Anti-Fat Bias
“The various forms of discrimination that fat people experience, in schools, at doctors' offices, in the job market, in housing, and in their social lives, means that, effectively, their life chances—for a good education, for fair and excellent health care, for job promotion and security, for pleasant housing, for friends, lovers, and life partners. . . in other words, for a good and safe life—are effectively reduced.”
(Farrell, Amy Erdman. “Considering Fat Shame.” Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, New York University Press, 2011.)
This section includes resources that specifically discuss anti-fat bias and stigma, with a focus on American society. These resources endeavor to outline the various ways anti-fat bias manifests in society, and how it can impact fat people—without replicating that bias.
Books
Fat Shame by ISBN: 9780814728345Publication Date: 2011-03-01Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Amy Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Firmly in place by the time the diet industry began to flourish in the 1920s, the development of fat stigma was related not only to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period related to consumer excess, but, even more profoundly, to prevailing ideas about race, civilization and evolution.
Framing Fat by ISBN: 9780813560939Publication Date: 2013-05-03Framing Fat takes a bird’s-eye view of how public actors—including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, advertisers of the fashion-beauty complex, food industry advocates, and fat activists—construct the fat body by identifying the messages these groups put forth, particularly where issues of beauty, health, choice and responsibility, and social justice are concerned. Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves examine how laypersons respond to these conflicting messages and illustrate the gendered, raced, and classed implications within them. In doing so, they shed light on how dominant ideas about body fat have led to the moral indictment of body nonconformists, essentially “framing” them for their fat bodies.
What's Wrong with Fat? by ISBN: 9780199857081Publication Date: 2013-01-02Why, Saguy asks, has the view of “fat” as a problem—a symptom of immorality, a medical pathology, a public health epidemic—come to dominate more positive framings of weight—as consistent with health, beauty, or a legitimate rights claim-in public discourse? Why are heavy individuals singled out for blame? And what are the consequences of understanding weight in these ways? What's Wrong with Fat? presents each of the various ways in which fat is understood in America today, examining the implications of understanding fatness as a health risk, disease, and epidemic, and revealing why we've come to understand the issue in these terms, despite considerable scientific uncertainty and debate.
Fat-Talk Nation by ISBN: 9780801456442Publication Date: 2015-11-16Susan Greenhalgh tells the story of today’s fight against excess pounds by giving young people, the campaign’s main target, an opportunity to speak about experiences that have long lain hidden in silence and shame. Featuring forty-five autobiographical narratives of personal struggles with diet, weight, "bad BMIs," and eating disorders, Fat-Talk Nation shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people who are obsessed with their bodies and whose most fundamental sense of self comes from their size.
Other resources
Headless Fatties by Charlotte Cooper
"Headless Fatties are a version of fat people, a never-ending parade of us, taken from us and then sold back to us, hatefully and with ignorance. They reek of a surveillance culture with which fat people—whose bodies are policed by glares, and disapproving looks—are all too familiar."
Fat Reproductive Justice: Navigating the Boundaries of Reproductive Health Care by Andrea LaMarre, Carla Rice, Katie Cook, May Friedman
A thematic analysis of the narratives of 17 participants who had been labeled “overweight” or “obese” while pregnant and/or seeking reproductive health care related to fertility and/or pregnancy. Participants’ narratives speak to experiences of being surveilled and controlled in medical settings; this surveillance and control negatively impacted their access to desired care.
Dismantling Anti-Fat Bias on NPR Fresh Air
Journalist Virginia Sole-Smith says efforts to fight childhood obesity have caused kids to absorb an onslaught of body-shaming messages. NPR Fresh Air talks about thin privilege, how to neutralize food and the word "fat," and how diet culture hurts everyone.
The Size of It: Fat Bias in the News by the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance
A quantitative review of one year of national news coverage (Dec. 1, 2021 - Nov. 30, 2022) found that a mere 48 articles about anti-fatness were written or published by traditional news sources, and only 24 spoke about fat liberation or justice in any way. Meanwhile, traditional news sources featured over 18,000 articles focused on covering weight loss.