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!