In recent years, social justice discourses and frameworks have been increasingly embraced by health professionals aiming to transform their practices for the betterment of their clients and the social context in which their work occurs. For health professionals passionate about weight inclusivity and fat liberation, incorporating these principles into their work is a matter of providing ethical, evidence-based, and stigma-conscious services and resources, as well as resisting the injustices imposed by social body hierarchies. In essence, for many weight inclusive health professionals, work is not just work—it is also activism.
However, if the goal is to make the world safe for fat people, there are issues with collapsing the work of health promotion or care with the work of challenging oppression. In the interest of recentering fat liberation, this webinar explores the conflicts that arise when challenging antifatness becomes equivalent to weight inclusive health care, promotion, and research. In particular, we will:
- Discuss the overlaps between how weight inclusive and “obesity” elimination proponents understand (and medicalize) the problem of antifatness
- Distinguish stigma mitigation from stigma eradication
- Consider the merits of a different, yet counterintuitive approach to challenging antifatness: limiting, rather than expanding, the role of health professionals and promotion in fat liberation activism
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