Size Acceptance Research Articles

Educate yourself! Exploring feminist politics and self-development in Danish online fat activism

ABSTRACT This article explores Danish fat activism and feminist politics on Instagram. Based on a 6-months ethnographic and digital fieldwork among Danish fat activists on Instagram, the article investigates the social implications of challenging normative body ideals online. Through ethnographic examples, the article illustrates how learning about fat acceptance through a fat accepting community is a liberating, deeply personal and transformative process. It is however also a social process taking place within a particular digital community with certain expectations on how to enlighten, educate, and understand oneself as a political subject. In the process of becoming a fat activist online, one is encouraged to appropriate new knowledge on feminist body politics and a feminist language for the social oppression of, among others, fat bodies. We argue that, contrary to popular transformation journeys on TV and social media, the goal for Danish fat activists is not outward bodily change but instead to develop the abilities to recognize social injustice and translate it into a social and feminist critique. Ironically, this inwards process towards feminist enlightenment simultaneously situate the Danish fat acceptance movement within an individualized neoliberal cultural logic of self-development as imperative.

The politics of fat positivity and fat acceptance: Exploring select post-millennial, South Indian “fat films”

ABSTRACT While the representation of the fat body in post-millennial mainstream South Indian films has often been problematic due to the inherent biases against non-normative bodies, a promising trend has been visible in recent post-millennial South Indian movies centered on fat protagonists. Known as “fat films” within fat activism for their stance on fat positivity and fat acceptance, these movies claim to promote liberatory discourses regarding fat bodies. However, we argue that the liberatory potential of these movies often becomes limited due to the structurally similar, formulaic plots that construct fatness as a liminal, alterable state of being. For our analysis, we have chosen three mainstream South Indian “fat films” released in three different Indian languages in which the narratives navigate through the complex life experiences of the fat protagonists: Da Thadiya (Hey Fatso) (2012), a Malayalam movie directed by Ashiq Abu; Inji Iduppazhagi (Size Zero) (2015), a Tamil movie directed by Prakash Kovelamudi; and Laddu Babu (2014) a Telugu movie directed by Ravi Babu. It is found that the subversive potential of these films is undermined by a host of issues, both specific and general, such as a) their construction of fatness as an abject form of embodiment where it becomes a constant source of laughter b) their reductive and redundant portrayals of fat subjectivities and inability to contribute alternative narratives which aren’t centered on the fat protagonists’ “eternal” conflict with their bodies and c) their inability to interrogate the larger body politics behind the aestheticization of certain bodies as normative.

#Headlesspreggos: challenging visual imaginaries of pregnancy and reproduction

Amid new abortion restrictions in the USA, scientific advances in genetic technologies and investigations of COVID-19 vaccinations in pregnancy, news stories about reproduction abound, often accompanied by images of what...

Oprah and Ozempic: a commentary on Oprah Winfrey’s “shame, blame and the weight loss revolution”

ABSTRACT In this essay, we examine Oprah Winfrey's body as a site of cultural negotiation of body positivity, fat acceptance and the thin ideal. We analyze the intersection of race, body size, and media representation, focusing on how Oprah, as a black woman celebrity, navigates societal pressures related to body image. The rise of accessible weight loss medications ushers in a resurgence of the thin ideal, complicating the discourse around weight loss and body neutrality. Using fat studies and black feminist theories, we examine how Oprah's celebrity status is entangled with the acceptability of fat women, black women, and fat black women. By Analyzing Oprah's special “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,” we demonstrate that Oprah's language embraces body positivity yet, the framing of the show symbolically annihilates those who are content with their large bodies. The special's focus on weight loss, coupled with the absence of positive portrayals of fat bodies, underscores a broader pattern of symbolic annihilation. Hence, we explore the converging pressures of Oprah's celebrity, desire for thinness, and attempt to represent multiple viewpoints about the weight loss “revolution.”

Lizzo’s intersectional visibility politics: contesting colonial beauty standards and dismantling the white heteropatriarchal gaze

ABSTRACT The body positive movement—which initially set out to positively represent, humanize, and liberate fat, nonnormative, and multiply marginalized bodies—has been co-opted, commodified, and depoliticized. For the movement to have any chance of returning to its radical fat activist roots, it must shift to center intersectionality in both the forms of rhetorical labor engaged by body positive rhetors as well as the bodies on and through which body positive rhetoric gains visibility. Using popular hip-hop artist Lizzo as a timely and illustrative example, this essay suggests that intersectional visibility politics are central to the political viability and decolonial worldmaking potential of body positivity. I analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s celebrity persona engages two forms of rhetorical labor that recenter the body positive movement back onto multiply marginalized bodies like hers and envision the possibility of a fat-positive world: (1) assemblaging the big butt and the fat, Black body, and (2) resisting dominant gazing and representational practices through performances of feeling herself. In doing so, I theorize intersectional assemblaging and feeling herself as two rhetorical maneuvers of intersectional visibility that reclaim power, agency, and humanity outside of the terms offered by coloniality and the white heteropatriarchal gaze.

Weight Inclusive Thinking for Fitness Spaces (WIT FITS): A Three-Month Follow-Up of a Weight Stigma Intervention for Exercise Professionals

Among the few interventions that exist to decrease weight stigma in exercise settings, none include a long-term follow-up to assess if changes are sustained. The aim of this study was to assess if a weight stigma intervention that showed success in improving fat attitudes among university recreation center professionals had sustained effects after three months, compared to a control group. Participants were 46 university recreation center professionals who took the Fat Attitudes Assessment Toolkit before completing a two-hour self-paced online intervention or control course, after course completion, and at a three-month follow-up. At follow-up, participants in the intervention group showed significant improvement in total fat attitudes, F(2, 88) = 7.94, p < .001, η2p = 0.15 and in fat acceptance, F(2, 88) = 4.25, p = .017, η2p = 0.09. Future studies should further develop interventions and assess results in larger samples and after longer periods of time.

Compassionately fat: An autotheoretical exploration of queer bodies

ABSTRACT The concept that queer scholars hold a shared responsibility for all queer people forms the driving inspiration for this exploration at the juncture of queerness and fatness. We advocate that cultivating compassion can be a way for queer fat people to engage in new relations with their embodiment that reflect the tenets of fat social justice. Drawing from fat activists of color and fat studies scholars, our relationships with our bodies are political. Within queer men’s communities, hegemonic constructs of queer men’s bodies privilege muscular bodies that are lean with very little fat. In this article, we advocate for compassion as an approach to queer fat activism. Compassion is a social construction and social beliefs, values, and knowledge shape not only how compassion is practiced and enacted but also who is able to receive compassion. We cannot ignore how cis-heteronormativity and fatphobia influences the way compassion is understood and practiced. In this dual autotheoretical work, we will explore the meanings of compassion within the context of fat activism as queer men. Our approach combines practices of self-narration with critical theory, and thus unites the authors’ bodily experiences through creative means with philosophy. We relate, through storytelling, our experiences of queerness and (non)compassion with fat studies scholarship for the purpose of advocacy and social transformation.

"Whatever I said didn't register with her": medical fatphobia and interactional and relational disconnect in healthcare encounters.

This article focuses on medical fatphobia as a specific phenomenon structuring interactions between patients and healthcare practitioners. Throughout the article, we use 'fat' and 'fatphobia' as the preferred terms in the body positivity and fat acceptance communities. It is well documented that 'fat' people frequently experience negative and highly stigmatising healthcare encounters where weight is disproportionately centred and over-attributed as a cause of ill-health. This can compound and worsen disordered eating, trigger mental health problems, and lead to healthcare avoidance. Although the regularity and risks of these weight-focused encounters are well established, there does not yet exist a coherent theoretical framework for understanding such discriminatory practises. In this article, we draw on the experiences of 15 fat women who are members of the Health at Every Size (HAES) online community to explore how they perceive their fatness impacting medical encounters. Through these data and specifically drawing on the framework of 'cultural health capital,' we suggest that given the deep purchase of cultural tropes surrounding it, fatness is perceived to embody and therefore confer on patients' assumptions of low cultural health capital. We argue that ubiquitously characteristic of medical fatphobia is what we call an 'interactional and relational disconnect' between fat patients and healthcare practitioners. We suggest that this disconnect structures fatphobic interactions by over-attributing fatness as the underlying cause of medical problems, which entrenches patient and practitioner ambivalence because of a lack of joint decision-making. We argue that interactional and relational disconnect is produced by, sustained by, and reproduces asymmetric power relations between patients and practitioners. While we demonstrate that patients develop tactics to mitigate and manage fatphobia in healthcare encounters, the persistent interactional asymmetry between doctors and patients means these attempts often fail. We conclude with a plea for sociology to take medical fatphobia seriously as a form of intersectional systemic discrimination. While movements like HAES, fat positivity, and body acceptance create kinship and support fat patients with self-advocacy in healthcare interactions, we suggest that systemic rather than individual change is necessary for effective healthcare inclusion and interaction.

Ventilator and the Vaccine

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the fat body was caught up in a complicated logics of life and death in the North American context, where “obesity” was regarded as an “underlying condition” for greater risk of severe disease and death from Covid. As such, bodies with high BMIs were refused ICU ventilator care in certain jurisdictions, which fat activists classified as eugenics. At the same time, some vaccination campaigns prioritized people with higher BMIs for scarcely available Covid vaccinations, also on the basis of fat bodies’ higher risk status for Covid death. This paper explores the seeming tension between two articulations of fat during the Covid pandemic, whereby fat bodies were simultaneously worthy of life and of death in the same moment. Using MBembe’s conceptualization of necropolitics, which draws out and expands upon Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, I argue that the two perspectives on fatness operated in tandem, within an overall temporal shift in classification of obesity; from that of a risk factor for eventual death to that of an emergent threat. Such a temporal shift, I argue, relied on well-worn eugenic patterns in Canada, through which “normative” white bodies were prioritized for life through a complex necropolitical practice by which fat bodies were both made live and let die.

Being big in the big tent: Is fat social justice part of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on college campuses in the United States?

ABSTRACT Fat social justice and fat liberation movements share language, symbols, and strategies with many other movements striving to fight discrimination and stigma, such as movements centered on race, gender, sexuality, and disability. These communities should be natural partners with fat activists in striving for intersectional liberation and in fighting existing structures of privilege. It is less clear, however, the degree to which fat activism and activists are welcome in spaces explicitly constructed to address comprehensive approaches to social justice. To address this question, we examine a setting specifically built to address issues of privilege, oppression, and discrimination: diversity, equity, and inclusion organizations at US colleges and universities. We compile a data set of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices at 200 four-year colleges and universities in the US, with stratified samples to ensure inclusion across regions of the US, a broad variety of educational settings from large Research 1 institutions to small liberal arts colleges, and a subset of historically black colleges and universities. We examine whether and to what degree issues of fat social justice and liberation are included in university diversity and inclusion offices, websites, and materials. Findings show fat people, their experiences, and fat social justice issues are generally excluded in DEI spaces. We provide potential explanations for this exclusion and outline possible steps forward for those interested in fat social justice.

Co-healthism in Health at Every Size®-aligned TikTok activism: Transforming the definition of healthism via feminist-of-color disability studies theorizing

ABSTRACT This article is a feminist-of-color disability studies-oriented TikTok critical discourse analysis of 100 popular Health at Every Size® (HAES®) TikToks. It evaluates the power relations surrounding how HAES® frameworks are disseminated on TikTok and unpacks the implications for fat liberation. HAES® frameworks of care capacitate the eradication of medical fatmisia and the weight-centered health paradigm. While popular among online fat activists, HAES® frameworks have been widely accused of perpetuating healthism. My analysis makes clear how HAES® discourse is often steeped in ableist, white supremacist, and colonial healthism. Through this analysis, I ultimately argue that the definition of healthism needs to shift to center ableism, white supremacy, and colonialism, as well as the co-constituting nature of how systems of oppression aggregate to weaponize health against those with embodiments marked as “unhealthy.” I argue that this shift is necessary to produce analyses committed to radical solidarity. I mark this shift by coining and utilizing the term co-healthism. To demonstrate the need for my argument, I organize the results into three themes: healthist ableism, healthist white supremacy, and healthist colonialism in HAES® discourse. In the discussion, I clarify the co-constitutive nature of these themes and argue for the shift from healthism to co-healthism. I also define the concept and explain its methodological potentialities.

False Consciousness In Body Positivity Campaigns In Women's Lifestyle Media

This article aims to discover how women’s lifestyle media constructs a false awareness about women’s bodies through body positivity discourse. Using media and gender perspectives, false consciousness, body positivity, and Roland Barthes’ semiotic analysis, this research finds that the media produces body positivity discourse as a narrative that ‘all bodies are beautiful, whatever their shape.’ Body positivity discourse refers to fat bodies as ‘normality’ to fight the stigma that fat bodies are not beautiful and are a problem for women. Body positivity evolved from the fat acceptance movement. This body positivity discourse is built on the construct that women must accept their body shape to live happily. The media produces the message through photos and texts that fat bodies are delicate as long as they are healthy. It ignores that medical obesity carries serious health consequences for many women. Thus, this research shows that instead of building women’s positive acceptance of their body shape, the media creates a misguided consciousness of fat bodies from a medical perspective.

Digital Mental Health Interventions: Differences in Diet Culture Intervention Framing.

Diet culture is a societal norm that ranks thin bodies as superior to other body types and has been associated with negative outcomes, such as eating disorders. Wellness has evolved into a term that is often used to promote diet culture messages. One possible way to combat diet culture is through single-session, digital mental health interventions (DMHIs), which allow for increased access to brief public health treatments. The framing of DMHIs is critical to ensure that the target population is reached. Participants (N = 397) were enrolled in a single-session DMHI, which was framed as either a Diet Culture Intervention (n = 201) or a Wellness Resource (n = 196). Baseline group differences in eating disorder pathology, body image, weight stigma concerns, fat acceptance, and demographic characteristics were analyzed. Across groups, participants reported moderately high eating disorder pathology, low-to-moderate levels of body dissatisfaction, moderate levels of fat acceptance, and either very low or very high weight stigma concerns. Participants in the Diet Culture Intervention group reported higher levels of fat acceptance than those in the Wellness Resource group (p < 0.001). No other framing group differences were identified, though post hoc analyses revealed differences based on recruitment source (i.e., social media versus undergraduate research portal). This study found that framing a DMHI as targeting diet culture or as a Wellness Resource can result in the successful recruitment of individuals at risk of disordered eating. Framing a DMHI as a Wellness Resource may increase recruitment of individuals with low levels of fat acceptance, which may be particularly important for dismantling diet culture, disordered eating, and weight stigma concerns. Future research should assess DMHI framing in other populations, such as men and adolescents.

WIT FITS: Effects of Weight Stigma Intervention on Exercise Professionals’ Attitudes Toward Fatness: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Exercise professionals often hold anti-fat attitudes, which contribute to weight stigma and discrimination in physical activity contexts. This study examined the effects of an online weight stigma intervention on exercise professionals’ attitudes toward fatness. Participants were 105 exercise professionals who were employed at least part-time at university recreation centers in the United States. In this randomized controlled trial, participants were randomized into an intervention online course to decrease weight stigma or a control online course to learn about communication techniques to enhance motivation for physical activity. Attitudes about fatness were assessed at pre- and post-course using the Fat Attitudes Assessment Toolkit (FAAT). There were significant increases in the fat acceptance composite score in the intervention group compared to the control group, suggesting recreation center staff who completed the intervention WIT FITS course experienced more positive evaluations of fat people as a result of the intervention.

How pharmaceutical companies misappropriate fat acceptance

ABSTRACT Pharmaceutical companies influence whether we perceive conditions as relevant to the medical sector and in need of pharmaceutical intervention (pharmaceuticalization). Recently, through coordinated media and professional campaigns, pharmaceutical companies are coming to influence our understanding of bodily size. Beyond merely affecting conversations about how weight should be understood and engaged with in healthcare, however, pharmaceutical companies are swaying how society approaches weight stigma. By elevating certain voices, those of organizations and clinicians with whom they partner, and not others, including fat acceptance activists, pharmaceutical companies are having a regressive impact on body acceptance veiled as “obesity” stigma advocacy.

(Un)Mapping trajectories of fatness: a critical account of fat studies’ origin story and the reproduction of fat (white) normativity

Origin stories set the stage for the development of a field of study and are integral to the ways they grow and shift. Similar to other reclamation projects, fat studies aims to rewrite the history of ‘fat’ by subverting its violent use for surveillance and control, and positioning it as a natural human characteristic. Its origin story is inextricably linked to the activism and scholarship of white and white-passing women, and is often located in gendered expectations of the ‘appropriate’ feminine body. As a result, the racial origins and functionings of fatphobia become erased and create a normative fat subject that is typically cisgender, female and white, which is reproduced in much of the research emerging from the field. I, along with other fat activists and scholars, propose a fundamental shift towards an intersectional fat studies, with race as an entry point to analysis towards rewriting the field’s history and presence.

Fat Liberation: How Social Workers Can Incorporate Fat Activism to Promote Care and Justice

Despite serious health and mental health problems associated with weight stigma and dieting, many health providers consider intentional weight loss to be a positive pro-health intervention. Alternatively, the fat activist movement challenges weight prejudice and advocates for the equitable treatment of individuals with diverse body types. Inspired by the work of fat activists, this article encourages social work educators and practitioners to critically deconstruct anti-fat social norms and to integrate body-positive interventions within micro, mezzo, and macro practice. Fat activism complements critical feminist, queer, and disability justice frameworks that are relevant to this special issue on critical feminist inquiry.

“Happy Women are the Most Beautiful, but…”: The Use of Weight Stigmatization and Social Comparison to Analyze Media Images

ABSTRACT This study offers a valuable interpretivist approach in understanding how beauty standards and social comparison influence viewing of a fat or thin media image. Participants (N = 135) viewed either an altered or unaltered female media image and then responded to a series of questions. Through inductively analyzing the written discourse, three themes were generated. The first theme highlights how socialization informed participants’ viewing and interpreting of the images. The second theme specifies that participants interpreted the images through a lens of preexisting assumptions. The third theme captures the social comparisons that were made while viewing the images. Results are explained in the context of weight stigmatization and health assumptions, body positivity and fat pride, and social comparison theory.

‘Operación Feria’: a critical analysis of body discourses on Instagram

Narrow understandings about fatness and health continue to prevail in the West. However, we have witnessed emerging trends and movements against these dominant discourses. Examples of these counter discourses are the fat acceptance and body positivity movements. Social media is a space where confrontation and discrepancies between these different discourses are common, particularly in relation to non-­normative bodies. This paper explores how Instagram users reinforce or ­challenge underlying assumptions regarding the ‘Operación Feria’ advertising campaign, which focuses on promoting physical exercise to fight obesity and fatness. A total of 1,930 comments posted on Instagram were analysed using a discourse analysis approach. Two main narratives were constructed from the data. On the one hand, there is a dominant position that challenges societal norms regarding bodies, which confronts fat-phobia and stereotypes. On the other hand, there is a reinforcement of the campaign with a discourse based on humour, victimhood and medical terms.

Neoliberal Narratives and Internalized Weight Stigma: Obstacles to Fat Equality

In recent years, public health discourse has been dominated by anti-fat biases and attitudes. Fat bodies face oppression through the medical industry and broader diet culture which characterize larger bodies as immoral and requiring individual efforts to discipline. In attempts to reduce fat stigma, this article outlines one key barrier to fat liberation: internalized weight stigma. Internalized weight stigma occurs when negative attitudes towards fatness are turned inwards, and people begin to believe the negative stereotypes and beliefs imposed by health systems and broader culture. To address internalized weight stigma and its impacts, this paper examines how internalized weight stigma provides one barrier to dismantling anti-fat beliefs and societal structures. First, this paper outline the current state of legislation regarding discrimination based on weight. Next, it explores the neoliberal sources of internalized weight stigma, specifically through the diet industry and medicine. Third, it considers how narratives of weight stigma may be adopted internally by a fat person. Fourth, it addresses how internalized weight stigma may provide a barrier to recognizing weight as grounds for discrimination. The conclusion of this essay turns to the work of fat activists, and suggests how the current body positive movement may be altered and supplemented to reduce the structural and internal barriers that prevent fat liberation.