Anti-Fatness at the Foundations of Food Access: Toward a Culture of Nourishment

Keywords: Anti-fatness, food access, obesity, nourishment, health, bodies, food justice
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

For this presentation, I propose to begin at the beginning, with an analysis of the rhetoric of anti-fatness in the introductions to research articles addressing food access interventions, particularly fresh fruit and vegetable interventions, aimed at low income people and people of color. By showing the ways in which food access work is so often justified with reference to an ostensibly “burdensome” fat body, I make room for a recognition that on paper at least, food access work founds its efforts on a phantasmic projection of thin bodies over the real flesh and blood of ourselves and our subjects. As other scholars have argued, the rhetoric of anti-fatness is deeply tied to white supremacy culture’s projections of excessive, unruly non-white bodies, and I argue that by founding our work in reasoning that tactily or explicitly accepts the idea that obesity is the problem that food access should seek to address in marginalized communities, we misdirect both ourselves and our subjects, clients, participants and communities in ways that perpetuate harm. I’ll close by invoking examples of embodied approaches to food access work that explicitly include the nourishment of fat bodies in their pursuit of healthier and more equitable communities.