Summary

[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]

Research into the social and cultural dimensions of body size has been rapidly growing, including within the interdisciplinary field of fat studies. Fat studies scholars contest and critique mainstream ideas about body size or weight, including the view that “obesity” is fundamentally pathological or inherently unhealthy, or that individuals can control their body size. Researchers have also challenged negative stereotypes and highlighted the harms of moralizing and stigmatizing discourses about larger bodies. Research within this area often draws upon ideas produced within fat liberation activist movements, including rejecting the term “obesity” as overly medicalizing and pathologizing, and instead reclaiming “fat” and “fatness” as neutral descriptors.

Research has identified and characterized the pervasiveness of anti-fatness (weight stigma, or anti-fat discrimination) within and across societies. Anti-fatness has interpersonal and structural dimensions, both of which can have far-reaching effects on fat people’s lives, including effects on health outcomes. Scholars have traced the historical emergence of anti-fatness, the connection between anti-fatness and racial hierarchy, and the ways in which anti-fatness contributes to the moralization of food and the prevalence of dieting practices. Additionally, policies and clinical guidelines developed to address the “obesity epidemic,” such as calorie labeling and the use of body mass index (BMI), have been a target of critical examination. Researchers have suggested that these interventions can function as potentially harmful practices of control and surveillance that reinforce anti-fat attitudes and structures. Similarly, frameworks and understandings of food environments, food justice, and health have been evaluated in terms of the ways in which these discourses can continue to problematize fat bodies and contribute to discrimination or marginalization.

There has been increasing recognition of the harms of anti-fatness in fields such as public health, which has led to attempts to move away from stigmatizing language and interventions, and to reject placing responsibility on individuals. However, these attempts have been criticized for continuing to medicalize and pathologize fatness, and therefore continuing to perpetuate harm. As the language and policies around “obesity” or fatness shift, in part driven by the introduction of novel weight-loss interventions such as Ozempic, research into social attitudes toward fatness and the experiences of people with larger bodies continues to evolve.