#fat studies

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

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This might be funny if it wasn't pipelining pure toxic excrement into the waters of our knowledge-making institutions.

It's all fake. But now it's cited and treated as legitimate when it still isn't and never was. This is a form of corruption and fraud.

[tobeabatman]

Fatness and research

Currently, in the world we live in, research on fat bodies is an ethically loaded field.

People associate fatness with poor health, and every study making a claim to one end or the other, is not really about health. It’s about proving whether fat people deserve to be treated the same way thin people do.

And research on fat bodies is incredibly biased. Most research on fat bodies is focused on proving us unhealthy, instead of actually coming up with ways to help us in a anti-fat society. The same researchers forget to take into account the various different social struggles fat people face (lack of access to healthcare, housing, jobs, increase in poverty and both stress caused either directly (e.g weight-based bullying, microagressions, etc.) or more indirectly (homelessness, poverty, etc.) because of fatphobia. Also mental health conditions such as binge eating disorder, depression, social anxiety, etc.).

This research is almost never completely without explicit biases in the research report. Terms such as ”obesity epidemic” are far too often used by researchers, alongside with using terms such as ”a problem” to refer to fatness. These terms are loaded with anti-fat bias. The term obesity epidemic compares fat bodies to disease. And I feel like everyone understands why calling some types of bodies a ”problem” is problematic, especially in an academic setting. But I’ve heard fatness being referred to as a problem even in my school health textbook.

Research on fat bodies being unhealthy, is seen as a justification to deny us things, mostly basic human respect and healthcare. No research on fat bodies exists in a vacuum: it will ultimately affect the care we get at the doctor’s office, or the treatment we get from other people. This is what makes bad research on fat bodies being proven unhealthy, especially dangerous.

But the thing is, researchers also don’t live in a vacuum. Fatphobia is everywhere in our world, from children’s books and TV shows, to elementary school classes and school nurses, to academics. Fatphobia became quickly popular in the 19th century, because of a bunch of eugenicist French biologists decided to publish articles on how fatness was a trait of African and Chinese women.

Science has always represented the biases of the people living at the time. Researchers sure as heck can’t clearly insult fat people in their works, but they can loudly criticize research proving their biases wrong. They can also massively influence the way we see fat bodies, by affirming our old biases with research that doesn’t even take into account that fat people are a marginalized group that faces obstacles to health just from our marginalization.

On the other hand, I wish that we didn’t live in a world where we fat people had to prove our humanity with research that proposes alternative views to whether fat is unhealthy. Studies on fat bodies should not be a way to either justify fatphobia or a way to argue against it. Studies on fat bodies should just exist. At most they should be a way to offer healthcare workers and us fat people a better understanding on how our bodies work.

But we unfortunately don’t live in a world where this is the case. We live in a world where research on fat bodies most often stems from biases, and finding a way to prove those biases right. Research proving fat bodies unhealthy is never unbiased, in a world where fatphobia started because of eugenicist scientists to begin with. You can’t create a problem and then spend a couple hundred years trying to prove it.

Anyway. Please remember that I’m not a researcher myself, and can only provide a way to look at fat studies from the perspective of someone with lived experiences of being fat. I didn’t proofread this post. I hope you guys have a lovely day!

[pensandsofas]

and then he did :)

[frenchublog]

🏹💘...!

[jess-le-mess]

Oh cool! I came across it through reading an article about another scholar in Fat Studies (this interview with Carlie Pendleton, which focuses on the history of queer fat liberation).

Hope your paper went well! (I did some fatlib papers/presentations in my undergrad, but it was nowhere near my major so I didn't go any further than first/second year stuff)

Something to help with some self-reflection regarding fatphobic ideas:

(source)

[warmfuzzyanimal]

woof :03 (it/he)

[littlegayteaboy]

drew katara in the snow to keep myself cool on a 34C aussie summer day🥵

[librarycards]

what incredible company! i'm flattered and a bit overwhelmed. i'm going to add a few resources you might be interested in:

Pipe Wrench Magazine's Fat Issue, particularly Mikey Mercedes' piece on fatphobia in gynecology. Massive, MASSIVE trigger warning for that one.

My dear friend and comrade, Rachel Fox, has a number of written works published on antifatness and/as medical violence. She's one of the foremost new scholars in critical fat studies today.

Regan Chastain's Weight and Healthcare Newsletter reliably summarizes and critiques developments in so-called "obesity medicine" from a body liberation perspective. Chastain is author of the old-school fatosphere, still-going-strong blog Dances With Fat.

The podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back, features five fat activists/public scholars, including Da'Shaun Harrison, author of Belly of the Beast: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, offers a superb and unvarnished takedown of thin supremacy, including but not limited to its constitutive medical violence.

One notable absence in the fields of disability/Mad/fat studies is the particular violence against fat existence/fat people in the areas of "eating disorder treatment." This absence points both to a kind of organized abandonment (h/t Ruth Wilson Gilmore) by the medico-psychiatric industry....a kind of antifat necropolitics in which fatness both constitutes and forecloses the possibility of a deadly eating disorder - there's a lot to say about this in regard to "deathfat"ness and the literal categorical impossibility of the fat anorexic (de jure, as it were, up until the DSM V and still de facto).

Simply put, there aren't enough works in Mad studies/disability studies on disorderly eating practices, and when there are, they are focused on thin, white anorexic women and generally oriented around performances of starvation/refusal and the tired old arguments about their role in feminist discourse/organizing. Yawn. We desperately need more work on fatness and medical violence that takes disorderly eaters explicitly as its subjects, and looks to the ways in which disorderly eating is both the base underlying assumption of fat pathologization (obesity as "disease" that can be "cured" via lifestyle change, and increasingly, biomedical intervention) and is also strategically refused as a means of refusing "care."

There's a lot more to say here, but I'll leave it here. I need to go back through my readings (also my fat studies tag) and vet papers that do mention fatness/eds before i actually recommend them, but I do know that kelpforestdwellers and @bioethicists speak about this in regard to medical ableism. You may also be interested in @worth-beyond-a-number-scale, as I believe the blogger is also in social work school and posts regularly about antifatness and thin privilege. There's also their other blog, @fatphobiabusters, which does the same.

Hi Mac! Sorry to bug you, but do you happen to have any literature/reading about medical fatphobia on hand? (the prevalence, people’s experiences with it, etc.) I’m a fat disabled person and I’m currently talking to some of my friends about it, but I’d like to be able to provide some more info outside of my own negative experiences, if possible! No worries if not though, ofc <33 Thanks in advance for your time!

not a bother at all!! in addition to my fatphobia tag (link 1), i really loved & learned a lot from Anna Mollow’s article “Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies” (link 2). cw for discussion of oppressive violence, particularly anti-Black police violence

this one is not specifically medical fatphobia & is definitely in my fairly niche interest as a conversion therapy victim & ex-christian interested in the sociology of evangelicalism, but Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America by Lynne Gerber was a fantastic read that really shaped my thoughts on a lot of these topics

i also recommend checking out @librarycards + @heavyweightheart + @bigfatscience ! lots of great resources & starting points there, in terms of statistics etc but also towards developing a framework of analysis + locating our experiences within broader systems of oppression

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

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[ Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/birt.12844 ]

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When I say that the Humanities is rife with academic fraud, I worry that people think I'm kidding, being hyperbolic or otherwise exaggerating. On the contrary. It's not possible to undersell it.

All of this is fake. It's bogus. It's fraudulent. It does not exist.

And yet, people are being given credentials and injecting fantasy into our sense and knowledge-making processes for what is the scholarly equivalent of air guitar.

[joyousjoyfuljoyness]

Sketches of some kitties using my favorite fude fountain pen, the Jinhao 159!

[crowrelli]

how I doodle oswald: 💕✨😕 // how I doodle ed: a mix of wallace and gromet and curious george

[1000dactyls]

a random assortment of httyd drawings i’ve collected in the past couple of weeks…. B) maggotfig is my httyd oc who is a very good viking boy who dreams of not very viking appropriate things, like what the best kenning for a zippleback’s teeth might be. his right eye is covered because it causes him a lot of pain and is hyper-sensitive when exposed to light, leading to a lot of migraines. it’s a good thing gormworm (or “gormy”) guards his blindspot…

[bethdehart]

Sketchbook 4-7-24

I used fatphotoref.com for these studies. Boy am I rusty haha.

(For $3 a month you can see exclusive sketches, concepts, and behind the scenes content of my comic hallowed hijinks! https://ko-fi.com/bethdehart )

[intervex]

Teratical: a coining for people who want to resist/subvert ideas of "monstrosity"

Teratical: an individual whose appearance is stigmatized in a way that society frames as "monstrous", who is critical of this framing and seeking to reject/resist/subvert ideas of "monstrosity". A solidarity-building term for liberation-seeking minorities that are the subjects of teratology: intersex people, disabled people, fat people, people with disfigurements, etc.

The term rhymes with "emphatical". The word teratical is presently an obscure word in English which means “incredible, marvellous” and shares the root terato- (monstrous) that is used in medicine. 😯

Speaking back to teratology

This is a backdoor way of reclaiming of the root terato- (monstrous) that is used in medicine. Teratology is the study of congenital “defects” and continues to be an active subfield of biomedical research. Some related terms include: teratosis (having such a congenital difference), teratogenesis (the development of a teratosis), and teratogen (an environmental substance which causes teratogenesis).

The scope of teratology as a discipline has long included intersex people, people with disfigurements, and a large variety of disabilities. It includes environmental teratoses (e.g. fetal alcohol syndrome) and genetic ones (e.g. Down syndrome). It’s worth noting that teratology has consistently included the study of people whose “monstrous” traits emerged over the course of their life span. Intersex variations which first become apparent at puberty have reliably been within the scope of teratology: congenital means you were born on this path, not necessarily that it was visible at birth.

While fatness, madness, and acquired disfigurements (e.g. burn survivors) haven't consistently been within the scope of teratology, the point here is for us teratical folks to reframe the conversation. I don't see a need to limit ourselves to the traditional scope of teratology. Fat people, burn survivors, mad folks, and anybody else who feels the spectre of monstrosity can use the term.

Why coin this term?

Because I want a way to talk about the shared history of intersex, disfigurement, and disability. I want a way for us to talk about our common political struggles. And I want a way to do it on Tumblr without invoking the Discourse around the term crip. 👀

There’s an academic niche which takes a critical disability lens to the concept of monstrosity (monstrosity studies), and I think it’d be nice to be able to tap into that while working to build solidarity between the intersex, fat, mad, disability, and disfigurement communities.

@scifimagpie contributes a verb form, teraticalizing: to subvert notions of monstrosity in ways connected to disability/intersex/fat/etc justice/liberation. In the same vein of how queering and cripping are verbs used to subvert binaries and ideas about ability.

Flag details

The flag is inspired by the Disability Pride Flag and the Crip Pride Flag. Its stripes represent:

Yellow: the affirmation model of disability. Our existence is not a tragedy. Our lives and our unique viewpoints are valuable. Our bodies are beautiful.

Blue: the social model of disability. It’s not us who are the monsters: the monstrosity we face is the oppression we face.

Olive (yellow-green): the eco-social model of disability. The social model focuses on how the interactions we have in our daily lives disable us. The eco-social model winds back the clock to point out that we can be disabled by social decisions made long before we were born. For example, lead pollution in POC communities is a social cause of disability. I think of this model as “social determinants of health” meets environmental justice meets disability studies.

Purple: the social construction model of disability. “Disability”, “intersex”, and related categories are created by humans, and who is and isn’t included in the categories changes over time and across cultures. Beauty is also socially constructed.

Cerise (pink-red): the radical model of disability. Disability is socially constructed, but in practice we disabled people don’t actually get to control the definition of disability. So let's focus on who experiences ableism. Ableism does not act alone: it shares a deep history with racism and cisheteroperinormativity. 

You can learn more about these (and other) models of disability on their Wikipedia page! (Full disclosure: I created and wrote the bulk of the text in the article 😅).

Sub-coinings

While I'm in term coining mode, I thought I'd get the ball rolling on some subtypes:

Interteratical: teratical in a way that is linked to being intersex (e.g. “bearded lady” presentation of hyperandrogenism, Klinefelter’s)

Neuroteratical: teratical in a way which is neurological, such as tremors, paralysis, seizures, dyspraxia, autism, etc.

Musculoskeleteratical: teratical in a way which is musculoskeletal (e.g. brachydactyly, hip dysplasia, kyphoscoliosis)

Syndesmoteratical: teratical in a way connected to a connective tissue disorder (e.g. EDS, Marfan’s)

Dermoteratical: teratical in a way which is dermatological (e.g. albinism, vitiligo)

Fat-teratical: teratical in a way which is linked to being fat

Mad-teratical / psychoteratical: teratical in a way which is mad/mental

Enviroteratical: teratical in a way which is linked to environmental causes (e.g. lead)

Genoteratical: teratical in a way which is genetic (e.g. Down Syndrome, CAH)

Cryptoteratical: teratical in a way which is unknown or unclear (credit: @scifimagpie)

Racioteratical: teratical in a way which is amplified by being racialized

Flags and additional subcoinings on demand. 💜

Tagging for archival: @disabilityflagsarchive @disabilityflags @mad-pride @varsex-pride @radiomogai @liom-archive @interarchive

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“Body positivity but only for bodies that don't make me jealous“

-- Reply

“One of the things that is a classic trope of the religious bigot, is while they’re denying people their rights, they claim that their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they are behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party. It’s upside down world.“

-- Salman Rushdie

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It’s remarkable how much body shaming of women comes from other women who have deep-seated self-hatred and envy. And especially from the “body positivity” set.

The problem isn’t that Bekkah lost weight, it’s that her weight loss shows Leah could too. Since Leah has committed her identity to this obese persona, and seeks attention and validation through it from others with the same anti-science, reality-denying ideology. Bekkah losing weight is akin to ex-Muslim apostasy. It’s a moral-religious betrayal.

Not only is the language hyperbolic and emotionally charged, it’s intended to reconfigure and hide the dynamics here, in the hope that you don’t notice. Which is that this tirade could never go in the other direction. Only one of these people could scream at the other and not just get away with it, but perhaps even be cheered on. Only one of these people can disparage and dehumanize the other as a matter of moral virtue.

This shows you where the real power lies. Who is the Rebellion and who is the Empire.

P.S. Way to go girl, going from 363 lb to an under-10 minute mile. Amazing. 👍

Link:  ‘I was 20 pounds over the weight limit. This is it, Bekkah. You have to change.’: Mom credits ‘the power of a mother’s love’ with kickstarting incredible weight loss journey