While we’re on this thread, we notice that “fat studies” has hit academia. Much like women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies and critical race studies, fat studies is the latest interdisciplinary field of scholarship “marked by an aggressive, consistent, rigorous critique of the negative assumptions, stereotypes, and stigmas placed on fat and the fat body.”

In the foreward to the Fat Studies Reader, we learn that “if you believe that fat people could (and should) lose weight, then you are not doing fat studies – you are part of the $58.6 billion per year weight-loss industry or its vast customer base.” Or if you believe that fat people cannot possibly enjoy good health or long life, “your approach is aligned with ‘obesity’ researchers, bariatric surgeons, public-health officials who declare ‘war on obesity,’ and the medico-pharmaceutical-industrial complex that profits from dangerous attempts to ‘cure’ people of bodily difference.”

Do you believe poverty causes fatness (poor people cannot afford healthy fruits and vegetables, health clubs, etc.)? Wrong. Fatness causes poverty. Fat people are less likely to get jobs because of discrimination. Proponents of fat studies point out that while efforts to wipe out obesity are prescriptive in nature, fat studies is descriptive: weight, like height, varies across any population, and the field “offers no opposition to the simple fact of human weight diversity but instead looks at what people and societies make of this reality.”