The Future of Fat

Of all of the topics I teach, including a range of controversial issues within gender and sexuality studies, fat studies is, by far, the topic that generates the most discomfort among my otherwise open-minded students. There is a general unwillingness to hear perspectives that contradict what they think they already know about fat and a disregard for sound research that points in different directions than common wisdom. I suppose their response is not surprising given that they have come of age in the era of “the obesity epidemic.” Is it any wonder that US college students would have a hard time taking in information that disputes what has become strangely defining of US citizenship itself? With book titles like Greg Critser’s Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, countless headlines in newspapers and magazines proclaiming the United States’ dire obesity problem, including the Atlantic’s May 2010 cover featuring a fat Statue of Liberty emblazoned with the text “Fat Nation,” and a 2003 symposium at the University of California at Berkeley titled “The Politics of Obesity: A National Eating Disorder,” it is clear that fat—or fat panic—has become thoroughly nationalized. Fat panic has also found tremendous resonance with policymakers and politicians of all stripes. Recent legislation targeting the so-called obesity epidemic includes Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to ban the sale of large sugary beverages in New York City, trans-fat bans, increased regulation of school lunch programs, and the use of zoning ordinances to regulate fast-food establishments. In 2010 First Lady Michelle Obama launched the Let’s Move! campaign aimed at “solving the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation” and declaring that the “physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.”¹ In a recent HBO documentary series, The Weight of the Nation (2012), public health researchers repeatedly nationalize weight; one expert contends, “It’s not only health, it’s about the survival and well-being of the United States as a nation,” while another claims, “Obesity will crush the United States in oblivion.”

American studies would be remiss not to carefully track the phenomenon of “the obesity epidemic” and responses to it. As Marilyn Wann contends in her foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, “Whenever members of a society have recourse to only one opinion on a basic human experience, that is precisely the discourse and the experience that should attract intellectual curiosity” (x). Fat studies, borne from grassroots activism, online communities, and scholarship from both inside and outside the parameters of traditional publishing, offers analyses that begin with the premise that fat is one element of human variation. Unlike terms such as overweight or obese that inherently imply abnormality, fat is embraced by the field as a word that should function as a descriptor, rather than as a term of derision. The field of fat studies faces tremendous resistance, the kind of resistance backed by entrenched ideologies reinforced by stakeholders with a lot to lose. While fat studies should hold on tightly to its roots in activism and the widely accessible domain of online communities, it also needs researchers with access, resources, and training in various academic and professional disciplines. The four texts under review continue to advance the field in this direction.

The publication of The Fat Studies Reader marks an important moment in the evolution of fat studies as a field. Edited by Esther Rothblum and...