#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!

[redgranola]

Image description below

fat liberation manifesto

1. We believe that fat people are fully entitled to human respect and recognition.

2. We are angry at mistreatment by commercial and sexist interests. These have exploited our bodies as objects of ridicule, thereby creating an immensely profitable market selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, that ridicule.

3. We see our struggle as allied with the struggles of other oppressed groups, against classism, racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, imperialism, and the like.

4. We demand equal rights for fat people in all aspects of life, as promised in the Constitution of the United States. We demand equal access to goods and services in the public domain, and an end to discrimination against us in the areas of employment, education, public facilites and health services.

5. We single out as our special enemies the so-called "reducing" industries. These include diet clubs, reducing salons, fat farms, diet doctors, diet books, diet foods and food supplements, surgical procedures, appetite suppressants, drugs and gadgetry such as wraps and "reducing machines." We demand that they take responsibility for their false calims, acknowledge that their products are harmful to the public health, and publish long-term studies proving any statistical efficacy of their products. We make this demand knowing that over 99% of all weight loss programs, when evaluated over a 5-year period, fail utterly, and also knowing the extreme, proven harmfulness of repeated large changes in weight.

6. We repudiate the mystified "science" which falsely claims that we are unfit. It as both caused and upheld discrimination against us, in collusion with the financial interests of insurance companies, the fashion and garment industires, reducing industries, the food and drug establishments.

7. We refuse to be subjected to the interests of our enemies. We fully intend to reclaim power over our bodies and lives. We commit ourselves to pursue these goals together.

FAT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE.....

--Judy Freespirit and

Aldebaran

November, 1973

For more info write Fat Underground, P.O. Box

5621, Santa Monica, CA 90405

Below this there is a simple, black on white line drawing of a seated, nude fat person

Freespirit, J., & Aldebaran. (1979). fat liberation manifesto. Off Our Backs, 9(4), 18–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25773035

[pensandsofas]

and then he did :)

[frenchublog]

🏹💘...!

[littlegayteaboy]

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

[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)

[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.

[redgranola]

In the early days of fat activism, you kinda had two separate camps. There was the relationships focused side, and then you had the fat liberation groups who tended to be queer, fat, Jewish women dissatisfied with feminist organizing in women's spaces who wanted to advocate for fat people's rights. And so we get the fat underground, and the fat liberation manifesto in particular. Body positivity (from my memory) was at one time the visibility arm of fat acceptance, just being able to see happy active pictures of ourselves. That quickly got co-opted into the sad state of bopo affairs we see today - depoliticized, defanged, focused on desirability and assimilation. That's always been there, but we have to do more. Fat liberation is where it's at

Good article beyond my oversimplified summary: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/fat-liberation-jewish-past-and-future

Let me plug the book 'Shadow on a Tightrope' too. Some of the earliest fatlib writings still easily available, non-academic language more like personal stories and essays, but tw for some real upsetting contents

Let me also plug FatLibArchive.org for so much more

And the spring 22 issue of Pipe Wrench mag just for good measure: https://pipewrenchmag.com/issue-six-spring-2022-archive/

i saw a post a while ago that basically said "fatphobia is often treated as only a facet of misogyny, rather than a separate oppression", and it explained smth i felt for a while, i often have felt alienated from fat positivity spaces bc of the emphasis on it being abt fat women being beautiful (to men) and not expanding much outside of that. and to explain my and the post's intentions better, its not abt saying the intersection of fatphobia and misogyny isnt a problem, rather its abt the erasure of that intersection to reduce fatphobia and oppression resulting from it to simply being a thing only resulting from misogyny, a consequence of desireability politics being the only thing people talk abt as being a problem of fatphobia. and even then, the desireability politics of fatness ARE smth important, but the way they affect men and lgbt people is typically brushed aside in this angle as well. devaluing fat people based on their appearance and perceived value is a result of fatphobic oppression, not the main facet of it.

[crowrelli]

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

[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 )

[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

[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…

[bielbunny]

Dropping a late night sketch 'cos sometimes you see something real good on that twitter website

[bixels]

I'm so in love with everything about your art!! I wanted to ask something about your MLP human designs in particular. all of them have really lovely and interesting face shapes/details. even though all the pony designs have the same head molds (save for eye shape), all the unique characteristics you gave them just... look RIGHT. is there a particular method or design principle you used? thanks for your time!! I can't wait to see more of your work!

It's all about shape language and how they inform a person's read on the character.

I talked about this before, but each of the Main 6 were paired together so I could design them in contrast with each other. For RD, I wanted her short hair to have a wind-swept look, as if she's constantly running. So bare forehead and hair spiking out at the bottom. She contains lots and lots of sharp lines and shapes to give her the look of a speeding arrow.

Felice, on the other hand, droops down a lot to reflect her solemn, shy disposition. I didn't want her hair to be perfectly straight though, as that'd suggest she spends a lot of time fretting over it and isn't outdoorsy, so I made it a bit of a tangled mess too.

In short, RD's features are sharp and point upwards, Felice's features are round and droop downwards. (Think Joshua tree vs. weeping willow.)

For these two, I specifically wanted to include non-Western facial features, as I found I haven't really included them in my character designs up until now.

Pinkie's bold and loud, so I gave her bold eyes, bold eyebrows, a bold nose, etc. I worked on Thea's nose for quite a bit and ended up abstracting the shape a bit to look more cartoony, borrowing from Pixar's Soul's character design notes. In cases like these, I recommend finding ways to simplify features and break them down into easily-recognizable shapes and forms (Cartoon Saloon are masters at this). The less visual noise, the easier their expressions are to read! And it's generally more fun to draw.

In short, diversify, exaggerate, and simplify. Figure out what works for you and get a little wacky with it. Character design is all about finding a balance between maintaining your voice and vision and creating something unique and lively.