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Research Description
My research focuses on the oppression of fat people, especially at the hands of medicine and public health. In this research, I have two main objectives: one, to provide detailed descriptions and explanations of how fat oppression works, and two, to find ways to intervene in fat oppression through the practice of valuing fat people, fatness, and fat community.
My dissertation, Misdiagnosing Fat Oppression: Weight Stigma and the Anti-Obesity Assemblage, explores how the effort to produce a world without fat people structures fat oppression, even in the context of anti-stigma efforts.
As part of this project, I proposed a new concept to describe how anti-fatness is structured in the twenty-first century: the anti-obesity assemblage. The anti-obesity assemblage is a flexible, dynamic structure comprised of anything that works to enable or enact obesity elimination. The anti-obesity assemblage both creates and attempts to solve the "problem" of "obesity." Any people, institutions, actions, policies, or discourses that legitimate “obesity” as a pathology, dehumanize fat people, and/or funnel fat people towards weight loss are contributing to the devaluation of fat people and the harm they face. While my research has begun to document the existence of the anti-obesity assemblage, we urgently need more research that connects the AOA to its oppressive consequences for fat people.
Projects In Process
Solo-authored manuscript in progress: Fighting Fat Elimination: How to Remake Fat Studies in the Era of GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs
Co-authored manuscript (under review): The Case for Demedicalizing Stigma Research - with Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp, Monica Kriete, and Marquisele Mercedes
Co-authored manuscript in progress: Structural Weight Stigma and Its Health Consequences - with Monica Kriete and Magdalyn Hallead
In the US, fatness is systematically devalued, and prejudice and discrimination against fat people is prevalent. Weight stigma researchers and advocates argue that defining and treating fatness as a disease reduces stigma against fat people, while fat-positive scholars argue it exacerbates stigma. In this dissertation, I propose a new theoretical concept: the anti-obesity assemblage, defined as the network of human and non-human actors, technologies, practices, and discourses that enable and enact the elimination of obesity. I argue that the anti-obesity assemblage structures the oppression of fat people. I use this concept to investigate two main questions. First, how is the anti-obesity assemblage intertwined with weight stigma research and advocacy? Second, how does that entanglement restrict the capacity of weight stigma research and advocacy to meaningfully combat anti-fatness? To answer these questions, I use a variety of methods, including content analysis, discourse analysis, praxiography, and assemblage theory, to analyze what weight stigma researchers and advocates do and say in their stigma reduction efforts. Based on a random sample of 400 academic articles, I find that most (64%) weight stigma research prioritizes fighting obesity over investigating or reducing stigma. In my praxiography of weight stigma interventions with health professionals, I find that these interventions exercise what I call “afflictive power,” defining fatness as a source of suffering and incompatible with a good life. Anti-obesity weight stigma interventions are stigmatizing in part because they depend on the exercise of afflictive power. Finally, my analysis of Novo Nordisk’s weight stigma-focused media campaign shows that this campaign prioritizes obesity education and treatment and narrowly defines stigma in terms of shame and blame, yielding the overarching message that weight loss is the solution to fat oppression. Taken together, my findings demonstrate that anti-obesity efforts, including treating fatness as a disease, can never combat anti-fatness because they inevitably uphold the devaluation of fatness and direct attention and resources toward eliminating obesity, rather than toward social and political change that would improve the status of fat people. Fat studies scholars and activists must turn their focus to the role of the anti-obesity assemblage in upholding fat oppression.
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