Fat Studies and Fat Social Justice

This book offers examinations from the field of fat studies to consider how fat social justice has been conceptualized in the past, its status today, and how we might more effectively envision and strategize around fat social justice for the future.

For decades, fatness has been decried as a global public health scourge, crisis, and epidemic. An array of dietary, exercise, surgical, behavioral, psychological, interpersonal, and pharmaceutical interventions have been amassed with the aim of diminishing bodily fat, to no long-term avail. Alongside this costly array of interventions are myriad empirical research studies demonstrating the profound consequences of anti-fat social stigma and bias across nearly every facet of social life today. Even as representation of some fat bodies slowly begins to expand, the largest fat people experience increasing social isolation, broad lack of access, care refusals, and public ridicule. Fatness is intersectionally experienced, producing variable outcomes for individuals and groups of people who live at these intersections, and few legal protections exist to protect fat people from fatphobia, anti-fat stigma, and discrimination.

The contributions to this book offer reflections, provocations, and possibilities for next steps in the fight toward fat social justice today. One of the themes that recurs across many of the pieces herein is the need to better attend to intersections of identity, embodiment, and experiences in the lives of fat people today. A second theme is ensuring greater focus on multiply-marginalized fat people and groups in order to develop better and more effective approaches for working toward fat social justice for all fat people. Finally, all of the work herein attests to the power of fat people to form alliances, initiatives, self-concepts, and communities that serve to empower and affirm their dignity, worth, and to underline their deservingness of freedom from discrimination, stigma, and oppression. This book was originally published as a special issue of Fat Studies.