Fat Studies: Mapping the Field

An extensive body of literature concerning obesity already exists, but this paper seeks to map the field of an emerging body of work that is critical of that dominant discourse. Although it has been most recently mobilised by the rhetoric of an assumed global obesity epidemic, or moral panic around fatness, Fat Studies has an extensive history and interdisciplinary literature which questions and problematises traditional understandings of obesity and draws upon the language, culture and theory of civil rights, social justice and social change. Fat Studies enables the reframing of the problem of obesity, where it is not the fat body that is at issue, but the cultural production of fatphobia. Given the powerful commercial, ideological and institutional interest in maintaining dominant obesity discourse, such reframing is contested. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates that Fat Studies offers dynamic new possibilities for social scientists interested in using fat as an interrogative lens.