Emma Marija Atherton

Contributory injustice (a form of epistemic injustice) occurs when marginalized people are hindered in communicating their experiences to members of dominant groups, due to dominant groups’ collective ignorance of the ways marginalized communities have understood the world. This article demonstrates that medical consults can be sites of contributory injustice for fat patients. Fat patients’ testimonies concerning their experiences of medical fat-phobia are collected from 30 videos shared under #medicalfatphobia on TikTok. Reflexive thematic analysis of these testimonies demonstrates that practitioners’ reliance on obesity frameworks and ignorance of the ways fat communities have understood fat-ness and health (such as through Health At Every Size® frameworks)hinders fat patients in having their testimony taken seriously in medical consults, producing contributory injustice. In this way, medical fatphobia silences fat patients. This analysis enhances understanding of how medical fatphobia is enacted at the microlevel of patient–practitioner interactions through meso and macro politics of knowledge. It offers important considerations for ameliorating key aspects of medical fatphobia by directing us towards fostering conditions of contributory justice for fat patients: i.e. working to bolster the likelihood of fat patients’ concerns and claims being properly heard and attended to in medical consults.

In this paper I examine and analyze the moral language surrounding food and eating in contemporary diet culture. I look to three dieting subcultures - 'thinspiration', 'fitspiration' and contemporary 'wellness' culture. I argue that the vocabularies of these three subcultures are on a continuum, in that their moralizing messages reflect and embody the same gendered and racialized social prohibitions, taboos, and normativity around food, eating, and bodies. All three dieting subcultures reflect and reproduce cultural fatphobia - the social and material discrimination against fat people, and the gendered and racialized ideology in which fat bodies are seen as threatening and cast as socially abject. I argue that thinspo, fitspo, and wellness subcultures emerge as spaces which recognize fat abjectness and provide their members with different strategies for managing or mitigating the social 'danger' of food and the risk of becoming fat and socially abject. I also argue that the different moral vocabularies these subcultures use to discuss food and eating reflect these different strategies. Arguing that these three vocabularies are on a continuum with regards to the bodily and behavioral normativity they transmit is significant because while thinspo is popularly regarded as extreme and damaging, and while there is some popular critique of fitspo, mainstream ‘wellness’ culture receives much less popular critical scrutiny and is presently socially normalized. Seeing these rhetorics on a continuum enables us to see how the same social prohibitions and taboos against fatness are just as operative in mainstream society as they are in ‘fringe’ spaces recognized as harmful.