37 Fat activism in the news
Dimitrinka Atanasova, Queen Mary, University of London
‘Fat acceptance’ meaning self-acceptance and body positivity regardless of one’s weight and ‘fat activism’ referring to the diverse activities in which individuals engage to create livable lives both for themselves and for others are certainly not new concepts. Fat activism has been traced back to the 1960s and 70s when the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) was established and The Fat Liberation Manifesto was published. My own exposure to the concepts and the encompassing activities is, however, recent and happened while analysing the news reporting on ‘obesity’ in Britain and Germany – two geographies that have been understudied, according to my literature searches at the time.
When we talk about ‘obesity’ we define fatness as a contributor to chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes or a chronic disease in its own right. Thus, obesity is a problem in need of a solution. As a media and communication researcher, I wanted to know what solutions are highlighted in the media and, more generally, 1) how obesity is problematised in mainstream online newspapers which reach large audiences and 2) how readers react to such coverage. While I identified different frames or representations of obesity, most news articles problematized weight and focused on the negative impact of obesity on physical health, national healthcare systems and the wider economy. Individuals labelled ‘too fat to work’ were presented as a drain on scarce resources. So while we may think of weight as an apolitical issue, it also does not escape the attention how such representations may resonate especially well with notions of good citizenship in neoliberal societies, where individuals’ main goal is seen as being able to lead an economically productive life. Obese individuals were also portrayed as a cause of melting ice-caps and desertification, thus drawing a not unfamiliar link between weight and global warming.
What struck me though was the admittedly much smaller number of news articles that challenged this status of weight as a key determinant of good health and did not problematize weight per se, but rather society’s preoccupation with weight. These news articles explicitly referred to fat activism, traced the origins and described the aims of the fat acceptance movement and gave voice to individuals identifying themselves with the movement. This was interesting because media and communication research and social movement research has shown how difficult it is for social movements to gain mainstream news representation, as they normally fall outside of journalistic beats. Further, even when social movements gain news attention, the coverage tends to be highly dismissive. The fact that this was not the case here seemed to be a sign of success for fat activism.
Some of those news articles were closed for comments from the outset, others contained brief notes to indicate t