VOLVOX: Making Narrative Medicine Happen Alumni Speaker Series

The (Mis)Use of Fat Suffering in Weight Stigma Interventions with Rachel Fox, PHD, MS'15

Moderated by Cherie Henderson, PhD, MS'14

Some scholars have argued that using theater to depict the discrimination and hardship faced by fat people works to combat anti-fatness. Drawing on this idea and other principles from the medical humanities, researchers have tried using performance to reduce weight stigma among health professionals. However, in these interventions, fat people are depicted as having miserable lives due to their size, and anti-obesity treatment is cast as the solution to their suffering.

in this presentation, Rachel Fox argues that, to date, performance-based weight stigma interventions have intensified anti-fatness rather than reducing it. The performance of fat suffering can only be liberatory when that suffering is clearly connected to the oppressive structures that produce it. Otherwise, such depictions implicitly posit that the solution to fat people's mistreatment is to create a world without them.