Disability Studies Gets Fat

ANNA MOLLOW

This article invites disability scholars to “get fat,” that is, to support the goals of the fat jus-
tice movement. I argue that the contemporary politics of fatness can productively be read
through the lens of disability studies’ social model. At the same time, I mobilize feminist cri-
tiques of the social model to push fat disability studies toward a more in-depth engagement
with the topics of health and illness. Additionally, I contend that feminist scholars’ accounts
of our personal relationships to fatness and disability can make crucial contributions to our
scholarly work. These arguments take shape within a new interpretive framework that I
introduce: “setpoint epistemology,” which brings together the feminist disability studies notion
of “sitpoint theory” and the scientific concept of “setpoint theory.”

Disability studies has got to get fat. Get fat? you ask. Who wants to get fat? After all,
fatness is supposed to be everyone’s worst fear. Women especially are said to dread
getting fat; studies show us preferring to be hit by a truck, to develop a terminal ill-
ness, or to have limbs amputated.1 Fatness, in other words, scares us more than dis-
ability. But this is not quite right, because in the fatphobic cultural imaginary, fatness
is inseparable from disability. Heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, and on
and on: the litany of ailments that fatness allegedly causes is recited daily in newspa-
pers, medical offices, and casual conversations. The message is inescapable: thin is
“healthy”; fat’s not “fit.” This essay contests our culture’s dominant view of fatness
and calls upon disability studies to make fat justice a central goal of our work.
My imperative, “get fat,” does not reference a mandate to literally increase one’s
body size.2 It does, however, demand an end to dieting and diet talk and a recogni-
tion of the ways that these activities intensify our culture’s already severe social
stigma against fat people. “Get fat” also means “get it” about fat: learn the facts,
know the politics, and actively support fat justice. To facilitate this “getting it,” I
posit a new way of thinking about fatness, which I call setpoint epistemology.3 Setpoint
epistemology brings together “sitpoint theory” (a neologism, coined by Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson, that puts a crip twist on the philosophical concept of feminist
standpoint theory) and “setpoint theory” (a concept from the physical sciences that

Hypatia vol. 30, no. 1 (Winter 2015) © by Hypatia, Inc.

200 Disability Studies Gets Fat

postulates that each person’s body has a biologically determined “setpoint,” or weight
that it “wants” to be) (Garland-Thomson 2011, 33–34).4 Acting as a channel
between disability studies and fat studies, setpoint epistemology contends that embod-
ied understandings of setpoint theory have epistemological consequences akin to
those that sitpoint theory highlights.5 That is, the personal knowledge that diets
don’t work can inform politicized crip vantage points from which powerful challenges
to hegemonic conceptions of fatness can be issued. These embodied perspectives
reveal fatness, often conceived as tangential to disability studies, as a topic of utmost
importance to our field.
Why should disability scholars care about fat? Because the modes by which fat
people are oppressed are indistinguishable from ableism: architectural barriers, dis-
crimination, pathologization, pity, and staring are common social responses to both
fatness and disability. Also, “fat people” and “disabled people” are not two distinct
groups—how could we be, when the medical establishment deems two-thirds of the
US population (and comparable percentages of other wealthy countries) “overweight”
or “obese”? For decades, governmental and medical institutions of industrialized
nations have been waging an ever-intensifying “war on obesity,” an attack that fat
activists correctly characterize as a full-scale assault on fat people.
Getting fat means taking sides in this battle—and not merely as allies. For as bell
hooks points out, the word “ally” evinces a less-than-whole-hearted commitment: “If
someone is standing in their own beliefs, and their beliefs are anti-patriarchal, anti-
sexist, they are not required to be anyone’s ally. They are on their front-line in the
same way that I am on my front-line” (Jones 2013, 3). Sami Schalk also goes beyond
allyship; describing herself as a “nondisabled fat, black, queer woman” who does not
identify “as a person with a disability,” Schalk indicates that she does “identify with
the term ‘crip’” (Schalk 2013, 6, 1). Fatness, Schalk specifies, is “one of the primary
avenues” through which she makes this identification (4).
Schalk’s exploration of fat-disability cross-identifications intrigues me because her
relationship to disability is the mirror image of my relationship to fatness: while I do
not (yet?) identify as a fat person, I do identify as a person with a disability, and my
disability is a vector through which I identify with fatness. Sideways identifications
such as these are at the heart of disability studies.6 For example, although I do not
identify as a person with blindness or obsessive compulsive disorder, as a disability
scholar I position myself in identification with others who have these impairments,
much as they may identify with my environmental illness or repetitive strain injury,
even if they themselves do not have these particular conditions. The present essay
adds fatness to this mix. Taking up Schalk’s contention that “identifying with” is
“more personal, sustained, and affective” than simply “being an ally” (Schalk 2013,
4), I aim to persuade disability scholars of all sizes to identify with fatness—or, in
other words, to get fat.
Far from the first incitement to theorize fat and disability together, my call to get
fat builds on the work of numerous authors, including Schalk, Nomy Lamm, Sondra
Solovay, Kathleen LeBesco, April Herndon, Joyce Huff, Ashley Hetrick, and Derek
Attig, who have posited connections between fatness and disability. But despite these
 Anna Mollow 201

scholars’ important contributions, disability studies as a whole has not yet gotten fat:
our field has not incorporated the central claims of the fat justice movement into our
analyses of ableism; nor do we frequently cite fatness as an example of the ways that,
in Garland-Thomson’s words, “the meanings attributed to extraordinary bodies reside
not in inherent physical flaws, but in social relationships” (Garland-Thomson 1997,
7).7
My articulation of setpoint epistemology takes as its starting point a claim for-
warded by Solovay, Huff, Herndon, and others: that fatness is interpretable as a form
of disability, if “disability” is understood within the framework of disability studies’
social model, that is, as political oppression rather than individual defect. When fat-
ness is read through the lens of the social model, it becomes clear that disability
scholarship has the potential to reshape contemporary cultural conversations about
“obesity.” But getting fat also entails going beyond the social model. Theorizing fat in
conjunction with feminist disability scholars’ critiques of the social model, I press fat
disability studies to “get physical,” that is, to treat health and illness as salient politi-
cal concerns. My post-social-model approach also calls on fat and disability scholars
to “get personal” by speaking about the effects of fatphobia on our individual lives.
Getting fat, most people figure, is as easy as pie: just let yourself go. But as femi-
nist, queer, and disability theories teach us, letting go of the self is seldom so simple.
Indeed, to get fat is to risk losing a lot: notions of individual control, fantasies of
superiority over subjects whose bodies are larger than ours, and faith in scientific
“facts” all fall away when we get serious about getting fat. Yet this falling can be free-
ing. In letting go of the fear that too little vigilance—too many bites of the “wrong”
foods, too few trips to the gym—might send our selves to ruin by making us “too
fat,” we open up the possibility of an exuberant embrace of fat-positivity as a force of
far-reaching social change. Let’s get started. Let’s get fat.

THE SOCIAL MODEL GETS FAT

“Do I dare to eat a peach?” wonders Carmen Pirollo, a participant in a 2004–2005

University of Pennsylvania study comparing the efficacy of low-calorie and low-carbo-
hydrate diets. “Do I dare” are not Pirollo’s exact words, but in an interview with the
New York Times science writer Gina Kolata, Pirollo does point to the peach as the
cause of his falling off a low-carb regimen several years prior: “‘There were Jersey pea-
ches and beautiful Jersey tomatoes,’” Pirollo recalls; “‘I thought, Well, those are natu-
ral, God-given foods. They can’t be too much of a problem. But they were’” (Kolata
2007, 27).
It’s a pity we’ve grown afraid of treats like peaches and cream. I say “pity” not just
to mean that it’s sad to live in a land of forbidden foods, but also to call attention to
the pervasiveness of pity as an affect infusing contemporary cultural conversations
about “obesity.” Pity is easy to miss in anti-“obesity” discourse, because it’s often
eclipsed by the twin disciplinary measures of shaming and blaming. “‘No one ever
forced me to go to McDonald’s,’” pointed out Mike Huckabee, the former Republican
202 Disability Studies Gets Fat

governor of Alabama, after losing 105 pounds (Kolata 2007, 188).8 It’s not just con-
servatives who get moralistic about fat. When I published an article advocating fat
justice in Bitch magazine, hundreds of readers wrote in to object (Mollow 2013a). “In
virtually 100% of cases, fat people are fat because of their choices,” opined a typical
commenter.
But alongside blame-the-individual approaches to body size, another discourse has
emerged in feminist and other Left political contexts, which envisages an “obesity
epidemic” as a social problem requiring political interventions. Targeting putative
environmental causes of fatness, leftist and feminist anti-fat commentators hope that
fatness might be eliminated by taxes on snacks and bans on large sodas. At first
glance, this approach may seem friendlier to fat folks than the mainstream model of
personal blame. Yet in its pathologization of weight diversity and its depiction of fat
people as unwitting victims, the account of “obesity” proffered by anti-fat critics on
the Left is equally insidious. I propose to call this the “pity model of fat,” and I sug-
gest that setpoint epistemology might subvert fat pity by putting in its place a social-
model-informed theorization of fatness as benign difference that’s stigmatized through
staring, cures, and overcoming narratives. As we use the social model to critique fat-
phobia, we’ll see that disability scholars have crucial interventions to make in femi-
nist and Left conversations about fat.
Paul Longmore’s germinal work on telethons can help us understand pity’s role in
anti-fat discourse. Interpreting the telethon as a ritual of “conspicuous contribution”
through which nondisabled US Americans “prove to themselves that they have not
been corrupted by an egocentric and materialist capitalist order,” Longmore argues
that the telethon allows donors to “demonstrate [their] commitment to moral com-
munity” (Longmore 1997, 136). Although these public displays of giving may make
the givers feel good, they reinforce the social invalidation of disabled people (136,
138). A similar dynamic shapes contemporary responses to today’s so-called obesity
crisis, where public worrying about fatness takes a form that, in an adaptation of
Longmore’s term, I call a ritual of conspicuous concern. When feminists and other left-
leaning cultural critics display concern about “obesity” and point to capitalism as its
“cause,” they, like telethon donors, demonstrate “commitment to moral community”
while furthering the stigmatization of those they purport to help.
We don’t have telethons for fatness, but we do have poster children. In 2011, the
state of Georgia launched a hard-hitting poster campaign against “childhood obesity”;
on billboards with large red “WARNING” signs, it pasted images of sad-faced chil-
dren above slogans like “Big bones didn’t make me this way. Big meals did.”9 The
confessional tone marks a point of divergence from the telethon: in contrast to the
emblems of innocence featured on March of Dimes posters, children pictured on
anti-“obesity” billboards are framed as guilty of eating “too much.” This shift from
“innocence” to “guilt” reflects a specious racialization of “obesity.” Whereas Jerry’s
“kids” were mostly white, Georgia’s anti-“obesity” poster children are racially and eth-
nically diverse. Such “inclusiveness” belies a practice, common in government-spon-
sored interventions against fatness, of targeting black and Latino/a communities.
These groups, medical “experts” proclaim, are at especially high “risk” of being fat.
 Anna Mollow 203

To call fatness a risk is to mischaracterize it; body size is a physical trait, not a
behavior. Importantly, the practices commonly thought to “cause” fatness replicate
stereotypes of people of color as “lazy” and governed by uncontrollable appetites.
These stereotypes find explicit expression in writings by liberal anti-fat critics: David
H. Freedman suggests that the “less affluent masses” of “junk-food-eating obese” have
“little cultural bias against over-indulging in food, or putting on excess pounds”
(Freedman 2013, 78, 76), and Greg Critser displays concern for “the fat, darker
exploited poor, with their unbridled primal appetites” (Critser 2000, 6). Perhaps,
Critser proposes, “a few more black Kate Mosses might not be such a bad thing”
(4).10
Like disabled bodies, fat bodies, especially those belonging to people of color, are
routinely disciplined by means of the stare. Freedman, for example, recounts watching
“overweight” Latino/a children walking home from school “with a slow, waddling
gait” (Freedman 2013, 78). Critser also invites readers to join him in staring at fat
people. Studying a Latino/a family eating at Winchell’s Donuts, he looks on censori-
ously as “Mami placates Miguelito with a giant apple fritter” and “Papi tells a joke
and pours ounce upon ounce of sugar and cream into his 20 ounce coffee” (Critser
2000, 3).11 Critser’s pity for fat children is in full view in this passage; claiming that
“obesity-related disorders are everywhere on display” at the donut shop, he says he
spots “fat kids who limp,” as well as a tired-looking “chubby boy” who, Critser
assumes, is probably “suffering from some form of sleep apnea” (3).
Lauren Berlant, a queer theorist and critic of capitalism who has written copiously
about fatness, acknowledges that racialized constructions of “the obesity epidemic”
risk “reinforc[ing] the image of African Americans as a population already saturated
by death” and “compelled by appetites rather than. . . sovereign agency” (Berlant
2011, 113). But Berlant herself figures fatness in ways that solidify precisely these
associations. Interpreting fatness as a “symptom of unhealth,” she asserts that “obes-
ity” “does characterize, disproportionately, the bodily propensities of working-class
and subproletarian” US Americans, “especially people of color” (113). As she
rehearses the long list of ailments from which, she believes, fat children of color com-
monly suffer, Berlant performs conspicuous concern:
The bodily consequences of this increase in obesity are catastrophic for
those children, and not only for their “self-esteem.” They now suffer the
wearing diseases of old age. High blood pressure and diabetes are especially
catastrophic, as these portend early heart disease, liver and pancreatic fail-
ure, strokes and aneurysms, as well as blindness and circulation problems.
(113)12
Berlant’s recitation of this catalogue of diseases reduces fat people of color to diagnos-
tic labels and signifiers of tragedy. Disregarding the disability studies maxim, “Nothing
about us without us,” Berlant figures fat people only as objects of concern, never as
subjects with opinions of their own.
When Berlant and other feminists attribute fatness to fast food and sedentary jobs,
they leave key questions unanswered. If “McDonald’s” causes fatness, then how come
204 Disability Studies Gets Fat

so many consumers of fast food are thin? And if sedentary work makes poor people
fat, then why do so many fat people have jobs that demand strenuous physical exer-
tion: cleaning hotels, scrubbing other people’s homes, and laboring in fields and
farms? I raise these questions not to establish the “moral validity” of fat people13 but
simply to point out that fatness is not an invention of late capitalism. Populations
have always included fat bodies, and these bodies will not wither into thin ones
should the revolution ever come.
Indeed, the hope that after the revolution we’ll all be thin creates precisely the
form of social injustice that it seeks to undo. In a special issue of Social Text Online
devoted to Cruel Optimism (one of several texts in which Berlant’s analyses of “obes-
ity” appear), Kathryn Bond Stockton lauds what she calls Berlant’s “supremacy on
fat” (Stockton 2013, 1). The word supremacy is telling; it speaks to the ways that, as
Longmore observes, displays of concern for people deemed “less-fortunate” “boost
the. . . social status” of those “on the upper side of a great social divide” (Longmore
1997, 151). Cultural fantasies of thin supremacy reinforce fat stigma, which in turn
produces more economic discrimination, more bias in medical care, and thus a greater
likelihood of fat people being poor and/or ill.
According to Berlant, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you
desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant 2011, 2). In her discussion
of fatness, Berlant names food as this something: fat people, she surmises, eat to get
relief from the stresses occasioned by capitalism (117). But here’s what I don’t get:
doesn’t the hope that fat people could become thin itself constitute a form of cruel
optimism? Diets have a near-universal failure rate; they make people less healthy over
the long term; and they present overwhelming obstacles to flourishing, as happiness is
continually postponed until “The Fantasy of Being Thin” is realized.14
One thing almost all “obesity” researchers agree on: no one knows how to make
fat people thin. Since the 1950s, researchers have known that thinness and fatness
are mostly hereditary.15 Yet our bootstrap-oriented culture, and even many of our
most radical feminist critics of bootstrap capitalism, have steadfastly resisted knowing
this; they prefer to define fatness as a condition that can and should be overcome.
Here, parallels with disability are striking. As Anne Finger observes in her history of
polio, scientists published accounts of post-polio syndrome in nineteenth-century
medical journals, but this information was “forgotten” by the mid-twentieth century
because “it did not fit in with the narrative about polio being a disease that could be
conquered through individual will” (Finger 2006, 155).16 Try harder and adopt a can-
do attitude, medical professionals advised people with polio. “I did try,” Finger recalls,
but “nothing much changed. I hated being told to try. I had tried and tried and tried”
(122).
Finger’s experience resonates with that of fat people who have tried and tried
again to make themselves thin. These efforts fail not because fat people lack “will-
power” (a shaky construct, to be interrogated later in this essay) but because the size
of each person’s body is governed by a setpoint or “set range,” the weight or narrow
span of weights that, over the long term, a given individual can embody (see Kolata
2007, 158). Even if permanent, substantial weight loss were possible for more than a
 Anna Mollow 205

minuscule percentage of dieters, there’s scant evidence that this would be “healthy.”
As Deb Burgard trenchantly observes, a “starved fat person” does not have the same
body as an “always-thinner person,” and so exhorting fat people to lose weight is “like
starving a St. Bernard because a study of dogs shows that greyhounds live longer”
(Burgard 2009, 45, 44).
Burgard’s remark touches on another commonality between fatness and disability:
harmful and ineffective cures. As Herndon notes in her discussion of similarities
between fatness and deafness, both bariatric surgery and cochlear implants damage
healthy organs, and neither realizes its promise of making fat people thin, or d/Deaf
people hearing (Herndon 2011, 225). Fat and disabled people also confront similar
access barriers. For example, Julia McCrossin notes that as a supersize person, she
feels “too big for the chair, the booth, the hallway, the door, the shirt, or the subway
car.”17 Like disability scholars who discern eugenic impulses in efforts to eliminate
disability, fat activists remark that those who want to “help” fat people would do bet-
ter to focus on removing social obstacles to fat people’s thriving, rather than remov-
ing fat people from the social landscape. Marilyn Wann puts it pithily: “There is no
nice, unstigmatizing way to wish that fat people did not eat or exist” (Wann 2009,
xvii).
When the social model gets fat, here’s how it looks: disability scholars object as
strenuously to Left and feminist displays of conspicuous concern about “obesity” as
we do to telethons, poster children, and other representations of disabled people as
pitiable. When we hear talk of “the obesity epidemic,” we speak up: applying disabil-
ity studies’ core claims to the field of fat studies, we urge feminists and others on the
Left to join us in protesting the medical profession’s propensity for defining benign
human variations as diseases in need of cures. Finally, we claim fatness in the same
way that Simi Linton has advocated “claiming disability” (Linton 1998), and with
Charlotte Cooper, whose groundbreaking book announces in its title that she is Fat
and Proud, we celebrate size diversity and refuse to hew to cultural conceptions of
“the norm” (Cooper 1998).

FAT DISABILITY STUDIES GETS PHYSICAL

There’s one “fact” about fat that most people think they know for sure: being fat is
“unhealthy.” But this so-called fact is false. Only at the extreme ends of the weight
spectrum (very fat or very thin) does body size have an appreciable relationship to
health, and even this relationship is minimal (see Campos 2004, 10–25). Besides, as
statisticians and fat activists continually remind people, correlation is not causation: it’s
likely not fatness, but rather variables correlated with being fat (economic discrimina-
tion, social stigma, and lack of access to healthcare) that are to blame for the small
differences between some fat and thin people’s average life expectancies (see Campos
2004, 26–28; Oliver 2006, 26–28).
But, some disability scholars may wonder, why I am bringing up the topic of
health? Disability studies’ social model and its corollary critique of the medical model
206 Disability Studies Gets Fat

have schooled us in the importance of segregating discussions of health from political

analyses of disability. Garland-Thomson articulates this field-defining paradigm shift
in her introduction to Extraordinary Bodies: “I want to move disability from the realm
of medicine into that of political minorities,” she writes (Garland-Thomson 1997, 6).
A similar wish is expressed in a foundational book in fat studies; in her introduction
to Revolting Bodies?, Kathleen LeBesco notes that her primary purpose involves
“moving inquiries about fat from medical and scientific discourses to social and cul-
tural ones” (LeBesco 2004, 2). This is one of several texts in which LeBesco criticizes
fat scholars who mount scientific challenges to mainstream medicine’s pathologization
of fatness. LeBesco grants that such critics have their “hearts” in “the right place”;
but, she claims, their strategies “are problematic” (LeBesco 2010, 76). Because LeBe-
sco’s critiques of medically-inflected arguments against anti-fat hegemony are highly
influential, and because they diverge significantly from my project, I will address them
in detail. In contrast to LeBesco’s approach, which sidelines discussions of health, my
setpoint epistemology underscores the value of direct confrontation with anti-fat
medical claims. Additionally, while LeBesco maintains that “sometimes” fat is “not”
“healthy,” and that “diets do work sometimes,” setpoint epistemology is resolutely
anti-diet (LeBesco 2004, 116).
LeBesco’s first objection to health-centered critiques of fatphobia is that they
allow “healthism to flourish unchecked” (LeBesco 2010, 77). LeBesco is right to iden-
tify healthism―aptly defined by Abigail Saguy as “the moral imperative to be healthy
and pursue health” (Saguy 2013, 63)―as a problem in some fat scholarship and
activism. For example, when Wann says that she likes to “talk about how great [yoga]
makes [her] feel with the same ga-ga enthusiasm that thin women use,” she risks posi-
tioning people who can’t, or don’t like to, exercise at the bottom of a health-based
hierarchy (Saguy 2013, 63). As Abby Weintraub and Rebecca Weinberger point out,
healthism has the effect of “pitting fat people against each other in a false ‘good
fatty’/‘bad fatty’ divide”; on the “good” side of this divide are fat people who can pres-
ent themselves as “healthy”; on the “bad” side are “superfat, ill, and disabled folks”
(Weintraub and Weinberger 2013).
Because I myself am ill and disabled, and have often had my bodily symptoms
read as manifestations of moral failings, I wholeheartedly concur with these critics’
call-outs against healthism. But I do not agree that situating discussions about fatness
outside of medical frames is the best way to counter healthism. Fat activists who seek
to remove health from “the rights equation” are correct: civil rights claims should by
no means be predicated on health.18 But the fat justice movement has historically
extended beyond rights-based discourse; it has challenged a wide range of deeply
embedded cultural beliefs and practices, many of which pertain directly to the issue
of health. Currently, approximately one third of US Americans are attempting to lose
weight, in part because they believe that fatness poses a threat to their health (see
Brown 2013). Drawing on setpoint theory, fat activists aim to convince dieters that
these efforts are almost certain to fail and are likely to harm, not help, their health.
If health is taken out of the equation, these transformative arguments can no longer
be made. “Moving inquiries about fat [away] from medical and scientific discourses”
 Anna Mollow 207

may seem to resist healthism, but it actually reinforces it, as this approach is viable
only for people who are, and expect to remain, in good health.
Marginalizing discussions of health has also had negative repercussions in disability
studies. In an article titled “Unhealthy Disabled,” Susan Wendell pushes disability
studies to grapple with the fact that some disabled people “are sick” and “very much
want” to be cured (Wendell 2001, 18). And as I have observed elsewhere, for some
black women with depression, insufficient access to healthcare, rather than inappro-
priate medicalization, is the most salient aspect of their oppression (Mollow 2013b,
411). On the surface, these concerns may seem the antithesis of those I have
sketched out in regard to fatness; whereas Wendell foregrounds the subject positions
of the “unhealthy disabled,” I assert that being fat is not unhealthy. But fat and
chronically ill people (who, of course, compose two overlapping groups) have much
in common. When I go to the doctor with back pain and am told, “Your tests are
normal; maybe you’re thinking about your pain too much,” and when a fat person
reports the same symptoms and is told, “You need to lose weight,” we are dealing
with interconnected forms of oppression.19 We best resist this oppression not by
eschewing discussions of health, but by insisting on our right to access appropriate
medical care.
Fat-positive literature is replete with stories of fat people being denied this access.
Marianne Kirby did not receive treatment for severe asthma for several years, because
her doctors attributed her difficulty breathing to the fact that she was fat; and Bar-
bara Benesch-Granberg’s mother died from a condition that could have been treated,
had she not been afraid to go to the doctor after being warned “not to come back. . .
until she’d lost fifty pounds” (Harding and Kirby 2009, 20, 60). In the context of
widespread medical mistreatment of fat people, the “playful approach” that LeBesco
advocates, which “destabilizes traditional understandings of health,” is insufficient
(LeBesco 2010, 80). Such an approach cannot secure access to appropriate healthcare
for fat people who are ill; nor is it likely to convince government authorities not
to remove fat children from their homes on the grounds that their health is in dan-
ger.20 Certainly, a strategy that shuns science won’t assuage the fears of the many
people―fat, thin, and in-between―who worry that eating “too much” will cause
them to contract life-threatening illnesses.
Fear of fat persists even among fat-positive critics. Paul Campos and Susan Bordo
each note that in the course of composing fat-positive books, they lost weight.21 At
the end of Revolting Bodies?, LeBesco recounts that before becoming a fat scholar she
“successfully” lost one hundred pounds (LeBesco 2004, 116).22 As previously noted,
LeBesco claims that “sometimes diets do work.”23 She acknowledges, however, that
“the choices one makes to achieve considerable weight loss frequently reduce one’s
quality of life” (LeBesco 2004, 114; emphasis added). LeBesco does not say why she
uses the word achieve to describe weight loss; nor does she explain why losing weight
would be worth reducing the quality of one’s life. But a clue appears in an earlier pas-
sage of her book, in which she chides scholars who deny that people can eat “them-
selves to ill health and even death” (16). These statements make it clear that fat
disability studies must not abandon discussions of health. For the assertions that
208 Disability Studies Gets Fat

LeBesco presents as commonsense facts―that diets sometimes work, that fatness can
result from eating too much, and that being fat may threaten one’s life―are the focus
of sustained (and, in my view, thoroughly persuasive) critique in the very body of
work that LeBesco dismisses for its putatively healthist investment in “scientific
research” (LeBesco 2010, 80). By calling off counterfactual challenges to mainstream
medical models of fatness, LeBesco helps ensure that hegemonic anti-fat “facts”
remain unquestioned.

Image 1 Members of the Bod Squad perform cheers mocking weight loss surgery (WLS). The 2004
demonstration, which took place under the windows of the bariatric surgery office at St.
Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco, featured Heather MacAllister (left rear, with hand
on hip), Marilyn Wann (front center, with sports bra and antennae), Sondra Solovay (rear
center, waving pom-pom), and Margarita Rossi (front right, holding sign). Some of the
cheers that the group performed were: “Staples are for paper, not for people!” and “We’re
here, we’re spheres, get used to it!.” (Photo Credit: Karen Kasmauski/National Geographic
Creative)

Nor do I concur with LeBesco’s characterization of fat-positive counterfactual

arguments as “assimilationist” (LeBesco 2004, 111). On the contrary, when Kate Har-
ding dismisses BMI (Body Mass Index) as “horseshit” (Harding 2007), and when fat
activists don pink miniskirts and sports bras and hold signs highlighting the medical
risks of bariatric surgery (see Kasmauski 2004), they employ powerful anti-assimila-
tionist strategies, which resonate with Robert McRuer’s provocative notion of “crip
 Anna Mollow 209

noncompliance.”24 Bringing McRuer’s concept to bear on fat studies, I read fat acti-
vists’ refusals to heed the medical threat, “Lose weight or die,” as potent instantia-
tions of fat noncompliance. Expanding the work of noncompliant fat scholars who dare
to argue with doctors, I say, Let’s “get physical”: let’s study the facts and counterfacts,
ask critical questions, and engage in cultural and scientific debates about fat.25 And
as we get physical, let’s also get personal: let’s talk about why size matters so much to
so many of us, and what we each mean when we say that diets do, or don’t, work.

FAT DISABILITY STUDIES GETS PERSONAL

This is my brain on a diet. It’s 2004, and I’m a thirty-three-year-old PhD student.
When I wake up in my studio apartment, my first thought is, “I will not eat too much
today.” Most days I don’t. I stick to the small portions I prescribe for myself on my
modification of the Zone diet. Food comes in “blocks”: an ounce of protein is a block,
and so are nine grams of carbohydrates, or three grams of fat. I mix and match blocks
to make. . . not enough food: just enough to function, never enough to feel full.
If you were not in my brain, you might wonder, why didn’t I just eat? I was, after
all, what Burgard calls an “always-thinner” person; no doctor had ever told me to lose
weight, and no medical chart had said I was “too fat.” But still, I lived in the culture.
I watched Howard Stern and saw the covers of Cosmopolitan. I knew that a woman’s
stomach should be perfectly flat, and that not a drop of “cellulite” should appear on
her thighs. I also knew the cultural capital that the ableist ideal of “fitness” confers.
My disability prevented me from exercising, and to compensate I strove to be thin—
so thin that my disability might not matter.
This is a diet not working. It’s 10 p.m., and I’m standing in my kitchen. I reach
for the handle of the refrigerator, and, like a spectator, watch the notion of “choice”
dissolve into air. I don’t care, I’m thinking. I have to eat.
Just go to bed, I tell myself. I close the refrigerator door.
From the bowl on top of my file cabinet, I take down a Zone nutrition bar, choco-
late mint. I’ve already had my one allowed bar today, for breakfast. I open the wrap-
per and start eating. I will regret this tomorrow. I open the fridge. I pile deli meats on
a plate. Turkey and ham. Not my usual three- or four-ounce allotments. Big piles.
And big chunks of cheese that I break off from a package of cheddar, which I also
put on my plate. I open a jar of Best Foods mayonnaise and spoon a big scoop onto
my plate. I carry everything, mayo jar included, to my bed where, sitting on top of
the covers, I eat. Cheese dipped in mayo. Meat dipped in mayo. Plenty of salt.
Cheese wrapped in meat dipped in mayo. It is delicious. The best thing I ever ate.
I eat and eat, and when I finally stop eating, I am surprised; there is such a thing
as satiety. Appetite seems endless, but it’s not. Still, I want something sweet. I have
another nutrition bar and some frozen raspberries microwaved with canned peaches.
And then I sleep.
“Bingeing,” some people call this behavior. “Refeeding” is the term I prefer, as it
removes the pathology from eating and indicates more clearly what’s actually
210 Disability Studies Gets Fat

happening: when we go too hungry for too long, our bodies make us make up for
what they’ve lost.26 This is setpoint physiology at work: when my weight dipped too
low, my appetite drove me to the refrigerator. The drive to eat is not a disorder in
need of a remedy; it’s a hunger in need of feeding. This is true whether one is thin,
fat, or in between. Hunger is not a sensation that accords easily with notions of
choice.
I said that my disability was one reason I dieted. This is true, but it’s not the
whole story. I also dieted to please men. In my thirties, I took a several-year hiatus
from my lesbian identity; my foray into heterosexuality took place during the only
time in my adult life that I restricted my eating to avoid “getting fat.” “Restricted my
eating” sounds clinical, almost painless. It’s not. Hunger is pain, points out Vivian
Mayer (Mayer 1983, 7). To ask someone to diet―and, worse, to call a diet “a perma-
nent lifestyle change”―is to ask this person to consent to a life of permanent pain.
A few years into my diet, I am in my graduate student studio, sitting on the edge
of my bed next to a man I am seeing. We are looking at a photo album filled with
old pictures of me in my twenties. One image shows me dancing at a party. I am
laughing, having a good time. My hair is short, and I am wearing jeans and a blue
t-shirt. My Levis are a size eleven.
“Wow,” says the man, in slow amazement as he takes in the picture. “You were a
fat, ugly, dyke.”
Psychoanalysis defines trauma as an unassimilable event: a thing that happened
that you can’t let go of. Thus understood, the label “trauma” applies to my story―less
because of what that man said than because of how I responded. Rather than object-
ing, I laughed in agreement. When his words came back to me later, I took them as
a warning: I’d come so far, but so easily, I could slip back.27
During my graduate school years, I wore a size zero and performed heterosexuality
at full force. For me, heterosexuality was not conducive to Butlerian resignification;
like dieting, it always hurt. Of course, sexuality and size are not exactly analogous:
although some lesbian or gay people do become straight or bisexual and lead happy
lives, dieting is miserable for pretty much everyone. Here Ellen Samuels’s reflections
on the limits of “analogies between queerness and disability” are germane; although
anti-fat and anti-queer oppressions are similar, they are not identical (Samuels 2003,
233). This is why I’m not persuaded by some critics’ claims that fat studies should
forego “diets don’t work” arguments on the grounds that they replicate “born queer”
claims (see LeBesco 2009). These critics worry that “born that way” arguments imply
that “no one would choose” to be queer or fat. This is not how I see “diets don’t
work” claims functioning in fat-positive conversations. When contributors to Virgie
Tovar’s anthology Hot and Heavy tell tales of diets not working, it’s clear that they
don’t experience fatness as a “choice”—but these “fierce fat girls” are not shrinking
violets wishing to be thin (Tovar 2012). As fat-positive feminists, they celebrate the
sexual, physical, and aesthetic pleasures that fatness affords.
According to LeBesco, fat activists who assert that “diets don’t work” attempt to
escape moral blame by saying, “I have no control over my own body” (LeBesco
2004, 116). Such a strategy, LeBesco contends, “paints [fat people] as incompetent
 Anna Mollow 211

and powerless” and denies them “corporeal agency” (116). But the ideal of corpo-
real agency is laden with ableist implications. As disability scholars have demon-
strated, a root cause of disabled people’s oppression is the threat that we are seen
as posing to cultural fantasies of bodily control (see Longmore 1997, 152; Garland-
Thomson 2011, 17). If the statement, “I have no control over my own body”
evokes unsettling associations with disability, then perhaps as disability studies gets
fat, we might invite fat scholars to “get crip”: that is, to amplify, rather than dis-
avow, the ways that all subjects fail to embody ableist ideologies of corporeal con-
trol.28
Setpoint epistemology does not claim that fat people lack agency and thin people
have it. Nor does it apologetically insist that fat people “can’t help” being fat because
they “don’t eat a lot.” Rather than positing “good” fat people who eat small portions
and “bad” fat people who eat “too much,” setpoint epistemology emphasizes that,
over the long term, neither how much one eats nor how much one weighs is subject
to individual control. As Issa Waters observes, the physiological mechanisms that
govern appetite are “powerful biological controls, as basic as those related to breath-
ing, blinking, sleeping, and pissing and shitting. . . .Your so-called willpower is simply
not in charge” (Waters 2012). Waters’s articulation of setpoint theory pairs perfectly
with disability studies’ critique of overcoming narratives. As Linton notes, it’s when
disabled people abandon attachments to fantasies of individual overcoming that we
are most likely to mobilize political agency (Linton 1998, 18). So it is with fatness:
as Saguy and Anna Ward point out, a belief in dieting deters many people from
“joining the cause” of fat justice (Saguy and Ward 2011, 71).
Many feminists have also avoided this cause. Acknowledging at one moment that
dieting is bad for thin women, fatphobic feminists worry in the next breath about
“the obesity epidemic.”29 But fat oppression is a social injustice that urgently needs
feminist interrogation—especially because, as we have seen, anti-fat prejudice upholds
racism, xenophobia, classism, homophobia, ableism, and misogyny. As feminist dis-
ability scholars take measure of the injuries that fatphobia inflicts—especially on fat
people, but also on individuals of all sizes—we will come to understand that fat
oppression cannot be dismissed as “someone else’s issue.” In an oft-quoted passage in
disability studies, Douglas Baynton remarks that “disability is everywhere in history,
once you begin looking for it” (Baynton 2001, 52). This is also the case with fat—
and sadly, in our historical moment, with fatphobia. Let’s start seeing it, and let’s
start stopping it. Calling all disability scholars: let’s get fat.

NOTES

This essay was greatly improved by feedback from Merri Lisa Johnson, Jane Arlene Her-
man, Julia McCrossin, Mycroft Masada Holmes, Georgina Kleege, Robert McRuer, Kim
Q. Hall, and two anonymous readers from Hypatia. Without my magnificent typing
assistants, Jennifer Nicole Herman and Josieda Lord, this article could not have been
completed.
212 Disability Studies Gets Fat

1. According to Laura Fraser, a 1994 Esquire magazine survey reported that 54% of
respondents would rather be run over by a truck than be fat (Fraser 1997, 47).
2. The literal directive, “get fat,” would be impossible for most people to fulfill; as we
shall see, bodies seldom comply with individuals’ efforts to alter their sizes. Also, to take
“get fat” literally would impose a false narrative of “becoming” on bodies that have always
been fat (my thanks to Julia McCrossin for this insight). On the fatphobic clich!e of a for-
mer thin “self” “imprisoned” in a fat body, see Kent 2001, 134–35.
3. Merri Lisa Johnson made a transformative contribution to this essay by suggesting
the term “setpoint epistemology” and helping me define this concept.
4. The basics of setpoint physiology: provided that one lives in an environment in
which food is readily accessible, each person has a “set range,” a span of about ten to
thirty pounds that she or he can maintain for long periods of time. Calorie restriction can
temporarily push body weight below its set range, but this weight is almost always regained
within five years. The body exerts powerful physiological controls, such as increased appe-
tite and decreased metabolism, to ensure that it returns to its set range. Only a tiny per-
centage of dieters permanently maintain substantial weight loss, and these feats of
“overcoming” likely have negative health effects. See Campos 2004, 32; Kolata 2007, 158–
59; Waters 2012.
5. Setpoint epistemology takes up April Herndon’s invitation to theorize fatness
through the lenses of disability studies and feminist standpoint epistemology (Herndon
2011, 256–57, 260).
6. Although my phrasing invokes Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of the “sideways,”
I will critique Stockton’s treatment of fatness (Stockton 2013).
7. Few of the most frequently cited texts in disability studies devote sustained atten-
tion to fatness. A notable exception is Herndon 2011.
8. Like almost all dieters, Huckabee regained the weight he lost. See Ogilvie 2011.
9. See Saguy 2013, 158–66 for further discussion of these posters.
10. On fatphobia and racism in Critser, see Campos 2004, 57–69.
11. The diminutives “Mami” and “Papi” and the name “Miguelito” are apparently
Critser’s invention; Critser gives no indication that he has ever met the family he is
observing.
12. For scholarship that refutes the claim that fatness causes these diseases, see Cam-
pos 2004; Oliver 2006; and Kolata 2007. Berlant dismisses this work in a footnote, in
which she inaccurately claims that Campos and Oliver derive their data from “fat acti-
vists” (Berlant 2011, 280, n. 26). The scare quotes are Berlant’s, not mine―and as Cam-
pos and Oliver each make clear, their conclusions are based on years of careful study of
peer-reviewed scientific literature (Campos 2004, xvi; Oliver 2006, ix–x).
13. “Argu[ing] moral validity” is the purpose that Kathleen LeBesco ascribes to scien-
tific challenges to mainstream medical accounts of fatness (LeBesco 2010, 77).
14. On “The Fantasy of Being Thin,” see Harding and Kirby 2009, 78. On diets’ fail-
ure rates and “false hope,” see Kolata 2007, 220–21. For diets’ damaging effects on health,
see Campos 2004, 32.
15. Body size is not entirely hereditary. Better childhood nutrition, a decline in smok-
ing rates, and an aging population may have caused US Americans to become slightly
heavier in the past few decades. See Kolata 2007, 122–24, 131, 208–09.
 Anna Mollow 213

16. Appearing years after one is infected with the polio virus, post-polio syndrome
causes muscle weakness and atrophy (Finger 2006, 154–55).
17. Personal communication, March 29, 2014. For more on fatness and inaccessibil-
ity, see Hetrick and Attig 2009; Huff 2009.
18. An activist interviewed by Saguy expresses a wish to “remove [health] from the
rights equation” (Saguy 2013, 63).
19. On fat shaming in medical contexts, see DasGupta 2014.
20. On legal cases regarding fat children, see Solovay 2000, 13–24, 64–77; Campos
2004, 99–106.
21. Campos lost sixty-seven pounds by engaging in an intensive exercise regimen
and “denying [him]self foods [he] wanted to eat” (Campos 2004, 241–42); Bordo lost
twenty pounds by participating in a “national weight-loss program” (Bordo 1993, 30).
22. For an interview with LeBesco about her weight loss, see Wilson 2006.
23. On why diets almost never work, see Kolata 2007, 158.
24. “Crip noncompliance” references strategies for resisting medical imperatives and
rehabilitative ideologies (McRuer 2006, 134).
25. Fat disability studies’ getting physical might be a jumping off point for “getting
mental,” since fatness is commonly read as a sign of mental disability. Although beyond
the scope of this essay, intersections between fatness and psychiatric disability are promis-
ing areas for future research.
26. The term “refeeding” often appears in literature about eating disorders.
27. My anecdote should not be seen as implying that heterosexual men do not find
fat women attractive. For correctives to this misconception, see Tovar 2012.
28. Much of LeBesco’s writing on fatness is arguably engaged in “getting crip”; LeBe-
sco is among the first scholars to theorize fatness and disability together. However, when
LeBesco objects to the claim that diets don’t work, she may miss an opportunity to further
the dialogue between fat studies and disability studies.
29. For a critique of feminist fatphobia, see Lamm 1995, 138–39.

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