Rebellious Nursing Conference

I arrived in Philly on Thursday for the first ever Rebellious Nursing conference, dedicated to finding "inspiration, awareness, solidarity, and practical ways to impact health equity and health disparities among all living beings (from conference mission statement)."

I heard about the conference from my friend Asam over at It Gets Fatter. The conference founder, Sarah Lipkin, and I got together a few months ago over coffee and she told me about how truly heinous nursing education is around fat/phobia. She said the conference needed a workshop that addressed this. So, Brooklyn-based Geleni Fontaine (friend, acupuncturist, fat activist) and I developed "Fat Positive Possibilities for Rebellious Health Workers" over some phone calls and emails.

Geleni & I after our workshop

from the conference program

Honestly, despite having had fatphobic experiences with medical professionals myself, I must say I didn't know how bad things were until I started preparing for the conference. 

I was really invested in sharing the results of the survey I conducted on fat patient medical care. See this Special Report for those results (trigger warning: this report includes narratives of fat shaming and medical neglect). Since I'm super nerdy, I was also interested in bringing an intersectional theoretical understanding of the issue of fatphobia to the conference goers.

Here are some of the slides from my presentation:

Many people think that fatphobia is just about fat stigma and may miss the ways that it intersects with and adds to other stigmas related to race, class and gender. "Stigma loading" is the phrase I use to describe the harmful cumulative effects of multiple stigmas interacting. The experience of stigma loading can be highly individualized.

Gilman posits that fat shame is encoded in the way we interact with society as women and that dieting is a way of performing submission/compliance.

Ilan Meyer's research on minority stress has linked higher rates of depression and anxiety and low birth weight to the stress and discrimination - including perceived/anticipated discrimination - related to minority status.

The language of fatphobia shares unmistakable links with the language of other types of discrimination. It's significant to note this overlap because it gives clues to the underlying issues inherent to fatphobia: racism, classism, and ableism are among the most notable.

Excitingly, the workshop was really well attended! Every seat was filled! Yay deconstructing fatphobia for large audiences!

Geleni and I offered a lot of answers and resources, among them:

• Health At Every Size (it's a book and a movement!)
• The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise by Hanne Blank
• The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos
• Audre Lorde's writings on intersections of health, race (e.g., The Cancer Journals)
• Stranger Here by Jen Larsen (a weight loss surgery memoir)
• Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion chapter entitled "Truce" by Abby Weintraub 
• Remember: providers can (and should!) make recommendations based on outcomes unrelated to weight loss.
  

Of course I can't end this blog without expressing my gratitude and love for the Rebellious Nursing volunteers, attendees and those who offered homestays. You did an AMAZING job creating this super radical conference. P.S. I'm kind of in love with Philly!

And now gratuitous pictures from the trip:

The murals are amazing...

and so are the coffees made of pie...

and so are the magic gardens...

and so are the cats! (pictured here: my hosts' cats)

And, yes, the requisite 24-hour New York on a Sunday visit for the 3-Fs (friends, food, flea market).