Fat studies gaining recognition in academia

Humanities students can study any number of cultural issues [HTML_REMOVED] and if Sheana Director gets her way, they may soon see another theme added. The politics of body size is the focus of an emerging multidisciplinary trend in the academic world that advocates are calling Fat Studies.

"It's important to recognize the connections between fat prejudice and other prejudices, and to understand that a fat person is never just fat [HTML_REMOVED] they also have a race, an age, a class, a gender, a sexuality and so on," said Director, a San Diego State University (SDSU) women's studies graduate student.

Fat studies arose from the concern that Americans [HTML_REMOVED] mostly women and girls, but increasingly men and boys [HTML_REMOVED] have about weight and body size, said Esther Rothblum, a professor of women's studies at SDSU.

"There is a multi-billion [dollar] corporate industry [HTML_REMOVED] diet foods, diet books, health clubs, cosmetic surgery, gastric surgery, etc. [HTML_REMOVED] dependent on people feeling too fat," Rothblum said.

Director said there needs to be a reassessing of these ideas.

Accordingly, in April the fat advocacy group Size Matters, which Director helped co-found, held a three-day national conference called "Fat and the Academy" at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

"It provided a space for scholars of fat studies to identify the work we do as fat studies, not just as people researching fat within the realm of art history or sociology or communications," Director said.

To many people, though, obesity does not fall within the realm of any of these subjects, but is in fact a medical issue. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention links obesity with hypertension, high cholesterol, Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

One of the central tenets, however, of the fat acceptance movement is that there is in fact a distinction between fatness and poor health. The International Size Acceptance Association (ISAA) Web site states, "ISAA does not believe that obesity is a disease for several reasons. First and most importantly, in most instances, obesity does not prevent fitness nor activity."

ISAA and other groups like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and the Big Fat Blog work to combat the popular sense that weight loss is the only proper response to being fat.

Thomas Diehm, a UW social worker, takes a pragmatic approach to the confluence of the cultural and medical discourses surrounding obesity.

"I certainly believe that we need to focus a good deal of energy and resources on prevention of obesity," Diehm said. "[But] if the prevention methods we use don't work, and we still have obese people, we need to work with them to mitigate the negatives of their obesity to the greatest degree possible the same way we would work to help someone with a spinal cord injury from a motorcycle accident [HTML_REMOVED] another one of those lifestyle choices."

Reporter Chris Weeg: news@thedaily.washington.edu