Like all people, fat people will die. Yet, fat people are particularly likely not only to die of anti-fatness, but also to be perceived as blameworthy for their own deaths. I argue that fat people are subject to postmortem inequality and discrimination via exclusionary death and dying technologies. I show that fat people’s dignity and right to choice in death are constrained. I highlight how technologies relating to both cremation and burial – the two most common options for postmortem disposition – both convey additional burdens for fat people and their loved ones, and highlight how contemporary mediation of death via technology can perpetuate anti-fat discrimination. I review the financial and emotional burdens of dying while fat, with an eye toward enhancing social justice and equity in death.
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People die.
Fat people most affected.
90% of this absolute intellectual diarrhea comes out of Women's Studies and Gender Studies.
Idk how to explain to Hollywood that taking away fatphobic fat characters without replacing them with or creating new/better fat characters doesn't really help with fat representation. Like, if you take a bad fat character and just replace them with a thin character, it kind of shows that you only see fat people through a fatphobic lense.
Hairspray: The Musical Review - Tracy Is A Fat Protagonist We Deserve
I was watching Hairspray a couple nights ago, watching Tracy dance and sing even though the other dancers - *cough* Amber and her mother, Velma - were witches to her and I fell in love all over again. Tracy Turnblad is a teen in urban Baltimore, who auditions to be on a teen dance show, but is first turned down because of her weight and her views on integration - the producer, Velma, of the show is racist but powerful. However, she wins the attention of the host of the show when he sees her dance at the show’s record hop, which puts her in the spotlight instantly.
What makes me so happy about Tracy is that her story doesn’t end with her losing weight to be liked by the boy, nor having deep shame towards her body. The most she changes is her power in who she is and the highlights in her hair. While her mom has shame in her body - “I haven’t left this house since 1951” - “the neighbors haven’t seen me since I was a size 10” - Tracy carries her confidence in her talent of dancing and singing, her nativity, kindness, and willingness to protect those she loves is what gets her friends. She becomes friends with Seaweed because of her ability to see past the social binaries of race in the early 60s, she claims Link’s heart because of her passion for dancing, singing, and her openness that helped him see everything with a new light.
What Tracy shows is that fatness should not dictate how likable you are. All that matters is who you are as a person and how you treat those around you.
What happens when parts of the American public-health apparatus are commandeered by ideologues pushing yet another victimization narrative?
By: Do No Harm Staff
Published: May 21, 2026
What happens when parts of the American public-health apparatus are commandeered by ideologues pushing yet another victimization narrative? Thanks to the “Fat Justice Working Group” at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health (SPH), we may soon have an answer.
“The purpose of the Fat Justice Working Group,” its website declares, “is to engage students, faculty and staff … in learning, activities and advocacy to reduce weight stigma and anti-fat bias in ourselves, our School and society at large.”
Beneath that word salad is a meatier agenda: “We imagine a future where public health is openly and firmly committed to ending discrimination and other oppression of people in larger bodies.”
This is sloppy thinking, directly antithetical to the principles of public health.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, defines its mission in part as “enhanc[ing] health, lengthen[ing] life, and reduc[ing] illness and disability.” By presenting obesity as an “oppress[ed]” identity category rather than a treatable medical condition, Oregon’s SPH makes this work more difficult.
We have been here before. Last year, Do No Harm catalogued efforts by the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University to downplay the adverse health consequences of obesity.
For instance, the school hosted a presentation entitled “Introduction to Weight Stigma & Weight Inclusive Care,” the purpose of which was, in part, to “promote a non-judgmental and inclusive environment for patients of all body sizes.”
Unbelievably, the presentation made the assertion that “health and well-being are achievable for all regardless of weight.” One need only read the relevant medical literature to grasp the inaccuracy of this claim.
Medical science demonstrates that obesity correlates strongly with elevated mortality. It is often, in the words of a Ghana Medical Journal article, “a major risk factor for the development of several non-communicable diseases, significant disability and premature death.”
Moreover, as Do No Harm wrote last year, obesity is not an immutable condition. In many instances, obese patients “who lose significant amounts of weight have been shown to live longer, with better quality of life.”
None of this means that men and women suffering from obesity deserve public censure or scorn. Physicians and other public-health officials should treat all patients with respect, even as they bring their expertise to bear on conditions that lead to significant medical complications.
In short, the medical establishment needs to help people struggling with obesity to make lifestyle improvements or, in some cases, to choose appropriate pharmacological or surgical interventions. Obese patients need assistance, not a team of social-justice warriors telling them that everything is okay.
Faculty and staff at Oregon’s SPH must know this. Yet the work of the Left is always and everywhere to expand the ranks of the “oppressed,” thus granting political power to those who would “rescue” them.
In medicine, this has often meant fixating on identity and compassion at the expense of patient care. Yet evidence-based medical science should not be deemphasized by those who wish primarily not to give offense.
In the normal course of things, such a tendency is often merely obnoxious. When it helps convince doctors not to tell necessary truths, however, the consequences can be deadly.
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Stigma about indisputably bad things is a good thing.
Discriminating against people based on height is objectively worse than discriminating against people based on weight. You can actually change your weight.
A seen body causes memories to flow, memories to flow.
This special issue asks the question: What does Indigenous fat studies look like, particularly when we refuse coloniality? It questions what happens when fat Indigenous bodies are not positioned as problems to be solved, but as sovereign sites of knowledge, memory, resistance, and futurity.
Across (un)settler colonial contexts, Indigenous Peoples have been rendered (hyper)(in)visible through surveillance and medicalization, while simultaneously oppressed as sovereign thinkers and embodied knowledge holders. Anti-fatness, in particular, has been mobilized as a colonial technology, intertwined with racialization, missionary morality, public health moral panic, neoliberalism, and more. For Indigenous Peoples, fat bias and fat hatred are not simply matters of dislike, they are intersecting systems of oppression that entangle with the theft of land, food system and relationship disruption, sexualized violence, and the ongoing (mis)governance of Indigenous lives.
This article confronts the urgent need for Indigenous Fat Studies by asking: What does it mean to embody fatness as an Indigenous person under the weight of settler-colonial oppression? Fatness, for Indigenous Peoples, is a radical site of resistance against a colonial legacy that enforces Eurocentric ideals of health, beauty, and body size. Indigenous body sovereignty stands as a powerful act of defiance, rejecting settler narratives that demonize and pathologise fat bodies. This article explores how Indigenous fat liberation reclaims fatness as a vital expression of cultural strength, self-determination, and community resilience. By reclaiming body narratives embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems and lifeworlds, Indigenous communities challenge harmful colonial frameworks and reject colonial ownership over Indigenous bodies and lives. This article calls for a dismantling of settler-colonial health, body and beauty regimes and champions a future where Indigenous body autonomy reigns, asserting that Indigenous fat studies is essential for radical body liberation and sovereignty.
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What does Indigenous fat studies look like
Here's a better, easier question: What do the authors of this "indigenous fat studies" article look like? Try to imagine them in your mind.
Got it?
Were you close?
These people always write about themselves. It's always about why they don't have to improve, why society is the problem, why society has to change to suit you. This is all stated on absolutely no evidence. It's just critical theory built atop existing critical theory.
If it was just about two fatties deluding themselves, that would be one thing. But the problem isn't just that they're writing about and for themselves, it's that this becomes "knowledge." So, activist-minded lunatics can point to "a study" or "a paper" that justifies telling people with weight and health issues that, no, it's not that you injest more calories per day than you expend, it's that… checks notes… "settler colonialism" and… "patriarchy" and… "cisheteronormativity" or whatever… hates you and wants to hurt you. You're perf already and everybody else in the world is wrong.
Basically, the real world application of the "Her-o's Journey."
This paper critiques core tenets of feminist studies through the lens of evolutionary psychology, arguing that many claims – such as those c
Abstract
This paper critiques core tenets of feminist studies through the lens of evolutionary psychology, arguing that many claims – such as those concerning patriarchy, social constructionism, fat studies, rape, ecofeminism, and lived experience – lack empirical support and are shaped more by ideology than science. It begins by reassessing the feminist concept of patriarchy, traditionally seen as a deliberate male power structure, and instead proposes it as an emergent outcome of evolutionary pressures around reproduction and resource allocation. The paper then critiques fat studies, which often dismiss biological and medical consensus on obesity in favor of social constructionist views. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, the analysis highlights that human preferences for certain body types are not arbitrary but reflect adaptive traits related to health and fertility. Feminist theories of rape are also examined, particularly the view that rape is solely about power and not sexual motivation. The paper presents an evolutionary perspective that considers rape a maladaptive reproductive strategy, arguing that ignoring sexual motivation oversimplifies a complex issue and limits explanatory accuracy. Overall, the paper contends that feminist studies have increasingly prioritized ideological narratives over empirical inquiry, influenced by Marxist and postmodernist critiques. The article concludes that, rather than serving as a neutral academic discipline, feminist studies now functions predominantly as an advocacy platform – one better suited to political settings – while empirical inquiry into gendered behavior should be pursued within disciplines adhering to stricter methodological standards.
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Studying the nature of women and men through postmodern gobbledygook and the "wisdom" of some of the most mentally ill women to ever exist who didn't know what a p-value is, rather than studying biology and evolution… is no different than studying the nature of the universe through the bible and the "wisdom" of primitive goat herders who didn't know where the sun went at night, rather than studying astronomy and cosmology.
As climate change-related disasters continue to affect both human and more-than-human ecologies, it is increasingly evident that fatphobia influences which beings are worthy of protection. Although queer and disability studies scholars have critiqued ecology research that does not adequately attend to socio-political landscapes, fatphobia's links to environmental exploitation have gone largely untheorized. In this thesis, I imagine what a fat queer ecology might look like by theorizing different fat, queer strategies for approaching environmental justice in the United States. By constellating these practices, I account for ways that fat, queer justice becomes environmental justice, and vice versa. I argue that considering eco-criticism and environmental justice through a fat, queer lens opens alternate ways of forming kinship with more-than-human ecologies.
In Chapter One, I demonstrate how fat, Black leatherdyke "fuck sessions" in pornographer Shine Louise Houston's Crash Pad Series suggest possibilities for not-quite-human and more-than-human porosities. In Chapter Two, I focus on Claudia Hermano's photographic series, TIL WE ARE FULL, and my personal encounters with the landscapes of the American Southwest. I theorize enfolding, a process where fat folds encircle other bodies and catalyze a disruption of a bounded sense of self. Finally, in Chapter Three, I assert that the digestive system in Neb Berry's A Monster Made of Many Mouths provides insights into fat, queer more-than-human kinship. Throughout this thesis, I reassert the inextricability of fatphobia and ecological violence, which are both ongoing systems of exploitation that cast aside human and more-than-human bodies alike for capitalist gain.
