Health at Every Size (HAES™) as a Reform (Social) Movement within Public Health: A Situational Analysis

• In Event: 516 - Section on Medical Sociology Paper Session. Health, Biomedicine and Social Movements

Abstract

Health at Every Size (HAES™) is a weight-neutral perspective on health that departs from usual weight-centered, if not weight-focused medical models of health. Research and publications utilizing HAES largely focus on health improvement interventions, shifting weight-based views of health in public policy, or HAES as a health advocacy tool. Drawing on ethnographic work and examination of early HAES journals, this paper examines HAES as a reform movement in two important ways using a social worlds/arenas situational analysis. First, a social worlds/arenas analysis situates HAES and its adjoining fields of public health and fat politics and examines segments within HAES as an extension Bucher’s work (1961, 1962) on early reform movements within professions. Second, analysis of early HAES journals and ethnographic data shows how the HAES movement situated itself via academic publishing and events, engaging in important boundary-making within and outside the HAES social world. While some of HAES closely align with public health, using health as the central focus and delegating body acceptance to the background, the “both/and perspective” that incorporates both health and acceptance as key and inseparable pieces of HAES is most common and one way in which HAES intends to push the boundaries of public health. While it is tempting to attempt to pin down HAES as a movement focused solely on the relationship between body size and health, segments within HAES that critique racism and ableism within HAES and beyond it show its promise as a multicausal health and social justice movement.

Author

• Natalie Ingraham, University of California at San Francisco