Covid-19 Risk and Obesity

Abstract

Warnings about the increased risk of contracting and suffering severe COVID-19 among fat people has been in the spotlight of public discourse and media attention since the pandemic began. Added to this has been widespread anxiety about the risks of weight gain that were predicted to follow public health restrictions that compelled Canadians to work and learn from home. Critical scholars assert that obesity and the problematization of the fat body are discursively constructed through the deployment of biopedagogies--instructive lessons about what it means to eat and live right. By framing and deploying lessons in right living, biopedagogies exert social control over individual and collective bodies, including by making the fat body problematic. In this article, the authors present a discourse analysis of the ways that Canadian news media have reported on the connection between COVID-19 and obesity and draws on biopedagogies as a theoretical framework to elucidate how fat phobia is promulgated by such reporting. The authors call for guidelines to curb fat phobic language and the scientifically inaccurate, discursive constructions of bodies, body weight, and health in news media.