Webinar: Understanding and Resisting Anti-Fatness in the Age of Ozempic (in Partnership with WIND)
Journalistic coverage of new weight loss drugs seems to have taken over the North American media sphere, alongside a new discourse of “weight stigma.” Anti-obesity actors are aggressively redefining “stigma” against “people living with obesity” so that it can be used to sell weight loss drugs and rehabilitate the image of pharmaceutical companies. Against this backdrop, how can dietitians, nutritionists, and allied health professionals differentiate “weight stigma” discourses and initiatives that hurt fat people from the ones that help? What criteria should we use to evaluate new claims about what “weight stigma” is and how it should be combatted?
This workshop will help participants develop the skills to critique fat oppression in the age of Ozempic – the ability to assess whether a piece of “weight stigma”-related research or media perpetuates fat oppression and illustrate how it does so. This kind of critique depends on a novel, structural understanding of the connection between anti-obesity efforts and fat oppression, which Fox has termed “the anti-obesity assemblage.” The workshop will begin with an exploration of this new concept and how it facilitates critique of fat oppression. Workshop facilitators and participants will then collaboratively work through examples of material that claims to be “anti-weight stigma” but actually perpetuates fat oppression. Finally, workshop participants will have the opportunity to work through an example with their peers. Participants should leave feeling confident in their ability to detect covert anti-fatness and explain how medicalizing discourses of stigma entrench fat oppression in a new and deceptive way.
By the end of this workshop, participants should be able to…
- Define weight stigma as a multi-level system of oppression
- Define the anti-obesity assemblage and identify several of its components
- Explain the relationship between anti-obesity efforts, fat oppression, and negative health outcomes for fat people
- Assess whether a piece of “weight stigma”-related research or media perpetuates fat oppression
- Illustrate how a piece of “weight stigma”-related research or media perpetuates fat oppression
All registrants will receive access to the webinar recording, transcript, and any additional resources.
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Speakers
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Marquisele Mercedes (she/they)Marquisele (Mikey) Mercedes (she/they) is a fat liberationist writer, educator, and doctoral candidate from the Bronx, New York. At the Brown University School of Public Health, she works at the intersection of critical public health studies, fat studies, and scholarship on race/ism, examining how racism, anti-Blackness, and fatphobia have shaped health care, research, and public health. Her dissertation focuses on the measurement of medical anti-fatness, as well as how mainstream weight stigma researchers perpetuate anti-fatness and anti-Blackness. Mikey is also a co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back, which explores the lived fat experience from diverse vantage points to examine fatphobia in our relationships and culture. They have been quoted for their expertise in various media outlets, including Gizmodo, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Popular Science.
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Monica Kriete (she/her)Monica Kriete, MPH is a writer, speaker, and consultant from Harrisburg, PA dedicated to challenging weight stigma in healthcare and public health. Under the name Fatty MPH, Monica works with clinicians, researchers, public health practitioners, and students to research and address weight stigma in health policy and clinical practice. She holds a BA in Biochemistry from Kenyon College and a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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Rachel Fox (she/her)Rachel Fox is a PhD candidate, Kroner Family Fellow, Judith and Neil Morgan Fellow, and UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellow in the Communication Department, Science Studies Program, and Critical Gender Studies Graduate Specialization at UC San Diego. She holds a BA in Biology from Wesleyan University, an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and an MA in Communication from UC San Diego. Her research has been published in the Fat Studies Journal, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. In 2021, she joined the Centre for Fat Liberation and Scholarship as an Inaugural Junior Fellow. Her dissertation research critically examines the field of weight stigma research and its relationship to anti-obesity efforts in the US.
