Fat Activism vs. Body Positivity

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I, Caro, usually to try to be witty for show notes but frankly there are too many resources to share for this episode so I’m going to organize them by the three major topics covered in this conversation and then leave it there, ya girl has been poring through met gala archives for days and she’s TIRED.

on the body positivity movement, aka that time period where we were all briefly “liberated” by the charitable and fierce activist work of, uh, corporate capture

First, you should read anything that Virginia Sole-Smith or Aubrey Gordon write on the topic (and here’s the column we quote from Gordon about being “body positive but”)

Now, onto the links.

The Guardian op-ed on the “end of body positivity” by fat columnist and writer Rose Stokes

Some useful historical information on the history of fat activism (generally speaking, the national association to advance fat acceptance (naafa) is a great org)

Vogue’s 2025 inclusivity report which lamented our drop in body positivity from, checks notes, 2% percent of models to 1.8% of models

Some helpful context for the real-world weight loss of glp-1 vs clinical trials

some evidence for just how often we undergo a culture-wide chicken little moment of running around screaming that “ultra thin body types” are “suddenly back in vogue” and “it’s a dangerous new trend”

* we were worrying about it in 2023

* …and also in 2022

* …and also in 2019

* oh and by the way, when we *did* have fat characters on the screen, we basically mocked the characters mercilessly for being fat, yay for body positivity!

* anyways yeah we were also talking about this in 2016

* and 2012

* and 2007

You get the point.

Oh also here’s an op-ed about michelle obama’s crusade against obesity that might complicate the narrative around conservatism equaling skinny culture

on the moral panic around eating disorders, featuring a series of fun facts caro learned on her intellectual rumspringa which thoroughly blew her mind

some recent studies on the potential inheritability of eating disorders

some background information on how men and fat people have been historically excluded from eating disorder research and recovery avenues

a historical explainer of anorexia (and here’s where I found the William Gull excerpt)

info on the high comorbidity between anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder

a deep dive on the “biopsychosocial” of it all in relation to eating disorders

and then a quick side door into the tressie-katie convo that truly rocked our worlds

as well as this incredible comment we received on our liv schmidt/skinnytok ep, in its entirety:

casual!

on the magical third door/leg stool: Rayne Fisher-Quann’s theory of being “womaned”

Here’s the full piece Fisher-Quann wrote for i-D Magazine

And the book I reference, Damned Whores & God’s Police, by Anne Summers

Here’s the JLaw NYT interview, as well as the Kristen Stewart NYT interview

That’s it, thanks for coming to the show, there will be no encore, etc etc etc-

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