Fighting Not to Lose: Blogging Fat Acceptance

• In Event: 322 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 20. Obesity

Abstract

Public health and popular discourses frame obesity an illness and as one of the major threats facing the U.S. today, yet members of the Fat Acceptance movement challenge the concept of obesity as illness and pursue both the demedicalization of and destigmatization of obesity. Based on a content analysis of Fat Acceptance activists’ blog posts, I study how these bloggers challenge medicalized obesity discourses, practices, and identities. Employing their embodied expertise of the health or lack thereof of large bodies and engaging critically with medical and scientific literature and media portrayals of obesity, these bloggers complicate simplistic ideas of obesity as disease and empower their readers to resist not only the medicalized and stigmatized identity it incurs, but also the underlying social control of their bodies legitimated by that medicalization.

Author

• Meredith R. Pustell, Brown University