San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Fatphobia, race and gender intersect in abuse of Lizzo
People have a lot to say about other folks’ bodies. Arguably too much to say, especially when it comes to people who are fat. So when it comes to someone like Lizzo — a talented and beautiful celebrity who’s insistent on loving herself and empowering people who look like her to reject hiding and hating themselves — critics refuse to leave them alone.
Despite keeping her Twitter account set to private, last month the singer was driven to respond to another onslaught of fatphobic and body shaming comments because of a video of one of her recent live performances, saying that the constant remarks were really starting to make her “hate the world,” and she was “tired of explaining myself all the time.” These attacks focused on another person’s physical appearance, especially their weight, aren’t new, and they intersect with issues like race, gender and socioeconomic status. Scholars and advocates have spent decades researching and advancing a better understanding of fatphobia and efforts to eradicate it, but the work is arduous.
Sabrina Strings is a chancellor’s fellow and associate professor of sociology at the University of California Irvine and the author of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.” Rachel Fox is a doctoral candidate at UC San Diego in the communication department and the science studies department and is also a critical gender studies graduate who focuses on fat studies. She’s the co-author of an article from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology on combating weight stigma. Strings and Fox took some time to discuss fatphobia, the ways that it intersects with other issues, and its effects on people’s lived experiences. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of these discussions, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lisa-deaderickstaff.html.)
Q:
Lizzo was, again, the target of fat shaming last month, resulting in her expressing frustration about consistently being the subject of these kinds of online attacks about her body. What were your initial thoughts when you heard about these latest comments and their effect on the singer?
Strings: On the one hand, I was a little bit surprised that people are still this openly fatphobic, despite all of the amazing things that so many people have done — Lizzo, herself, in order to bring greater awareness to the fact that you can be any size and you can be healthy, you can move your body, you can be sexy, you can be fire, all of that. We see all of that on social media every day, so I was a little shocked that she’s still being hit with so much fatphobia, but that’s something that I should have known would still be going on. We are in a moment right now in which there is a fat liberation movement and it’s being led by organizations like the NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance). There are so many people now who are aware of the fact that, (A) you can be healthy no matter what size your body, and (B) people often like to hide behind some trumpedup health concern in order to just stigmatize fat people because they want to be gross. So I was shocked, but I shouldn’t have been because I do know that fatphobia has existed in the Western world since the 18th century and it has overwhelmingly targeted Black women in history.
Fox: Since the rise of the war on obesity, let’s say the late ’90s to early 2000s in the U.S., the way that I want people to understand that effort is as an effort to get rid of fat people in the world. In my work, I call it an elimination campaign. If we think about the war on obesity and this whole effort as an attempt to get rid of fat people, to create a world without fat people and posit that that world would be a better world, then people like Lizzo who are in the public eye and who say things like, ‘I’m here and I’m fat and that’s OK’ or ‘I love myself ’ or ‘I’m going to get fat backup dancers because I value fat people,’ doing that is basically the antithesis of the attempt to create a world without fat people. She is staking her claim, she’s asserting her own value, and she’s pushing against that idea that a world without fat people would be better. By doing that, she’s challenging this very kind of tacit, taken-for-granted idea that underlies all of these anti-obesity efforts. I admire her so much because I think it’s a really dangerous, heavy thing to do to continually assert your value in a world that says you shouldn’t be valuable to the point that you shouldn’t exist. I think she’s amazing, but it also doesn’t surprise me that if that’s the perspective, that all of these comments that she gets and the fact that she, in particular, gets them — knowing that antifatness is also interlocked with or holds up sexism and anti-blackness, especially in the U.S. — that pattern of attacks becomes really clear. Frankly, that she has resisted that as long as she has, and that she continues to assert her own value, is so brave. That’s what I think about when I see those kinds of things.
Q:
People have argued that their comments about someone else’s body are motivated by physical health concerns, pointing to medical research linking obesity to cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and chronic diseases. On the other hand, there is also research exploring the concept of metabolically healthy obesity, outlined as a higher body mass index with much lower risk for the health issues commonly linked to obesity. What do you think we collectively tend to misunderstand about the idea of physical health and fat bodies?
Fox: Previous to my dissertation work, motivated a lot by Dr. Strings, I was looking at weight loss interventions in children and adolescents in the U.S. from around 1920 to the present. I stopped doing that project because it made me devastatingly sad. What I learned from doing that project and looking at the medical literature from 100 years ago was that pediatricians were saying nearly identical things to what pediatricians are saying now. They said things like, ‘We have to help this boy lose weight so that he has a chance at a normal life. He’s getting bullied. He can’t get a girlfriend. He can’t keep up with his classmates in gym class. It’s our job as pediatricians to help him lose weight.’ If you look at the guidelines that were released this year from the American Academy of Pediatrics, they say very similar things. What that tells me is that there has never been a time that doctors or medical, scientific researchers have tried to figure out what the health effects of fatness are where they weren’t also inadvertently looking at the health effects of discrimination. I would say I’m not sure if we know anything about the relationship between higher body weight and health. I would say what we do know is the relationship between oppression and health, which is that being oppressed or being discriminated against is really harmful for your health.
lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com