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All the recent attention to the so-called obesity epidemic provides a fascinating context for understanding interactions between civil rights consciousness and the ordinary lives of fat people, who both deploy and resist the ideological formations that make up our most basic presumptions about who deserves rights protections. This study of fat acceptance advocates asks how stigmatized people who are excluded from legal protections muster descriptions of themselves as deserving inclusion in antidiscrimination laws. Analysis of in-depth interviews with fat acceptance advocates from around the United States reveals elaborate techniques for managing social life and enacting legality that coexist with more narrowly framed and contradictory arguments for rights. Culturally dominant logics for reasoning about what persons deserve prefigure what is possible to say in defense of fat people, in many ways even for fat advocates themselves. And yet in their struggles to overcome the limitations of the presumptions they are given, fat advocates reveal deep tensions in our antidiscrimination ethics and hint at a new way to think about difference.
I do a lot of swimming and I get in the water and I just feel like a total ballerina in the water. I'm very buoyant and graceful and amazing in the water. But then when I'm on land, I feel very clumsy and large and awkward. I feel just the opposite in the water. I absolutely love being in the water. On the Discovery Channel, I always think of the hippopotamuses.
(Vicky, a 47-year-old homemaker from Massachusetts and fat acceptance group member)
Why Study Fat Acceptance?
Everyone is talking about fat people.1 Contemporary American society is experiencing a period of intense media attention and general cultural anxiety over the so-called obesity epidemic. News reporting on Americans' increasing weights spiked dramatically by the late 1990s (from only a few dozen stories early in the decade to thousands) and tend to dramatize, moralize, and individualize body weight, particularly when referring to higher weights among minority populations (Saguy & Almeling 2008).2 Being fat is highly stigmatized (Brownell et al. 2005) and, following the tone of mass media coverage, most people attribute it to individual choices and behaviors (Oliver 8c Lee 2005). Editorials have blamed obesity on "feminist careers" because women prepare fewer home-cooked meals these days (Saguy...