Fat – Therefore, Unhealthy? Oppressing Fat People in the Name of Health

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2023This dissertation is primarily a response to the concern for health objection that is frequently used in an attempt to discredit the fat acceptance movement. I offer a critical understanding of “health” in relation to fatness and argue that dominant understandings of the relationship between health and fat have perpetuated the oppression of people in larger bodies. Fat oppression has taken different forms over time, and is currently disguised as a concern for health and well-being. However, this seemingly legitimate reason for demonizing fatness is also what makes this kind of oppression more insidious.The dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter one advances an understanding of fat oppression as a kind of cultural imperialism perpetuated in today’s society through an overly pathologized narrative of fatness as being antithetical to health. In chapter two, I argue that the dominant and overly medicalized perspective of fatness is communicated to society via a medical model of fatness and that obesity researchers have relied on medical model assumptions in ways that impede both our epistemic aim of generating accurate knowledge about the body and the social aim of improving health. Chapter three provides more motivation for my argument that the medical mode is the primary underlying problem perpetuating fat oppression today by explaining how it plays a central role in the epistemic injustice that people in larger bodies experience. I argue that the medical model should be understood as a deeply entrenched ideology that has unknowingly shaped our social practices in a way that is unjust and yet appears justified. For this reason, simply critiquing agents for not cultivating epistemic virtues or critiquing the ideology itself will not help us achieve justice – this will require that we change the social meanings that inform our actions. Chapter four offers an alternative view of fatness to replace the medical model – the value-neutral model of fatness – which interprets fatness as something that is neutral with respect to well-being. The concluding chapter demonstrates how this alternative view of fatness – as well as things like epistemic friction, participatory research, and education in critical weight studies – can support fat activists' efforts toward achieving fat liberation