My dissertation has been published!

​You can access my dissertation on ProQuest here! I specifically published it open-access so that anyone can read it, regardless of institutional affiliation. You can find a full PDF on my research page as well!

October 3, 2024: I'm in a documentary!

​I was featured as a weight stigma expert in NBC San Diego's documentary "The Cost of Losing: The Risks and Rewards of the Weight-Loss Drug Boom." You can check out my segment below. I laid out how treating fat people as a medical problem contributes to weight stigma. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly provided statements to the station that said exactly what I was criticizing! 

Decebmer 10, 2024: I defended my dissertation!

​My dissertation, "Misdiagnosing Fat Oppression: Weight Stigma and the Anti-Obesity Assemblage, will be published open access in 2025. In the meantime, check out a summary in the video below!

Dissertation abstract: 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. 
​

February 22, 2024: ​Understanding and Resisting Anti-Fatness in the Age of Ozempic webinar for WIND-WIDIC

Register Here!
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Journalistic coverage of new weight loss drugs seems to have taken over the North American media sphere, alongside a new discourse of “weight stigma.” Anti-obesity actors are aggressively redefining “stigma” against “people living with obesity” so that it can be used to sell weight loss drugs and rehabilitate the image of pharmaceutical companies. Against this backdrop, how can dietitians, nutritionists, and allied health professionals differentiate “weight stigma” discourses and initiatives that hurt fat people from the ones that help? What criteria should we use to evaluate new claims about what “weight stigma” is and how it should be combatted?   

This workshop will help participants develop the skills to critique fat oppression in the age of Ozempic – the ability to assess whether a piece of “weight stigma”-related research or media perpetuates fat oppression and illustrate how it does so. This kind of critique depends on a novel, structural understanding of the connection between anti-obesity efforts and fat oppression, which Fox has termed “the anti-obesity assemblage.” The workshop will begin with an exploration of this new concept and how it facilitates critique of fat oppression. Workshop facilitators and participants will then collaboratively work through examples of material that claims to be “anti-weight stigma” but actually perpetuates fat oppression. Finally, workshop participants will have the opportunity to work through an example with their peers. Participants should leave feeling confident in their ability to detect covert anti-fatness and explain how medicalizing discourses of stigma entrench fat oppression in a new and deceptive way.

By the end of this workshop, participants should be able to…

• Define weight stigma as a multi-level system of oppression
• Define the anti-obesity assemblage and identify several of its components
• Explain the relationship between anti-obesity efforts, fat oppression, and negative health outcomes for fat people
• Assess whether a piece of “weight stigma”-related research or media perpetuates fat oppression
• Illustrate how a piece of “weight stigma”-related research or media perpetuates fat oppression

July 23, 2023: The recording and resouces from my Joint Workshop at the International Weight Stigma Conference are Now Available!

From Mikey's Patreon Post about this presentation:
Critiquing Fat Oppression in the Age of Wegovy
About a month ago, I had the absolute pleasure of debuting a new tool that Rachel Fox, Monica Kriete, and Blakeley Payne and I developed based on a new theory Rachel came up with for understanding fat oppression. 
Rachel's theory, the anti-obesity assemblage (AOA), is a new and needed way to describe the landscape of the many forces that create an oppressed class of fat people and anti-fat ideologies. As we state in the presentation, the anti-obesity assemblage is "a network comprised of anything (idea, person, object) that works to enable or enact the elimination of fat people from the world.  This can include standards, people, institutions, technologies, practices, representations, and discourses." 

The AOA enables obesity elimination by:

• The transformation of fatness into “obesity”: Practices of quantification (BMI) and classification (weight classes) make fat people legible as a pathological population, regardless of how accurate or inaccurate they are
• The transformation of fat people into an eliminable threat: News media about the obesity epidemic makes fat people highly salient as a threat to themselves, others, and the state; reality TV, weight loss media presents different ways that fat people are expected to undo their bodies
• Generating new knowledge about “obesity": New research increases ongoing efforts to eliminate obesity. As causal theories get more complex, they also call for new solutions, increasing network. Additionally, as “new harms” of obesity are popularized, this also leads to new intervention and new allies to the cause of obesity elimination

Enabling obesity elimination by these means causes:

• Widespread devaluation and discrimination: Portrayal as a threat creates associations between fatness and moral badness, i.e., harm, suffering, waste, and backwardness
• Diminished ability to imagine living a good life while being fat: Anti-obesity media never portray fat people as flourishing or even as having the possibility to flourish without weight loss, diminishing many people’s ability to even imagine living a good life while being fat.
• “Obesity” to become the defining characteristic of a fat person: The omnipresence of medical categories like obesity and clinical tools such as the BMI has spread a clinical sensibility towards fatness

The AOA enacts obesity elimination by:

• Facilitating the pursuit of thinness via individual disciplinary practices – Providing the means by which fat people can engage in weight loss endeavors, e.g. diet foods, weight loss supplements, intimate technologies, weight loss surgeries, weight loss “gurus”
• Facilitating the pursuit of thinness via disciplinary standards & spaces - the anti-obesity assemblage includes spaces where dieters can receive explicit support for their efforts, e.g. forums, weight watchers meetings, OA meetings. Healthcare providers may also coerce or explicitly push fat people into weight loss by withholding other forms of medical care, e.g. weight first treatment paradigm

Enacting obesity elimination by these means causes: 

• Widespread physical and mental suffering of fat people: Fat people’s physical and mental suffering can be considered an oppressive consequence of the anti-obesity assemblage and its efforts to eliminate obesity. Hunger, bodily aches and chills, lightheadedness, obsessive thoughts about food, and mood swings. Psychological burden of being repeatedly told that if they do not lose weight, they will die. Lack of medical care and coercion into weight loss.
• Suffering attributed to obesity itself, feeding back into the AOA: This suffering is attributed to obesity itself, and thus feeds back into the AOA as another way obesity elimination is enabled.

​In the past, when people have tried to describe how or why anti-fatness exists or functions, they usually get stuck in a pit of describing implicit or explicit bias or they focus a bit too hard on specific domains (healthcare, employment) or they are not explicit enough about where anti-fat beliefs come from. And in the space of "weight stigma" research, not having a theory that can clearly explain how or why anti-fatness exists or functions creates an opening for "weight stigma" researchers to claim they are acting in fat people's best interests when they are, instead, working on behalf of our elimination by claiming "obesity prevention" is stigma prevention. The AOA allows us to cut through that bullshit immediately and evaluate things much more holistically and straightforwardly. 

(If you're interested in learning about the AOA in more depth than we go into in the workshop, you can check out the recording of Rachel's conference presentation here. Her presentation focuses a bit more explicitly on the nature of "anti-stigma work" that utilizes debunking tactics. I highly recommend it.)

I've had the absolute pleasure of watching Rachel develop the AOA over the course of a year+ and it was wonderful watching her present it at last and even more of a blast to be part of making the AOA Artifact Analysis Tool, which we demoed in the workshop above. We wanted to make something based on Rachel's theory that could help people in critically evaluating the media they were consuming--especially media that claims or seems to be taking an "anti-weight stigma" stance. 

I've posted about the evolving tactics of the weight loss industry in this cultural moment before (and spoke about it on a more recent episode of Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back), but if your job or focus isn't to follow the weight loss industry as it appropriates anti-stigma and fat activist language, then it can be really hard nowadays to understand whether you're engaging with things that are actually in support of challenging anti-fatness or if you're engaging with something that is meant to sell you on the idea that weight loss methods are "liberation". The AOA Artifact Analysis Tool walks you through the process of evaluating whether something related to fatness or fat people perpetuates fat oppression or not. And I think we did a really great job making it accessible and easy to use. So I welcome you to try it out for yourselves!

The AOA Artifact Analysis Worksheet is available for download here. The end of the worksheet contains relevant copyright and attribution info. ​

July 21, 2023: I Won the UC President's Dissertation Year Fellowship!

​The UC President's Dissertation Year Fellowship is awarded to promising students in the final stages of their doctoral work who demonstrate strong potential for university teaching and research. The UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship includes a $25,000 stipend plus tuition and fees. This means I get to work on my dissertation (and applying for jobs) full time for the next academic year! 

If you'd like to read the statement I wrote for the fellowship, you can check it out here.

July 12, 2023: My Article was Featured in the Weight and Healthcare Substack! 

​Fat activist and educator Ragen Chastain featured my article "Working Toward Eradicating Weight Stigma by Combating Pathologization: A Qualitative Pilot Study Using Direct Contact and Narrative Medicine” in her newsletter Weight and Healthcare. I'm so grateful to Ragen for providing such a thorough summary of the article for a general audience. 

Reducing Stigma by Ending the Pathologizing of Fatness - Part 1

​When I talk and write about weight stigma (which I do frequently!) I often say/write some version of “you can’t reduce weight stigma while being invested in anti-fatness.” By this I mean, you can’t be invested in pathologizing fatness, calling the existence of fat people an “epidemic,” eradicating fat people from the world and preventing more fat people from existing… and also reduce weight stigma, since all of those things are expressions of weight stigma that create additional weight stigma. Unfortunately, the weight loss industry is counting on us (and by us I mean the general public, the healthcare industry, and anyone they can convince) believing that the same people who are willing to risk our lives and quality of life to make us thin are also the world’s leading experts in ending weight stigma. It seems ridiculous on its face, but it is a massive issue and we are at a tipping point wherein the weight loss industry is trying to co-opt decades of anti-weight stigma work by fat activists and weight-neutral health advocates in order to make “anti-weight stigma” about selling weight loss, using their massive profits to center themselves as the experts.

That’s why I was thrilled to learn of a study by Rachel Fox, Kelly Park, Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp, and Anne T. Vo called “Working toward eradicating weight stigma by combating pathologization: A qualitative pilot study using direct contact and narrative medicine.”...

Check out the rest of this post here!

Fighting Weight Stigma by Ending Weight Pathologization - Part 2

In part 1 we started discussing the study “Working toward eradicating weight stigma by combating pathologization: A qualitative pilot study using direct contact and narrative medicine” by Rachel Fox, Kelly Park, Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp, and Anne T. Vo.

We discussed the issues with existing weight stigma research and the approach that this study is taking. Today we’ll take a look at the study and its findings. Again, thank you so much to Rachel Fox for reviewing this before it was published!

To start with, this is a qualitative study, which means that rather than testing hypotheses to understand the relationship between variables, it instead is focused on understanding an experience in the context of the real world through the use of interviews and observations. It’s also a pilot study which means that it is an intentionally small study, conducted to determine whether a larger study may be warranted...

Check out the rest of the post here!