As Theory has developed, it has become increasingly obsessed with identity and positionality. The postmodern knowledge principle insists that objective knowledge is not possible and favors specialized “knowledges” that arise from the lived experience of individuals of a certain identity, positioned in a specific way by society. The postmodern political principle is, in essence, a call to identity politics, which requires adopting an identity as part of some marginalized group or being assigned to a relatively privileged one. This is supported by the postmodern theme of fragmenting the universal and replacing the individual with the group. We see this tendency in postcolonial Theory, where the “other” needs to be rescued from Western ways. We see it in queer Theory, in which “queer” sexual, gender, and other identities are a peculiar fascination, while “normal” identities are problematized for the alleged implications of their very existence. We see this in critical race Theory, which advocates identifying with one’s socially constructed racial status and adopting, promoting, and protecting specific cultures. We see it in intersectional feminism, which continually examines how various identities intersect to create ever more niche identity statuses. We also see it in the postmodern study of disability and fatness, which focuses on social constructions to such an extent that the objective realities of the disabilities and excess weight they examine are Theorized almost out of existence. This is a kind of kabuki theater, in which Theory is used to turn support-group initiatives into scholarship and ill-informed activism.
As with gender studies, critical approaches to studying disability and fatness as identities began with the applied postmodern turn of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led to the creation of two related postmodern identity studies fields: disability studies and fat studies. Like gender studies, these have largely displaced other approaches to scholarship and activism, which tend to be more practical and less apt to believe everything is best seen as a purely social construct and engaged through highly emotional appeals to identity politics. Though similar in many respects, these two fields have different histories, so they will be considered separately here.
Disabled activism began in the 1960s, at around the same time as and with similar goals to the Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, and Gay Pride. Its original aim was to make society more accommodating and accepting of disabled people, and thereby improve their quality of life. Much of this was to be achieved by increasing disabled people’s access to the opportunities available to the nondisabled and the movement enjoyed much success in this. On the whole, this was excellent progress.
This perfectly reasonable goal began to change in the 1980s. After the turn towards applied postmodernism and the incorporation of intersectional feminism, queer Theory, and critical race Theory, disability studies began to view ability as a social construct, and has since become increasingly radical and in denial about reality. Various forms of disability are considered to be cultural constructs—as is the condition of being able-bodied (lacking a disability). Disability (including certain treatable mental illnesses) came to be valorized as a set of related marginalized identity groups, and these were placed in contrast to “normal” able-bodied identities. As a result, disability studies has taken on an increasingly intersectional and queer Theoretic approach, which has made it steadily more obscure, abstract, and unsuited to improving the opportunities and quality of life of disabled people.
The changes to “dis/abled”1 scholarship and activism in the 1980s can be best understood as a shift from understanding disability as something that resides in the individual to viewing it as something imposed upon individuals by a society that does not accommodate their needs. Before this shift, disabled people were considered to be people with some form of disability; afterwards, disability was viewed as a status imposed upon them by a relatively unwelcoming and uninterested society. For example, a person with deafness was previously considered to be a person who cannot hear, and who is disabled to some extent by her impairment. After the shift, she was seen as a Deaf person, someone who cannot hear and whom society has “disabled” by failing to be equally accommodating to those without hearing as it is to those with hearing (by default). In other words, a person is only disabled because of society’s expectations that people are generally able-bodied and benefit from being so. It is a status imposed upon those with impairments.
This shift to a social constructivist view of disability seems to have taken place in two stages. In the first, what is commonly called the “social model of disability” replaced the “medical model of disability,” sometimes called the “individual model.” This occurred in the 1980s and is widely credited to the British social work scholar and sociologist Michael Oliver. Within the medical or individual model (some people conflate these and others distinguish them), disability is something that affects a person, and the solution is to fix the disabling condition or mitigate their impairments, so they can engage with the world more like able-bodied people do.2 Within the social model of disability, the onus is on society to accommodate the individual with impairments. Oliver writes,
Th[e] social model of disability acknowledges impairment as being a cause of individual limitation, but disability is imposed on top of this. This may be summed up this way: Disability is the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by the political, economic and cultural norms of a society which takes little or no account of people who have impairments and thus excludes them from mainstream activity. (Therefore disability, like racism or sexism, is discrimination and social oppression)…. This social model of disability, like all paradigms, fundamentally affects society’s world-view and within that, the way particular problems are seen.3
Oliver aimed to effect a conceptual shift: from a binary understanding of disabled versus able-bodied people to the idea of a spectrum of capabilities, whose meanings have been understood differently in different times and cultures. The understanding of disability that existed in the 1980s, in Britain in particular, changed to one that placed the responsibility for enabling or disabling people onto society. This conceptual shift demands that society must adjust to the individual, not the other way around.
There is no sign that Oliver originally took a particularly postmodernist approach, and his view of disability as a social construct is not radical. That has since changed. His book Social Work with Disabled People, first published in 1983, is currently in its fourth edition and includes significant references to later work from within identity studies. For example, in the most recent edition, the language has clearly been influenced by intersectionality:
[E]xperiences will undoubtedly be culturally located and reflect differences of class, race, gender and so forth, and so discourse may well be culturally biased. When using the social model, understanding also comes from recognising that historically experiences of disability have been culturally located in responses to impairment. The social model can be used by those in different cultures and within ethnic, queer or gender studies to illustrate disability in those situations. Equally these disciplines all need to take account of disableism with their communities.4
Disability studies currently relies strongly on the two postmodern principles: knowledge is a social construct, and society consists of systems of power and privilege. This orientation within disability studies frequently draws on critical race Theory. Disability studies as a whole relies heavily on both Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and consequently its most frequent postmodern themes are the blurring of boundaries and the importance of discourse—accompanied by a radical distrust of science. The concept of the individual is also frequently disparaged within disability studies, due to the belief that individualism enables a “neoliberal expectation” to adapt to one’s disabilities and become a productive member of capitalist society.
Within disability studies, “ableism” is largely understood as the acceptance of the (Theoretically problematic) assumptions that it is generally better to be able-bodied than disabled and that it is “normal” to be able-bodied. “Disableism,” on the other hand, denotes prejudice against disabled people, including the idea that their disabled status exists outside of the usual understanding of “normal” and the belief that an able-bodied person is superior to a disabled person. This oppression is part of a constellation of different forms of bigotry. As the self-described autistic, disabled, asexual, and genderqueer activist Lydia X. Y. Brown defines it,
[A]bleism might describe the value system of ablenormativity which privileges the supposedly neurotypical and ablebodied, while disableism might describe the violent oppression targeting people whose bodyminds are deemed deviant and thus disabled. In other words, ableism is to heterosexism what disableism is to queerantagonism.5
Accordingly, queer Theory, with its focus on deconstructing the normal, has proven particularly compatible with disability studies. Just as queer Theorist Judith Butler evoked Adrienne Rich’s concept of “compulsory heterosexuality”—the social enforcement of heterosexuality as the normal, default sexuality—so does Robert McRuer in disability studies. In his 2006 book, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability,6 which examines how queer Theory and disability studies inform each other, he argues,
Like compulsory heterosexuality, then, compulsory able-bodiedness functions by covering over, with the appearance of choice, a system in which there is actually no choice…. Just as the origins of heterosexual/homosexual identity are now obscured for most people so that compulsory heterosexuality functions as a disciplinary formation seemingly emanating from everywhere and nowhere, so too are the origins of able-bodied/disabled obscured … to cohere in a system of compulsory able-bodiedness that similarly emanates from everywhere and nowhere.7
Foucault’s influence is evident here. This passage echoes his notion of power operating on all levels, to control and constrain people into conforming with expectations.8 The solution is to blur the boundaries of categories to the point of erasing them. Foucault and the queer Theorists who drew on him argued that sexualities and madness were merely constructs of medical discourses that unjustly sought to categorize people as “normal” and “abnormal” and to exclude the “abnormal” from participation in the dominant discourses of society. The view of ability status as something that is unjustly constructed as “normal” (able-bodied) or “abnormal” (disabled) has consequently dominated and confused disability studies ever since its adoption of queer Theoretic approaches.
This new, postmodernist approach fit the social model of disability exceptionally well and formed the basis of the second stage of its shift toward applied postmodernism. It is central to Dan Goodley’s 2014 book, Disability Studies: Theorising Disableism and Ableism. Borrowing directly from Foucault, Goodley writes, “Disability is normatively understood through the gaze of medicalization: that process where life becomes processed through the reductive use of medical discourse.”9 He applies Foucault’s concept of “biopower,” in which scientific discourses have particularly high prestige and are accepted as truth and perpetuated through society, where they create the categories they seem to describe.10 Goodley’s adoption of the postmodern knowledge and political principles—he understands scientific discourses as oppressive and no more rigorous than other ways of knowing—is clear when he likens science to colonialism,
We know that colonial knowledges are constructed as neutral and universal through the mobilisation of associated discourses such as humanitarian, philanthropic and poverty alleviation measures. We might also ask: how are ableist knowledges naturalised, neutralised and universalised?11
Alarmingly, Goodley considers diagnosing, treating, and curing disabilities as cynical practices, dependent upon corrupt ableist assumptions and upheld by a “neoliberal system,” in which people are forced to be fully autonomous, high-functioning individuals so they can contribute their labor to capitalist markets. Even more worryingly, he claims that “autonomy, independence, and rationality are virtues desired by neoliberal-ableism.”12
The postmodern political principle, which sees the world as constructed of systems of power, pervades Goodley’s book. He describes society in intersectional terms, as “merging overlapping discourses of privilege” and writes,
I argue that modes of ableist cultural reproduction and disabling material conditions can never be divorced from hetero/sexism, racism, homophobia, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and capitalism.13
For Goodley, Oliver’s social model isn’t intersectional enough. He argues that it does not include analyses of race and gender and that it fails to regard disability in queer Theory terms—as “an identity that might be celebrated as it disrupts norms and subverts values of society.”14
This idea that disabled people have a responsibility to use their disabilities to subvert social norms—and even to refuse any attempts at treatment or cure—in the service of the postmodern disruption of categories is yet another alarming feature of disability studies—and it isn’t peculiar to Goodley. It also appears in Fiona Campbell’s much-cited Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness.15 Like Goodley, Campbell regards it as problematic that disabilities are seen as problems to be cured, if possible:
[A] chief feature of an ableist viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability (irrespective of “type”) is inherently negative and should opportunity present itself, be ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated.16
Within scholarship and activism, the express wish to prevent or cure disability is shockingly often reframed as wishing disabled people (rather than their disabilities) did not exist—a cynical ploy that abuses a play on words. Campbell goes even further. Drawing on the queer Theory of Judith Butler, she characterizes able-bodiedness and disability as performances that people learn from society. They “co-constitute” each other in a binary that must be overthrown:
Whether it be the “species typical body” (in science), the “normative citizen” (in political theory), the “reasonable man” (in law), all these signifiers point to a fabrication that reaches into the very soul that sweeps us into life and as such is the outcome and instrument of a political constitution. The creation of such regimes of ontological separation appears disassociated from power…. Daily the identities of disabled and abled are performed repeatedly.17 (emphasis in original)
This isn’t merely insane, nor is it just fetishism of the underdog. It’s applied postmodernism. This tendentious passage bears clear marks of the influences of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. The Derridean view posits that our understandings of disability and able-bodiedness create each other by means of a hierarchical dichotomy—that is, we understand each concept only as not being the other, and the two concepts are not viewed equitably. This is interpreted through the Butlerian notion of performativity, which she derived from applying Derrida and Foucault to her own interpretation of John Austin’s concept of the same name in the philosophy of language.
Campbell also calls upon critical race Theory, especially its tenet that racism is such a normal, ordinary, and natural part of Western life that no one sees or questions it.18 She adapts this to disability studies to argue that ableism is also such an ordinary form of prejudice that we do not question why we believe it is better to be able-bodied than to have an impairment. She even criticizes disabled people for having “internalized ableism”—a false consciousness that leads them to accept ableism, despite being disabled—if they express any wish not to be disabled. She writes, “By unwittingly performing ableism, disabled people become complicit in their own demise, reinforcing impairment as an undesirable state.”19
These ideas are fairly typical of disability studies. Lydia X. Y. Brown, for example, also depicts disability as a performance and having a disability as an identity to be celebrated. This is apparent in this account of a discussion with a Muslim convert friend, who explains why she wears hijab, although she does not believe in the modesty concept behind it:
Wearing hijab is an outward sign of being Muslim. She was performing “being Muslim” and wanted to be associated with being Muslim, and chooses to wear the hijab so that other people—Muslim or not—can identify her, similarly to how I, as an Autistic person who doesn’t instinctually or innately flap my hands or arms—it was never a stim that I developed independently—will deliberately and frequently choose to flap, especially in public, in order to call attention to myself, so that other people—whether autistic or not—might identify me as autistic. I use this as an outward sign, [just as some Muslim women might choose to wear hijab even in the absence of religious convictions about head coverings].20
It is unlikely that this openly attention-seeking performance would be universally appreciated by autistic people (or the Muslim performance by Muslims). Nevertheless, some activists insist that their disabilities—including treatable mental illnesses, like depression, anxiety, and even being suicidal21—are positives and liken them to other aspects of identity, which can be used for empowering forms of identity politics.
This politicized approach should be distinguished from accepting one’s impairments and embracing their reality in a psychologically positive way. It parallels the identity-first “I am Black”/“I am a person who happens to be Black” distinction made by critical race Theorists (see chapter 5). For instance, in his book No Pity: People with Disabilities Forming a New Civil Rights Movement, Joseph Shapiro objects to the idea that it is a compliment when an able-bodied person doesn’t think of a disabled person as disabled. He writes,
It was as if someone had tried to compliment a black man by saying “You’re the least black person I ever met,” as false as telling a Jew, “I never think of you as Jewish,” as clumsy as seeking to flatter a woman with “You don’t act like a woman.”22
Shapiro likens Disabled Pride to Gay Pride. Having a disability, he feels, should be seen as laudable:
Like homosexuals in the early 1970s, many disabled people are rejecting the “stigma” that there is something sad or to be ashamed of in their condition. They are taking pride in their identity as disabled people, parading it instead of closeting it.23
While no one should be made to feel ashamed of their sexuality, race, religion, gender, or ability status, many disabled people probably disagree with the view that having a disability should be celebrated—and this is unlikely to help them find an effective treatment or remedy, if that’s what they want. And, despite what disability studies claims, this is not something they should be ashamed of wanting.
An additional problem arises when activists wish to take on a disability as an identity for the purposes of celebration or political empowerment, but do not wish medical practitioners to label them. This often arises from the postmodern knowledge principle, which rejects the idea that doctors are any more qualified to diagnose disability than anyone else. This encourages people to self-diagnose, for the purpose of belonging to an identity group. A documented conversation between Lydia X. Y. Brown and Jennifer Scuro provides an example (LB and JS, respectively):
LB: People do say to me, “I think I’m Autistic but I don’t really want to say that because I’ve never been diagnosed,” that is, given a diagnosis by someone with letters after their name. My response is: “Well, it’s not up to me to tell you how you should or should not identify,” but I don’t believe in giving power to the medical-industrial complex and its monopoly over getting to define and determine who counts and who does not count as Autistic …
JS: Yes, once I started to get into the territory of diagnosis, once I started playing around with the problem of diagnostic thinking when it is only left to trained diagnosticians, this allowed me to challenge how all of us must contend with thinking diagnostically.24
This exchange seems to advocate that people self-identify as disabled for the purposes of gaining a group identity (postmodern theme), to engage in postmodern disruption of the knowledge-production capacity of medical science (postmodern knowledge principle), or as a politically motivated disruption of the dominant belief that disability is a thing to be avoided or treated (postmodern political principle). It is unclear how any of this can be helpful to disabled people.
Disability studies and activism and the social model of disability started off well. Despite some worrying conceptual shifts, their initial aims were to place less onus on disabled people to adapt themselves to society and more on society to accommodate them and their disabilities. This change of emphasis, which has been incorporated into various laws, is likely to increase disabled people’s access to employment and social opportunities from which they have historically been barred. This was a similar goal to those of second-wave feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and Gay Pride, and it was fitting that scholarship should continue this work by studying social attitudes towards disability with a view to improving them.
Unfortunately, the incorporation of applied postmodern Theory into disability studies scholarship seems to have derailed it. This identity-obsessed approach pressures disabled people to identify with, celebrate, and politicize their disabilities. While disabled people can be constrained by an overuse of medical labels, a deep suspicion of medical science in itself is unlikely to benefit disabled people or anyone else. Intersectionality is likely to confuse and complicate the issue of prejudice against the disabled—entirely unnecessarily—by burying it under a mountain of “overlapping discourses of privilege.” The use of critical race Theory as a model to insist that disabilities are ultimately social constructions is particularly unhelpful, given that—unlike social categories of race—physical and mental impairments are objectively real and people often dislike having them because of the way they materially affect their lives (and not because they have been socialized to believe they should dislike them).
It is especially unethical to demand that disabled people take on their disability as an identity and celebrate it in order to disrupt ableist cultural norms, in an application of the postmodern political principle. While some disabled people may find comfort and empowerment in identify-first politicking, many won’t. Many disabled people wish they weren’t disabled—which is perfectly reasonable—and seek ways to improve or mitigate their condition for themselves and others. This is their right. Accusations of “internalized ableism” are presumptuous and insulting. Disabled people may not wish to be identified primarily by their disability but by other aspects of themselves they feel better represent who they are. Worthwhile disability activism would support this, rather than problematizing it.
One problem with taking on a physical or mental disability as an identity is that it disincentivizes any possible mitigation of the disability. This might, for example, lead people to problematize or refuse technology that allows deaf people to hear, because they can no longer identify as deaf afterwards. While individuals should do as they wish, this suggests a profound confusion of priorities. Most deaf people whose hearing impairment could be straightforwardly25 remedied by a hearing aid would not consider rejecting that intervention, and they are unlikely to be helped by people calling them identity-traitors for taking it. Disability studies and activism therefore fail to speak for the people for whom they claim to advocate, and inhibit disabled people’s ability to get the diagnoses and treatments they desire. Furthermore, focusing on one’s identity as a disabled person can devalue other aspects of an individual, which could lead to greater fulfillment and quality of life. Given the current problem with the rise of victimhood culture, which assigns superior status to marginalized identities,26 there may be an increased temptation to become more rather than less disabled and to focus overwhelmingly on one’s disability. This is particularly troubling if people can self-identify as disabled without a professional diagnosis or medical care. In this regard, disability studies is a well-intentioned failure.
The problems in disability studies are mirrored in a related field called fat studies. Like disability studies, fat studies began in the United States in the 1960s, as fat activism, and has appeared in many forms since, but it has only recently established itself as a distinct branch of identity studies. It also draws strongly on queer Theory and feminism, especially as it has developed in the United Kingdom, and has a strongly intersectional focus. It attempts to portray negative perceptions of obesity as akin to racism, sexism, and homophobia, and it explicitly rejects science. In postmodern fashion, it focuses on the social construction of obesity and seeks to empower obese people to reject medical advice and embrace a supportive community “knowledge” that sees obesity favorably. Fat studies relies strongly on the postmodern knowledge principle, which sees knowledge as a construct of power, perpetuated in discourses—here, discourses that are rooted in the “hatred” of fat people (fatphobia), combined with misogyny and racism. Fat studies is therefore prone to Theorizing highly complex frameworks of oppression, evincing a radical skepticism of science, and advocating “other ways of knowing,” which include personal experiences, Theory, feminism, and even poetry.
Though it is most popular in the United Kingdom, fat activism probably began in the United States, with the founding of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)27 in 1969 and the development of the Fat Underground28 in the 1970s. Fat activism originated squarely within the set of social, cultural, and political changes that began to elevate cultural and identity studies, and postmodernism, in around the 1970s. However, fat activism seems to have taken on postmodern traits much more recently than the other types of identity studies that rely on applied postmodern Theory. This is probably because fat studies did not become a scholarly field in its own right until quite recently, although feminist scholars had long Theorized about pressure on women to be slim. Fat studies insists that pervasive and societally accepted “fatphobia” prevented it from being taken seriously and regards as fatphobic any study of obesity as a dangerous and (usually) treatable medical condition.
Historically, the scholarship and activism that would go on to become fat studies was called fat feminism. This was strongly associated with the radical and radical-lesbian branches of feminism and consequently had a limited following. This did not change much until the 1990s, when the body positivity movement, which focused on acceptance and celebration of “fat bodies,” emerged from within liberal currents in society. A related Health at Every Size movement, which seems to have existed in various forms since the 1960s, became prominent in 2003 when the Association for Size Diversity and Health trademarked the phrase.29 In 2010, Linda Bacon, a scholar of physiology and psychotherapy, wrote a popular book called Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight,30 which argues that bodies of all dimensions can be healthy.31 The medical consensus opposes this idea.32
Fat studies developed rapidly, began taking on an applied postmodern approach, and soon became thoroughly intersectional, making illogical claims like: “we cannot dismantle weight/size oppression without addressing the intersectionality of all oppressions.”33 Fat studies’ claim to be an independent discipline was strengthened in 2012, when the journal Fat Studies was founded. The journal explicitly likens negative opinions about obesity—including concerns about possible health implications of being overweight or obese—to prejudice against people for their immutable characteristics, claiming, “Fat Studies is similar to academic disciplines that focus on race, ethnicity, gender, or age.”34
The development of fat studies has been comprehensively detailed by Charlotte Cooper, arguably the leading fat scholar and the author of Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement (2016). Cooper, who is British, notes the virtual abandonment of fat activism by radical feminism and its revival by postmodern feminism:
The origins of fat feminism are immersed within a feminism that is problematic, maligned, unfashionable and obscure, that is, radical lesbian feminism, including, at times, lesbian separatism. Critiques of this feminism surfaced within queer, third wave and postmodern feminisms because of, for example, its essentialism and its fundamentalism.35
Within fat studies, it is common to address negative attitudes towards obesity alongside racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disableism, and imperialism, even though there is strong evidence that obesity is a result of consistently consuming more calories than are needed and carries significant health risks. Fat activism and fat studies are now predominantly intersectional and feminist, and draw heavily on queer Theory and the Butlerian politics of parody.36 In her book, Charlotte Cooper describes a fat-activism event that was staged in response to the 2012 London Olympic Summer Games—which are deemed intrinsically fatphobic in the extreme—called “Fattylympics,” in which deliberately silly quasi-athletic events were mockingly engaged in at a London park as an act of strategic resistance and protest.
Queer Theory and Judith Butler have been particularly influential in the development of fat studies. Charlotte Cooper begins her book, for example, by declaring it to be “openly queer” and by “encouraging fat activists to resist the pull of access and assimilation, if they can, and consider queer strategies to reinvigorate the movement.”37 Again, Foucault’s concept of “biopower”—in which scientific discourses are argued to have undue power as producers of knowledge, which is then perpetuated at all levels of society via discourse (ways of talking about things)—is utilized, in a rather paranoid fashion. As Cooper writes,
In The History of Sexuality, and elsewhere, power is not enshrined within authorities feeding down to the lowliest subject, it is a dynamic field in which everyone is implicated.38
She also claims,
Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality is commonly used to theorise bodies in relation to power and has been used by people interested in how fat people are socially controlled, stratified, surveilled, regimented, patrolled, and self-governing.39
This isn’t merely a quirk of Charlotte Cooper’s. Kathleen LeBesco, senior associate dean of academic affairs at Marymount Manhattan College, takes a similar stance in The Fat Studies Reader.40 This belief in hidden discourses, through which power is conveyed and discipline upheld, runs through Fat Activism texts at all levels and calls upon, not only Foucault but also Judith Butler.41 For Cooper, “Obesity discourse is totalitarian, by which I mean it presents itself as the only authority on fat, nothing else counts.”42 For fat scholar Marilyn Wann,
Every person who lives in a fat-hating culture inevitably absorbs anti-fat beliefs, assumptions, and stereotypes, and also inevitably comes to occupy a position in relation to power arrangements that are based on weight. None of us can ever hope to be completely free of such training or completely disentangled from the power grid.43
Let’s take a broader view for a moment. Visualize a power grid. This is the conception of human society that constitutes the postmodernist worldview. It posits that we are born and positioned by elements of our identity, such that we have different levels of access to power—privilege is like being plugged in to the network—and we learn to perform our position and thus “conduct” the power through ourselves as part of the system, often without ever knowing that the grid is there. This learning is achieved mostly by socialization into “hegemonic” identity roles constructed and accepted by society and is rarely intentional. By performing our roles, we uphold the social and cultural assumptions that grant and deny access to power. Furthermore, access to power has an automatically corrupting influence, which leads us to perform our roles, thus socializing ourselves and others into accepting the inequities of the system, justifying our own access, and rationalizing the exclusion of others. This is all done through discourses—ways we speak about things, including how we represent them in nonverbal media. As this conception of society, which originated in the obscure and complex language of the original postmodernists, has evolved, it has consolidated into a belief system. Thus, we frequently see Theorists state this explanation with the confidence of an objective belief—something that would not have been possible for the first postmodernists.
In order to navigate this complex grid of power-laden discourses, one has to first be trained to detect it. This is what critical Theory was invented to do. So, in a circular, self-justifying argument, Theory insists that we need Theory. For some fat studies scholars, gender—thus intersectional feminism and queer Theory—is most significant:
Sexism has become a deeply coded set of behaviors that are difficult to unlock if you don’t know how to see them. It can take special access to education and language in order to unveil sexist behavior. Often, that critical language is cast as suspect, overly intellectual, or a product of paranoid fantasy.44
For others, although the intersectional and queer approach to evaluation and disruption is both productive and appropriate, everything ultimately comes back to capitalism. Charlotte Cooper, for instance, makes a very similar argument to that made by Goodley in Disability Studies. For Cooper, the forces of “neoliberalism” (approximately: capitalist society) pressure people to adapt themselves to society, instead of requiring society to accommodate them. Cooper is therefore deeply critical of the body positivity movement, which she considers a form of “gentrification” in its “emphasis on individualism rather than collectivity.”45 Her issue is that body positivity places the responsibility on individuals to love their own bodies and be happy in them, rather than on society to stop viewing obesity negatively—a problematic approach, which is sometimes referred to as responsibilizing them. As one member, “Liz,” of what Cooper called her “fat community,” who she interviewed for Fat Activism, argues, “Fat hatred is fuelled by capitalism because these companies create products that are all about making fat people skinny,”46 and “using capitalism as a basis for activism illustrates how, within the gentrification of fat activism it is access rather than social transformation that has become the main motivator.”47
If this sounds like a paranoid fantasy, it’s because it is. The idea of an intersectional power grid surrounding fat activism is needlessly messy. Biology and the science of nutrition are misunderstood as a form of Foucauldian “biopower,” which constrains and disciplines people. Medical science around obesity is misunderstood to impose an oppressive, disciplinary narrative on people. “[C]alling fat people ‘obese’ medicalizes human diversity”48 and “Medicalizing diversity inspires a misplaced search for a ‘cure’ for naturally occurring difference,”49 Marilyn Wann tells us in the foreword to the Fat Studies Reader, echoing Foucault. Kathleen LeBesco likens obesity to homosexuality and reasons that, just as homosexuality has now been recognized as a naturally occurring phenomenon that does not need a cure, so too must obesity be similarly recognized. Despite the ample evidence that obesity increases the risk of serious diseases and early death, while homosexuality in itself does not, LeBesco also speculates that obese people who think their weight is a problem have been conditioned into accepting their oppression:
That fat and queer people would heartily embrace science and medicine as a solution to their socially constructed problems is redolent of Stockholm syndrome—after all, science and medicine have long been instrumental in oppressing fat and queer people, providing argument after argument that pathologize the homosexual or “obese” individual (whether the mind or the body).50
One answer to this is to embrace or even increase one’s fatness. “It takes time to make a fat body,” fat studies scholar Allyson Mitchell writes; “it takes even more time to make a politicized fat body.”51 LeBesco goes even further, arguing that “scientific knowledge doesn’t reveal all there is to know,”52 hinting that fatphobia is motivated by eugenics, and advocating the use of social and political tools to deal with fat hatred. By contrast, emphasizing the value of health is cast as a problematic ideology called healthism.
Healthism is bolstered by nutritionism, which is an allegedly excessive focus on the relevance of the nutritional value of foods to the study of nutrition and dietetics (diet and its impacts on health). There are parallel “critical” fields of dietetics and nutrition studies, which seek to make those fields about Social Justice instead of about diet and nutrition. Lucy Aphramor and Jacqui Gingras, for instance, deplore the way studies of diet and nutrition are typically based on science:
Dietetics recognizes knowledge as that which can be supported by dominant scientific literature developed around rigorous, quantifiable scientific methods. Such rational knowing has implications for how dietetics is taught and practiced.53
And
But to uphold the rigor of the scientific convention limits engagement with meaning making: language is not a neutral tool but rather a powerfully charged political vector. The words that we use here influence our ability to generate possibilities.54
Rather than using science to understand diet and nutrition and their health implications, these critical dieticians “have instead chosen to engage poetry as a way of ‘crafting a praxis-oriented culture’ and troubling the status quo.”55 They urge a “rethink of how dietetic attitudes toward fatness and gender play a role in legitimating and constructing science.”56 This seems unlikely to advance any of the relevant fields of study or to help anyone do anything other than temporarily feel special.
The book Critical Dietetics and Critical Nutrition Studies, aimed at undergraduates, is therefore extremely troubling. While the Health at Every Size approach stopped short of denying medical science and instead used dubiously interpreted medical studies to claim one could be healthy at any weight, Critical Dietetics describes science as no more useful than any other approach to understanding food, nutrition, diet, and fatness:
Although we do not wholly reject the scientific method as a means of creating knowledge about the world, a critical orientation rejects the notion that it is even possible to produce knowledge that is objective, value-free, and untouched by human bias. A critical orientation similarly rejects the idea that any one way of creating knowledge about the world is superior to another or is even sufficient…. As such, [Critical Dietetics] draws on poststructuralism and feminist science (two other windows) that hold that there is not one truth that can be generated about any single thing, that multiple truths are possible depending on who is asking and for what purpose, and that knowledge is not apolitical even if it is considered positivist (i.e. value neutral or unbiased).57
This is as explicit a rejection of objective reality as it is possible to get. “Post-structuralism and feminist science” are used to dismiss the overwhelming evidence that nutrition plays a significant role in health and that obesity increases the risk of heart disease, several cancers, and diabetes—not to mention polycystic ovary syndrome, joint problems, mobility problems, and respiratory problems—and is strongly correlated with early death. This “fatphobic” health denialism is the approach taken by Cooper too. She advocates “research justice,” in which empirical studies of obesity can be swapped out at will for “embodied community knowledge”58 in order to “unlock knowledge that has already been generated by fat people.”59
Fat studies and fat activism seem to have started in various different places at different times and have many strands. In addition to its radical lesbian feminist origins, fat activism includes a celebratory body positivity movement, a dubious but popular Health at Every Size model, and (recently) an intersectional queer feminist branch with its associated scholarship—which is to say Theory. The proliferation of these approaches strongly suggests that there is a need for some kind of advocacy and community for obese people. Fat activism could have a valuable role to play in society, if it could counter discrimination and prejudice against obese people and provide a support network, without descending into radical social constructivism, paranoia, and science denial.
Sadly, fat studies is currently among the most irrational and ideological forms of scholarship-activism in identity studies. A latecomer to the party, it has had to incorporate so many existing forms of identity-driven Theory, without having an internally consistent framework of its own, that it has become highly messy and confusing—veering from critical race to feminist to queer Theory, while weaving in anticapitalist rhetoric and ideas taken from disability studies. Fat studies spends a great deal of time trying to associate itself with forms of activism and scholarship that address prejudice against people on the grounds of immutable characteristics like race, sex, and sexuality, although this is frequently unconvincing due to the evidence that obesity is a result of overeating. Again, a productive form of activism could work against the idea that overeating is simply the result of a lack of self-discipline or of greed and look at the psychological and physiological issues that make this problem hard to overcome for so many people—but this is not the approach fat studies takes. Instead, it has adopted the postmodern knowledge and political principles, applies the four postmodern themes, and integrates these into an approach that otherwise very much resembles that of a support group that asserts itself as rigorous.
This also leaves fat activism vulnerable to the criticism that it undermines other forms of activism by attempting to claim too close a kinship with them. The idea that obesity is just like homosexuality, for example, could threaten the hard-won recent consensus that homosexuality is innate, value-free, and perfectly healthy. It is also clearly unethical to accuse obese people of Stockholm syndrome or internalized fatphobia if they are unhappy being overweight. But, as erasing the individual in favor of group identity and focusing on the power of language are primary concerns in fat studies, it considers this gambit both necessary and virtuous.
Above all, this form of fat activism is potentially dangerous. People who find it very difficult to manage their weight and suffer from low self-esteem as a result can be motivated to reject the medical consensus that obesity is a serious health problem of epidemic proportions. If fat activism succeeds in attaining the status currently assigned to feminist and antiracist activism, doctors, scientists, and researchers could feel intimidated to provide factual information to the obese—which would limit the ability of obese individuals to make informed choices about their health.
In sum, fat studies is hardly a rigorous approach to studying anything and yet it has found a home within the various fields of study that might collectively be called Social Justice scholarship. These fields vary widely, though they have enough in common to be readily identifiable: they are usually entitled “critical X” or “X studies,” where X is whatever they want to complain about, disrupt, and modify, in accordance with the postmodern knowledge and political principles. Despite addressing a range of concerns, which encompass almost all human endeavors, they share one common element: Theory, applied in a form that treats the underlying postmodern assumptions as objectively real. It is to this Theory that we must now turn our attention.