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Interrogating the Language of Health in the Fat Movement

9/10/2012

 
When perusing my program for the NOLOSE Conference, I was struck by the number of workshops devoted to "keyword: fat + health." I wasn't the only one who noticed. Another conference-goer mentioned in a conversation that she felt there were two main tracks at the conference: one committed to health and the other committed to issues related to anti-racism/people of color organizing. This observation felt like cause for pause.

My ongoing ambivalence about the discussion of health in the fat movement was further complicated by attending a workshop entitled "Reclaiming/Reframing Fat Bodies: Is Health a Moral Imperative?" I spent the better part of the weekend having conversations and thinking about this question. Through those internal and external dialogues I was able to articulate some of my feelings around the language of health in the context of fat activism.

"Healthy" as an Identity
As a person who's fascinated by identity, I found myself asking: "Why are some fatties so strongly invested in an identity like 'healthy'?" Let me back-peddle momentarily and say that this post is not about why fatties are concerned about health. We are in the midst of an increasingly vociferous War on Obesity. We are constantly expected to defend our health. We are less likely to seek medical care because of the compounded (1) lack of affordable/accessible healthcare and (2) fatphobia that is a codified part of medical practice. Fatties have varying degrees of interface with the medical system, have different health needs, have different experiences around dis/ability. I'm not interrogating that. What I'm interrogating is the prevalence of the healthy+fat narrative. What I'm interrogating is Healthy as an identity.

I personally do not identify nor do I feel drawn to identifying as "healthy." On the one hand, this is pretty typical. When we're talking about identity, it's pretty typical that a person in privilege doesn't feel drawn to an identity related to that privilege - because they're not constantly forced to think about and experience this thing. For instance, once I was asked by a trans-identified researcher, "what does it mean to you to be a woman?" I was stymied. I didn't really have anything to say. I didn't have a highly salient/strongly-felt identity around being a woman because - as a cisgendered woman - there was little question - from friends or society - about my status as a woman. Related to the matter of health, a person who does not require ongoing medical care - a person like me, right now - is less likely to have a highly salient health-related identity. On the other hand, because I am a woman and a person of color and a fat person, my body (and bodies like mine) has been subject to medical and social discourse and scrutiny for quite some time. Disabled, female and people of color bodies have been pathologized for centuries. So, in some ways I feel I have been precluded or disqualified from the title "healthy," and so it's not even a desire I can locate.

Once a person holds an identity they are likelier to flag an identity or "perform" that identity. A fatty invested in identifying as "healthy" may be more likely to "perform" healthy. They may be more likely to talk about the "healthy" way they prepare foods or the abundance of "healthy" practices in their daily lives. In this way, the dominant discourse around health is reproduced in a community of people who have been stigmatized and dehumanized by that very discourse.

The Politics of Respectability
In a conversation at NOLOSE, a friend introduced me to Higgenbotham's critique. The politics of respectability are deeply concerned with being palatable to the very forces and institutions that seek to entrap us in the discourse of conservatism - which is about just that: conserving. It is a project concerned with morality, with (false) binaries, with "who belongs" and "who deserves." It is a project that has historically left people of color, poor/working class people, queer people, disabled people, trans people and even fat people behind. And I see the centering of the language of health/healthy in the fat movement as a threat to the future of our radicalism because it creates a culture of compliance in which there is an acceptable way to be fat and an unacceptable way.

We cannot discuss health in fat community in a cultural vacuum. When we talk about health at NOLOSE, for instance, we cannot ignore that we are in Oakland (home to a historically Black, working class population, where there are neighborhoods that have only liquor stores and no grocery stores), California (one of the biggest economies in the world, home to some of the wealthiest cities in the US), United States (where there is a firmly entrenched, WASP-centered idea of what health means and looks like). There is a pre-existing discourse around health that has a history mired in racism, sexism, and ableism. There is incredible cultural impetus to be "healthy" and "health" is framed in the United States as a personal/individual responsibility rather than a federal one. So, when we bring a discourse of health into fat community it already has preexisting capital and meaning; it already has the weight of social mores on its side. The message is familiar and so it's easier - and perhaps more alluring - to adopt.

Me & the Art of Failure
In another amazing conversation with a fellow theory nerd at NOLOSE, a (new) friend and I began discussing the politics of failure. I think being deemed a cultural failure is not only hot but also subversive. I had posted the following thought on my Facebook page:

Social systems are most vulnerable at their margins: so sayeth Judith Butler. To be fat is to experience the freedom that marginality - failure - gives me: the freedom from the tyranny of straight life, freedom from the suffocation of externally determined success, freedom to push the envelope, the conversation, to hike up my skirt, to see the futility of apology, to sweat and love and fuck the way that rebels do.

My friend said our conversation reminded her of J. Halberstam's newest book, The Queer Art of Failure. She observed that the idea of/obsession with health or "long life" is reminiscent of ideas of futurity and reproduction (in the baby-having sense). When I think about my life as a fatty, I find myself drawn to publicly consuming high fat foods, to showing cleavage, to having too much sex and too much fun. Maybe because I'm overly macabre, I don't imagine myself being 70 and telling stories to grandchildren. I don't see myself as part of the project of success or health or being a good American or being a good girl. And that doesn't make me feel sad. It makes me feel like a superstar. The rhetoric of health doesn't resonate with me, and there are lots of reasons why.

I have no grand conclusions or admonitions. I don't want to point fingers or shame people. These thoughts are just my offerings to a growing movement at a crossroads.
sizeoftheocean link
9/10/2012 08:35:34 am

Yes yes yes! I'm working on a chapter on public health for my thesis right now, and making a similar argument to this.

There's been a bit of anti-social queer theory (such as Halberstam and Edelston, who talks about reproductive futurity) turning up in fat studies recently, and I find it really exciting!

Virgie Tovar
9/10/2012 02:55:12 pm

It's super exciting that you're doing this work for your thesis! Amazing. I haven't read any Edelston. I will add them to my list. I'd love to read the chapter if you can/want to share it.

Sam
9/10/2012 10:56:39 am

Brilliant peace, full of good points.

I think it is always a clear sign that a discourse is mostly about screwing with folk when the people who frame the debate fail to define the central term.

It sounds silly to ask what we mean by healthy, but that is why we must ask it, for when we do, it becomes very clearly, very quickly that we actually mean ideal, rather than say "a long, full life free of chronic pain and suffering."

By most cultural standards professional athletes are so high on the "health" scale - as measured by, say how many times they are on the cover of men's health - as to be almost super human. Yet, the average life expectancy for an NFL player is 56, and the last half of those years are usually full of chronic pain and mental illness caused by repeated blows to the head. In a sane world Michael Vick would be no more suited for the cover of health and fitness, than he would be for the cover of Pet Lovers Monthly.

On the flip side, Keith Richards has survived on a diet of vodka, cigarettes and heroin for the last 40 years and has no health problems that weren't caused by falling out of a Fijian tree at 62, so where the hell is his Men's health cover?

Virgie Tovar
9/10/2012 03:10:05 pm

Indeed, where is his Men's Health cover? And loved the point about athletes! I recently found out that Sports Medicine is a really new field that arouse out of the need to treat the injuries of people participating in extreme and/or professional sports and/or who exercise to the point of injury/harm. I was struck by the fact that there was an entire field dedicated specifically to treating the outcome of the type of strenuous physical activity that leads to the body type that is aggrandized in our culture.

O
9/13/2012 12:35:24 am

That's interesting, because I do think of health as "a long, full life free of chronic pain and suffering." I am also studying to be an acupuncturist, so maybe this is not the standard health narrative in Western medicine. There is now actually Sports Medicine Certificate for acupuncture, which is strange since Traditional Chinese Medicine would not consider extreme athleticism healthy. Just my random $0.02!

And yes, defining central terms is important; obviously a lot of oppressive assumptions and cultural baggage are hitching a ride on this one.

cutselvage
9/10/2012 11:49:37 am

Thanks for writing and sharing this post, Virgie - it has given me heaps of new ideas to consider, and I feel really invigorated by thinking about the notion of health and marginal status. I'm not a theorist, and I only have a fairly superficial knowledge of a lot of the ideas you referred to, but you made the topic super accessible, so thank you for that too.

Virgie Tovar
9/10/2012 03:11:59 pm

My pleasure :)

s.e.
9/13/2012 11:43:15 am

fascinating discussion, lots to think about.

Scott link
4/10/2013 05:57:08 pm

As a former-fatty (100lbs lost) i just have to say I'm more comfortable on a bike, in a car, skydiving, walking, dancing, at a restaurant table, sneaking out of a lover's house. When I look in a mirror, I like myself. Just as the acceptance of "fat" might be an acceptance of economic structures and the restrictions of location (food deserts), I think the language of "health" is also a discussion on education, industry, and government. I suppose in a way you can "health" yourself to death, but running 10 miles, or skydiving, or weightlifting, or skiiing. . . I think we are really talking about being as able bodied as you can be while you have the time. Again, as a person who weighed almost 300 pounds twice in my life, and grew up in an enabling house hold with historical "fatness" (and cancer and diabetes), losing "weight" meant liberating myself from many systems of disinformation and ignorance. It didn't get me laid anymore than when I was heavy, but I was able to move around the world more easily. I also have to say that the joys of being "healthy and fit" have been much more lasting and rewarding than those of being fat.

Virgie
4/11/2013 01:47:59 am

Hi Scott! Thank you for sharing your story. I'm primarily doing a linguistic/discursive analysis in this post (though, admittedly, I did veer off that path in the final third of the post). I think your desire to share a story that reproduces dominant discourse in one of the very, very few venues of dissent is an excellent example of the phenomenon I'm analyzing.

Lonie McMichael link
4/21/2013 12:14:52 am

Excellent post! I especially appreciated the part about failure.

I've made the health argument for a long time (you know -- fatties can be fit, weight loss isn't possible for most people, etc.). About 3 months ago, I realized that every time I make it, I felt like I was apologizing. It dawned on me that the health argument will never take us anywhere -- because it wasn't about health to start with. It has always been about profit-driven prejudice.

I think fatties should be able to identify with fit and healthy if they so choose, but as a movement as long as we continue to focus on health, we will spin our wheels. We will only make true progress when we focus on prejudice and oppression.

The health argument is attempting to dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

Sydney Bell link
4/21/2013 07:41:58 am

Great post! I am currently exploring the topic area of body acceptance and health for a masters research thesis and you have given me much to think about. I have been a proponent of the Health at Every Size framework for years now, but I have always wondered about the increasing morality attached to health in our society.
Look forward to reading more of your writing!

In solidarity,
Sydney

Spidersocks link
1/28/2014 03:07:47 pm

Thank you so much for articulating the privilege (and victim-blaming and denial of systemic inequality) inherent in the emphasis on individual "control" and "achievement" of health. As a fat person in whose family diabetes is present, I have long dreaded not only getting the disease, but being shamed and blamed for it. Never mind genetics. Never mind the existence of thin and average-sized diabetics.

Even knowing about the viciousness underlying a personal responsibility approach to health, I still catch myself mentally blaming others and myself for suffering from "preventable" health problems. I wonder if most fatties have internalized healthism, along with sexism, racism, classism, and other isms.


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    Virgie Tovar

    Virgie Tovar, MA is one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp (a 4 week online course focused on helping people break up with diet culture) and the editor of Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, 2012). She writes about the intersections of size, identity, sexuality and politics. See more updates on Facebook.

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