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The obesity epidemic and American culture
Published in Anna Bellisari, The Anthropology Of Obesity in the United States, 2016
In response to anti-fat bias, the current fat pride movement is gaining popularity in television shows and plays such as “Huge,” “Girls,” “The Mindy Project,” and “Fat Pig.” The fashion and clothing industry has discovered that the sale of large-sized clothing is very profitable; plus-size clothing fashions were featured in the New York Fashion Week for the very first time in 2013 (america.aljazeera.com). Pointing out that bias creates psychological and medical problems for its victims, the fat acceptance movement resists and rejects the narrow culturally and medically determined body size ideal for women, the prevailing fat phobia and repugnance for individuals with obesity, and the meaning of obesity as self-induced, voluntary, and individually controllable. However, obesity-related health risks are overlooked and even denied in the “fatosphere” with its justifiable emphasis on tolerance for body size variation (Rabin 2008).
Fat and Furious: Interrogating Fat Phobia and Nurturing Resistance in Medical Framings of Fat Bodies
Published in Women's Reproductive Health, 2019
Ultimately, the more we can humanize, complicate, and embrace fat people and fat bodies, the better medical treatments will be for fat people and for anyone who does not fit the imagined idea of the “perfect” medical patient. We have an obligation to first understand the deep-seated qualities of fat phobia and hatred, just as we can (and should) embrace the more radical and activist parts of the fat studies field and the fat acceptance movement. Finally, psychotherapies that focus on fat-affirmation can better situate fatness not as a liability but as another piece in the puzzle of the human condition, one that is both ordinary and mundane, and the basis for growth, exploration, and resistance.