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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 difference 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.
Linguistic anthropology offers a robust set of tools with which to examine how racialized understandings of weight, health, and morality are encoded in language. A raciolinguistic perspective, for example, can help uncover how anti-fatness becomes critical to the performance and valorization of whiteness. We can apply methods from conversation analysis to understand how weight stigma manifests in contexts ranging from doctor-patient interaction to social media. The political economic framework of language materiality can elucidate how firms produce capitalist value from anti-fat discourse, and in doing so, generate profit from white supremacist body ideals. By examining the semiotic production of fatphobia—as does, for example, Krystal Smalls’s recent article in Transforming Anthropology—we can offer greater insight into how everyday language use perpetuates racialized harm against fat people.
Linguistic appropriation in dietetic discourse
The racializing logics of fatphobia are on full display in professional dietetics, a field that is overwhelmingly dominated by white women (92 percent women, 80 percent white). Ample research demonstrates the long-term physical and psychological consequences of dieting, leading many registered dietitians and nutritionists in recent years to reject traditional weight-normative models of health and embrace a new “anti-diet,” weight-inclusive approach. They draw primarily on the clinical paradigms of Intuitive Eating and Health At Every Size, which promote food and body neutrality and emphasize social determinants of health, including weight stigma, racism, and poverty—thus aligning in many cases (though not all) with the decolonizing perspectives of fat liberation scholars, activists, and dietitians. Whereas fat liberation activists seek to highlight the intersecting forms of discrimination faced by fat people of color, the anti-diet approach has largely aligned with the more generic discourse of “body positivity,” which