Fighting for a (wide enough) seat at the table: weight stigma in law and policy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Few jurisdictions provide legal protection against discrimination on the basis of weight despite evidence of pervasive inequalities faced by fat individuals in employment, healthcare, education, and other domains. Yet, in the last two decades, advocacy efforts in several countries aimed to remedy this situation have been largely unsuccessful. We present a cross-national conceptual analysis of three significant anti-discrimination developments regarding weight in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Iceland, respectively, to highlight how the creation, implementation, and enforcement of legal and policy mechanisms that prohibit weight discrimination ironically suffer under the very burden of deeply rooted structural stigmas against fatness and fat bodies that such efforts seek to counter. However, drawing on research around policy change in response to other social movements, we conclude that we may be at a time where broad-ranging policy change could become a reality.