How can linguistic anthropology help illuminate the connections between dietetics, fatphobia, and racism?
Recently, a Twitter user wrote: “There is a fat politics movement. Come on in. The water’s fine.” Linguistic anthropology needs to “come on in,” as it were, to the fat politics movement. Specifically, we need to harness our analytical insights into the co-constitution of language, the body, and social differences to understand how people in this “fat-talk nation” produce and contest fatphobia.
Fatphobia—or, more specifically, anti-fatness—is the societal and biomedical antipathy toward fat, and it impacts nearly every aspect of our world. Fatphobia manifests in doctors’ rampant misdiagnoses of fat patients due to their weight; in licit size discrimination in employment; in the de facto exclusion of larger bodies in infrastructure and design; and in a vast diet industrial complex that at best demonizes and at worst seek to eliminate fat people.
Fat liberation activists and scholars have long recognized how thin supremacy is predicated upon and compounded by white supremacy, ableism, and cissexism. Fatphobia has been, and continues to be, central to the construction of whiteness within European settler-colonial projects. Sabrina Strings shows that as the transatlantic slave trade gave rise to scientific racism during the long eighteenth century, the figure of the robust Black African woman became a medicalized object of derision, transforming fat from a sign of wealth and health into a sign of racial inferiority and moral failure. These processes continue today in the moral panic surrounding the “obesity epidemic,” which stigmatizes Black women’s bodies in particular, and obscures the fact that weight stigma and systemic racism pose greater health risks than weight itself, including for COVID-19.
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