for their
choices, often at a time when food, movement and body
shape are most fraught.
� Nature and nurture do not cease to matter once we are no
longer children. We live in environments and communities.
 CHOOSING FAT? 47

Environmental toxins, prevalence of food deserts, familial

traumas, specific community expectations around food and
physique—all of these things impact how our bodies exist and
evolve over time. The mobility of populations may also have
an impact as our access to different environments changes. Are
school lunches provided? Do we have time for a coffee break
allocated in our day? Does the retirement residence care that
we hate cauliflower? The idea that we have choice over how
our bodies fit into the world is laughable. Even if the simple
calories in/calories out logic were accurate—which is it not—
most of us have little to no control over either—yet parents,
and specifically mothers, are still given blame for their chil­
dren’s size (Boero 2009)
� Pervasive hatred can change our bodies. If, as established in
Chapter 2, living in a larger body causes much pain and even fear
of fat can impact our psyches greatly, some of the impact may
exist within our metabolic structures, resulting in unexpected
changes to our bodies or a resistance to changes we may be
trying to enact. These changes may be even more pervasive if we
live in the face of multiple different forms of oppression.
� Finally, the impact of poverty cannot be underestimated.
Bodies resist being beaten into control, but to even make the
attempt requires enormous resources. Access to fresh food,
time to make meals, leisure time in which to exercise or
otherwise move the body, and the mental space in which to
control all these things—these are not equally distributed. In
the present moment, the prevalence of expensive weight loss
drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy exacerbates the pro­
blem—people with resources will have access to (temporary)
thinness, while those without these resources will only be
further punished for their seeming lack of control.

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF ASKING ABOUT CHOICE?

It would seem that asking about how we become or stay fat could
help fat people—if we aren’t responsible for own “failings” perhaps
we will be treated better. While much of the discourse of choice is
rooted in good intentions, unfortunately the reality is more
complicated.
48 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Generally speaking, we ask whether human differences are rooted

in choice in order to discern whether we should offer blame or pity.
If fat people are just lazy slobs, then we are “allowed” to hate them—
if they’re unfortunate schlubs, we must merely feel sorry for them.
The premise of the question is rooted in the idea of fat as inevitably
and always bad. We don’t ask whether people have a choice about
their shoe size; we don’t ask about the origins of perfect pitch. As
LeBesco writes, we seek explanation for conditions that are viewed as
problematic or less-than (2009). LeBesco frames the chronology of
research around the “gay gene” and the “fat gene” as examples of
“fact”-finding rooted in judgment.
As with many other human differences, fat may or may not be a
choice for different people at different places and times. Suggesting
that fat is multifactorial does not eliminate the role of human
agency. Some people identify as “gainers”—people who are
deliberately seeking to become as fat as possible (Adams and Berry
2013). While the logic of “calories in/calories out” is imperfect,
there is an element through which some of us may control some
part of our weight profile, some of the time. In other words—
perhaps fat is a choice, at least sometimes.
The problem with the conversation about choice is that it sug­
gests a hierarchy of fat life in which only blameless fat folks deserve
to be treated with dignity and respect. Some fat people are fat
because of underlying health conditions such as Polycystic Ovarian
Syndrome. Some fat people have mobility differences that limit
capacity for movement. Some people are fat because they live in
food deserts or work three jobs or have back-to-back pregnancies.
Some people are fat because they eat a lot of food. Some people
are recovering from eating distress and refusing to monitor intake
as part of their recovery. Fat is complex and so is our relationship
with our bodies. There is no singular reason why fat arrives, nor
why it sometimes leaves—many people become suddenly thin
because of cancer and are lauded for their “healthy” choices. The
same way there is no right way to be a human being, there is no
right way to be a fat human being and being “well behaved”
cannot be a pre-condition for being treated humanely.
Fat Studies scholarship begins from the premise that the human
species includes bodies of all sizes, for all reasons, and that all of
those bodies are worthy of respect, dignified medical treatment and
 CHOOSING FAT? 49

chairs, among other things. Beginning to organize human beha­

viours into categories of more or less worthy is unsettling and
creates tests that only lead to failure.

IMPACT OF THE WEIGHT LOSS INDUSTRY

The weight loss industry, including diets, bariatric surgeries, weight
loss drugs, exercise plans, personal training, etc., is a 90 billion
dollar enterprise (LaRosa 2024), and it has only increased its scope
and earnings in the last thirty years. It is tempting to believe that
the increased focus on weight loss and body management more
generally is just a natural trend of human behaviour that happens
to have been monetized, but the truth is more insidious: Diets are
not increasing because people are getting fatter and sicker. Rather,
we are being told that people are fatter and sicker precisely to
ensure that the weight loss industry is more lucrative.
Stoll explains the origins of the “obesity epidemic” here:

While efforts to pathologize and medicalize fat began decades earlier, it

was in the early 1980s, when a small group of health professionals, gov­
ernment health officials, and lobbying groups, with ample support from
the pharmaceutical and weight-loss industries, began diligently promot­
ing the idea that “obesity” was a disease. Their efforts would start to pay
off in the following decade, beginning in 1993 when a study by McGillis
and Foege titled “Actual Causes of Death in the United States,” was
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The
McGillis and Foege article suggested that a poor diet and a sedentary
lifestyle were associated with 300,000 deaths per year in the United
States. This study became a major justification for Surgeon General C.
Everett Koop to launch the Shape Up America! Campaign (a campaign
Weight Watchers, SlimFast, and Jenny Craig contributed over a million
dollars to) and declare the war on obesity in 1995. In the same year, the
World Health Organization (WHO) issued a report recommending that
“overweight” be established at a BMI of 25. The International Obesity
Taskforce (IOTF) had a major hand in drafting this report. But as Oliver
points out in Fat Politics, what most laypeople did not realize was that the
IOTF was primarily funded by Hoffman-La Roche, makers of the diet
drug Xenical, and Abbott Laboratories, makers of the diet drug Meridia.
(Stoll 4–5)
50 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

The weight loss industry would not be as successful if diets

worked. If any weight loss plan was a singular, effective and finite
intervention, then this industry would fail to be so spectacularly
lucrative. Instead, the entire industry is premised on two factors:
that bodies left in their natural state are usually deeply flawed and
headed toward terrible outcomes (namely death); and that body
management is endless and lifelong (which is another way of saying
that all diets fail). Simply put, if we are satisfied by our bodies—
regarding our looks or our health or both—we do not spend as
much money trying to change them.
Even for people not actively engaged with weight manage-
ment—not enrolled in Weight Watchers, not tracking food intake
on their phones—the beliefs offered by the weight loss industry
inform daily activities. The omnipresence of nutrition labelling,
food pyramids and other tools results in a system where diet talk is
pervasive and taken for granted. We are seduced by “expert”
knowledge, and the many different forms of expertise that have
been funded by the weight loss industry have become canonical
truths that are hard to shake.
In some Fat Studies and fat activist spaces, the diet industry is
compared to conversion therapies (Bergen and Mollen 2019) for
queer and trans people and a broader set of industries such as
applied behaviour analysis (ABA) for autism, and even child pro­
tection scrutiny, which require the person and family to fit them­
selves into the environment rather than finding fault with the
systems that govern us. In the face of any kind of rampant dis­
crimination there are largely two choices: change the body, or
change the environment. In regard to many identity issues, the
idea of changing the body is generally seen as problematic: while
we engage in behaviours such as accent management and skin
whitening, we may also acknowledge that fundamentally these
behaviours are apologetic, rather than affirming. Likewise, shame
may keep us in various closets—but, at least in progressive spaces,
we aim to support the emergence from these states, not to push
folks further into their closets. With weight, even in very pro­
gressive spaces there may still be a tacit acknowledgment that body
management is not only accepted but inevitable. Rather than
meeting fat discrimination with affirmation, the body is constantly
seen as the source of the problem, and therefore the solution is to
 CHOOSING FAT? 51

change the body. That the body likely can’t and won’t change is
handily overlooked.
The social model of disability (Oliver 2013) suggests that dis­
abled bodies are not flawed or deficient, but rather that the envir­
onment fails to meet the range of needs humans embody. Fat
studies scholars have extended this analysis to weight (Meleo-
Erwin 2014; Herndon 2021) by considering that fat bodies are
naturally part of the human landscape and that the limitations
imposed upon them are thus structural rather than individual. This
is an important idea but one that as yet doesn’t have mainstream
traction—the overwhelming common sense knowledge is that fat
people do not fit because they choose not to.
I am often reminded that other expert discourses have had
similar primacy to expert beliefs about fat: “science” believed in
the fundamental wrongness of queer and trans folks; “experts”
published information on different intelligences based on race—
these knowledges have been debunked and are no longer accepted
as fact. Furthermore, these forms of knowledge were equally
informed by white supremacy and capitalism, the same values
which underpin the weight loss industry. Fat Studies asks us to
maintain scepticism and to consider that the current belief systems
are not innocent and not necessarily true, ideas that will be
explored further in Chapter 4 in consideration of fat and health.

You might believe that you live outside of the weight loss complex.
There are some questions that you might want to ask yourself:
When is the last time I ate whatever I wanted? When is the last time
I engaged in exercise even though I didn’t feel like it? How do I feel
emotionally and cognitively when I eat fruits and vegetables? How
do I feel when I eat fries and a burger? The hierarchy of good foods
and bad foods, good movement and non-movement, good lives and
bad lives is deeply engrained and it’s virtually impossible for any of
us to escape it. This shouldn’t be a reason to feel more guilty—that
is completely contrary to the spirit of Fat Studies and fat activism!
Rather, I hope to make the reasons why we engage in many differ­
ent behaviours more transparent in order to start to heal and treat
ourselves with greater kindness.
52 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

BIOPOWER
The concept of biopower originates in the work of Michel Fou­
cault (1990). Foucault considered the ways that states may control
or govern the lives of citizens through impacting biological and
physical behaviours. Biopower manifests in two major ways. First,
by measuring and controlling individual behaviours through sys­
tems of discipline and record-keeping—systems such as BMI mea­
surement in schools, growth charts at doctor’s offices and nutrition
labelling all place responsibility on individual actors to maintain
“normalcy”. The second way that biopower occurs is at a popula­
tion level, gatekeeping access to fertility systems and other treat­
ments, allowing for specific populations to flourish and others to
struggle. The impact of biopower is population control, in the
sense of literally controlling the population to push societies, as
well as the bodies within them, into specific shapes. Meleo-Erwin
writes that “Within a system of biopower, in which the focus of
governance is on the health and vitality of the population, nor­
malization operates through practices of division, classification,
ordering and identification.” (2014, 390). By implicating the indi­
vidual into the responsibility of the health of the nation, biopower
demands obedience which is often enacted through shaming and
blaming approaches.

There is a great degree of self-regulation of the population in the

present day, around and beyond issues of weight. Perhaps more
importantly, the idea that we have choices, and that we are therefore
responsible for (seemingly inevitable) outcomes of those choices,
informs how we live and how we relate to one another. What if we
learned from Fat Studies to reject biopower and instead acknowl­
edge that many choices are constrained, especially (but not only) in
the area of weight management? What if instead of encouraging
docility we truly embraced diversity, both of different shapes and
sizes, and of the conditions that create them? Such an approach
would respond to Foucault’s thinking around the need to reject the
regimented and controlling approach of the state and instead
thicken our ways of being and relating to one another.
 CHOOSING FAT? 53

Foucault argues that biopower is “an explosion of numerous and

diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the
control of populations” (1990, 140). The rationale for why bodies
and populations require control is complicated. Social control
encourages efficiency and obedience; free will and empowerment
are messy. It will never be as cost-effective to make sure that there
are chairs for every type of body, and yet in order to create a just
society we must truly acknowledge the full range of bodies and
behaviours.

MEDIATED BODIES
This chapter necessarily considers some of the ways that every
person engages in body management practices. It is virtually
impossible to feed ourselves without being informed by the dis­
cursive noise about food. We all have a range of reasons why we
may or may not move our bodies. These decisions live amongst
innumerable others—to wear a dress or pants, to get that tattoo, to
stop using that hair straightener, to get the cane. No body goes out
into the world unmediated. We all make choices about how we
want our bodies to be received and the choices we make, or don’t
make, around weight, need to be considered within a larger politic
where we decide how we want to be seen and understood by the
world around us.
In order to think about mediated bodies we need to really break
down the idea of choice altogether. There are no choices that we
make about our bodies that occur in isolation. When we’re put in
a pink or a blue sleeper before we have language we’re already
being put into systems of signification that impact the rest of our
lives! In a world that is so overwhelmingly discriminatory toward
most people for one reason or another we are constantly navigat­
ing how we show ourselves. For example: the “right” outfit for
Pride might not be safe for the commute to the march. The
clothes I wear for school pickup may not be appropriate when I
am teaching a class. Even when these rules are “broken”—there is
sometimes an aesthetic of sort of aggressive underdressing in spe­
cific spaces including the university—they are deliberately and
thoughtfully broken. We are not allowed not to care.
54 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Exploring other body choices may help us explain: I am a brown

woman with very curly hair and I was taught from a very young age
to make sure that my hair was tamed and contained. One of my
earliest memories is of my mother putting my hair painfully onto
massive rollers and sitting me under a huge hair dryer that looked
like the helmet of a spacesuit. I began using chemical straighteners to
tame my curls when I was 11. As a young adult I discovered fem­
inism and anti-racist movements and began to embrace my ethnicity
in new ways. At 30 I finally stopped using chemical straighteners
(the “creamy crack”—if you know, you know) and let my curls
emerge. Yet now, in my late forties, I still do not move in the world
with unmediated hair. I do not force my children to tame their curls
into straight(ish) lines, but I do insist that their hair is tidy, fearing
the censure aimed at me as their racialized mother. I twist my curls,
use lots of hair goo, do my best to ensure that my hair, and my
children’s hair, looks “safe” for a world that still aims to disappear
someone like me. I offer this example because the continuum of
mediated to unmediated bodies is not binary: we do not learn
shame, start to engage in body controlling practices, and then
become enlightened and stop. Rather, we are engaged in constant
negotiation and risk assessment.

Roxane Gay resists the orthodoxy of many fat activist spaces.

Instead of cheerily loving her fat, she suggests that living in a mul­
tiply Othered body as a tall, fat Black queer woman can be
exhausting and overwhelming. While critical of the idea of fat as a
choice, she nonetheless writes in her 2017 memoir Hunger about
some of the deliberate ways she aimed to increase her body size
following sexual abuse. In “What Fullness Is: On Getting Weight
Reduction Surgery”, she also writes about the choice to reduce fat,
explaining why she is opting for gastric bypass surgery. These per­
spectives challenge the usual Fat Studies story of a reformed fatty
who now embraces their fat and never intervenes with their body
again. Yet Gay’s ideas are also familiar to so many people: for most
of us the decision to understand more information about fat and
fatness can’t totally counter a lifetime of weight stigma. We may
choose safety and a simpler life even if we know that, for example,
diets will only help us temporarily.
 CHOOSING FAT? 55

As the example above shows, the landscape of decision making

around our bodies is hugely complex, in the realm of fat and
beyond. We never make any choice about our bodies without a
decision making matrix informing what we do. It’s a hard world in
which to be Other. In the face of the deluge of information we all
receive about fat as not only wrong, but also shameful and humi­
liating, is it any wonder that most of us cannot easily and whole­
heartedly reject all body modifying lifestyle choices? In the realm
of weight, we may not be ready to give up our body controlling
practices. I remember a research participant who said something
like “I don’t know if I want to be in the project because I won’t
be able to continue my bulimia if I keep learning about all of this.”
Controlling ourselves is exhausting and harmful, but in the face of
a world that seeks to constantly reduce and eradicate fat people
(and all people who deviate from the mythic white male straight
norm), it can be easier to give in than give up.
We may seek out spaces that allow us to be common, or usual—
even if these moments of respite are brief. I think about the bril­
liant work of Crystal Kotow (2024) who describes BBW bashes,
weekend long retreats for super fat women and their admirers:

I have been to several bash pool parties over the last four years and
they are always spaces where I feel free in my body. They are also
always experiences that make me think about how great it would be if
I could go to any pool party and feel that comfortable in my body.
One of the most fascinating elements of bashes is how they work to
normalize fat bodies as a result of exposure to other fat bodies
experiencing freedom and joy. I am not concerned about whether I
am going break a chair. I am not concerned that I am being judged
for my food choices when I’m out with bash friends having dinner
before that night’s dance. I am not hyperaware of being winded after
taking stairs. I can assume that if someone is showing interest in me,
it is genuine. In these important ways, I am able to relax into my body
and get a glimpse of what it is like for non-fat people navigating their
day-to-day lives.
(2024, 153)

Part of what makes these spaces so radical is that the goalposts of

“normal” are shifted—miles of exposed fat flesh are expected and
56 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

appreciated, rather than rejected. At the same time, even in BBW

spaces, as Kotow documents, people compare diet tips and engage
in competitive exercise conversations.
In our joy at finding fat affirmation, we may want to scold or
school fat people who continue to try to change. Yet to do so is
not the way to truly embrace fat positivity. At its worst, fat acti­
vism and fat affirming spaces can reject one “right” way of living
and simply replace it with another. Learning to love your fat so
you can jeer at someone who is still participating in diet culture
does not result in the transformed world of our dreams. Rather,
we must resist fat shaming discourses individually and structurally,
but we must also offer compassion about how hard it is to step off
the weight hating train. There is no right way to recover from fat
phobia, any more than there was a right way to have a body in the
first place. Instead, at its best, Fat Studies and fat activist spaces
encourage transparency and dialogue, a capacity for critical thinking
that fits fat into a larger landscape of perfectionism that is about
controlling people and populations. We seek to reject these struc­
tures but we also acknowledge their reach and so we offer gentle­
ness as we all navigate a fundamentally difficult world. To do
otherwise is to simply re-entrench a new shiny picture-perfect Right
Way that we may all fall short of.

Mischel’s Marshmallows: In 1970, a psychologist named Walter

Mischel undertook an experiment. Based on his anecdotal observa­
tions of his children’s classmates, he hypothesized that self-regula­
tion could be seen as a predictor for future success and then
designed an experiment to prove his idea (Mischel 2014). The
research design was relatively simple: young children were left alone
in a room with a marshmallow or other delicious treat. They were
told that they could eat the treat immediately, but that if they could
wait, they would receive two sweets instead of one. The results
varied wildly, both in terms of how long children could resist temp­
tation, and also in what resources they drew upon to help them­
selves. The children were then followed over many years with
stunning results: the kids who had managed to hold off the longest
were successful across most traditional measures: better academic
outcomes, higher test scores, better access to employment and
 CHOOSING FAT? 57

promotion. The conclusion (which was recently debunked) was that

capacity for self-regulation helps people succeed.
But what if we chose to come to a different conclusion? What if
what Mischel was measuring was conformity, and what if conformity
and control are not what allow for the most livable life, but are
rather what are most rewarded? The tight control required by all of
us to “succeed” may come at very high costs in terms of mental
and physical health and overall wellness and access to joy. If the
measure wasn’t, for example, SAT scores, but rather happiness rat­
ings, would the outcomes of this experiment vary? If we made liva­
bility and truly nourished and healthy people, families and
communities the goal, what would we value?

We have not merely been taught that thin is good and fat is bad.
Rather, we have been taught that control is good, that we have
total free will and must use it to bully ourselves into submission at
all times. That is the measure of a successful life—obedience and
conformity. Thinness is thus the side effect, not the malady. And of
course—obedience is not merely a way to ensure success, but for
many people the only way to avoid negative consequences. For
Black children, hyper obedience may be the only way to avoid
punishment. For queer and trans folks, being compliant and plea­
sant may minimize negative interactions. Where is our “choice” in
the face of these consequences? Similarly then, in the realm of fat,
we may believe we must “choose” to be thinner—even though
our actual control of our bodies is very limited—in order to per­
form obedience. If you can’t change the weight, at least you can
perform “good fatty”—one who is at least trying follow the rules,
even if the rules are impossible and nonsensical.

NEXT STEPS
We can’t really think about fat life in the landscape of oppression
and justice without confronting the question of why people are fat.
If many other areas of discrimination such as race and disability are
seen as outside of our control, then what business do we have
defending fat people? There is a lot of anger and scorn aimed at fat
activism as the height of absurd political correctness. In truth,
58 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

however, as this chapter has shown, the question of fat as a perso­

nal choice is much more complex. Most people cannot control
their body size in any significant way for any significant length of
time. Perhaps more importantly, however, to ask whether fat is a
choice is to immediately agree with the idea that fat equals bad.
This chapter has sought to frame fat as a natural human variation
like any other, and to suggest that the devaluing of fat life explored
in Chapter 2 is never justified. The hierarchy of good and bad
fatties (Bias 2014) does not lead to fat liberation. Rather, in
thinking about fat and beyond fat, obedience can’t be the price we
pay for respect and humane treatment.
Questions about fat as a choice live within a larger system of
social constructions about free will, agency, personal responsibility
and beyond. This chapter has aimed to demonstrate that our
overwhelming hyper-focus on weight is part of a larger system of
social control that is limiting the ability of most people to achieve a
livable life. The fact that these ideas may seem so radical—that fat
bodies, and all bodies, need not maintain nonstop vigilance in
order to receive respect—is evidence of how completely we have
been programmed into believing that fat is bad, and that it’s the
responsibility of all of us to remove it.
Of course, there is a lingering elephant in the room as we take
up this idea of choice. The endless rhetoric of the obesity epidemic
does not merely suggest that fat people are ugly and unseemly.
Rather, the language of the obesity epidemic grew alongside an
overwhelming health anxiety that is used to control populations in
a range of different ways. Simply put, we are committed to
cheating death and attempting to control our fat is positioned as
one major way to stay alive. It is impossible to think about fat, and
about fat and choice, without confronting our concerns about
health. The next chapter will thus take up the biggest question
facing fat people and Fat Studies: is fat unhealthy?

FURTHER READING
Boero, Natalie. “Fat Kids, Working Moms, and the ‘Epidemic of Obesity’:
Race, Class, and Mother Blame.” The Fat Studies Reader, edited by
Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, New York University Press,
2009, pp. 113–119.
 CHOOSING FAT? 59
Chalklin, Vikki. “Obstinate Fatties: Fat Activism, Queer Negativity, and the
Celebration of ‘Obesity.’” Subjectivity, vol. 9, no. 2, 2016, pp. 107–125.
Elliot, Charlene D. “Big Persons, Small Voices: On Governance, Obesity and
the Narrative of the Failed Citizen.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 41, no.
3, 2007, pp. 134–149.
LeBesco, Kathleen. “Quest for a Cause: The Fat Gene, the Gay Gene and the
New Eugenics.” The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and
Sondra Solovay, New York University Press, 2009, pp. 65–74.

WORKS CITED
Adams, Tony E., and Keith Berry. “Size Matters: Performing (Il)Logical Male
Bodies on FatClub.com.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 4,
2013, pp. 308–325.
Bergen, Martha, and Debra Mollen. “Teaching Sizeism: Integrating Size into
Multicultural Education and Clinical Training.” Women & Therapy, vol. 42,
nos. 1–2, 2019, pp. 164–180.
Bias, Stacy. “12 Good Fatty Archetypes.” stacybias.net, June 14, 2014.
Boero, Natalie. “Fat Kids, Working Moms, and the ‘Epidemic of Obesity’:
Race, Class, and Mother Blame.” The Fat Studies Reader, edited by
Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, New York University Press,
2009, pp. 113–119.
Cotugna, Nancy, and Anum Mallick. “Following a Calorie-Restricted Diet
May Help in Reducing Healthcare Students’ Fat-Phobia.” Journal of Com­
munity Health, vol. 35, no. 3, 2010.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated
by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1990.
Friedman, Jeffrey M. “Modern Science versus the Stigma of Obesity.” Nature
Medicine, vol. 10, no. 6, 2004, pp. 564–569.
Garvey, W. Timothy. “Is Obesity or Adiposity-Based Chronic Disease Curable:
The Set Point Theory, the Environment and Second-Generation Medica­
tion.” Endocrine Practice, vol. 28, no. 2, 2022, pp. 214–222.
Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Harper, 2017.
Gay, Roxane. “What Fullness Is: On Getting Weight Reduction Surgery.”
Medium, 24 April, 2018.
Hall, Kevin D., and Juen Guo. “Obesity Energetics: Body Weight Regulation
and the Effects of Diet Composition.” Gastroenterology, vol. 152, no. 7,
2017, pp. 1718–1727.
Hass, Margaret. “After the After: The Biggest Loser and Post-Makeover
Narrative Trajectories in Digital Media.” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Weight and Society, vol. 6, no. 2, 2016, pp. 135–151.
60 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Herndon, April. “Law, Identity, Co-Constructions, and Future Directions.”

The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, edited by Cat Pausé and
Sonya Renee Taylor, Routledge, 2021, pp. 88–101.
Kotow, Crystal. The Hidden Lives of Big Beautiful Women, Palgrave, 2024.
LaRosa, John. “U.S. Weight Loss Industry Grows to $90 Billion, Fueled by
Obesity Drugs Demand.” Market Research Blog, 6 March2024, https://blog.
marketresearch.com/u.s.-weight-loss-industry-grow
s-to-90-billion-fueled-by-obesity-drugs-demand.
LeBesco, Kathleen. “Quest for a Cause: The Fat Gene, the Gay Gene and the
New Eugenics.” The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and
Sondra Solovay, New York University Press, 2009, pp. 65–74.
Mann, Traci, A. Janet Tomiyana, Erika Westling, Ann-Marie Lew, Barbra
Samuels, and Jason Chatman. “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity
Treatments.” American Psychologist, vol. 62, no. 3, 2007, pp. 220–233.
Meleo-Erwin, Zoe. “Queering the Linkages and Divergences: The Relation­
ship Between Fatness and Disability and the Hope for a Livable World.”
Queering Fat Embodiment, edited by Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha
Murray, Routledge, 2014, pp. 97–114.
Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control, Little, Brown,
2014.
Oliver, Mike. “The Social Model of Disability: Thirty Years On.” Disability &
Society, vol. 28, no. 7, 2013, pp. 1024–1026.
Parker, George. “Mothers at Large: Responsibilizing the Pregnant Self for the
‘Obesity Epidemic.’” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Weight and
Society, vol. 3, no. 2, 2014, pp. 101–118.
Stoll, Laurie Cooper. “Fat Is a Social Justice Issue, Too.” Humanity & Society,
vol. 43, no. 4, 2019, pp. 421–441.
 4

TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY?

INTRODUCTION
Perhaps the ideas which underpin the prior chapters are starting to
make sense: fat people truly suffer and are a population worthy of
protection from discrimination; fat people may or may not have a
choice about being fat but should not be treated poorly regardless.
The looming question which lingers, however, is central to any
understanding of fat life: Is fat unhealthy? This chapter seeks to
respond to this question by both articulating some of the problems
with equating fat and poor health and suggesting possible other
explanations for health concerns. Perhaps more importantly, how­
ever, this chapter seeks to consider why our fear of, and hatred
toward, perceived ill health may reveal more about us than just our
fear of fat.
This chapter is framed by the following questions:

� Is fat unhealthy?
� What are some of the reasons why some fat bodies may face
different health outcomes than thinner bodies?
� Are people obliged to seek health?

It is impossible to talk about fat people in the present moment

without speaking to the concerns about health that have been
taken for granted as obvious consequences of living in a bigger
body. This chapter will seek to examine the origins of the language
of “obesity epidemic” and question the conclusions of some of the
popular stories about fat and health. The chapter will further

DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773-4
62 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

explore some of the impacts of fat stigma, as distinct from fat itself.
Finally, this chapter will seek to question the impact of “healthism”
and ask why striving for health—for all bodies, but especially for
fat people—is a moral imperative.

IS FAT UNHEALTHY? UNCOUPLING THE LINK

It has become a taken for granted truth that bigger bodies—those
that fit the Body Mass Index descriptor of overweight or obese or
morbidly obese or super morbidly obese—are, by definition,
unhealthy. Countless punchlines rest on the assumption that we can
gauge someone’s health by visual examination of their body. We
assume that we know both someone’s behaviours (as seen in the
previous chapter) as well as their future, just by looking at them.
Unfortunately, the predictive value of this visual assessment is about
as accurate as palm reading or other forms of fortune telling.
There are plenty of fat people who do not have any health
concerns. There are plenty of thinner people with high blood
pressure, diabetes, heart conditions or other health conditions that
are commonly expected to coincide with obesity. If we would like
to know if someone has hypertension, the best measure is to take
their blood pressure continuously over twenty-four hours (Sharma
et al. 2017). Looking at their clothing size is, by contrast, a terrible
measure. If we are concerned about someone’s blood sugar, a
useful measure would be to take blood and test it, ideally after 12–
14 hours of fasting. An ineffective measure is to eyeball their belt
size and assume we know. Heart conditions are often quite hard to
assess, requiring a range of different diagnostic tools. Counting
someone’s chins is not among those tools. Simply put, there are
many, many ways to determine the health of various body systems
in the modern age, but a visual examination of the size of a body is
not one of them. This method fails everyone, because we not only
assume fat people are unhealthy, we assume thinner people are
always healthy and that they also engage in allegedly health seeking
behaviours such as diet management and exercise. Looking at
someone’s body, however, doesn’t tell you anything about what
they do, or about how long they’ll live.
Some of our anxiety is rooted in a need to avoid death. We
would like to believe that we have the capacity to avoid death and
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 63

debility, but we will all die, no matter what we eat, no matter how
much we move. Likewise, all of our bodies will have changed
capacities over our lives and only a small amount of that outcome
is within our control.
In some cases, the fact of fat can be lifesaving. Many of the
conditions of so-called “metabolic syndrome” such as diabetes,
hypertension and cardiac symptoms have better outcomes among
people who are bigger (Bacon and Aphramor 2011). Across all
populations, overweight people have better outcomes than under­
weight people (Flegal 2005). As we age, fat is increasingly protec­
tive: among people over fifty-five, the lowest mortality is among
people in the obese category (Bacon and Aphramor 2011).

WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH BMI? BODY MASS INDEX

AND ITS HISTORY
The Body Mass Index is the major medical tool used to assess size.
The scale takes a person’s height in meters divided by their weight
in kilograms. The numeric output of this calculation is then placed
into distinct categories of underweight, “normal” weight, over­
weight and obese, and decisions about care are made with these
categories in mind. While the application of math and categories
gives the impression that BMI is rooted in empirical data, it is
fundamentally a deeply flawed measure. There is no measure of
weight or size that accurately predicts anything. Researchers at the
University of Pennsylvania argue that

BMI (body mass index), which is based on the height and weight of a
person, is an inaccurate measure of body fat content and does not
take into account muscle mass, bone density, overall body composi­
tion, and racial and sex differences.
(Nordqvist 2022, para. 1)

In other words: knowing your BMI tells you very little about any­
thing other than the difference between your height and weight.
In 1830 an astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet went on a
quest to determine the perfectly normal average man. Using
exclusively white, Northern European men, Quetelet envisioned
the human mean—“l’homme moyen”—as the exemplar to which
64 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

all people should aspire, and he created a crude scale based on his
data collection. Quetelet was motivated by eugenics, the deeply
racist idea of aspiring to human ideals through minimizing per­
ceived outliers. Even Quetelet never thought his data should be
used for individual diagnosis (Gordon 2020). Rather, his data pre­
sented a nascent form of biopolitics, suggesting that overall popu­
lation trends should move toward whiter, more male, more able
and thinner ideals. Unfortunately for all of us, Quetelet’s ideas
soon grew to have a life of their own.
In 1867, life insurance companies in the United States began to
seek forms of measurement that could quantify risk and organize
bodies into different scales for the purpose of determining insurance
fees. Beginning from the hypothesis that fatter people were
obviously less healthy than thinner people, they happened upon
Quetelet’s scale as a justification and adapted it for use as a diagnostic
tool for assessing clients. Despite the quest for “empirical data”, there
was a great deal of fluidity in the measurements beings used:

To go even further, the companies weren’t following Quetelet’s gui­

dance on what counted as “overweight” or “obese”—they were
making the numbers up. [Aubrey] Gordon says that the “overweight”
category could fluctuate by 40 lbs (around 18 kg) across different
insurance companies. It wasn’t until the 1940s that these were stan­
dardised, and not until the 1970s that the National Institute of Health
in America suggested a guideline scale for categorisation—now
known as BMI.
(Gray 2021)

Even the final assessment of BMI categories was unstable. In the face
of widespread concerns about obesity rates (largely funded by the
weight loss industry, see Stoll 2019), the emphasis on BMI became
more entrenched in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, the cutoffs for
different categories were changed and “millions of people became
fat overnight” (Wann 2009, p. xiv). If obesity is an indicator of ill
health, did these people’s health status immediately change?
A scale designed to celebrate conformity cannot possibly
acknowledge human diversity. The eugenic roots of the BMI scale
represent the need for a singular “right” body, so unsurprisingly,
most bodies are determined to be wrong. There is a high degree of
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 65

confirmation bias here: at all stages of the development of BMI the

assumption that fat equals bad and unhealthy informed its creation.
Yet the depth of these assumptions is not due to a huge increase in
population weight, nor a massive change in health outcomes—if
anything people are living longer than ever before, despite being,
on average in North America, ten to twenty pounds heavier than
people of the past. This confirmation bias is evident when we
consider that weight anxiety is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Flegal writes that “A 1969 study found that patients and physicians
did not view body weight and weight loss as salient medical pro­
blems and considered deviations from weight standards to be
almost meaningless” (2023, para. 2). She quotes the Institute of
Medicine which states that “Prior to the late 20th century, over­
weight and obesity were not considered a population wide health
risk” (in Flegal 2023, para. 2). In one respect, BMI is an accurate
measure: a measure of our increasing demonization of fat people,
and our widespread health anxiety, rather than a reliable measure
of population or individual health.
BMI is rooted in racist, colonialist and outdated logics of bodies
and populations. Its continued application is as nonsensical as going
to the dentist for bloodletting or applying leeches. It lives in the
realm of fads such as intermittent fasting that are rooted in pseu­
doscience and are deeply discriminatory and problematic in their
application. Yet this measure holds us in its grip almost from
birth—the weight and height scales are applied to children imme­
diately and kids who are outliers are disproportionately scrutinized.
So many different outmoded ways of thinking and measuring have
become laughable in the present day—what has informed our
abiding commitment to this scale?
BMI is the darling love child of colonialism and capitalism. We
want to organize bodies into right and wrong and control the sys­
tems around us; ideally, we also want to make money by doing so.
In reflecting anxiety about the “obesity epidemic”, the weight loss
industry gains huge profits, especially since all interventions are
destined to fail, ensuring a population that is effectively held hos­
tage. Our bodies are dynamic and variable, and the BMI does not
acknowledge any of that. It hampers our health by suggesting it
may be predictive of anything and contributes to the demonization
of fat people. Flegal speaks to this concern:
66 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

recommendations for universal screening and lifestyle interventions

generate an intense focus on BMI categories and weight loss without
adequate evidence of long-term improvement in morbidity or mortal­
ity. Moreover, they ignore several potential sources of harm. A 1998
New England Journal of Medicine editorial cautioned: “Until we have
better data about the risks of being overweight and the benefits and
risks of trying to lose weight, we should remember that the cure for
obesity may be worse than the condition. The focus on BMI also
ignores the possible adverse health effects caused by weight bias in
health care leading to health care avoidance. More generally, the
emphasis on weight loss contributes to discrimination and the harms
of weight stigma.
(Flegal 2023, para. 11)

So where do we go from here? Even doctors are acknowledging

the ways that BMI is a crass and ineffective way of organizing
people. Yet the confirmation bias that fat is predictive of ill health
is maintained. New measures are being developed, to acknowledge
muscle to fat ratio, waist circumference, and other forms of cate­
gorizing bodies. These measures may increase accuracy of record
keeping but they still begin with the premise of fat as always bad.
They do not predict our likelihood of higher cholesterol or blood
pressure. Our genetic history of diseases such as cancer is far more
predictive than any measure that involves weight.

SO: IS FAT UNHEALTHY? ALTERNATE EXPLANATIONS

While fat is a deeply imperfect and imprecise predictor of poor
health, even allowing for confirmation bias, there is a lot of
information suggesting that fat people do have poorer health
outcomes with greater frequency than thinner people. Suggest­
ing that more fat people are unhealthy is not the same as saying,
however, that fat is always predictive of poor health, or that a
simple visual impression of any person is a substitute for actual
diagnostics. In this section, I aim to provide possible alternative
explanations for any poorer health outcomes which do occur in
larger populations.
� First and foremost, stigma has a negative impact on health.
Populations that experience societal discrimination and oppression
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 67

have poorer health, independent of the impact of discrimination in

medical care. For example, Black women in the diaspora (i.e.
women who experience racism) have increased rates of breast
cancer; genetically, the families of those women in their homelands
do not show this same increase, suggesting that it is the impact of
lifelong racism that results in increased diagnoses (James et al.
2010). The cumulative impact of lifelong hatred is deadly, con­
tributing to auto-immune disorders as well as stress related condi­
tions such as high blood pressure and cardiac issues. Ironically, in
the case of fat people, it is fat which is held responsible for these
conditions, rather than fatphobia.

“The minority stress model is a framework that foregrounds the

central role of stressors uniquely experienced among members of a
minority group, including expressions of violence, stigma, and dis­
crimination targeting the group in question, as potentially salient
contributors to poor physical and mental health” (Kia et al. 2021, p.
2). In the context of fat people, we can consider that the daily
microaggressions and ongoing mental load of anticipating hostile
physical and emotional environments can impact physical and
mental health.

� While hatred across the lifespan can contribute to poorer

health, there is a much more direct impact in the realm of fat-
phobic healthcare. Healthcare providers are overwhelmingly judg­
mental of fatter patients. Wann writes that, “Fat women are a third
less likely to receive breast exams, Pap smears, or gynecologic
exams, but are no less likely to receive mammograms, which may
indicate obstetric/gynecology physicians’ hesitation to touch fat
patients” (2009, xxi). Fat people are counselled about weight loss
at every appointment, with other possible explanations for symp­
toms routinely dismissed. Diagnostic equipment is not always
available for larger bodies, resulting in misdiagnosis or the total
absence of diagnosis. Fear of fatphobia in medical settings also
makes fat people doctor-averse—avoiding going to the doctor is
often not good for people’s health.
68 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Ellen Maud Bennett died shortly after being diagnosed with inoperable
cancer. Her obituary read, in part: “A final message Ellen wanted to
share was about the fat shaming she endured from the medical pro­
fession. Over the past few years of feeling unwell she sought out
medical intervention and no one offered any support or suggestions
beyond weight loss. Ellen’s dying wish was that women of size make
her death matter by advocating strongly for their health and not
accepting that fat is the only relevant health issue.” Bennett’s death
would undoubtedly be counted among the higher number of cancer
deaths among fat people, instead of being seen as what it was—a case
of medical malpractice due to fat oppression.

� The social determinants of health are well established. Poverty,

lack of education, lack of access to health care, social isola­
tion—these are all contributors to poorer health at both indi­
vidual and population levels. Being fat puts people at risk for
all of these conditions. Maintaining a body requires wealth and
time—but being fat can make it harder to have or keep a job
or an apartment—which predicts poverty. Rather than the
physical fact of fat itself, perhaps fat people are more prone to
poorer health outcomes because of the impact of stigma in its
capacity to limit access to the determinants required for health?
� As discussed above, fat people who have health conditions
often correlated with fat such as hypertension and diabetes,
may have greater longevity and better outcomes from those
conditions (Bacon and Aphramor 2011). If more fat people
have diabetes, could it be that these issues are correlated rather
than caused by fat? Perhaps evolutionarily, those of us already
genetically prone to diabetes, for example, may also be prone
to fat, rather than the relationship being causal.

If our health was seen as inevitable rather than something that

can be controlled, perhaps we would simply learn how to treat
conditions without requiring the cycle of shame. We do not know
why bodies who engage in identical eating habits have different
health outcomes; ultimately what we can control about our health
is quite limited. On the topic of control, the illusion of control is
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 69

contributing to a crisis in mental and physical health. Our health is

impacted by innumerable factors and very few are within our
control, but we are fed the illusion that if we live “clean” we will
live long and well. Yet controlling food and exercise is not with­
out cost—it may deprive us of community or leisure time, it may
force us into a punishing relationship with ourselves and our bodies,
to the extent of the newest form of eating disorder, orthorexia. The
overall impact of self-hatred and endless self-regulation is not what I
would consider “health”. The wellness industry has weaponized the
idea that we are infinitely responsible and as a result, wellness has
never been further out of reach.

The organization more-love.org has produced cards to bring to

doctors’ offices. The cards state: “Please don’t weight me (unless
it’s (really) medically necessary).” The back side of the card provides
explanations for why being weighed at the doctor’s office may be
unnecessary or even harmful. Fat patients may fear bringing these
cards to the office and being seen as strident or difficult, especially
if they live in the intersection with other health or disability issues.
Recently, I encountered a doctor who took the proactive choice to
provide these cards herself. The notion of having these cards avail­
able to patients at a doctor’s office—rather than waiting for people
to advocate for themselves in the face of so much fat shame—is
radical. For more information go to: https://more-love.org/resour
ces/free-dont-weigh-me-cards/

CONFIRMATION BIAS
Simply put, confirmation bias refers to the idea that we see what
we expect to see. In research, confirmation bias occurs when a
researcher comes into the work with a pre-existing hypothesis and
designs the research study with that perception in mind. All
research is guilty of some degree of confirmation bias: researchers
are, first and foremost, people, and we design our studies based on
our beliefs and values. That said, confirmation bias is a known
challenge within research, and researchers are expected to try to
minimize its impact.
70 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Confirmation bias is a huge issue in the realm of obesity research

(Tomiyama 2018). As can be seen above, the thesis that fat always
means unhealthy is relatively recent in the public imaginary, but it
has become deeply rooted. Even when this thesis is tested, for
example, in the case of better health outcomes for larger people
with hypertension and diabetes, these findings are referred to as a
“paradoxical outcome”(Bacon and Aphramor 2011), one which is
unexplainable in the context of the major thesis, rather than the
thesis itself coming under scrutiny. Writing in the Canadian Medical
Association Journal (CMAJ), Paradis and Reznick explore the ways
that metaphors around weight are threaded throughout medical
care settings, suggesting that “these metaphors encourage doctors
to evaluate every symptom through a weight-focused lens” (2013,
153). Paradis and Reznick asks us to acknowledge that how we
think about fat informs what we find in both research and clinical
settings, and that an awareness of bias, akin to that which training
practitioners (should) receive around gender, race and sexuality, is
necessary to confront pre-existing biases.

What are your implicit associations with fat? If you took the Implicit
Association Test, which measures some of the values we hold which
may lurk under the surface, what would it reveal about your deeply
held views about fat and fat people and their health? When did you
learn these ideas? How deeply held are they? What is your emotion
when you think about the potential of confronting these beliefs?

There are two major reasons why confirmation bias is so deeply

engrained within research and practice with fat people. The first is
that research will always reflect the values and biases of the world
in which it is undertaken. We are not able to divorce ourselves
from common sense understandings. For this reason, queer iden­
tities were taken for granted as negative through centuries of psy­
chological and scientific research. Similarly, social “causes” of
autism were analyzed and scrutinized before mothers were blamed
for their inability to attach to their children—the bias confirming
the claim. (Obviously, in the present day, neither queer nor neu­
rodivergent identities should be viewed as anything other than
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 71

possible ways of being human and as a result, no blame is

required for their origins.) The second, more troubling reason
for confirmation bias in obesity research is all about money: the
stranglehold of so many weight loss industries, as well as indus­
tries rooted in allegedly health seeking behaviours (most often
suggesting self-regulation and hyperscrutiny of diet and exercise
as the recipe for health) means that research is funded and set
up to find what it wants to find (Stoll 2019). For millennia,
humans believed the earth was flat. My hope is that we look
back at this era with the same sense of absurdity toward our
earlier misguided selves.

Katherine Flegal is a senior scientist at the Centres for Disease

Control in the United States. Her research has looked at large
scale sets of public data around weight that involved millions of
people. Importantly, the data that Flegal used was not funded by
anyone with ties to the weight loss industry. When she initially
undertook this research in 2005 she found that over these large
data sets the highest mortality was among people in the under­
weight category of BMI, with the highest longevity (longest life­
span) among people in the overweight category. She published
this data assuming that the field would welcome a course correc­
tion on the popular thinking on this topic. Instead, she was sub­
jected to a backlash that has lasted for almost 20 years, even
though further research continues to maintain her findings. In
“The Obesity Wars and the Education of a Researcher: A Personal
Account” she writes that her initial naivete as a researcher meant
that she assumed people would just want the truth (Flegal 2021).
Instead, she was subjected to misogynist baiting, public scorn and
a rejection of her professional credibility. Katherine Flegal is a
deeply impressive and highly trained researcher, yet her skills and
capacities still did not give her enough clout to contradict the
“official” story of fat and health. Her example reminds us of the
deep threads of confirmation bias, and the huge financial invest­
ment in the fat = death hypothesis. Thinking about fat life differ­
ently is not only heresy—it’s literally bad citizenship and as a
result, it’s a bias that is very hard to budge.
72 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

CONFIRMATION BIAS IN FAT STUDIES

While the field of obesity studies has real problems with con­
firmation bias, arguably so too does the field of Fat Studies. Much
of the scholarship coming out of Fat Studies spaces assumes that all
fat life is good life, that fat bodies cannot, and therefore should not,
change. Fat life, however, like all life, is complex and messy. Some
fat people may still wish to try to control their bodies, even after
learning about some of the ideas covered in this book. Some fat
people may never stop wishing they were not fat. Fat Studies can
sometimes replicate the same colonial need for certainty and clean
lines that is found in the fields it aims to refute. While the best of
Fat Studies scholarship aims to complicate fat life and lean into the
mess, it can be tempting to replace the idea of an ideal body with
an ideal way of being fat. We will not save ourselves from perfec­
tion by merely worshipping at a new altar—instead, we must keep
challenging ourselves, in Fat Studies spaces and beyond—to reject
the idea of perfection altogether and live with the ambivalence and
complexity our lives naturally offer.

HEALTHISM
Perhaps even more engrained than the belief that fat contributes to
ill health is the belief that health is always good, always achievable
and required to be fought for. Yet these beliefs also reveal deeper
values and do not always withstand our analysis. Healthism is
defined as a focus on health-seeking behaviours as intrinsically the
responsibility of all citizens and actors (Metzl and Kirkland 2010).
Mackert and Schorb argue that

Situating the problem of health within the individual shifts the focus
from the social to the personal and paves the way for an under­
standing of health as an issue of individual control and a result of
‘good’ or ‘bad’ choices and behavior.
(2022, 3)

Healthism is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the

emphasis on health suggests that people who are, for any reason,
unhealthy, are less worthy and more flawed. Yet people live
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 73

outside of health for a range of reasons—arguably almost every person

will experience times of ill health. Some people live throughout their
lives with chronic health conditions, others may face precipitous
changes in health status. Our health may change as a result of accident
or disease. If we are lucky enough to achieve old age, virtually all of
us will end our lives unhealthy, almost by definition.
Further, while knowledge can be useful and powerful, the vague
sea of knowledge in which we all swim does not provide clear
guidance but rather a climate of fear and control. Rather than a
focus on reducing harm, we frame health in the context of
achieving perfection, and as a result when we inevitably fall short,
we immediately ask what went wrong, who screwed up. This
inclination is natural—what we’re really asking is “How do I stay
safe? How do I keep the people I care about safe?”— yet in
believing we can answer this question we are harming ourselves
and others.
In many religious spaces, there is a quest for morality and obe­
dience that is the threshold expectation for worthiness. By obeying
the rules, the idea goes, you will be admitted to Heaven (or its
equivalent, depending on your faith system). The belief in good
and evil is so taken for granted that for religiously observant
people, what may seem nonsensical to the secular is binding and
impossible to avoid. Health has, for many people both religious
and secular, become equally binding. Health-seeking is the new
morality, and any behaviour that is deemed health-avoidant
(behaviours that are ultimately impossible to steer clear of, because
there are so many and because they often contradict one another)
is a sign of sin. LeBesco writes that,

The fat person who argues moral validity by saying that he can’t help
being fat and has good eating habits and takes plenty of regular
exercise seeks deliverance. It is an understandable goal, but one
based on truly fraught reasoning that allows healthism to flourish
unchecked.
(2010, 77)

In religious spaces the same questions are asked as above: “How do

I stay safe? How do I keep the people I care about safe?” The
uncle who prays for your return to heterosexuality as a pathway to
74 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

your salvation purports to care about your spiritual safety; the well-
intentioned parent who does not affirm your gender wants to free
you from potential violence. In justice-minded spaces, we have
come to understand that the quest for normalcy is not a pathway
to safety, at least not much of the time. Yet while celebrating
authenticity and rejecting conformity in many critical spaces, the
quest for health goes unquestioned—even at the feminist organiz­
ing retreat, many of the people are picking the salad they don’t
want and pushing away the fries.
The suffocating hold of healthism is challenged along many axes,
including weight, in the collection Against Health, the cover of
which provocatively shows a lit cigarette with smoke wafting from
its tip (Metzl and Kirkland 2010). What would it look like to
acknowledge risk and aim to live a full, joyous, passionate life
while acknowledging that health is a receding goal? How would
we conceive of “health” if we took into account our social, spiri­
tual, emotional and mental health and aimed to love ourselves
unconditionally rather than punishing our physical selves in the
name of some kind of “better” living? Healthism requires a
“Basics” book of its own and this brief description cannot begin to
do justice to such a vast topic, but exploring the health conditions
of fat people cannot be undertaken without at least an elementary
understanding.

HEALTH AT EVERY SIZE

In some of the earlier formal scholarship on fat, many authors and
scholars aimed to posit other more nuanced ways of thinking of fat
bodies outside of the obesity witch hunt which characterizes so much
contemporary literature and practice. As the examples above
demonstrate, the evidence that weight always and inevitably leads to
ill health is quite weak, and where high weights are correlated with
poorer health outcomes there is a range of possible explanations that
push responsibility beyond the simple fact of fat on any given body.
In response to the demonization of fat, a group of critical dieticians,
Fat Studies scholars and other researchers presented a new framework
for thinking through fat and health: Health at Every Size.
First presented in 2010, HAES was broadly composed of three
key ideas:
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 75

� The idea of intuitive eating, in which people re-learn how to

respond to their bodies hunger cues and desires. This frame
suggests that in rejecting some of the “food noise” around us,
we might be free to instead allow our bodies to explore food
differently, eventually rejecting ideas of good and bad foods
and instead just eating what and when we choose.
� HAES suggests that we move toward joyful movement, both
celebrating the moving we already might be doing in the
activities of daily living, and also aiming to see moving as a
something we do in aid of pleasure rather than pain. In this
framework, we should seek out the long walk with a friend or
folk dancing class or fat swim, rather than doing more cardio
reps at the gym with the mean trainer.
� Finally, HAES suggests that we become (somewhat) body acti­
vists, refusing to be at war with our own bodies and rejecting
the premise that our bodies are failures based on our size. By
rejecting the premise of health and weight as inherently linked,
HAES asks us to explore the possibilities of living in body
neutral ways (Bacon 2010; Bacon and Aphramor 2011).

HAES quickly gained attention and notoriety. Many people in

healthcare fields, in particular, sensed that they were harming their
clients/patients with mainstream approaches to fat and were eager
to embrace an alternative that still centred health but allowed for
less of a punitive focus on fat people. HAES has made inroads into
spaces that more ambitious fat activism might not have been able
to infiltrate. But does HAES truly present radical alternatives?
Lucy Aphramor and Lindo Bacon authored one of the key
papers that led to the popularity of Health at Every Size. Published
in 2011, the article “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a
Paradigm Shift” considered the flaws in traditional diet science and
posited HAES as a credible alternative that divorced health seeking
behaviours from the size of the body doing the seeking. In 2021,
however, Lucy Aphramor published what essentially amounted to
a retraction of the original paper, suggesting that HAES was deeply
flawed and did not invite a true rethinking of weight and health
paradigms, but instead presented a palatable but still deeply
healthist and weight-phobic framework. Responding to the origi­
nal article Aphramor writes that, “providing inclusive, respectful,
76 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

culturally competent lifestyle interventions as a means to reduce

early death is actually a prescription for social murder camouflaged
in a glitzy wrapping of right-on rhetoric.” (2021, para. 26)
Two key ideas are essential to the critique of Health at Every
Size: first, in maintaining a commitment to health, HAES still
suggests that healthy bodies are better than unhealthy bodies,
undermining the efforts of disability activists and other critical
scholars and activists to consider that all bodies are worthy. Second,
HAES insidiously maintains a commitment to individual labour
and self-betterment, sneakily affirming the very value system it
seeks to disrupt. HAES maintains the idea of conditional human-
ity—that only people who follow the rules are “worthy”. It seems
radical on the face of it by extending humane treatment to larger
bodies, but only to bodies who continue to chase health. In doing
so, it both maintains a hierarchy of good and bad fatties, but also
plays into the health morality and commitment to individual
choice and control that Fat Studies (at its best) seeks to disrupt.

NORMATIVE VS. NORMAL

Chrisler suggests that current medical wisdom adheres to the
“Goldilocks” rule (2017, 38) which suggests that there are perfect
parameters within which all bodies must live. While it is necessary to
understand, for example, how fast or slow hearts can beat before
they are in crisis or how much iron is necessary for a body to
maintain its functioning, other body systems are much less objective.
(Even these “objective” measures include variability—babies’ hearts
beat much faster than those of adults.) In beginning to frame ideas
about what constitutes normal or “usual” health, unfortunately we
have slid into normativity, suggesting that all bodies should ideally
function in the same ways across all axes. This quickly deteriorates
into seeing bodies that function differently as fundamentally wrong.
Most humans poop out our buttholes, but people with a
colostomy are not failures. Most humans produce insulin but dia­
betic people are not freaks. Many people are heterosexuals but the
range of other possible sexualities is to be celebrated, not viewed as
“abnormal”. The focus on health as a narrow and consistent state
that is possible across the life cycle is ludicrous and our ceaseless
chasing of health is causing an epidemic of stress and anxiety.
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 77

What would change in your life if you did not believe that you were
responsible for your health or your size? What would you do differ­
ently on any given day if you could shed that responsibility and
instead believe that, to a fairly large extent, your health outcomes
and size were predetermined? What would happen if you challenged
yourself to live, even for one day, based on intuitive desires, instead
of rules and plans? When I’ve discussed this in public lectures and
classrooms people report that this idea feels liberating but also ter­
rifying—we rely on the idea that we can control our health to alle­
viate our health anxieties in the short term, but we create more
anxiety in the long run.

NEXT STEPS
So where do we go from here? To be frank, this was the scariest
part of this book to write, because the belief that fat is unhealthy
feels immovable, and rejecting it feels like heresy. In all honesty,
sometimes I have a hard time remembering that I’m not suggesting
the social equivalent of a flat earth—that I have carefully reviewed a
wide range of research that supports the idea that health and size are
simply not the same thing. Further, I have come to believe, as a
former social worker, parent, teacher and human being, that the
endless quest for health is not keeping us healthy, or well, or whole.
There are two somewhat contradictory premises here—that fat
people aren’t inherently unhealthy, but also that health itself is
volatile, elusive and changeable and as such, is a terrible basis for
decisions about who deserves what treatment. I don’t mean to
underestimate the awful toll of chronic health conditions, espe­
cially chronic pain; the stigma of living in a society designed for
normative bodies is inescapable, and furthermore some health
conditions or disabilities do include experiences of pain or distress
themselves. As Eli Clare reminds us, there are nuances of “cure” in
which our desires for our bodies to be different may sometimes be
as complicated as our bodies themselves (2017). That said, precisely
because so much of our experience is beyond our control, we must
begin to allow for the full range of our experiences to meet with
relational, kind and responsive care.
78 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Some fat people are healthy. Some fat people are unhealthy.
All fat people, and people of all health statuses, deserve to have
their humanity respected and access to affirming and responsive
healthcare. As a people, all of our choices and indeed, the
facts, identities and experiences of our lives all occur as a result
of a wide range of different factors. Who we are, what we do,
how we look are all chaotic and dynamic—we shouldn’t be
judged by the width of our waists or the narrowness of our
arteries.
This chapter may be hard to digest. If it makes you uncom­
fortable it may be worth considering why. If you love fat
people but worry about their wellness, this chapter is for you. If
you are a fat person who can’t let go and accept yourself
because you are worried about your imminent death, this is for
you. If you’re the parent of a fat child and you are feeling
pressure to reject your child’s body, this is for you. I don’t
know how we heal from the rampant fatphobia that surrounds
us, but I do know that using health as a weapon does not result
in a population that is well and whole.

FURTHER READING
Aphramor, Lucy. “Hey! Are You One of the 401k Readers Misled by Our HAES
Theory?” Medium, June 30, 2021. https://lucy-aphramor.medium.com/hey-a
re-you-one-the-401k-readers-misled-by-our-haes-theory-14bc3b02276e.
Bacon, Lindo, and Lucy Aphramor. “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence
for a Paradigm Shift.” Nutrition Journal, vol. 10, no. 9, 2011, pp. 1–13.
Chrisler, Joan C., and Barney, Angela. “Sizeism Is a Health Hazard.” Fat
Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38–53.
Flegal, Katherine M. “The Obesity Wars and the Education of a Researcher: A
Personal Account.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, vol. 67, 2021, pp. 75–79.
Paradis, Elise, Kuper, A., and Reznick, R. K. “Body Fat as Metaphor: From
Harmful to Helpful.” CMAJ, vol. 185, no. 2, 2013, pp. 152–153.
Tomiyama, A. Janet, Deborah Carr, Ellen M. Granberg, Brenda Major, Eric
Robinson, Angelina R. Sutin, and Alexandra Brewis, “How and why
Weight Stigma Drives the Obesity ‘Epidemic’ and Harms Health.” BMC
Medicine, vol. 16, no. 123, 2018.
 TOWARD DEATH AND DEBILITY? 79

WORKS CITED
Aphramor, Lucy. “Hey! Are You One of the 401k Readers Misled by Our HAES
Theory?” Medium, June 30, 2021. https://lucy-aphramor.medium.com/hey-a
re-you-one-the-401k-readers-misled-by-our-haes-theory-14bc3b02276e.
Bacon, Lindo. Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight,
BenBella Books, 2010.
Bacon, Lindo, and Lucy Aphramor. “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence
for a Paradigm Shift.” Nutrition Journal, vol. 10, no. 9, 2011, pp. 1–13.
Chrisler, Joan C. & Barney, Angela. “Sizeism is a Health Hazard.” Fat Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Weight and Society, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38–53.
Clare, Eli. “Nuances of Cure.” Brilliant Imperfections: Grappling with Cure,
Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 53–68.
Flegal, Katherine M. “Use and Misuse of BMI Categories.” AMA Journal of
Ethics, vol. 25, no. 7, 2023, pp. 550–558.
Flegal, Katherine M. “The Obesity Wars and the Education of a Researcher: A
Personal Account.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, vol. 67, 2021, pp. 75–79.
Flegal, Katherine M., Barry I. Graubard, David F. Williamson, and Mitchell
H. Gail. “Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and
Obesity.” JAMA, vol. 293, no. 15, 2005, pp. 1861–1867.
Gordon, Aubrey. What We Don’t Talk about when We Talk about Fat, Beacon
Press, 2020.
Gray, Chloe. “BMI: This Podcast Exposes the History of BMI (and Why It’s
Really Not Fit for Purpose).” Stylist, August 3, 2021.
James, Carla, Wanda Thomas Bernard, David Este, Akua Benjamin, Bethan
Lloyd, and Tana Turner. “Racism Is Bad for Your Health.” Race and Well-
Being: The Lives, Hopes and Activism of African-Canadians, Fernwood Press,
2010, pp. 115–140.
Kia, Hannah, Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, Alex Abramovich, and Sarah Bonato.
“Peer Support as a Protective Factor against Suicide in Trans Populations: A
Scoping Review.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 279, 2021, pp. 1–14.
LeBesco, Kathleen. “Fat Panic and the New Morality.” Against Health: How
Health Became the New Morality, edited by Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirk­
land, New York University Press, 2010, pp. 72–81.
Mackert, Nina, and Friedrich Schorb. “Introduction to the Special Issue:
Public Health, Healthism, and Fatness.” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Weight and Society, vol. 11, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–7.
Metzl, Jonathan and Kirkland, Anna, editors, Against Health: How Health
Became the New Morality, New York University Press, 2010.
Nordqvist, Christian. “Why BMI Is Inaccurate and Misleading.” Medical News
Today, January 20, 2022. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/
265215.
80 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Paradis, Elise, Kuper, A., and Reznick, R. K. “Body Fat as Metaphor: From
Harmful to Helpful.” CMAJ, vol. 185, no. 2, 2013, pp. 152–153.
Sharma, Manuja, Karinne Barbosa, Victor Ho, Devon Griggs, Tadesse Ghirmai,
Sandeep K. Krishnan, Tzung K. Hsiai, Jung-Chih Chiao, and Hung Cao.
“Cuff-Less and Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring: A Methodological
Review.” Technologies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017.
Stoll, Laurie Cooper. “Fat Is a Social Justice Issue, Too.” Humanity & Society,
vol. 43, no. 4, 2019, pp. 421–441.
Tomiyama, A. Janet, Deborah Carr, Ellen M. Granberg, Brenda Major, Eric
Robinson, Angelina R. Sutin, and Alexandra Brewis. “How and why
Weight Stigma Drives the Obesity ‘Epidemic’ and Harms Health.” BMC
Medicine, vol. 16, no. 123, 2018.
Wann, Marilyn. “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution.” The
Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, New
York University Press, 2009, pp. ix–xx.
Wiley, Rachel. “Fat Joke.” Medical Traumas, December 17, 2018. https://m
edicaltraumas.wordpress.com.
 5

FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE

INTRODUCTION
This book has asked, several times, where we learned our ideas
about fat. Like all collective ideas, these are ideas we have been
socialized into, by our families, our education, and perhaps most
insidiously, through popular culture. In this chapter we explore
both the origins of fat phobia in multiple forms of media and also
consider sites of resistance.
This chapter is framed by the following questions:

� How are fat people presented in popular media?

� What are some of the common roles that fat characters are
assigned?
� What is the impact of fat in the realm of fashion and dress?
� What are some of the ways that fat is reclaimed in popular
culture?

This chapter will take up themes of representation, considering the

ways that fat people are shown in television, film, books and other
media, looking at the ways that fat characters are portrayed nega­
tively or as side characters. Particular attention will be paid to social
media as a means of extending representation of fat bodies in both
positive and negative ways. The chapter will also consider fat
fashion and the ways that clothing is increasingly less available the
larger the size.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773-5
82 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY POPULAR CULTURE?

Culture is all around us, and we both create it and also receive it.
Often in human services spaces there are notions of “cultural
competence” which unfortunately usually translate to “figuring out
how to deliver white services to non-white clients”—there are so
many assumptions of who is or does what in that framing! I have
come to think of cultural competence in a different way: as the act
of becoming critical and loving respondents to the many different
forms of culture with which we consume and engage. Often we
believe that our political, thoughtful and justice-seeking lives are
separate from the time we spend watching The Bachelor or going to
IKEA or reading a cheesy thriller. All of us, however, are inter­
acting with the larger culture—and contributing to it—at all times,
and becoming critical consumers is essential. Importantly, this does
not mean feeling guilty for engaging with problematic content. All
content is problematic, in one way or another. The media around
us—popular media, social media, all of it—is a reflection of, and a
contributor to, the broader values; our society is racist, sexist,
homophobic and profoundly outraged by fat people. If we’re
waiting for perfect cultural offerings, we’re going to need to invent
a new culture— and some of the media examined below is part of
this revolution. That said—sometimes we just want to watch TV.
No one is immune from this and guilt is unhelpful. Rather, this
chapter aims to support transparency in exposing some of the more
difficult ideas about fat people that are all around us. In so doing,
this chapter hopes to help readers become more critical consumers
of culture more broadly, so that we can understand how our
beliefs are formed and begin to ask harder questions, even as we
continue to engage with the media around us.

MAJOR TROPES
Across all forms of media there are specific tropes of fat people that
recur. The fat person is seldom the protagonist, but often relegated
to the sassy best friend. Fat men are even less common than fat
women but both are obviously undesirable (and there are virtually
zero portrayals of fat people outside the gender binary). Fat people
are undersexed but hypersexual, part of their rampant greediness.
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 83

This is especially true in contexts where fat Black women are

portrayed; alternately, however, fat Black women are portrayed as
abject victims such as in the example of Precious. Fat Black women
are also made into Aunt Jemimas and Mammies, caregivers whose
ample arms can soothe white pain. Fat people with disabilities must
be disabled by their fat, rather than any alternate causal pathway.
Fat people are always greedy and must engage in binge eating at all
times—any food shown or described as being eaten by a fat person
must be “bad” food. Fat people do not care about their health or
indeed, about much else—they are simultaneously hedonistic and
pathetic. That said, fat people, especially fat girls and women, must
be aware of their fat to the extent of trying to lose weight. Indeed,
this trope of body dissatisfaction is so ubiquitous that it is a staple
gag of virtually all media that includes women—the slightly more
curvaceous friend who is locked into battle with her body. What
fat people aren’t: doctors, professors, love interests, runners, dan­
cers, successes by any measure. Is it any wonder that from earliest
childhood we understand this as a fate we should avoid?
The hypervisibility of fat does make it distinct from other iden­
tity categories. Until quite recently there was limited queer repre­
sentation and virtually no trans representation in any mainstream
media. Even now, children can easily grow up never learning that
trans people exist unless families go out of their way to ensure that
this knowledge is shared. This is obviously especially dangerous for
kids who know themselves to be trans but have no basis for this
understanding. Likewise, people with disabilities are largely outside
of most media with the exception of revolting inspiration porn. Fat
people, however, are ubiquitous. While usually kept on the mar­
gins of any given narrative there are nonetheless virtually infinite
examples of fat people across all kinds of media. We are therefore
very aware of fat people and fat life without necessarily ever being
presented with a full range of fat possibilities.
For people who grow up fat or who become fat, how do we
come to understand ourselves? The whole story about us is one of
revulsion and/or pity. We know that love, success, fame, money—
all will be denied us. Is it any wonder then, that we try to flee
fat—unsuccessfully—at all times? We are sitting ducks for the
weight loss industry which neatly colludes with mainstream media
to ensure that we are told that shrinking ourselves is the only
84 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

pathway to “health”, but also to anything like a livable life.

Examining specific examples of fat characterization in a range of
media underscores this thesis.

LITERATURE
Reading to children is an essential part of helping them find their
place in society. The expert discourse (which is itself deeply
problematic, an analysis that might need to be saved for another
book!) suggests that all parents should read to their children
beginning in infancy. This, of course, ignores limits of time, lit­
eracy, language and other barriers and is problematic in terms of
reifying good parenting (by which we mean good mothering …).
That said—many children are exposed to many ideas through
books, beginning at very young ages.
Even the most elementary books tend to show normative body
types, even when those bodies are not human. The chubby bear or
piglet who is also a little dim and clumsy is so ubiquitous that it is
difficult to isolate examples. Before children even access language
fully they are being absorbed into systems of thinking that present
“right” and “wrong” bodies (across many axes including gender
and ability and race, but at present I will restrict this analysis to
thinking about fat!).
Moving into chapter books, examples of fat children abound.
Fat characters are evil, for example, Dudley and Mr. Dursley who
are nearly the only fat people within the Harry Potter universe.
Children reading the book know immediately what kind of child
Dudley is because he is fat—greedy, lazy, mean and stupid. Other
books present fat characters sympathetically but still as pitiable
deviants. In my own childhood the Judy Blume book Blubber
exemplified this trope by cataloguing the ways that a fat girl is
bullied. Importantly, however, this book did not entirely humanize
its protagonist and for many of us, stood instead as a cautionary tale
of how awful fat life could be. Of course—we already knew that
this was the case. Reading L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green
Gables I learned at a very young age that the fat friend could only
be a sidekick, a punchline, and that the protagonist would need to
exemplify both slenderness and cleverness in equal measure. (These
ideas are taken up beautifully Emily Bruusgaard’s chapter in Fat in
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 85

Canada which examines fat tropes in Anne of Green Gables in

detail.) It is astonishingly hard to find a children’s book that pre­
sents a fat character positively. The few which exist, such as Starfish
by Lisa Fipps, are stories of reclamation, but the idea of an unre­
markable but larger character is virtually non-existent.
As adults these themes are maintained. Fat characters are the
villains across all genres of writing and fat people are either entirely
absent or are relegated to the margins. “Curvy” protagonists who
agonize about their size but are actually revered by their lovers
(looking at you, Bridget Jones), have come into ascendency but
frankly, speak to the ubiquity of all women hating their bodies and
seldom present actually fat people. While there is a growing field
of fat utopic fiction, especially in romance novels, these books
remain outliers that are preaching to the choir— fat people seek
out books that may centre their experiences rather than the world
at large having an opportunity to think of fat in three dimensions.

MOVIES
Film presents unique possibilities for the presentation of fat life. As
a visual medium film may show rather than tell, portraying fat
people cruelly and with a focus on the ways that fat bodies may
deviate from those around them. Of course, in the cinematic uni­
verse the percentages of fatter people are so minute that any person
who is even slightly larger than tiny will be, by comparison,
viewed as large. Some films present this comparison as auto­
matically and essentially hilarious: Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect, for
example, is portrayed by the very funny Rebel Wilson, but the
key to her personality is in her excess and her audacious con­
fidence, which is only funny because she is fat. Mean Girls capita­
lizes on a similar trope, suggesting that the cruel prank played by
the protagonist of convincing her frenemy to eat high-calorie
protein bars instead of the diet bars she believes them to be, is a
really funny gag. Obviously nothing could be funnier than making
a skinny girl fat, and the scenes where she can’t buy clothes at a
mainstream shop, or can’t find anything to wear, are just the
hilarious punchline. Other films use fat suits to ensure that the
absurdity of fat bodies is displayed in its full freakery—Eddie
Murphy’s The Nutty Professor franchise, for example, is deeply
86 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

fatphobic. Importantly, the joke almost doesn’t have to be told—this

is a purely visual gag where a thin man playing a fat man is, alone,
meant to be funny. Lest we believe that fat hatred in film is restric­
ted to comedic offerings, the dramatic film The Whale, which met
with huge critical acclaim, also resorts to the use of a fat suit for its
protagonist who is shown as unlovable and abject, a pathetic and
calamitous figure with nothing to live for. There seems to be no
reflexivity of the fact that the portrayal of fat people (and in the case
of The Whale, specifically superfat people) as having impossible and
unlivable lives may, in fact, be creating the reality it aims to display.
Importantly, the hateful treatment of fat people in film is so
omnipresent that it is almost impossible to categorize. These few
examples are the tip of the iceberg. The barfing teen in Stand By
Me, the thunderous impact of Thor, who meets depression with
corpulence to great laughs—each of these examples contribute to
the belief that only pathetic and greedy people are fat and that to
be fat is incompatible with a good life—and in telling this story,
the story becomes true. We learn that to be fat is horrible and that
to fall in love with fat can only be fetish. We learn to run from fat
as fast and as hard as we can and when we can’t—we know exactly
what we deserve. This is a different version of Mean Girls in which
it is the mythical mean that is causing harm by being mean.

TELEVISION
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, so much of my information
about the world was informed by television. Even though I wasn’t
an avid watcher, soap operas were blaring in the background, and
even just an awareness of the bodies on talk shows informed my
consciousness from a very young age. I noticed, and continue to
note, that fat people were and are notably absent from mainstream
television.
In the context of sitcoms, fat people are either the sassy sidekick,
similar to those in the film universe discussed above, or sometimes
the mean alternative. The fat character is almost never the prota­
gonist and in the rare case when this is transgressed, such as in the
show Mike and Molly, the show revolves around weight. Roseanne,
one of the first shows to profile a fat couple at its centre, ran
through ten seasons of fat jokes and solidified the connection
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 87

between working class and fat cultures. It is precisely the crassness

and poverty of the show’s protagonists that situate their fat bodies.
It is impossible to imagine a show like Beverly Hills 90210—any of
its incarnations—showcasing a fat body. Indeed, all of the shows
that are set in high schools are notably free of fat characters with
the exception of the rare person who is set up as a hilarious foil to
the ubiquitous thinness—think Lauren Zizes on Glee, for example.
Unfortunately, like movies, sometimes television shows take fat
hatred and scorn further. The canonical example of this is on the
long running and wildly popular show Friends. One of the key
characters is revealed to have a secret fat past, portrayed by actor
Courtney Cox in a fat suit, generally shown to be stuffing her face.
Notably, Fat Monica is a completely different character than Usual
Monica—crass, cloying, over eager, hungry in all regards. What
does it mean to watch this beloved show and suddenly see a body
like yours—a body that, by all accounts, better resembles the
majority of North American women!—and know, once again, that
you are the butt of the joke? Kent writes:

Everything from how the character was designed—à la the svelte

Courtney Cox in a fat suit rather than an actual person who was, gasp,
fat—to how the character acted was greatly exaggerated to elicit
laughs—and not much else. In an alternate opening sequence, Fat
Monica hops onto the gang’s couch and almost tips it over—and
we’re supposed to laugh. Fat Monica is often seen eating sloppily,
wiping chocolate from her face, or licking powdered sugar from her
fingers. In “The One That Could Have Been” a two-parter where
Monica never loses weight in an alternate timeline, she remains a
virgin for the longest time (because apparently fat people didn’t have
sex in the ’90s?). And the show plays up the character’s hallmark
neuroses for laughs when she is overly concerned with someone
having sat on her Kit Kat bar (because being neurotic or struggling
with OCD is complex … unless you’re fat) in the same episode.
(Kent 2019, para. 4)

For years, many shows had a fat, stupid and often oversexed char­
acter. While this trope is withering somewhat, it has been replaced
by a resounding absence of fat characters. Is it better to be mocked
or erased? What does it do to our brains when virtually all bodies
88 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

that are in the public space look a very specific way—usually white,
predominantly within the gender binary, visibly without disability—
and thin? When any body that is even slightly larger than the mythi­
cal, impossible mean of television is obviously presented as locked
into diet culture? Is it surprising that there is an epidemic of eating
distress when we are presented with such an impossible version of
“reality”? Silly TV may seem innocent, the least guilty of our plea­
sures (especially compared with reality TV, taken up below) but the
impact of the few stories we’re told, over and over again, gives us a
pathway for a “correct” reality that can be very hard to escape.

REALITY TV
“Unscripted” or reality TV burst into ascendancy about 25 years
ago, initially with shows like Survivor and The Apprentice alongside
networks like TLC that aimed to showcase “real” life. Unscripted
television now comprises a huge percentage of network offerings
and the omnipresence of competitions, home renovations, make-
overs and possible cakes—or not cakes—is overwhelming.
There are many tropes which recur across unscripted television, but
two stand out in particular in regard to fat. The first is that much
reality television is aspirational: the overwhelming number of real
estate/renovation and other makeover offerings show viewers how to
demand and create the life you want, in your environment and in
your own body. These shows suggest that a better life is within our
grasp and that, indeed, to refuse to actively participate in creating that
life is a breach of the neoliberal contract.
In case we’re confused about what happens if we’re complacent
about our lives or willing to just let things go, there is a whole
other trope—the cautionary tale—waiting for us. Shows such as
The Biggest Loser and a raft of other less successful weight loss shows
not only position weight loss as possible and vitally necessary, but
they also position participants as always having a sad back story, a
reason why weight has arrived that is rooted in tragedy. Even
shows such as My Fat Fabulous Life, which submits a medical reason
for fat and aims to show the need for compassion toward fat
people, nonetheless frames fat as tragic.
In its own particular category is the world of super-sized freak
show reality TV. My 600 Pound Life followed on a series of
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 89

“specials” (Half Ton Man and The 750lb Man for example) that are
eerily similar to the fat lady at the carnival of old. We are invited
to gawk at super sized people, to see them as inherently abject and
impossible, unable to even wear clothes or walk, degrading both
disability and fat in one fell swoop. The series opens with a dis­
claimer: “Each year, hundreds of weight loss operations are per­
formed on patients weighting 600 pounds. Their chances of long-
term success are less than five percent.” This disclaimer would
seem to suggest that fat is immutable and weight loss nearly
impossible, but—through the use of humiliating images of naked
supersized people being bathed and rolled over and otherwise
framed in debased ways—quickly reminds us that even though
most people will fail at losing weight, it is nonetheless incumbent
upon everyone to try. It is not only the spectre of imminent death
that is offered in these cases but also the impossibility of a livable
life. Like all popular culture offerings, however, the show itself
contributes to the view of very fat life as intrinsically horrible.
On her blog The Fat Lip, fat activist Ash writes the following
about My 600 Pound Life:

But the reality—and truly the cruelty—of this whole production is that
it is designed to be a spectacle. The producers and doctors tell you,
the 600 pound person being recruited by Gabe the casting assistant,
that if you don’t commit yourself to this “journey” and ultimately
undergo this surgery, that you will die. Unequivocally. This is your only
option to stay alive. But you are in luck! This show can save you! Only
one tiny catch, though. Very minor. In order for the show to provide
this life-saving (they INSIST it is life-saving) service, you must reveal
your most vulnerable moments—your greatest emotional and physi­
cal struggles—to a national audience.
Every fear and insecurity must be recorded. Every swollen limb gets a
close-up. Have to step sideways through a doorway? Get that on
camera. And boy are they ever going to need to film you eating. The
producers of this show will take great care to show the parts of you
that the audience will find most horrifying. They want you to seem
grotesque. Monstrous. It is very important that your very existence
seems as shocking and tragic as possible and that your body seems
hideously inhuman.
90 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

But you must subject yourself to this—to being made a gruesome

spectacle and cautionary tale—to live. These compassionate heroes
will save your life for the low, low price of your actual human dignity.
(Ash 2020)

Importantly, Ash notes that the inability of fat activist spaces to

absorb the experiences of superfat or infinifat people contributes to
the desperation upon which the show capitalizes. She names the
ways that people at the largest end of the spectrum are abandoned
even by systems such as fat activism and Fat Studies. Ash reminds
us that fat hatred does not start or end with popular media but also
that its role can’t be underestimated.

OTHER SITES
Of course, popular media is not restricted to literature, film and tele­
vision. Love songs maintain a heterosexual and fairy-talesque bias.
Professional sports are sexist and masculinist in their approach. Even if
we never read a book or watch a movie or TV, we will still be made
aware at every turn of how urgently we need to change our bodies.
As I write this, the Paris Olympics are in full swing, replete with
endless ads for Ozempic. Olympic athletes are not “normal”—they
are even more extreme physical outliers than those profiled on My
600 Pound Life—but we are nonetheless meant to view them as
aspirational and inspiring—get off the couch and join them in the
quest for personal betterment!

How many messages do you get about bodies and thinness? On

any given day, try to catalogue how many different places you are
given information about fatness and thinness. Are you exposed to
advertisements on your daily commute? Does your employer want
you to join their Weight Watchers group? Did your colleague com­
ment on their indulgence over the weekend? Did your mom tell you
to eat only half of whatever you were served? The ubiquity of mes­
saging has become background noise such that it can be easy for all
those messages to escape our notice. The result, however, of this
relentless bombardment is that we continuously maintain our
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 91

awareness of what a correct body should look like and how it should
act. This impact is exhausting and overwhelming.

Every year, People magazine presents an issue about people who

are now “Half Their Size!” Shrinking the body in half is meant to
be inspiring and to motivate us to do the same. This issue is full of
the same themes as reality TV—trite information on how success is
achieved, blended with tragic back stories of why people “let
themselves go” in the first place. Of course People magazine, even
beyond these special issues, is part of the reason we are so mired in
fatphobia—a periodical that claims to show “People” instead shows
us an airbrushed, whitened, and absurdly thin version of who the
“people” are. Aliens sent to this planet and prepared with People
magazine would be greatly confused at the bodies of actual human
beings. The messaging throughout all forms of media is the same—
birth, adversity, triumph, success. When can we just rest?

Oprah Winfrey is arguably one of the most powerful women on the

planet. She was, for many years, the world’s only Black billionaire; her
talk show ran for more than 25 years; she is viewed as one of the most
influential people in the world (Wikipedia, “Oprah Winfrey” n.d.). She
is, in some ways, the canonical story of the American Dream—tri­
umphing over true adversity in her childhood, overcoming endless
barriers and now universally recognized and beloved. For many years,
Oprah Winfrey has had virtually every possible resource at her dis-
posal—money, people, medicine. Yet the perennial story that has
dogged her every accomplishment has been about her weight. Oprah
Winfrey has been every possible size, has tried every possible inter­
vention and has never stayed consistently thin. In 2015 she invested in
Weight Watcher’s rebranding, replete with marketing toward 8-year­
olds (National Eating Disorders Association n.d.; Yang 2022); in 2024
she left the board of Weight Watchers because she is taking weight loss
medication (instead?). If Oprah Winfrey cannot lose weight, what hope
is there for anyone else? I understand that had she been consistently
fat earlier in her career, she likely would not have achieved the success
she has had, but what message would it send for her to just be happily
fat now, to declare a truce in the war against her body?
92 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

SOCIAL MEDIA
I am middle-aged and as a result much of the media which
informed my childhood was through film, television and com­
mercials, as well as the books I endlessly read. My children, how­
ever, are living in an entirely different world. Social media is the
predominant space in which most of us now learn about ourselves
in the world: endless information offered in infinite tiny bites.
Social media and digital technologies are an incredibly influential
part of popular culture. Our ability to engage with one another
across huge distances in real time has made the world smaller—the
infinitude of information has perhaps made it feel larger and more
overwhelming. We can connect with friends and family and also
consume content made by people who do not have traditional
influence or access to sites of power. For the most part we are all
equally able to view someone squishing some slime or watch a dog
fall off a step.
In some respects we are living through a digital and technological
revolution. Our constant access to curated information is unprece­
dented. Even 20 years ago the thought of most of the people on
earth having access to mobile super computers would have been
laughable. I don’t mean to underestimate the digital divide—access
to online technologies is not equally distributed and issues of age,
education, poverty and geography do leave many people unable to
access the digital world. That said, the ubiquity of cheap cell phone
technologies has begun to shift the digital divide and mobile access is
becoming more and more reachable across the globe.
While we communicate and consume media differently than we
used to, all new forms of communication tend to preserve and
reflect existing social mores. In other words: new technologies
don’t entirely predict new ways of thinking. Digital media reflects
the same normativity of other media, showcasing whiteness and
heterosexuality, avoiding disability and entrenching ideas about
thinness. There is a deluge of new messages, but in many respects
they maintain the same ideas we’ve always had. This is unsurpris­
ing, because we are mostly the same people making those mes­
sages—if we live in a culture that sees weight loss as obligatory and
celebrates thinness, is it any surprise that 30% of the ads on my
Instagram are for exercise/lifestyle/eating systems? Given our focus
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 93

on celebrity and idealized visuality, isn’t the use of filters and

beautiful airbrushed lives just an obvious extension of our existing
value system?
That said, the omnipresence of social media and digital tech­
nologies can be very overwhelming. The endless parade of “cor­
rected” perfect bodies and lives can make it hard to remember
what real flesh and body life looks like or feels like, and as such,
social media can contribute to our epidemic of self-hatred and self-
regulation. If we all want to look like the people on our phones—
but even those people don’t actually look like those people—how
do we live with ourselves?
There is an abundance of curated and edited living happening
online. Perfect motherhood, perfect charcuterie board, perfect
garden, faultless soufflé, impeccable pores. Especially since the
social isolation of COVID when so much of our connection was
happening over screens, it is easy to forget that our bodies still
poop and pee, that our skin can stretch, that our stains and scars
can’t simply be erased.
At the same time that social media merely reflects the deep
normativity of our societies, there are new possibilities in digital
space that are quite different than our pre-networked lives. Parents
of children with unique diagnoses can find one another across
space and time. Left-handed train nerds can form a Discord. And
the fatties can begin to unpack the stories being told about them
from all around the globe. Fat activism has existed for as long as
there have been fat people, but the increasing speed with which
we can connect across geography has made the possibility of fat
connection greater and more robust. The suspicion we may feel—
maybe my body isn’t the problem?—can take root in community
and connection in meaningful and important ways. We can seek
out people like us, and we can also find images of bodies like ours,
as an antidote to the relentless normativity with which we are
surrounded.

How did you find this book? Were you googling “Fat Studies”? The
ability for Fat Studies to take root beyond a few gender studies
classrooms is partially due to the capacity for digital media to allow
ideas to spread and flow.
94 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Fat activist and author Lindy West responds to questions about

her confidence by naming online culture:

Honestly, this ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ chapter could be 16

words long. Because there was really only one step to my body accep­
tance: look at pictures of fat women on the internet until they don’t
make you uncomfortable any more. That was the entire process.
(2016, 69)

The remedy for shame is so often pride and connection. Finding

people who are like you, amplifying your voice in chorus, can be a
way to reject the stories told about you and about bodies like yours.
This is true for queer folks, contributes to anti-racist organizing,
builds connection among neurodivergent people. It is especially true
for fat people who may grow up steeped in shame and rejection and
who can benefit so greatly from finding their people.
For example, Kotow considers the ways that online connection
can mitigate social rejection. She writes that, “Finding online fat
community that taught me I could learn to simply accept—and
maybe even love—my fat body was a defining point in my life”
(Kotow 2024, 181). Kotow explains that finding validation online
allowed her the confidence to enter into real life fat spaces and
consider that she would find community and solace there.
When humans began to communicate by telephone, naysayers
were sure that the capacity for human conversation without embo­
died connection signalled the end of civilization. Each time we have
changed how we communicate we have changed human connec­
tions in important ways. On the whole, we have maintained the same
mores, strengths and faults we already have, but each change in
communication technology has also opened new opportunities. Fat
people do not have easier lives because of the internet and social
media; they do not have worse lives because of them, either. Rather,
fat life has changed and morphed as a result of the changes around us,
and will continue to change as these systems evolve further.

FASHION
Clothes are interesting because they matter across the whole hier­
archy of needs. At their most basic, clothes keep us protected from
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 95

the weather and maintain a level of privacy. At the highest levels of

fashion, clothes may function as artistry, self-expression, political
messaging or otherwise in aid of personal fulfilment. In the grand
scheme of ways that fat people are limited and put down by the
world, clothing may seem like an incidental concern, but given the
impact of clothing on how we understand ourselves and how we
are understood by those around us, fashion is a meaningful part of
popular culture and fat people’s inability to fully partake in this
function of fashion is problematic and painful.
While fat is a fluid signifier and attempts to demarcate
“stages” of fat can be problematic, there are specific experiences
of fat and of fat phobia that shift across the size spectrum. These
experiences are particularly delineated in thinking through issues
of access to clothing. Ashley of The Fat Lip podcast offers a
gentle categorization scheme as a way of thinking through the
impacts of fatphobia, in regard to clothing and beyond, for
people of different sizes.
Ash describes “The Fat Spectrum, as used on www.thefatlip.com”
and presents four options: The first says “Small Fat: 1x–2x, 18 and
lower, Torrid 00 to 1: Find clothes that fit at mainstream brands and
can shop in many stores”. The second says “Mid Fat: 2x–3x, 20–24,
Torrid 2 or 3. Shop at some mainstream brands, but mostly dedicated
plus brands and online”. The third says “Superfat: 4x–5x, 26–32,
Torrid 4 to 6. Wear the highest sizes at plus brands. Can often only
shop online”. The final description says “Infinifat: 6x and higher, 34
and higher, some Torrid 6. Very difficult to find anything that fits,
even online. Often requires custom sizing”.
It is virtually impossible to engage in human society without
some kind of access to clothing. Before any considerations of red
carpet chic, we must simply cover our bodies and even staples like
underwear can be difficult to find at the largest end of the spec­
trum. I think about a research participant I encountered via one of
my graduate students who, in order to wear underpants, had to
sew together the backsides of two pairs of mid-fat undies to make
one functional pair for her shape and size.
I often think of privilege vs. oppression in terms of mental load.
The privilege to simply replace underpants as needed is available to
some people: poverty, ability, as well as fat, may limit this capacity.
The added step of needing to MacGyver together underpants
96 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

simply to have something to wear is not something that occurs to

the vast majority of people.
As articulated by the chart above, the bigger you get, the more
you fall off the hierarchy of needs. Smaller fat people may be able
to indulge in self-expression, albeit to a lesser extent than thinner
people; larger fat people may struggle to simply cover themselves
in any way. Further, there is a flattening of style occurring: One
of the impacts of colonization is that access to purpose-made
community clothing is continuously diminishing, replaced by
mass market fast fashion. In other words: we all need to get
dressed and the expectation is increasingly that we can wear the
same jeans and hoodies as one another no matter where we are
and what we look like.
All of these issues matter. By acknowledging differential access to
clothing across the fat spectrum I don’t aim to hierarchize fat
experiences—instead, I would like to suggest that access to cloth­
ing that covers our bodies and makes us feel authentically good
should be a baseline for all bodies. Calla Evans’ work acknowl­
edges that there are so few dresses available in 5x and 6x that
people routinely show up to the event wearing the same clothes
(2020, 20). While potentially a bonding experience, it is also
painful to be unable to access the full palette of human expression
through dress. Fat is not the only reason people’s choices are lim­
ited, but it is one that matters.
These issues may be even more acute in the intersections of
experience and identity. Fat non-binary folks may struggle to
emulate an androgynous aesthetic that seems to revolve around
bony leanness. Sonia Meerai acknowledges the particular pain that
comes in trying to buy a wedding sari and hearing the “riiiiip” as
the largest size fails to accommodate her body (2020). Fundamen­
tally, we do not only want that jeans and hoodie—we may want
flamboyance or conservatism, severe tailoring or ruffles galore. We
may want to wear a kurta or an abeya or a bikini or a football
jersey or all of these at the same time. We are not singularities, and
our fat bodies do not foreclose the rest of our identities, so the
narrowing of our options to the skulls-and-Hello-Kitty style of
Torrid (for those of us lucky enough to fit!) does not allow the full
range of human experience.
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 97

FATSHION
Partially aided by the rise of social media, fat people have become
increasingly able to share fashion hacks and images of themselves in
outfits of the day. Some of these outfits are cobbled together
through self-made garments and vintage finds while others are off­
the-rack (or off-the-website) finds. While the burgeoning interest
in fat fashion represents a meaningful site of fat resistance, it is still
largely limited to people in the small and mid-fat range of the fat
spectrum—indeed, precisely as more mainstream retailers respond
to demands for diversity by stretching their clothes into 1x–3x fits,
people 4x and above are left in the dust with fewer and fewer
options. And as Ash writes—what of the folks who live where sizes
end? Ash notes:

But what should we fats on the very very very fat end of the fat spec­
trum be called? I humbly propose “infinifat”. Because what size am I?
I really have no fucking idea. A size greater than any assignable size
number. Infinity?
(cited in Evans 2020, 5)

The revolutionary potential of fat activism in popular culture will

be explored below, and fatshion is undoubtedly a big part of that
reclamation. Ash’s words, however, should be a sobering reflection
on the limits of who can reclaim space.

RESISTANCE IN POPULAR CULTURE

Reading this chapter, it can be tempting to believe that fat people
are doomed: at worst bullied and at best ignored in popular cul­
ture. That said, while there is an overwhelming array of fatphobic
and fat hating media, popular culture is also a meaningful site of
resistance.
Beginning in the realm of literature, there is a tiny but growing
field of children’s picture books that take up body acceptance.
Books like Beautifully Me and Bodies Are Cool do not explicitly
position fat bodies but begin from a notion of bodies as variable
and diverse. Abigail and the Whale stands out as a rare children’s
storybook that centres fat from a positive orientation.
98 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Moving into chapter books, Starfish by Lisa Fipps does not shy
away from acknowledging fat phobia and presents a protagonist
who speaks back and takes up space. There are a range of young
adult books, some of which are anthologies of first person experi­
ences and others which are fiction. Julie Murphy’s offerings,
including Dumplin’ and Pudding, as well as the superhero graphic
novel Faith Taking Flight stand out in this field but more can be
explored here: https://www.epicreads.com/blog/fat-protagonists/.
For adults, there has been an array of memoirs that explore fat
life from a range of positionalities. Shrill by Lindy West, Roxane
Gay’s Hunger, Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Thick by Tressie
McMillan Cottam are all excellent reads that speak back to the
usual story of fat; the latter three books also explicitly name the
impacts of fat Black life in America. There is also a growing field of
thicker protagonists in romance novels and “women’s” literature
such as Jennifer Weiner and Talia Hibbert’s books. The appetite
for these books is becoming more evident and as a result, authors
that centre fat characters are more likely to reach the market.
In the realm of mainstream films, there are spinoffs of some of
the books listed above, notably Dumplin’. That said, the majority
of fat friendly movies are documentaries such as Fattitude (2017) or
the 2023 film Your Fat Friend which profiles fat activist and author
Aubrey Gordon. Similarly, in the realm of television there are
several televised series that are based on fat activist memoirs, nota­
bly Shrill in the US and My Mad, Fat Diary in the UK. Somehow,
first person experience allows for fat friendly fiction in a way that
creative storytelling still limits. In the realm of reality TV, while
My Fat Fabulous Life is still somewhat problematic, it is nonetheless
the story of a largely happy superfat person and as such is still a
radical offering. Other shows that are meant to objectify and
humiliate fat people such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo may
nonetheless lend themselves to a more radical read by showcasing
unashamed fat people (Friedman 2014).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, the mainstream mechanisms of
publishing, filmmaking and the television industry are slow to
adopt fat friendly stories. Further, mainstream media seems to only
allow one standard deviation from the mythical norm—you can be
fat as long as you’re white, queer as long as you’re not disabled,
etc. For most people, life is isn’t regimented into fragments this
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 99

way, and the specifics of our lived experience may require an

awareness of diversity that is missing even from—perhaps especially
from—media that explores fat life. For this and many other rea­
sons, much of the positive representation of fat life and capacity for
fat community begins through the internet.
So much of the resistance—like so much of the hatred—occurs
online. The ease of storytelling in social media settings, YouTube
channels and other online sites allows for a virtually instantaneous
platform for self-discovery. Social media can condemn fat people
savagely, but it can also inspire alternative tellings of fat, which can
assist in the spreading of fat solidarity and activism. Over the years
I’ve heard from many students and other young people about how
the first interruption to the diet narrative of fat life came through
social media and felt literally life-saving. Through sharing hacks for
how to move fat bodies through space (and in airplanes), learning
more about how to creatively clothe ourselves, into the realm of
fat friendly family planning and fertility advice, the networked
world has offered a wealth of knowledge and connection to many
different disenfranchised people, including fat folks.
The internet allows us to find people who are living specifically
like us, rather than offering generalizations—I can find other fat
social work academics thinking about fat activism in the human
services; I can find fat students navigating campus life; fat weight
lifting or rock climbing communities abound—I can find friends,
sex, cooking tips, chess clubs, advice on the right bicycle, awareness
of my experience with fat and disability. While the fat activist world
is still pitched toward whiteness, the level of diversity and variega­
tion is better online than elsewhere, and as more and more folks
participate, we create a multicoloured, diverse and truly complicated
world that better showcases our experiences and desires.
Fat people are, generally, unseen and misunderstood. Yet there
is room for hope here, in considering the ways that fat voices are
finally being heard, albeit in the corners. For now, especially in
mainstream media spaces, fat people are seldom presented posi­
tively, and the rare positive story centres fat experience as the key
issue—fat people are still remarkable, even when shown with care.
The hope is that there will be such a range of fat experiences and
stories that fatness will become unremarkable, just another possible
way of being human in the world.
100 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

MOVING ON
Popular culture is like a fun house mirror—it reflects back our
belief systems, biases and values, but equally, impacts how we think
and live. Popular culture, including digital media and social net­
works, has a huge impact on how we understand the value of
specific bodies in the world; yet someone had to have these ideas
in order for them to proliferate in the first place. Changing the
stories we tell is therefore slow and iterative, shifting our collective
public understanding of who matters and why. While the pro­
liferation of alternative fat stories is beginning to take hold, these
stories are still woefully under-diversified. Fat Studies and fat acti­
vism have rightly been accused of being white woman’s fields
describing white women’s problems. Yet fat people exist in every
possible range of human experience. Furthermore, the specifics of
fatphobia, racism and colonization have an especially pernicious
impact on fat racialized and Indigenous people.
The next chapter will begin to explore some of the specific
impacts of fat in conjunction with other lived experiences. While
acknowledging that all identity categories may flatten difference
and hierarchize humanity, it is important nonetheless to explore
some of the specific impacts of fat life alongside experiences of
racism or marginalized gender identity or sexual orientation; in
relation to experiences of disability; and alongside other circum­
scribed experiences such as motherhood.

FURTHER READING
Abdillahi, Idil and Friedman, May. “Lessons Learned from Fat Women on
Television.” Body Stories: In and out and With and Through Fat, edited by Jill
Andrew and May Friedman, Demeter Press, 2020, pp. 165–172.
Barry, Ben. “Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male
Body.” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, vol. 23, no. 2,
2019, pp. 275–307.
Cleary, Krystal. “Misfitting and Hater Blocking: A Feminist Disability Analysis
of the Extraordinary Body on Reality Television.” Disability Studies Quarterly,
vol. 36, no. 4, 2016, pp. 61–66.
Hass, Margaret. After the After: The Biggest Loser and Post-Makeover
Narrative Trajectories in Digital Media. Fat Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2016,
pp. 135–151.
 FAT AND POPULAR CULTURE 101

WORKS CITED
“17 YA Books Featuring Fat, Female Protagonists.” Epic Reads. https://www.
epicreads.com/blog/fat-protagonists/. Accessed October 1, 2024.
Ash. “Our 600 Pound Lives.” The Fat Lip. http://thefatlip.com/2020/03/21/
our-600-pound-lives/. Accessed July 22, 2024.
Bruusgaard, Emily. “‘I’d Wish to Be Tall and Slender’: L. M. Montgomery’s
Anne Series and the Regulatory Role of Slimness.” Fat Studies in Canada:
Re(Mapping) the Field, edited by Allison Taylor, Kelsey Ioannoni, Raman­
preet Annie Bahra, Calla Evans, Amanda Striver and May Friedman,
Inanna Press, 2023, pp. 204–220.
Cali, Davide and Sonia Bougaeva. Abigail and the Whale, Owlkids, 2016.
Evans, Calla. “You Aren’t What You Wear: An Exploration into Infinifat
Identity Construction and Performance through Fashion.” Fashion Studies,
vol. 3, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–31.
Feder, Tyler. Bodies Are Cool, Rocky Pond Books, 2021.
Fipps, Lisa. Starfish, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2021.
Friedman, May. “Here Comes a Lot of Judgment: Honey Boo Boo as a Site of
Reclamation and Resistance.” Journal of Popular Television, vol. 2, no. 1,
2014, pp. 77–95.
Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, HarperCollins, 2017.
Kent, Clarkisha. “‘Fat Monica’ Is the Ghost That Continues to Haunt Friends
25 Years Later.” Entertainment Weekly, September 4, 2019. https://ew.
com/tv/2019/09/04/fat-monica-friends-25-years-later/.
Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir, Thorndike Press, 2019.
Lind, Emily R. M. “Queering Fat Activism: A Study in Whiteness.” Thickening
Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman,
Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 183–194.
McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Thick: And Other Essays, New Press, 2019.
Meerai, Sonia. “Taking Up Space in the Doctor’s Office: How My Racialized
Fat Body Confronts Medical Discourse.” Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Inter­
sectionality and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman, Carla Rice and Jen
Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 90–96.
My 600 Pound Life. TV show. TLC Network. 2012–present.
National Eating Disorders Association. “NEDA Statement on Kurbo by
WW App.” n.d. https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/neda-statem
ent-kurbo-ww-app/. Accessed October 4, 2024.
Noor, Nabela. Beautifully Me, Simon and Schuster, 2021.
“Oprah Winfrey”. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Oprah_Winfrey. Accessed October 4, 2024.
West, Lindy. Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, Hachette Books, 2016.
102 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Yang, Maya. “Weight Watchers Allegedly Used Diet App to Illegally

Gather Data on Children, FTC Says.” The Guardian, March 4, 2022.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/mar/04/weight-watchers­
kurbo-diet-app-children-data Accessed October 2, 2024.
 6

INTERSECTING FAT

INTRODUCTION
While fat stigma occurs to all kinds of people, both Fat Studies and
much fat activism can tend to focus more on fat white women.
Although intersectionality is threaded throughout this book with many
different examples, this chapter seeks to look at some of the specific
ways that fat intersects and interlocks with other lived experiences and
identities. The chapter will look at some of the academic work that has
contributed to Fat Studies as like other experiences (i.e. drawing from
disability studies) or with other experiences (i.e. fatphobia as anti-Black
racism). In offering a “thicker” view of fat, this chapter considers some
of the areas of further thinking and research that may be required.
This chapter is framed by the following questions:

� How does fat life specifically and particularly impact Black,

Indigenous and people of colour, people with different gender
and sexualities, and people with different abilities?
� What is the impact of fat on parenthood and family structure?
� Where are different social struggles aligned with fat justice and
where do they diverge?

Fat Studies is a young field and it is continuously being revised.

Generic responses to fat life have tended to flatten difference and
focus on normative experiences of race, class, ability, gender and
beyond. This chapter seeks to explore some of the specific ways
that fat impacts lives in the intersections as well as the ways that Fat
Studies has begun to interrupt this limitation.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773-6
104 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

This is tricky work—organizing the world into specific cate­

gories and fixed markings is somewhat contrary to the spirit of Fat
Studies, which aims to explore the messiness of life and to explode
static categories. Any exploration of fat and disabled life, for
example, will fall woefully short of a true consideration of all the
intricacies that people may experience, based on specific dis­
abilities, visible vs. invisible experiences, small or supersized fat life,
and so on and so on. It is tempting to continue to just talk about
fat people broadly and to avoid the pitfalls of focusing on specific
identities, knowing how limiting such an analysis can be. That said:
the specifics matter, and without choosing to deliberately centre
specific experiences we tend to default toward normativity. This
chapter is not capable of providing an exhaustive account of the
many different intersectional fat experiences humans live through,
but begins to provide a high level overview of the ways that fat life
is experienced in relation to other identity categories with their
own struggles and marginalizations.

OVERVIEW
Perhaps it is unsurprising, given the weight of evidence of how
reviled fat people are, that when fat people are living in other
marginalized identities, there are specific permutations of fat
hatred which emerge. This is not math, and I reject the framing
of intersectionality that is positioned as a recipe with different
ingredients. We all dip in and out of different identifiable and
hard-to-explain experiences, some of which may fit neatly into
specific categories and some which may not; even among
“named” categories, however, there is an infinite diversity of
experience. Eli Clare writes,

How do we make the space to talk honestly and wrenchingly about all
the multi-layered systems of injustice that target some of us and pri­
vilege others for who we are? The layers are so tangled: gender folds
into disability, disability wraps around class, class strains against race,
race snarls into sexuality, sexuality hangs onto gender, all of it finally
piling into our bodies.
(2003, p. 1)
 INTERSECTING FAT 105

Fat, too, is wildly diverse in its manifestations and experiences,

based on size, context and myriad other possibilities. Lives vary.
Given this clunky disclaimer, however, it is impossible to proceed
without acknowledging that, for a lot of fat people of colour,
tropes about laziness and productivity may fold over race and
through fat, resulting in difficulty in figuring out where racism
begins and fatphobia takes over. People with chronic health con­
ditions or illnesses that require medical specialists may have a
unique experience of fat and fatphobia based on the intricacies of
their health status. There are high level working truths we must
absorb here while also acknowledging the complexity and diversity
of our experiences.
Further, we must acknowledge that our experiences are dynamic
and variable: what is racist at work might be banter at home or in
community; our bodies may be celebrated in our bedrooms but
still rejected by our doctors; what is hot when we’re 20 may be
abhorrent when we’re 60. Moving through time changes our
bodies and the reactions to them; moving through space likewise
has impacts on our fat lives but also our variable intersections.
Many of us from immigrant and refugee families have had the
experience of moving, almost instantaneously, from being the
“usual” type of person, to being emphatically Other.
Given the chaos caused by space, time and differences among us, is
it productive to explore specific identity categories? We must
acknowledge that in doing so, we will narrow difference. We will get
things wrong, gather the wrong people in, leave some people out.
Yet to turn away from difference for fear of this flattening allows the
invisible norms to be maintained. In the realm of fat life, this means
centring the experiences of young, white, mid-fat women to the
exclusion of others. With all this in mind: let us dive in.

RACE
As Sabrina Strings and DaShaun Harrison display, the origins of
fatphobia are inescapably woven through the origins of racism, and
especially anti-Black racism. The nation building project that rei­
fied self-improvement and a specific physique to follow was rooted
in the degradation and theft of Black people following the Middle
Passage and has been maintained through tropes of both Blackness
106 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

and fatness that see specific bodies as less than human. Similarly,
colonization framed Indigenous peoples as savage and saw the
plunder of both people and land as a justifiable form of greed.
Fatphobia is a shapeshifter, not held to any consistent logic. The
pernicious stereotypes and abuses aimed at Black, Indigenous and
other people of colour thus get re-purposed for fat people as evi­
dence of a lack of humanity.
Given these historical roots, and the contemporary focus on fat
communities of colour as particularly in need of intervention, it is
therefore frustrating to have Fat Studies and fat activism character­
ized as not relevant to people of colour.
There are two main ways that this critique gets framed: first, that
many different racialized communities celebrate bigger sizes and as
such, are not harmed by eating distress or diet culture to the same
extent as white folks. The second, is that in the face of rampant and
extreme racism, fatphobia is an indulgence for which we cannot spare
activist energy. Neither of these frameworks withstand scrutiny.
Community mores around size are quite variable across differ­
ence. What is “too fat” in one culture or community might be
seen as scrawny elsewhere. I vividly remember a friend who was
met by his grandma, back home, with the phrase “look at you, so
nice and fat!” offered as a compliment. (I also remember all of us as
teenagers, giggling at the idea that this could ever be framed as a
positive statement, and my friend, like me, a culture-crossing child
of immigrants, struggling with the competing messaging of his
granny’s statement.)

Tressie Cottom McMillan writes about learning about the different

frames of attractiveness while watching the movie Grease in middle
school and the moment where a white classmate was clearly mes­
merized by Olivia Newton-John in leather pants in the final scenes
of the movie:

I remember the scene so clearly because that was when I got it.
A whole other culture of desirability had been playing out just
above and beyond my awareness, while my mostly black and
Latino friends traded jokes at gapped thighs, flat behinds, and
never trusting a big butt and a smile. And when the teacher, a
 INTERSECTING FAT 107

middle-aged white woman not unlike the one who once told me
my breasts were too distracting, looked at the too-tall boy, she
smiled at him and rolled her eyes, acknowledging his sexual
appreciation of Sandy as normal if unmannerly. He smiled back
and kind of shrugged as if to say, “I just can’t help myself.” The
teacher and the too-tall boy were in cahoots. Sandy, that strange
creature, was beautiful.
(2019, 43)

I have yet to learn of a community that doesn’t uphold some

metric of desirability, so while many different communities “allow”
for a range of embodiments that vary from the blond Barbie version
of the norm, they may still have a norm, and may police one
another within these normative expectations. Perhaps more impor­
tantly, people of colour still live within the larger world and as such,
even if they live in bodies that are framed as desirable in home
spaces, they may still face specific intersectional forms of fatphobia
beyond their families and communities. In other words: you may
think it’s weird that Sandy is beautiful, but you still need to exist in
a world in which she is the ideal to which you must aspire.
Other intersections yield other permutations and challenges. Fat
Studies scholar Sucharita Sarkar explores the ways that the
“yummy mummy” trope has entered into Indian culture, with
Indian mothers facing dual competing expectations: to nourish
their children endlessly, per Indian traditions, and simultaneously
to worship thinness and Western beauty standards, for both
mothers and their children (2020). Sarkar’s work speaks to the
perniciousness of thinness as a colonizing force that has spread
throughout the globe as a by-product of Western belief systems.
Boero finds similar outcomes in considering fat Latinx parents and
kids in the spaces of child welfare—tropes of “good” parenting are
overlaid with stories of size and race in order to demonize and
chastise people of colour (2009).
Sanders explores the ways that discourses of obesity epidemic
have been deployed to uphold whiteness and police race, and
explicitly considers the feminization of fatness and the ways that
Black fat women get framed (2019). The demonization of Black
people and other racialized folks who are fat is increasing. Dorothy
108 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Roberts speaks to the preponderance of “race-based medicine”

that would seem to meet the unique needs of people of colour
but are instead often simply money-grabs for pharmaceutical
companies that maintain stories of non-white bodies as inferior
and flawed (2010). Many of the conditions being targeted may
co-exist with fat. In the present day context where there is con­
cern about behaviour being deemed racist, fatphobic interven­
tions may allow for racist hatred to proliferate without being
stopped.
Anna Mollow specifically explores the ways that fat Black bodies
are deemed “unvictimizable” in the context of police violence and
beyond (2017). She names the ways that larger Black bodies,
especially those of men, are viewed as terrifying and dangerous; but
notes that simultaneously, when Black people such as Eric Garner
are harmed, their intrinsic ill health must be to blame:

defenders of the officers who killed Garner reproduced stereotypes

of black bodies as inherently disabled when they insisted that fat­
ness-induced disabilities—rather than a deadly police chokehold—
caused Garner’s death. At the same time, Garner was portrayed as
almost superhumanly invulnerable when Congressman King descri­
bed him as a “350-pound person who was resisting arrest,” the
implication being that Garner’s size made him so dangerous that
deadly force was necessary to defuse the threat that he presented ….
fatphobia and ableism work in conjunction with racism to construct
an ideological double bind that rhetorically positions black bodies as
incapable of being victimized. One side of this double bind renders
violence against black people inconsequential by suggesting that
fatness is the real cause of any injuries inflicted upon them, while its
other side depicts violence as a necessary response to the excessive
physical power that black people, especially those who are fat, are
imagined to embody.
(Mollow 2017, 105)

Mollow explores the ways that fat Black bodies are viewed as
defective, considering the ways that economic and ecological
racism have impacted communities of colour that are then held
accountable for shifts in health outcomes.
 INTERSECTING FAT 109

Health is the new wealth. While poverty was historically seen as due
to personal failings and thus was a valid reason to police—literally
and figuratively—people of colour, discourses of health are increas­
ingly the currency for abuse of people on the basis of race, ethnicity
and migration. Fears about unfit immigrants are pervasive through­
out the history of settler colonial nations such as the US and
Canada, but the specific nuances of fears about excess spending
based on obesity-related health conditions—many of which are
strongly correlated with the stress responses many migrant people
experience because of the challenges of coming to a new place—
result in the specific disciplining of certain bodies under the guise of
health but through age-old racist logics. The perniciousness of fears
about fat are thus a major tool in the arsenal of health witch hunts
that can be deliberately and effectively deployed toward people of
colour. The social determinants of health are less likely to be
achievable because of conditions of racism, and yet less likely to be
possible for fat people: fat people of colour are thus more likely to
experience health distress but especially likely to be found respon­
sible for their own challenges.

INDIGENEITY AND COLONIZATION

For the First Peoples of settler colonial states, there have been
endless grave injustices. Beginning with the notion of the land as
empty, ignoring its inhabitants, the land and its people continue to
be pillaged and abused. Residential schools, mass graves, missing
Indigenous women and girls, the lack of clean water—it is impos­
sible to catalogue the injustices that Indigenous people have faced
and continue to face. Further, given the deep connection to the
land, the ecological injustices that are done in the name of “pro­
gress” further inflict damage on Indigenous people and commu­
nities, both practically and psychically. At the same time, the story
of Indigeneity isn’t a story of victimhood, a tale of abjection. There
is enormous resilience and resurgence throughout groups of First
Nations, Native, Inuit, Metis and other Indigenous groups.
Margaret Robinson details a range of ways in which the con­
quest of Indigenous peoples is linked to discourses about fat (2020).
110 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

She explores Western high art from the 16th century that portrays
the pillaging of stolen land, with Indigenous bodies being framed as
savage, voracious and also fat—the spoils of the land being plun­
dered. Further, Robinson explores the ways that contemporary
health funding in the Canadian context is deeply concerned with
Indigenous health in the realm of obesity and diabetes prevention
while being eerily silent about state failures to provide obvious social
determinants of health such as clean water. Finally, Robinson’s work
undertakes a visual analysis of a Health Canada poster that shows a
(seemingly) Indigenous family striving for health:

The grandmother, in the centre background, stands at the counter

touching green-topped carrots. In the left foreground, the mother chops
celery at the kitchen table, smiling at her toddler who eats cut-up fruit
from a white bowl. In the back right, the father stirs something at the
stove. The eyeline of both parents is on the child, framing Indigenous
parents as responsible for the size and health of their children.
The kitchen reflects middle-class values of cleanliness and con­
sumerism: the white gas stove has a digital readout; there is a white
dishwasher; a white coffeemaker is nestled behind a bowl of fruit on
the counter. All the objects in the room are new, and white dominates
in cabinets, window frame, and blinds. The sparking silver faucet over
the sink indicates this is not one of the many First Nations families
living without running water.
(2020, 23)

Robinson’s analysis shows the multi-pronged force of fatphobia as

both an outpost of colonization as well as a tool in the arsenal of
colonizing states. The focus on a specific Western view of “progress”
and success, the emphasis on weights and measures and numeric fra­
meworks—all lead to an inescapable fixation on fat. In the realm of
Indigenous folks, the discourses of Native bodies as wrong has been
threaded through the story of theft and annihilation. The present day
health witch hunt that centres Indigenous bodies as inferior and prone
to disease is simply a new retelling of the same story. Fundamentally
this story inflates personal responsibility for health and prosperity
while flattening any acknowledgment of the impact of colonization
or the responsibility of governments and other structures for the
people and lands from which everything was stolen.
 INTERSECTING FAT 111

Thinking through fat and colonization can also have another

angle: The spread of Western cultural norms throughout the globe
is happening at a dizzying pace, aided by popular culture and social
media. There is almost no place on earth where you can’t buy a
Coke and, following this logic, almost nowhere that you can’t buy
a Diet Coke. Now: full disclosure, Diet Coke is my beloved bev­
erage of choice—so refreshing and bubbly!—but the ubiquity of its
spread and the semantic shift of the word “diet” as merely a benign
descriptor, rather than evidence of a pernicious global discourse of
weight loss as viable and necessary, should be alarming.
In “Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability” Niessen
(2020) details the shift away from artisanal and Indigenous forms of
clothing creation toward instead the ubiquity of Western clothes.
This is a sad shift for so many reasons—the loss of historic and
generational skills, the move toward plastic based clothing that is a
disaster for the planet—but it also speaks to an aesthetic flattening
that ensures that all bodies are dressed similarly all over the globe,
with traditional clothing being relegated to costume. Blue jeans are
an especially interesting example: made of cotton and indigo that is
often grown under inhumane and environmentally irresponsible
conditions, increasingly threaded through with plastics and non-
biodegradable components, jeans are both ubiquitous and danger­
ous. Not all bodies are designed for jeans; and jeans are not a
neutral or innocent choice. Weather, size, ethnicity, genetics all
speak to the need for a range of clothing choices, but these choices
are being flattened as Western expectations and mores spread.
Unfortunately, shifts in clothes result in changes in embodied
expectations as well—while prior to the Industrial Revolution all
clothes were made for the bodies of the wearer, now it is very hard
to go anywhere where clothes are created with specific bodies and
measurements in mind. As a result, the same sizes and silhouettes
are increasingly venerated as a by-product of Western cultural drift.
Fashion magazines may show models in a range of hues, but those
models have eerily similar bodies. While this impact may not meet
the official definition of colonization, it is a new form of meta­
colonization that takes the diversity of culture worldwide and
instead replaces it with Diet Cokes and jeans.
In the realm of food, things are also dire: traditional food choices
are often sneered at by doctors and dieticians who operate from
112 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Western and white information about diet and weight. As we have

seen, however, these logics are not actually terribly well informed
and they may simply serve as a way of imposing white Western
logics over food choices. The Diet Coke is thus paired with a slice
of pizza and a vegan bowl while the plethora of global food choi­
ces are repackaged for a Western palate at the Chinese buffet. I do
not mean to suggest that there are “good” and “bad” foods—all
food has a role, but food is also discursive and the narrowing of
food choices has implications for the earth and its inhabitants.
While approximately a quarter of the globe experiences food
insecurity and risk of starvation, the popular story that proliferates
is that an emaciated physique is attractive. The disconnect between
people’s lived realities and the cultural story of food, fat and bodies
that is continuously spread around the globe is dismaying. Fat-
phobia is a sharp tool in colonization’s arsenal, but one that has
become so normalized and invisibilized that its reach is barely
acknowledged.

DISABILITY
There is both strong alliance and great unease in the blending of
disability and fat activism. This may present specific challenges for
people living in this intersection. Finding a fat friendly family
doctor is challenging—finding a fat friendly oncologist or gastro­
intestinal specialist may be even harder. A fat person with mobility
challenges may face sneering rather than the unfortunate blend of
compassion and pity faced by other mobility device users. Health
conditions may cause fat but may inevitably be seen as being
caused by fat—the usual fight to be taken seriously in healthcare
settings is exacerbated in the case of fat life with disability. The
theoretical work extends this challenge and meets it in a range of
different ways.
There is significant scholarship exploring the relationship
between fat and disability. In some work, fat is viewed as being
like a disability—fat bodies are normal, but living in a world that is
actively designed against them (Cooper, 2007) Other authors
explore the ways that fat activism can and must align with disability
justice in the quest for all bodies to be welcomed and respected
(Herndon 2002; Meleo-Erwin 2014). Much of this research draws
 INTERSECTING FAT 113

on the social model of disability which understands all impairment

as stemming from hostile environments rather than bodies with
different abilities.
One problem with the social model of disability is that it does
not acknowledge that disability is not equally distributed. Mollow
writes that “For many black people … who face ongoing threats to
their physical and mental health from racism, overwork, poverty,
and lack of access to health care—a politics purporting not to care
about health is not viable” (2017, 112). Acknowledging racial and
environmental injustice and their differential impacts on different
communities should not end with a degradation of disability as
fundamentally flawed. How do we, for example, speak to the
impacts of lead poisoning in poorer communities without suggest­
ing that the different neurological and cognitive capacities of
people with lead poisoning are evidence of less worthy lives? These
are tangled questions, and fat justice lives in the middle of this
snarl, considering why some bodies have greater access to health,
wealth and safety and what happens to those who do not. This
circles back to the notion of fat as choice—our differential access to
privilege is another of many reasons why our bodies will be dif­
ferent. Mollow suggests the need for fat, Black disability studies as
a form of activism:

Fat black disability studies should take a multipronged approach that

opposes the medical profession’s equation of fatness with disease,
underscores the value of ill and disabled people’s lives, and at the
same time resists the unfair distribution of health risks along lines of
race, body size, and ability.
(2017, 114)

While it is essential to acknowledge the embeddedness of racism and

colonization as well as capitalism in creating different forms of access
to health and ability, it is equally essential that the bodies we have
now, in this world, are honoured and supported. A framework that
connects fat rights to disability justice can draw on a bigger logic of
embodied justice that includes many forms of non-normativity.
There is a far greater range of possible bodies than the seats on
public transportation or the makeup counter at the drugstore might
suggest. By bringing fat justice and disability rights together under a
114 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

bigger canopy of embodiment work there is room to include people

who may move back and forth or between fat and disability at var­
ious points in their lives as well as leaving room for ambiguous
embodiments that don’t adhere to the logic of identities as concrete
categories. With that being said: some fat people do not want to be
associated with disability, seeing that frame as part of a story of fat
bodies as inferior. Some disability activists do not want to extend
justice to fat bodies, seeing these bodies as detracting from the bigger
fight for inclusion by people with “real” struggles. These are uneasy
bedfellows.
Drawing from this unease, there is a significant strand of fat
activism that seeks to explore the ways that fat is not like dis­
ability, suggesting that fat people can be healthy and fit and that,
in opposition to bodies with disability, fat bodies are not
impaired. Much of this logic comes from frames such as Health
At Every Size, explored in greater detail elsewhere. Obviously
this logic is problematic in that it positions disability and ill health
as inherently negative and thus seeks to distance fat people from
these conditions and identities. In addition, this stance dismisses
the existence of people who are both fat and living with disability
or imperfect health—something that will be true of almost all
people at some point.
Meleo-Erwin asks us to disrupt this logic, suggesting that nor­
malizing fatness is a losing strategy that will ultimately pathologize
most people and behaviours (2014). Instead, Meleo-Erwin recom­
mends that we embrace “freakery” and lean into the non-normative
as a celebrated and respected state, in and beyond fat. As can be seen
in the analysis of popular media in Chapter 5, children learn about
normalcy early and often, and there are high costs throughout the
lifespan for deviating from the norm. Meleo-Erwin writes that “in
contemporary Western societies people are primarily disciplined
through and regulated through their active engagement with
recommended practices and techniques designed to normalize their
behaviour, selves and bodies” (2014, 391). Fat activist approaches
that aim to fit into this framework are doomed to failure because
most fat people will never be normal enough, but also because
bodies are dynamic and even bodies that are “normal” will move
farther and farther from this state throughout the lifespan. As a
result, acknowledging that most of us are freaks—and that all of us
 INTERSECTING FAT 115

are heading toward freakery—allows for a response to fat hatred that

builds alliances, acknowledges our intersections and also is politically
robust in its rejection of capitalist and colonialist logics.

GENDER
Fat lands differently based on gender, and fatphobia can also be
deployed in distinct ways dependent on how a body is read across
the gender spectrum. Expectations of male and female bodies, as
well as bodies outside the binary, vary across a range of different
intersections but are often quite distinct based on gender.
In “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendered Nature of
Weight Bias”, Fikkan and Rothblum explore the specific ways that
fatphobia is an agent of sexism that can be used in specific and
debilitating ways to demean women (2012). Certainly, the focus
on attractiveness, dress and demure femininity is a big part of dis­
ciplining female bodies and ensuring that women are too pre­
occupied or demoralized to keep track of all the different axes of
patriarchy. Diet culture largely hones in on female-identified
people, and there is a case to be made that in most cultures the
acceptable boundaries for a female body are narrower than those
for men. While female fat has historically been associated with
fertility, in the present moment fat women are targeted for fear-
mongering about infertility and cautioned of the harms they may
cause their offspring should they manage to become pregnant.
Within dating and relationship spaces, fat women’s value is lim­
ited. In heterosexual contexts, men who find fat women attractive
are seen as perverts, as though an attraction to fat must always be
evidence of fetish. The social currency afforded fat women is so
low that any traditional form of progress or success—marriage,
employment, education—is harder to achieve and may be met
with surprise or dubiousness, especially for racialized fat women.
Men are not immune to the impacts of fatphobia. While men
continue to be adjudicated more on performance than attractive­
ness, there is an increasing push toward mandatory attractiveness
and grooming practices for men. The visual expectation of what an
executive, or a doctor, or a professor looks like are different for
men than women, and the in-built advantage of masculinity may
still assist fat men more than women of any size, but increasingly
116 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

there is a focus on sculpting, manscaping and other body manage­

ment practices. Centuries of female anxiety about appearance have
resulted in a very lucrative industry that is spreading to include
men. As a result, diet culture and fat phobia—and a specific
increase in health anxiety—has functioned to discipline men. The
need to be strong, virile and powerful informs contemporary mas­
culinity, and fatness is seen as oppositional to each of these.
The specific location of fat on our bodies may suggest particular
affiliations with femininity or masculinity, with an hourglass shape
being associated with female bodies. Large and hanging bellies may
hide genitalia and render bodies unintelligible. Supersized bodies
may generally be viewed as unsexed, with secondary sexual char­
acteristics such as broader shoulders or breasts being less obvious. In
some fat people, the location of fat can also sexualize body parts
that aren’t traditionally viewed as erogenous—Kotow writes about
superfat women whose upper arm fat is constantly groped by
admirers (2023, 70). For men, thickness may be desirable in the
context of a football player’s physique, but curvy flowing fat may
be deemed overly feminine. Of course, there are deep contra­
dictions in these “rules” because they are no more “real” than
gender itself—rather, the shape and placement of fat may perform
masculinity, femininity, androgyny or other gendered tellings in
different ways dependent on context.
While the gendered messages of fat are unstable, there are
nonetheless specific impacts of fat and fatphobia for people whose
identity is beyond the gender binary. Because fat placement can
make a body look or feel more or less masculine or feminine, fat
trans and non-binary people may feel especially alienated by or
celebrated by fat. The emergence of plump breasts on a trans girl
newly on estrogen may be as much of a cause for joy as the
blooming chest of a trans boy is a source of despair. Rounded hips
and a swelling belly can help some bodies pass but can hinder
other bodies from feeling authentic in their gender identity. Some
of the problem here is a lack of expansiveness in our understanding
of possible gender stories—there are as many ways to be in a gen­
dered body as there are to be in any body, and no “right” or
“wrong” way to any of them, but within the world of gender as
performance, some performances nail it and others may require
greater persuasion. It is perhaps unsurprising that there is a huge
 INTERSECTING FAT 117

incidence of eating disorder diagnoses among trans people—weight

maintenance may feel like a way to control a body that feels out of
control. Among non-binary folks, the emergence of an androgynous
aesthetic that is highly reliant on a lean and young physique may render
rounder they/thems less visible in ways that can be deeply hurtful.
Trans-affirming medical settings may acknowledge gender iden­
tity while still maligning fat; many doctors refuse gender-affirming
surgeries or other gender-affirming care to people over specific
BMI cutoffs. Anecdotally, one doctor who treated trans youth
admitted to a researcher that he wished he could police the weight
of all young people but could only use his authority over trans
young folk by withholding puberty blockers and/or hormone
treatments to kids over set BMI categories.
Looking at the specific topic of gender transition raises important
questions. Trans lives and trans scholarship leads with the idea that it is
meaningful, if not essential, to seek a body that affirms one’s internal
state. Fat Studies, by contrast, suggests that the unaltered body is cor­
rect and that attempts to modify the body are dangerous and regressive.
Fat Studies scholar Francis Ray White notes that “While certain strands
of fat and trans discourses disagree over the malleability of the body,
strangely they converge when they deploy this discourse to promote
the liberatory potential of feeling ‘at home’ in one’s body” (2014, 92).
White explores the specific intersection of fat and trans identities
through both literature and personal experience, notably asking:

Perhaps what a fuller consideration of the intersection of fat and trans

discourse can begin to do then, is address the question of how, or if,
longing for a flat chest is any different from longing for a flat stomach.
(2014, 93)

It is notable that mainstream culture views body modification

through diet as completely normal while seeing gender transition as
dramatic and radical. I would argue that we are always amending our
“natural” bodies and that some degree of body management is simply
part of the human experience. Asking why we seek specific body
changes and eschew others, however, may allow for a critical reck­
oning of the choices that we make and the ways we plan to live (and
spend our money!) going forward, especially in thinking about fat and
gender.
118 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

SEXUALITY
There are distinctions and overlaps in talking about gender and
sexuality. Some of the ways we think about our gendered bodies
may implicate what we choose to do with those bodies in the
realm of sexual activities and sexual identities. These realms are not
the same, but neither are they completely independent of one
another. Fat is implicated in thinking through both gender and
sexuality in similar and different ways.
Fat and queer people may find that there is more room in some
queer spaces for a politics of fat desirability. Identities such as
“butch” and “bear” may explicitly celebrate bigger bodies as
worthy of sexual attention. Without seeking to essentialize, the
expectations of bodies around size, but also gender performance,
may vary in queer spaces, and a more expansive view of body size
is sometimes allowed. That said, there is plenty of policing of size
in queer space. Gay men’s spaces can be virulently fatphobic, with
the expectation of sculpted and highly maintained bodies. As queer
culture is increasingly pulled out of the closet, it is informed by
some of the same aesthetic impulses that are at play in the broader
culture; other influences such as drag aesthetics may flow from
queer space into the mainstream. That said, the visual cues for
queer life can sometimes uphold or even extend fat shaming nar­
ratives. Fundamentally, queer spaces are not independent of the
fatphobia of all spaces, but may frame expectations through differ­
ent lenses of aesthetics and desirability.
The aesthetic flexibility of some queer spaces may come from
some of the ways that fat and queer activism grew alongside one
another. Many of the fat activists of the civil rights movements of
the 1960s drew from their experiences in gay and lesbian organiz­
ing, and there is a significant overlap among mainstream fat and
queer activisms. Cooper’s 2016 book Fat Activism explores the
significant congruity and sharing of tactics and approaches between
fat and queer activism, and specifically by fat, queer activists. While
this congruency has been fruitful, it hasn’t been entirely without
controversy.
Lind considers the ways that fat activism has used queer mod­
alities to inform fat activism, including a focus on camp, disruption
and other forms of playful action (2020). That said, Lind explores
 INTERSECTING FAT 119

the ways that these modalities can be couched in uninformed

whiteness, exploring which bodies can afford to transgress in spe­
cific ways and who can afford to reclaim difference. She asks,

What would it mean to engage in a queer anti-racist politic grounded

in the politics of the body? One that takes seriously the contributions
of how bodies read and are read, and also understands ideologies of
race to be marking and unmarking bodies in fundamentally arbitrary
ways? A thickened politics of recognition is needed, I think, to
understand how whiteness operates and where it presents itself.
(2020, 192)

The spectacle of fat reclamation may draw from similar impulses

to the spectacle of queer camp. The glee of an anti-establishment
narrative may allow for a rejection of a range of different rule
systems. At the same time—there are many queer folks on diets.
There are gay men in tailored suits, femmes in frothy ruffles.
Queer desire does not always predict an anti-establishment
orientation, nor a commitment to rejecting all of society’s rules.
For identities that have been diminished or reviled, access to
livability may remain sporadic. For some, taking on a disruptive
stance may enhance livability, allowing for a flamboyant joy in
rich flesh. For others, too many shifts outside of normative status
may present threats. Our adjudication of this algorithm may also
shift across place and time—the fat activist T-shirt may work at
the Dyke March but not in other spaces. Activism which draws
from spectacle may truly affirm some folks, but may put others at
significant risk.

Andre Leon Talley’s memoir The Chiffon Trenches explores the bat­
tles of living as a Black queer man in the fashion industry. Talley
overcomes a range of different challenges but his body ultimately
betrays him by becoming fat, and this struggle stays with him until
his death (Talley 2020). Talley’s life as a significant influencer of
fashion systems is informed by his experiences as a queer Black
man. Yet his experience with fat is wrapped up in shame, and
indeed, speaks to his inability to stay within fashion space as his
size grows. He adopts a costume of a particular style of voluminous
120 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

dress, abandoning the range of garments which brought him joy

prior to his body’s growth. What could have happened if Talley’s
experience of fat pushed even further into fashion revolution, rather
than slinking away from fashion back into a new closet?

There is obviously no singular fat and queer story. There are

innumerable queer communities, each with their own cultures and
community mores. For fat queer folks, however, there may be
specific impacts of fatphobia regardless of the aesthetic standards of
their spaces. The cumulative impact of homophobia and fatphobia,
and the stereotypes of both as examples of excess, may make access
to employment and housing more challenging. For queer couples,
family building may often involve engagement with fertility sys­
tems that can centre anti-fat and homophobic approaches. Main­
stream systems such as banking, education, government offices,
etc., may require endless coming out of closets, and the impacts of
fatphobia may exacerbate homophobic engagements. Being fat and
queer isn’t better or worse than being fat and straight, but it may
be different for some queer folks, some of the time.

CHILDHOOD, PARENTING AND MOTHERHOOD

There are specific challenges that face fat parents and other challenges
faced by parents of fat kids—and of course, these conditions can often
coincide. Parents are seen as entirely responsible for their children’s
development and success, with myriad other influences and impacts
ignored. Childhood obesity has become even more demonized than
obesity in adults, with fearmongering campaigns extending through
public health agencies, schools and, of course, healthcare settings.
Known factors which positively contribute to children’s lifelong
health, such as access to education, clean drinking water, a variety of
foods, and safe, stable living environments, do not seem to garner
the same attention—or funding—as the campaign to (fruitlessly, thus
far) end childhood obesity. Michelle Obama centred the fight
against childhood obesity—targeting both parents and children—as
the cornerstone of her activism while First Lady of the US. Impor­
tantly, this political activism was rooted in the specific, personal fears
of a mother with growing children:
 INTERSECTING FAT 121

Shortly after President Obama was elected to the White House in

2008, first lady Michelle Obama divulged some sensitive personal
details: The Obama children, Malia and Sasha, were gaining weight.
In interviews and speeches, she described her worry about her
family’s health and a pediatrician’s warning that her daughter’s body
mass index (BMI) was creeping up. “Even though I wasn’t exactly
sure at that time what I was supposed to do with this information
about my children’s BMI,” the first lady said 2010, “I knew that I had
to do something. I had to lead our family to a different way.”
(Belluz 2016, para. 1)

There are two key problems that underpin the fight against
childhood obesity, and they are the same problems that dog Fat
Studies and fat activism throughout time and throughout this
book. First, obesity does not seem to be preventable, especially in
children. The many factors which arrange how our bodies look
stubbornly resist most interventions, and the interventions which
do work are most often extreme forms of eating distress, not
“healthy living”. Not all fat kids become fat adults—some reach
puberty and experience a shift in metabolism. Some fat kids were
never really fat to start with, just slightly higher on the mythical
growth charts because of ethnicity, poverty, genetics or a range of
other factors. Certainly, placing kids on diets is not predictive of
long term thinness unless it successfully embeds eating distress—
rather, changing children’s metabolisms as they grow tends to
alter those metabolisms in ways that may be predictive of higher
weight in adulthood, rather than the reverse. What would the
impact have been on America if Michelle Obama had simply
celebrated her daughter’s variable shapes and focused less on
physical appearance and more on livable life? How many resour­
ces could have been deployed toward functional determinants of
health and away from a futile attempt to police fat kids?
The second key myth for fat children is that fat hatred and
shame can contribute to a better life. Instead, many of the health
outcomes associated with childhood obesity can be better under­
stood as stemming from the impact of living, from early childhood
in some cases, with a body that is seen as “wrong”. The constant
attempt to change a child, by parents, but also by doctors, teachers
and peers, can deeply impact children’s physical and mental health.
122 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Yet the need to change children’s bodies is increasingly supported

as not only effective but necessary.
Children are not robots, they are wild, dynamic and unpredict­
able creatures, and the logic that suggests that parents can control
their children’s every move sets parents up to fail and seems to
have been devised by people who have never met children. It is
not by accident that the lion’s share of the shaming of parents of fat
kids is aimed at mothers. The history of mother blame rivals only
fat shame as a highlight of Western society. Mothers are respon­
sible for all of the world’s ills, but given nothing more than a card
on Mother’s Day in the way of control or assets to bring about
change. I use the language of motherhood with some hesitation,
not wanting to reify the gender binary—yet to speak of “parent­
ing” ignores the deeply gendered dimensions of parenting labour,
the ways that female identified parents are still held far more
responsible for their children than male parents. For mothers of
colour, this is exacerbated further: as Boero shows, racialized
mothers are uniquely blamed for their children’s size and scolded
for their failures both as mothers and as citizens (2009).
Fat is unique in its familial factors: neither a horizontal identity
such as (in many cases) queer or trans life; nor a vertical identity
such as (in many cases) race: fat kids may resemble their fat parents
or may be entirely the outliers in their families and there are
unique challenges in either case.
For fat kids who do not have fat parents, parents may not have
the tools to support their children. Further—the notion of fat as
mutable may cause overwhelming scrutiny and policing of children
by parents who are justifiably afraid to just let their children be.
Increasingly, the popular parenting advice is to let queer and trans
children, for example, live in their identities. While this parenting
choice obviously faces a terrible and dangerous backlash, it is
nonetheless codified in much of the human services literature and
advice. By contrast, a parent who sees their fat child and supports
them in growing into an empowered fat adult, is almost always
seen as neglectful or ill-informed. Increasingly, children have been
removed from their homes with their larger size provided as evi­
dence of neglect (Friedman 2014). There is no evidence to show
that these interventions result in the desired outcome—in fact,
foster care is understood to be an “obesogenic” environment. The
 INTERSECTING FAT 123

messaging, however, is clear—to ignore a child’s weight is evidence

of dangerously lax parenting and there will be consequences.
For fat parents, and especially fat mothers, the blame for fat
kids may be exponentially worse. Even though fat people are
more likely to make fat people—at least in families where genetic
relationships are at play—there is no acknowledgement of the
genetic factors in weight and size. While we marvel at families
full of tall adults and children, or remark upon families who are
all similarly athletic or musical, we seem to be unable to accept
that weight is genetic. When children see their parents suffering
as a result of their weight from their earliest age, and when that
struggle may include ongoing personal battles to shift weight—a
powerful message is sent that the bodies of fat children are dan­
gerous and wrong.
Parenting is terrifying work, especially for mothers. All
anyone wants is for their child to thrive and live safely into
adulthood. Parents who berate and shame their children may
often do so as an act of love, advised by systems that cannot
conceive of a safe, happy fat life. Yet this same logic dissuaded
generations of parents from accepting their children from
coming out as queer or trans, flattened authenticity in favour of
respectability. What would the world look like if fat children
were affirmed, and parents of fat children were supported, in
seeing fatness as simply another way to be?

MOVING FORWARD
This discussion cannot possible address the many different experi­
ences of fat life and how fatphobia as well as fat joy may mutate in
the permutations and intersections at which we all live. Fat life is
infinitely variable; fat shame is likewise dynamic and perverse, fine-
tuned to the specifics of any given life and experience. The aim of
this chapter is not to suggest that there is a menu of fat phobia and
that locating one’s specific intersection on the list will show the
“truth” of one’s experience. Rather, however, this chapter has
aimed to consider the ways that fat life is uniquely scrutinized in
some circumstances and to consider the uneven distribution of
access to fat joy and fat activism as a result.
124 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Fat Studies as a field is more committed to contesting empiricism

and resisting conclusions than tying things up with a tidy bow. The
next chapter will aim to provide some inconclusive conclusions
about the state of Fat Studies at present, as well as some ideas about
how we may proceed to think about fat people in new and radical
ways going into the future.

FURTHER READING
Lind, Emily R. M.Queering Fat Activism: A Study in Whiteness. Thickening
Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman,
Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 183–194.
Meerai, Sonia. “Taking Up Space in the Doctor’s Office: How My Racialized
Fat Body Confronts Medical Discourse.” Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Inter­
sectionality and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman, Carla Rice and Jen
Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 90–96.
Mollow, Anna. “Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies.”
African American Review, vol. 50, no. 2, 2017, pp. 105–121.
Robinson, Margaret. “The Big Colonial Bones of Indigenous North America’s
“Obesity Epidemic.” Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Jus­
tice, edited by May Friedman, Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020,
pp. 29–39.
Sanders, Rachel. “The Color of Fat: Racializing Obesity, Recuperating
Whiteness, and Reproducing Injustice.” Politics, Groups, and Identities, vol. 7,
no. 2, 2019, pp. 287–304.
White, Francis R. “Fat/Trans: Queering the Activist Body.” Fat Studies, vol. 3,
no. 2, 2014, pp. 86–100.

WORKS CITED
Belluz, Julia. “How Michelle Obama Quietly Changed What Americans Eat.”
Vox, October 3, 2016.
Boero, Natalie. “Fat Kids, Working Moms, and the ‘Epidemic of Obesity’: Race,
Class, and Mother Blame.” The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum
and Sondra Solovay, New York University Press, 2009, pp. 113–119.
Clare, Eli. “Digging Deep: Thinking about Privilege.” Unpublished paper, by
permission. 2003.
Cooper, Charlotte. “Can a Fat Woman Call Herself Disabled?” Disability &
Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 2007, pp. 31–42.
Cooper, Charlotte. Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, HammerOn Press,
2016.
 INTERSECTING FAT 125
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public
Cultures, Duke University Press, 2003.
Fikkan, Janna L., and Esther D. Rothblum. “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring
the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias.” Sex Roles, vol. 66, 2012, pp. 575–592.
Friedman, May. “Mother Blame, Fat Shame, and Moral Panic: ‘Obesity’; and
Child Welfare.” Fat Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 14–27.
Herndon, April. “Disparate but Disabled: Fat Embodiment and Disability
Studies.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 120–137.
Harrison, Da’Shaun L. Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-
Blackness, North Atlantic Books, 2021.
Kotow, Crystal. The Hidden Lives of Big Beautiful Women. Palgrave, 2023.
Lind, Emily R. M.Queering Fat Activism: A Study in Whiteness. Thickening
Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman,
Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 183–194.
McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Thick: And Other Essays, New Press, 2019.
Meleo-Erwin, Zoe. “Queering the Linkages and Divergences: The Relation­
ship Between Fatness and Disability and the Hope for a Livable World.”
Queering Fat Embodiment, edited by Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha
Murray, Routledge, 2014, pp. 97–114.
Mollow, Anna. “Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies.”
African American Review, vol. 50, no. 2, 2017, pp. 105–121.
Niessen, Sandra. “Fashion, Its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability.” Fashion
Theory, vol. 24, no. 6, 2020, pp. 859–877.
Roberts, Dorothy. “The Social Immorality of Health in the Gene Age: Race,
Disability and Inequality.” Against Health: How Health Became the New Mor­
ality, edited by Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland, NYU Press, 2010,
pp. 61–71.
Robinson, Margaret. “The Big Colonial Bones of Indigenous North
America’s ‘Obesity Epidemic.’” Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality
and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman, Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi,
Routledge, 2020, pp. 29–39.
Sanders, Rachel. “The Color of Fat: Racializing Obesity, Recuperating
Whiteness, and Reproducing Injustice.” Politics, Groups, and Identities, vol. 7,
no. 2, 2019, pp. 287–304.
Sarkar, Sucharita. “‘Neither Sari nor Sorry’: An Open Letter to the Indian
Yummy Mummy.” Body Stories: In and out and With and Through Fat,
edited by Jill Andrew and May Friedman, Demeter Press, 2020, pp. 29–38.
Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, New
York University Press, 2019.
Talley, Andre Leon. The Chiffon Trenches, Ballantine Books, 2020.
White, Francis R. “Fat/Trans: Queering the Activist Body.” Fat Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Weight and Society, vol. 3, no. 2, 2014, pp. 86–100.
 7

FAT ACTIVISMS AND

FAT REVOLUTION

INTRODUCTION
Talking and writing and reading about oppression is exhausting and
not terribly good for your health. It’s hard to talk about the pre­
sentation of and experiences of fat people without focusing on the
many forms of fat hatred which pervade our societies and culture.
While one of the major preoccupations of Fat Studies is offering a
deep history into the treatment of fat people, it is so much more: Fat
Studies scholarship allows the resistance of fatphobia to enter the
story, gives information on opportunities and connections. Fat Studies
both documents the creation of community and cultivates academic
and social communities in its very making. This chapter aims to
conclude this book by sharing more information on what makes fat
fabulous—the many different ways that fat life can be rich and won­
derful, and the many different offerings from fat doers and makers
that enrich everyone’s life by showcasing fat pride.
This chapter is framed by the following questions:

� How can we focus on fat joy?

� What does fat activism look like in practice?
� How do we contribute to a fat friendly world?

This chapter will focus on sites of fat activism and fat joy, laying the
groundwork for a practice of fat care and community. Practical
examples including action and reclamation will be foregrounded.
While the chapter will explore fat activism, the impacts and future
directions of Fat Studies, as an academic field, will also be taken up.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003539773-7
 FAT ACTIVISMS AND FAT REVOLUTION 127

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY FAT JOY?

A key part of Fat Studies and fat activism is in the reclamation and
amplification of fat joy. We have very few models for happy fat
people, so simply displaying enthusiasm and energy while being fat
is revolutionary. It’s tempting to prescribe this as necessary for all
fat people—resist fat abjection by smiling big!—but to do so
undermines the many reasons why joy may remain inaccessible.
Mental health is as complex and multifactorial as fat and suggesting
that optimism or enthusiasm are obligatory for any population is
both sanist and unkind. That said, the alternative, which is to agree
that all fat people are miserable, does no one any favours. Fat
people are happy and sad, high and low, experiencing all the
variety of life. Where fat people experience joy—and very speci­
fically, where that joy may be because of rather than despite being
fat, there is opportunity for reclamation and love.
Sometimes joy exists in the mundanity of unremarkable living.
As I have explained elsewhere, fat people are automatically
assumed to live pathetic and miserable existences. Ironically, being
large is meant to be evidence of having a small life. With this in
mind, the simple act of living like anyone else—educational
achievements, romantic partnership, travel, adventure, stable living
spaces and employment—may already be a radical rejection of the
story of fat. Achieving these milestones may be even sweeter in the
face of the surprise of the people around you.
A major site of fat joy comes in the connections of fat com­
munity. Many fat people are isolated as outliers and experience
the unique characteristics of fat life alone. Being the only person
who [insert non-normative identity here] can lead to shame.
Discovering that many people need a sturdier mattress or love
how their fat floats in the water or need to shop at a specific
online retailer can take the sting out of these experiences, not
only rendering them normal but also creating the sweetness of
common ground. For many fat people there can be an experience
of coming out of the fat closet (Murray 2005) in which hyper
visible fat is finally acknowledged and connections are made.
Being with people who are like you—in some way—is perhaps
the most important antidote to fear and shame and, ideally, can
create the conditions for joy.
128 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

Some fat joy is found in reconnecting with the fat body,

welcoming the very site of abjection and rejection. Using art, sex,
music, nature or other tools to engage with fat flesh; viewing
rolls, stretch marks and dripping parts as gorgeous and desirable
can be difficult at first, and not all people will find a path toward
this type of self-love. That said, revelling in the flesh can be a
potent site of joy and transformation. This can be true for people
of all sizes: so much of our time is spent wishing for transforma­
tion, no matter what we look like. This focus on rejecting the
body keeps us too preoccupied to get angry at many of the other
injustices with which we live—instead, we just pinch an inch or
two, or pop another pimple. Yet the endless fierce critique of the
self is not innate to humans—even mirrors are a relatively recent
invention in human history, to say nothing of innovations such as
fillers and filters.

Where could your energy go? If you decided your body was OK as it
is, what time and space would you liberate? What else would you
love to do? Perhaps you are resisting joy until you’re smaller or
better or your skin clears up. What would it mean to pursue joyful
possibilities immediately, instead of using our scant extra resources
to diminish and discipline ourselves? This may feel radical and ter­
rifying: to give in to joy is understood as indulgent, rather than
loving. If we think about what we want for the people we love,
however, we might see that we don’t want anyone to wait for hap­
piness or fulfillment—if they’re lucky enough to have any options,
we hope that our loved ones will take them and enjoy them fully.
What would happen if we applied this logic to ourselves?

HOW DO WE ACTIVATE FAT?

Activism, like self-care, can sometimes be co-opted by normative
systems and packaged as needing to be one specific thing: protests
in the street, or petitions, or rallies. What if we thought of activism
as akin to any form of resistance? Given the pervasiveness of thin
normativity and fat shaming, there is no shortage of ways to resist
fatphobia.
 FAT ACTIVISMS AND FAT REVOLUTION 129

Many of these different sites of activism are discussed in detail in

Charlotte Cooper’s excellent book Fat Activism: A Radical Social
Movement (2016). Cooper begins by unpacking what are seen as the
obvious sites of activism: skimpy approaches to body positivity, on
the one hand, or movements such as the National Association to
Advance Fat Acceptance on the other; thinking through eating
disorders, body image and “health”. Cooper examines the limita­
tions to traditional political activism and the ways that community
building may itself be a form of activist resistance. She further looks
deeply at art and making practices that result in new cultural forms.
There are engrained stories told about fat that are so deeply held
that disrupting them feels like heresy. The only way to change
these ways of thinking is for fat people to literally tell different
stories—in media, in art, in film, in literature. Further, our actual
daily living, the evidence of our multiple, complicated, messy,
joyful, painful lives also serve to resist the flattening of fat exis­
tence. This does not mean that simply by virtue of being a fat
person you understand the deep roots of fat hatred, or that you
work to eradicate it. But even if you are a dieting fat person, a fat
person who hates your own body more than anyone else does, just
the fact of your existence in the face of vast resources aiming to
disappear you, is itself radical and exceptional.
As with all activisms, we are stronger together. Digital media has
allowed for fat connection in heretofore unexpected and exciting
ways. Some of the traditional breeding grounds for fat activism—
queer space, academic space—continue to foment revolution, but
there is also room for connection in less obvious and expected
ways—through a shared love of clothes hacking, through navigat­
ing similar health issues, through experiences of similar sexual pre­
dilections. There are ways that our fat networks are, while under
attack, more robust, and more rapidly proliferating, than ever
before. And while laws matter, and chairs matter, and healthcare
obviously matters, the first step is in our growing awareness that we
matter, that we deserve better. As we can see in other activist
movements, often overcoming (or at least beginning to note) that
our poor treatment is not deserved, that we did not make our own
destiny, can lead to a louder voice and a stronger call for change.
Perhaps the most pernicious tool in the anti-fat toolkit is the extent
to which fat people ourselves have been persuaded of our
130 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

unlovability and of our disgustingness. Community helps us speak

back to the disgust, delight in our collective freakery and even­
tually demand a just world for all.

FAT HOPE, FAT JOY

There are so many examples of fat resistance that it is impossible to
exhaustively document the ways that fat life is celebrated and
nurtured. There are events—fat potlucks and fat swims, fat fashion
shows and fat fertility circles—there is art, music, drama, literature,
scholarship, joy. This section will showcase just a few examples of
fat activists and examples of fat joy, but this landscape is growing
and evolving and a simple google search can reveal the full
amplitude of fat offerings in real time.

� Dr. Jill Andrew is a fat activist, academic, public intellectual

and politician. Beginning 20 years ago, Jill saw the connec­
tions between racism, homophobia and fatphobia and other
oppressions and sought to disrupt these ills through her
writing, teaching and public speaking. Jill is the co-founder
of Body Confidence Canada, which awards individuals who
change the landscape of public life. In addition, Jill was
elected as a member of provincial parliament in 2018 for the
province of Ontario and has worked tirelessly around issues
of fair pay, healthcare, social sustainability and beyond. Jill’s
work has expanded the scope of fat activism in its inter­
sectionality and she is a force to be reckoned with in all
aspects of her work and life.
� Adipositivity was a project started by artist and photographer
Substantia Jones. For more than a decade Jones took pictures
of fat people, often nude, in a range of settings. Many of these
photos were curated into a series of calendars from 2007 to
2022. Adipositivity had a big reach and encountering these
beautiful photos of bigger people, often superfat people, had a
radical impact. In recent years, Jones has had a series of health
setbacks and has leaned into fat community in different ways.
Many of her prior images, and more information, are available
at adipositivity.com.
 FAT ACTIVISMS AND FAT REVOLUTION 131

� BBW Bashes are weekend long conventions for fat women

and their admirers. They take place throughout the US and
occasionally in Canada and include both racy opportunities
such as lingerie parties and spaces for sexual curiosity and
events that are mundane for non-fat people—pool parties,
dances, etc. There are also workshops and sharing events.
While far from perfect, for many fat people these are the first
places in which their bodies are understood as normal and
desirable. All of these themes (and so much more) are detailed
in The Hidden Lives of Big Beautiful Women by Crystal Kotow,
published in 2024.
� The Body Is Not an Apology, founded by radical superstar Sonya
Renee Taylor, has grown into an online and in-person com­
munity that takes up radical body love across many different
axes, including fat. Taylor’s platform spans many forms of social
media, spoken word poetry, a printed book (Taylor 2018) and
workbook (Taylor 2021) and has connected a wide range of
people around the world to the idea of body acceptance that is
not just about a tame version of self-care but rather connects
care for the self with care for the world and its inhabitants.
Focusing on a synthesized and intersectional view of justice,
Taylor’s work is both inspiring and exhilarating.
� Dr. Cat Pausé was an essential figure in the field of Fat Studies,
contributing a wealth of writing to the field and expanding
Fat Studies on a global scale. Cat founded the Fat Studies
New Zealand conference which runs every two years, bring­
ing together international Fat Studies scholars. At the time of
her death in 2022, Cat was working on research that con­
sidered the ways that needle length and dosing for COVID
vaccines might increase risk for fatter people. In addition to
her individual research, Cat was instrumental in mentoring
junior fat scholars and bringing Fat Studies people together
through community and scholarly connections. In addition,
with Sonya Renee Taylor, Cat co-edited the Routledge Inter­
national Handbook of Fat Studies in 2021.
� The Belly of the Beast by DaShaun Harrison (2021) is a beauti­
ful book that details the connections between fatphobia and
anti-Black racism. The book is intensely readable and deeply
personal, making links between forms of oppression in ways
132 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

that resist the additive model of intersectionality but instead

acknowledge the ways that systems such as racism and capit­
alism work together to police specific bodies and determine
who gets to live and thrive.

Beyond these specific examples, there are increasing spaces in

which fat people gather—fat dances, fat swims, fat yoga, fat-spe­
cific exercise spaces. Fat people are connecting to move fatly and
without the shame and scrutiny of movement in non-fat spaces.
Likewise, fat clothes swaps allow fat people to exchange clothing
without the shame of being the only person of a specific size.
These are not perfect spaces—someone is always the biggest person
at the swap and that is complicated; movement spaces do not
always acknowledge mobility differences or other access needs. A
truly intersectional analysis needs to acknowledge that in all col­
lective spaces there is still endless difference. All identity based
connections will marginalize some and still celebrate the centre
unnecessarily. The take away for me is a commitment to harm
reduction—to celebrate the burgeoning opportunities for fat folks
to connect and to acknowledge that these spaces must only be the
beginning, evidence that our work can begin to change the world
while acknowledging that we will never be finished with the
labour of demanding transformation.
Fat activism, like all activism, like all life, is in a state of con­
stant evolution, so even as this section is written, it has become
outdated. The joy of fat life is partially in its multiplicity and its
changeability—fundamentally, any place that allows a way to
reclaim our bodies from shame and foreground pride and con­
nection is part of the activist project. For most people, this will be
a receding goal— given the pervasiveness of fatphobia, it’s
understandable that our quest for pride may always be a work in
progress, but the continued energy and opportunities around us
are a step in the right direction.

THE NEXT PHASE OF FAT STUDIES?

This book has shown the ways that Fat Studies is a new field, a
young field, and also a discipline that is still inventing itself into
being. This book has explored the broad themes of Fat Studies—the
 FAT ACTIVISMS AND FAT REVOLUTION 133

specific myths that the field aims to debunk, the scholarship that
documents particular fat experiences—but there is so much more to
this subject as it continues to grow and evolve.
Fat Studies continues to gain traction in scholarly spaces. There
are increasingly many books that fall under the umbrella of Fat
Studies, some which focus on specific subsets of fat knowledge and
others that focus on specific jurisdictions. As with all identity based
disciplines that explore oppression, the increasing legitimacy of the
field allows for greater opportunities for additional publications,
which contributes back to the sense of legitimacy. In addition to
the Fat Studies journal, the new journal Excessive Bodies gives Fat
Studies scholars a publishing space. Fat Studies classes are still rare,
but not quite as confusing or shocking as they used to be. We have
seen this shift from “radical and confusing” to “established dis­
cipline” with other fields such Sexuality Studies and Disability
Studies—while these fields are still controversial (and increasingly
cancelled in the wake of right wing interests) they nonetheless
have institutional standing. As of this writing, I do not know of
any established university programs, major or minor, in Fat Studies,
but it no longer feels impossible to imagine that such a program
could be created in the coming years.

When I began publishing about fat in 2011, I was met with scep­
ticism outside of explicitly fat identified spaces such as the Fat
Studies journal. Students, colleagues, funding bodies, publications,
would agree that I was saying something important, but couldn’t
get past my claim that fat wasn’t intrinsically bad, and, some­
times after multiple rounds of revisions, would send me away.
The frustration of talking about fat only to people who already
agree with the central premises of Fat Studies was very irritating!
Over the last 15 years, however, I have seen at least a limited
openness about fat hatred taking root. I am increasingly invited to
provide education in medical spaces, libraries, public health and
nutrition classrooms. There is still a great deal of controversy
about the claims which Fat Studies stands upon—this is a hard
field to be a part of. At the same time, the total confusion which
greeted my desire to talk about fat has begun to shift. Rather
than fighting to write about these topics, I have many new
134 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

opportunities to do so, and more excitingly, am in a position to

offer those opportunities to others. Every single contribution to
this emergent field allows the field to grow. Collectively, we
change the “truth” about fat, contributing to a more robust,
complicated and multiple view of thinking about people of size.

Of course, so much of the creation of Fat Studies is bound up in

grass roots activism—the scholarship has sparked joy, but there is no
question that the joy, connection, community and organizing has
led to the conditions for scholarship. In common with other identity
based disciplines, the lines between community and academic space
are often quite blurry. There is a tension here: sometimes in the
quest for legitimacy, the community roots of anti-oppression can be
left behind. Grants, peer-reviewed articles, and institutional
grounding skew toward the empirical and the quantitative; the quest
for revolution can be muted in the attempt to get a seat at the table.
Unsurprisingly, this has contributed to the ways that Fat Studies can
still veer toward the normative. That said—I would argue that Fat
Studies will never be deemed a field that meets the threshold for
institutional legitimacy. Everything about Fat Studies—the rejection
of weights and measures, the commitment to exploring feeling states
and not just empirical data, the commitment to arts and other inno­
vative forms of dissemination—they all work toward a field that will
likely always be viewed with suspicion. I see this, not as a bug, but as a
feature. Many Fat Studies scholars have abandoned the quest for
respect and instead continue to contribute to a field that, in its radical
nature, participates in the decolonizing of the academy rather than
playing by its rules. This can be especially challenging for scholars in
specific disciplines such as medicine and nursing where the official
story of fat is deeply embedded; for some scholars in these fields there
is a tension in maintaining disciplinary conventions while also
exploring the new modes of inquiry offered by a Fat Studies approach.
In 2021, Dr. Cat Pausé founded the Centre for Fat Liberation
and Scholarship. This scholarly group brought junior and senior fat
scholars from all over the world to workshop ideas and share work.
Because there is no official Fat Studies department anywhere,
scholars are housed in a range of different disciplines and are often
the only person doing fat work in their departments. This
 FAT ACTIVISMS AND FAT REVOLUTION 135

presents specific challenges for graduate students who cannot find

people with appropriate expertise to supervise or be members of
their committees. The deep contrariness to Fat Studies ideas
exacerbates this issue—faculty members may not only be unin­
formed but explicitly opposed to many Fat Studies ideas that
students wish to explore. The CFLS functions as a kind of
unhoused Fat Studies department in which ideas and challenges
can be shared, junior scholars can seek mentorship and senior
scholars can be inspired by new ideas. While the future of the
Centre is ambiguous in the face of Pausé’s untimely death, it has
already accomplished a great deal in establishing space for the
ongoing maintenance of a Fat Studies scholarly community that
transcends geography and institutional affiliations.

SO: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

This book has offered a lightning fast jaunt through the major
theories, ideas and concepts of Fat Studies, as well as an overview of
some of the experiences of, and stories about, fat people. Lives and
experiences are dynamic—things are constantly changing and so, too,
the story of fat cannot truly be trapped in any given moment of time.
Fat Studies scholarship is exploding and the major themes of the field
are shifting and changing constantly. This book can only begin to
provide working truths about fat people and Fat Studies—an
overview of where we are, ish, at the moment.
That said, this book seeks more to disrupt than conclude: to
interrupt the major myths that have a chokehold on fat people and
that implicate the choices of people of all sizes by arguing that fat is,
and can only be, bad, ugly, lazy, dirty—dead. Fat activists talk about
people at the largest sizes being referred to as “death fatties”—folks so
corpulent that they are understood to be passively suicidal. Yet we all
die, fat and thin. We all make choices that are associated with health,
and others that are not—and we also know that these choices,
“good” or “bad”, do not always bear closer examination about
their validity. This book asks us to make peace with death and
imperfection, to take the case study of fat and apply it to a bigger
logic that acknowledges that we are all only ever getting older, and
that our attempts to control ourselves and our experiences are, in
the end, limited.
136 FAT STUDIES: THE BASICS

In thinking about fat, I am able to see the connections between

so many other struggles, and the disciplinary actions which are
undertaken to suppress those struggles. Fundamentally, the key to
both capitalism and colonialism is compliance, and fat is simply one
site in which the failure to comply—whether we “can’t” or
“won’t”— is punished. I invite us all to think about alternate futures
in which imagination is more richly rewarded than obedience. I
invite us to revel in our bodies as they are and as they will be, to
make peace with the ways we depart from the mythologized ideal,
to see the opportunities found in our variety and our mystery, and
overall, to contribute to a bigger, fatter, better, richer world.

FURTHER READING
Andrew, Jill and May Friedman, editors. Body Stories: In and out and With and
Through Fat, Demeter Press, 2020.
Taylor, Sonya Renee. The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love,
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018.

WORKS CITED
Cooper, Charlotte. Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, HammerOn Press,
2016.
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public
Cultures, Duke University Press, 2003.
Harrison, Da’Shaun L. Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as
Anti-Blackness, North Atlantic Books, 2021.
Jones, Substantia. “The Adipositivity Project.” https://theadipositivityproject.
zenfolio.com.
Kotow, Crystal. The Hidden Lives of Big Beautiful Women, Palgrave, 2024.
Murray, Samantha. “(Un/Be)coming Out? Rethinking Fat Politics.” Social
Semiotics, vol. 15, no. 2, 2005, pp. 153–163.
Pausé, Cat, and Sonya Renee Taylor, editors. Routledge International Handbook
of Fat Studies, Routledge, 2021.
Taylor, Sonya Renee. Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook: Tools for Living
Radical Self-Love, Berrett-Koehler, 2021.
Taylor, Sonya Renee. The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love,
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018.
 INDEX

750lb Man (TV show) 89

90-Day Fiancé (TV show) 34

Abbott Laboratories 49 Bacon, Lindo 75–6

Abigail and the Whale (book) 97 ‘bad’ bodies 14, 27, 51
abject theory 9 Bakhtin, Mikhail 9
academic discipline 17–18 Barbie 11, 107; beauty standards 11
ableism 28, 108 BBW bashes 55–6, 131
Accidental Pinup (book series) 34 Beautifully Me (book) 97
activism see fat activism Bennett, Ellen Maud 68
Adipositivity project 130 Beverly Hills 90210 (TV show) 87
age 17–18, 63 Biggest Loser, The (TV show) 45, 88
agency 58 billboard campaigns 31–2
Andrew, Jill 14, 130 biopolitics 64
androgyny 116–17; androgynous biopower 52–3; concept of 52;
aesthetic 35, 96, 117 population control 52–3; record-
animal species 11 keeping 52
Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Mon­ Black communities 37; bodies,
tgomery) 84–5 demonization of 14; children 57;
anti-fat 27, 29; bias 27 disability studies 113; fatness and
anxiety: crises of 42; health 65, 76, 116 105–6; feminism 3, 10; queerness
Aphramor, Lucy 75–6 119–20; women 67, 83
appetite management 45 Black Studies 17
applied behaviour analysis (ABA) 50 blood pressure 8, 33, 62, 66–7
Apprentice, The (TV show) 88 Blubber (book) 84
artwork 16 Blume, Judy 84
Ash (The Fat Lip) 89–90, 95, 97 Bodies Are Cool (book) 97
attractiveness 106, 115 body confidence 94
autism 50; social causes of 70 Body Confidence Canada 130
body histories 8–12
Baartman, Sarah 11 body management practices 10, 16,
Bachelor, The (TV show) 82 20, 27, 49–50, 53, 116–17
138 INDEX

Body Mass Index (BMI): cutoffs 117; classrooms 18–20

definition of 63; descriptors 62–3; clothes see fashion
history of 63–6; origins of 5–6; Coke/Diet Coke 111–12
problems with 5–6, 63; schools colonialism/colonization 3, 10–12,
52; see also obesity; overweight 20, 37, 43, 65, 100, 106, 136,
category; underweight 109–15
body positivity 12–14, 129 confirmation bias 65–6, 69–72; fat
body shape: acceptability of 35 studies 72
Boero, Natalie 122 control 68–9
Bridget Jones (book/film series) 85 conversion therapies 50
Bruusgaard, Emily 84–5 Cooper, Charlotte 12, 112, 118, 129
bulimia 55 Cottom McMillan, Tressie 106–7
bullying 27, 30, 32, 35 Cotugna, Nancy 45
COVID-19 pandemic 93, 131
‘calories in, calories out’ notion 42, Cox, Courtney 87
44, 47–8 craft 16
campus life 26 Critical Weight Studies 7
Canada 37, 131, 109 cultural competence 82
Canadian Medical Association Jour­ Cultural Studies 21
nal (CMAJ) 70
cancer: breast 46, 67; genetic links dance 16
66–7; prevention 33 dating 32, 115
capitalism 12, 29, 51, 65, 113, 115, 136 death 62–3; debility and 61–78
cardiac symptoms see heart demonization of fat people 65, 74, 107
conditions diabetes 31, 37, 62–3, 68, 70, 76
career opportunities 32–3 diet advice 30
CAT scanners 33 diet culture 12, 14, 27, 42, 56, 88,
cellulite 16, 35 103, 115–16; failure of 44; ‘yo yo’
Centre for Fat Liberation and Scho­ dieting 31, 44
larship (CFLS) 134–5 dietician students 45
Centres for Disease Control (US) 71 digital media see social media
child development see pediatric dignity and respect 48, 90
growth disability 9, 77, 83, 86, 99–100,
child protection 50 112–15; activism 13–14, 76; Black
child welfare 16, 107 studies 113; discrimination 57;
childhood 120–3 language of 36; politics of 8; social
choice 41–58; fat as a 42–7; notion of media and 92; social model of 51,
41; questioning, impact of 47–9 113; studies 103–4, 133
cholesterol 66 discomfort (physical or otherwise)
Chrisler, Joan C. 76 25–6, 30
chronic pain 77 discrimination, weight-based 14, 17,
citizenship 2, 18, 71 27, 50, 57, 61, 66–7
civil rights movement (1960s) 118 disobedience 14
civil rights organizations 12, 14 diversity 18, 24, 28, 30; BMI and 64;
Clare, Eli 77, 104 docility vs 52; popular culture 99
class see social class doctors’ offices 32–3
 INDEX 139
dolls see Barbie fat hope 130–2
drag aesthetics 118 fat joy 13, 15, 38, 123, 126–8, 130–2
Dumplin’ (book) 98; film adaptation 98 fat justice 103
Fat Lip, The (blog/podcast) 89, 95
eating disorders 31, 43, 69, 91, 117 fat lives 1–3; impacts of 29–34
eating distress 42–3, 48, 106, 121 fat pride 38
education 68 fat representation 16
embarrassment 8, 27 fat research 12
emotional hostility 25 fat shaming 7, 33, 128
emotional wellness 31 Fat Studies journal 17, 133
employment opportunities 32 Fat Underground (FU) 12–13
end of life care: coffins 33 fatmisia: definition of 29
Enlightenment-era: mind-body fatness: concept of 4–5; costs of 21;
dualism 8 disease and 113; feminization of
environmental toxins 47 107; impact of 29; negative view
ethnicity 6, 17–18, 32, 54, 109, 121 of 7; origins of 41
eugenics 64 fatphobia 6–7, 21, 38, 132; as anti-
Evans, Calla 96 Black racism 103, 131; coloniza­
Excessive Bodies journal 133 tion and 110, 112; death and 78;
exercise 27, 51, 73, 132; advice 30; definition of 27; fat activism and
plans 49; punitive 31 12, 28; fat shaming 36; fat stigma
and 25; gender and 115; health
Faith Taking Flight (graphic novel) 98 statistics and 31; homophobia and
Farrell, Amy Erdman 13 120, 130; impact of 95, 100,
fashion 81, 94–6; Black queer 119–20; 115–16, 120; internalized 27;
clothes swaps 132; magazines 111 intersectionality and 34, 105–7,
fasting: intermittent 65 123; medical settings 67; People
fat: concept of 3–5; definition of 2–3; magazine 91; queer spaces 118;
rationale for use of word 5–8; racial origins of 10, 14, 37, 105–6;
‘thinking fatly’ 1–2 racism and 108, 130; resistance of
fat activism 12–16; arts and 16; Black 126, 128
feminism and 10; campus life 26; ‘fatshion’ 97
critiques of 24, 57; disability and Fattitude (documentary) 98
112, 114; fat hatred and 32; fat femininity 115–16
revolution 126–36; fat studies vs 4, feminism 54, 74; on Barbie 11;
7, 19, 21, 38, 50–1, 90, 100, 103, Black 3, 10; organizational struc­
106, 123; fatphobia and 28; Health ture 13; second wave 20
at Every Size and 75; histories of fertility 115, 120; see also pregnancy
2–3, 93, 121; media 34; memoirs Fikkan, Janna L. 115
98; popular culture and 89, 90, 94, Fipps, Lisa 85, 98
97, 99–100; sexuality and 118; Flegal, Katherine 65–6, 71
spaces 18, 38, 50, 54, 56, 90, 119 floating signifier 9
fat art 38 Foege, William H. 49
fat community 12, 38, 126, 130 food: choices 111–12; ‘good’ vs ‘bad’
fat hatred 13, 17, 19, 25, 29, 35–6, 51; healthy 33; low calorie food
38, 67 12; pyramids 50; restriction 31
140 INDEX

foster care: obesogenic environment Health at Every Size (HAES) 32,

122 74–6, 114; body activism 75;
Foucault, Michel 8, 52–3 conditional humanity 76; critique
freak shows 10 of 76; intuitive eating 75; joyful
freakery 114–15 movement 75; key concepts 74–5
free will 58 Health Canada 110
Friedman, Jeffrey 46 healthism 62, 72–4; definition of 72;
Friends (TV show) 34, 87 problems with 72–4
healthy living 121
Garner, Eric 108 heart conditions 62–3, 67
Gay, Roxane 54, 98 heart disease 37, 46
gender 1–2, 18, 6, 70, 73–4, 103–4; Heavy (book) 98
identity 1, 32, 100, 116; inter­ Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (TV
sectionality 115–17; neutral show) 98
clothing 35; studies 17–18, 21, Herndon, April 51, 112
93; transition 117 heterosexuality 73, 76, 90, 92, 115
genetics 1, 43, 45–6, 121, 123; diseases Hibbert, Talia 98
66; epigenetics 46; fat gene 48 Hoffman-La Roche 49
geography 18 homophobia 28, 82, 120, 130
Glee (TV show) 87 hooks, bell 10
Global North 18 hormone treatments 117
‘Goldilocks’ rule 76 human dignity 90
‘good’ bodies 14, 51 human rights 14
Gordon, Aubrey 64, 98 Hunger (book) 98
Grease (film) 106–7 hurtfulness 24–38; experiences 27–9
greed 9, 82 hygiene 2–3
‘grotesque’, the 9 hypersexuality 34, 82
growth charts 30, 52, 121 hypertension 37, 62–3, 68, 70
gym membership 33 hypervisibility 8, 30, 83
gynecological exams 67
‘ick’, embodied 2
Half Ton Man (TV show) 89 identity politics 8; identity-based
Handler, Ruth 11 activism 32
hard work 10 illness 9
Harrison, DaShaun 105, 131–2 immigration 105–6, 109
Harry Potter (book/film series): Dudley Implicit Association Test 70
Dursley/Dursley family 33, 84 Indian culture 107
Hass, Margaret 45 Indigeneity 18, 109–12
hatred see fat hatred Indigenous peoples 106, 109; bodies
health 2, 3, 9, 61; anxiety 65, 76, 10, 37
116; appearance vs 35; care, lack Industrial Revolution 111
of access to 68, 113; care system Institute of Medicine 65
29; discourses of 17; fat and 51; in International Obesity Taskforce
pregnancy 29; race and 37; spe­ (IOTF) 49
cific version of 12; trolling 25; see intersectionality 34–8, 103–24, 132;
also unhealthiness prospects 123–4
 INDEX 141
Jenny Craig diet 49 metabolic syndrome 63
Jones, Substantia 130 metabolism 31, 43, 121
Journal of Fat Studies 17, 133 metaphors 70
Journal of the American Medical migration see immigration
Association (JAMA) 49 Mike and Molly (TV show) 86
minority stress model 67
Kent, Clarkisha 87 Mischel, Walter 56–7
Khoikhoi people 11 Mitchell, Allyson 16
Kill Joy’s Kastle 16 modernism 42
Koop, Everett 49 Mollow, Anna 50, 108, 113
Kotow, Crystal 55–6, 94, 116, 131 mood 31
Kristeva, Julia 9 moral disorder 29
morality 73, 76
Laymon, Kiese 98 more-love.org 69
laziness 2, 9, 32, 36–7, 105 mortality rates 6, 33, 63, 71
LeBesco, Kathleen 9–10, 48, 73 motherhood 47, 100, 120–3; lan­
lesbian movement 13–14 guage of 122
life insurance 64 movies 85–6
lifestyles 42 MRI scanners 33
Lind, Emily R. M. 118–19 multifactorial nature of fat 44, 48,
literature 84–5 127
Lorde, Audre 10, 14 Murphy, Eddie 85
love songs 90 Murphy, Julie 98
low calorie food 12 My 600 Pound Life (TV show) 88–90
My Fat Fabulous Life (TV show) 88, 98
Mackert, Nina 72 My Mad, Fat Diary (TV show) 34, 98
male bodies 35; see also men
Mallick, Anum 45 National Association to Advance Fat
mammograms 33 Acceptance 12–13, 129
masculinity 115–16 National Eating Disorders Associa­
McDaniel, Shoog 16 tion (US) 91
McGillis, J. Michael 49 National Human Genome Research
McMillan Cottam, Tressie 98 Institute 1
Mean Girls (film) 85–6 National Institute of Health (US) 64
media representations 33–4; see also neurodivergent identity 70–1; see also
popular culture autism
mediated bodies 53–7 New England Journal of Medicine 66
medicine 134; medical malpractice New Zealand Fat Studies conference
16, 33 131
Meerai, Sonia 96 Newton-John, Olivia 106–7
Meleo-Erwin, Zoe 51–2, 112, 114 Niessen, Sandra 111
men: body management practices non-binary life 35; children 31
115–16 normality 76–7
mental health 30, 36, 67, 74, 113, nursing 134
127; childhood obesity 121 nutrition: labelling 50, 52; nutri­
Meridia (diet drug) 49 tionists 25; students 45
142 INDEX

Nutty Professor, The (film franchise) Pitch Perfect (film series) 85

85–6 plus size models 16
poetry 16
Obama, Michelle 120–1 police violence 37
obedience 57 policing bodies 13
obesity 6–7, 33, 62; benefits for political correctness 57
older population 63, 71; BMI Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome 48
category 65; childhood 31, popular culture 81–100; characters,
120–1; epidemic see obesity epi­ negative representation of 33–4;
demic; fears around 17; genetics definition of 82; fat forward 34;
and 46; Indigenous populations future prospects 100; major tropes
37; morbid/super morbid 62; 82–4; resistance in 97–9; see also
prevention 28; rates 64; research fashion; literature; movies; social
70; war on 49 media; television; websites
obesity epidemic 58, 65, 107; lan­ poverty 33, 47, 68, 95, 109, 113, 121
guage of 29, 31; origins of 49, 61 Precious (film) 83
obesogenic influences 29 pregnancy 29, 46, 115
Oliver, Mike 49, 51 Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off 16
Olympic games 90 pride movements 32, 38, 53
online fat communities 94 progressive approaches 19
oppression 47, 57, 68, 126; anti- puberty 30–1, 121; blockers 117
oppression 134; privilege vs 95 public safety 29
orthorexia 69 public transportation 25–6, 99, 113
overweight category 6–7, 33, 49, 62, Pudding (book) 98
64–5; benefits for older popula­
tion 63, 71 queer culture 28, 118; aesthetics 118;
overwork 113 identity 70–1; life 8, 122–3;
Owen, Lesleigh 26 media representation 83; people
Ozempic 15, 47 50–1, 57, 94
Quetelet, Adolphe 6, 63–4
Pap smears 33, 67
Paradis, Elise 70 race 2, 6, 17–18, 32, 42, 70, 104–9,
parenting 120–3; ‘good’ 84; see also 122; discrimination 57; race-based
motherhood medicine 108
patriarchy 29, 115 racism 3, 8, 10, 17, 24, 32, 35–7, 67,
Pausé, Cat 131, 134–5 82, 100, 108–9, 113, 130; anti-
pediatric growth: newborn babies Black 103–5, 131–2; anti-racist
29–30; toddlers 30 movements 54, 94; BMI and 65;
People magazine 91 eugenics and 64
personal relationships to fat 4 Raw Nerve books 17
personal responsibility 2, 58 reading to children 84
personal training 49 religious systems 2, 73
pharmaceutical companies 108 resilience 45, 109
phobia: language of 28; see also responsibility 12; see also parenting;
fatphobia personal responsibility
photography 16 revulsion 9
 INDEX 143
Reznick, R. K. 70 spoken word poetry 131
right-wing approaches 19 sports: professional 90; teams 30
Roberts, Dorothy 107–8 Stand By Me (film) 86
Robinson, Margaret 109–10 Starfish (book) 98
Roseanne (TV show) 86–7 starvation 43–5, 112
Rothblum, Esther 17, 115 stereotyping 3–4, 12, 35, 37, 106,
Routledge International Handbook of Fat 108, 120
Studies 131 Stewart, T. J. 26
Rumsey, Alissa 31 stigma 3, 21, 25–7, 41, 54, 62, 66,
68, 77
Sarkar, Sucharita 107 stress 42, 67; see also minority stress
schizophrenia 46 model
school performance 30 stretchmarks 35
Schorb, Friedrich 72 Strings, Sabrina 10–11, 14, 105
self-care 2, 12, 43, 131 Strong4Life campaign 31–2
self-consciousness 30 surgery 27; gender-affirming 117;
self-control, lack of 9 weight-loss 45, 49, 54, 89
self-determination 42 Survivor (TV show) 88
self-esteem 30
self-hatred 69 Talley, Andre Leon: The Chiffon
self-help 12 Trenches 119–20
self-love 13–15, 128 Taylor, Sonya Renee 15, 131
self-regulation 56–7, 69, 71 teenagers 31–2
sexism 35, 82, 115 television 86–8; reality TV 88–90
sexual harassment 32 terminology 5–8
sexuality 1, 8, 11, 18, 32, 70, 76, textile 16
100, 103–4, 118–20; studies 17, Thick (book) 98
21, 133 This Is Us (TV show) 34
shame 2, 27; see also fat shaming Thor (film) 86
Shape Up America! Campaign 49 transgender: bodies 35; girls 116;
Shaw, Andrea E. 14 identity 117; life 8, 122–3; media
Shrill (book) 98; TV show adaptation representation 83; people 50–1,
34, 98 57, 117; youth 117
Simpsons, The 34 transphobia 28, 35
sizeism 27 trauma 45, 47
SlimFast 49
social class 6, 18, 42, 87 underweight 63, 71
social control see biopower unhealthiness 61–3; alternate expla­
social isolation 68 nations 66–9
social justice 19 United States (US): BBW Bashes
social media 82, 92–4, 99–100, 131; 131; colonialism 109; First
fashion and 97; filters 93, 128 Nations peoples 109; weight gain
social work 21 34, 46; whiteness, historical
sociology 21 development of 37
Solovay, Sandra 17 unruly bodies 10
spatial discrimination 25–6 US see United States (US)
144 INDEX

video 16 whiteness 19, 37, 92, 99, 107, 119

violence 108 willpower 43, 45
visual art 16 Wilson, Rebel 85
Winfrey, Oprah 91
Wann, Marilyn 32, 67 Winnie the Pooh 33
wealth 9 women: art 16; brutalization of 11;
Wegovy 15, 47 fetishisation of fat 11, 115; hyper-
weight acceptance 17 sexualization of 34; invisibility of
weight loss drugs 12, 15, 49; see also fat 34–5; in literature 98; over­
under individual weight-loss sexualisation of 2, 32; sexualisa­
medications tion of fat 116
weight loss industry 44, 64, 71, 83; Women’s Studies 17–18
impact of 49–51 workaholism 42
Weight Watchers 49–50, 90–1 World Health Organization
Weiner, Jennifer 98 (WHO) 49
wellness industry 69
West, Lindy 94, 98 Xenical (diet drug) 49
Whale, The (film) 86
white supremacy 10, 43, 51 Your Fat Friend (film) 98
White, Francis Ray 117 ‘yummy mummy’ trope 107