Political correctness has run amok in the ivory tower. If some academics have their way, college students soon will be forced to vet themselves for not only subconscious racist, sexist and classist thoughts, but fatist ones as well.
“In the tradition of critical race studies, queer studies, and women’s studies, fat studies is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship marked by an aggressive, consistent, rigorous critique of the negative assumptions, stereotypes, and stigmas placed on fat and the fat body,” write Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum in their most recent Chronicle Review article, “No Fear of Fat.”
According to the authors, fat studies “is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship marked by an aggressive, consistent, rigorous critique of the negative assumptions, stereotypes, and stigmas placed on fat and the fat body.”
“The field of fat studies invites scholars to pause, interrupt everyday thinking (or failure to think) about fat, and do something daring and bold,” they write. “Moving beyond challenging assumptions, they must question the very questions that surround fatness and fat people. They must not be satisfied by noting that people diet and asking why—they must ask why we continue to expect people to diet.”
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) conducts research on the increasing prevalence of obesity in American society. “More than one third of U.S. adults—more than 72 million people—and 16% of U.S. children are obese,” they write. (The CDC defines obesity as a body-mass-index (BMI), which compares height and weight, of over 30). According to the CDC, “diseases associated with obesity account for 27% of the increases in medical costs” between 1987 and 2001, and can lead to the following health problems:
- “Coronary heart disease
- Type 2 diabetes
- Cancer (endometrial, breast, and colon)
- Hypertension (high blood pressure)
- Dyslipidemia (high total cholesterol or high levels of triglycerides)
- Stroke
- Liver and gallbladder disease
- Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
- Osteoarthritis (degeneration of cartilage and underlying bone within a joint)
- Gynecological problems (abnormal menses, infertility)”
However, Solovay and Rothblum classify the BMI as subtly fatist in their article because it has differential outcomes for those taking the test. Encouraging readers to “be aware of” and remain “alert to” policies which have differential outcomes on others because of their size, they write: “For instance, a policy requiring Body Mass Index to be listed on report cards, or a science teacher who weighs all children during class and has them calculate their BMI as an assignment, is neutral, but it will have a different impact on fat children than on thin children.”
The New York University Press released The Fat Studies Reader on November 4; Solovay and Rothblum, editors of the Reader, gave a sneak preview of its contents:
- In the foreword, Stanford alumnus and author Marilyn Wann, argues that those who believe fat people should lose weight are part of the “58.6-billion per year weight-loss industry or its vast customer base” and that those who see obesity as a disease or deleterious to health are part of the “medico-pharmaceutical-industrial complex” profiting from “dangerous attempts to ‘cure’ people of bodily difference.” “Fat studies is a radical field, in the sense that it goes to the root of weight-related belief systems,” she writes.
- Glen Gaesser, a “professor of exercise and wellness” at Arizona State University estimates “the long-term failure of weight loss” at around 90 to 95 percent, they write.
- In addition, “…Paul Ernsberger, an associate professor of nutrition and cardiovascular disease at Case Western Reserve University, makes the groundbreaking case that fatness causes poverty because of discrimination (e.g., fat people are less likely to get jobs).”
- “Bianca D.M. Wilson, an assistant professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach, shows how the American obsession with weight affects black lesbian and bisexual women,” write Solovay and Rothblum. “Facing multiple forms of oppression—race, gender, size—many of these women continue to love their bodies, showing a resilience that should not be eradicated, Wilson writes.”
Solovay teaches at “John F. Kennedy University’s School of Law and at San Francisco Law School,” according to The Chronicle Review. Rothblum teaches Women’s Studies at San Diego State University.
The authors also draw inspiration—and the historical roots of fat acceptance activism—from the 1960s Civil Rights movement. To read about the Fat Underground of the 1970s, which “painted the effort to eradicate fat people via weight loss as a form of genocide perpetrated by the medical profession,” the Fat Liberation Manifesto and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), you’ll have to access their full article here.
Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
