Instead, this course explores how fat bodies are viewed in our culture. It also examines the resulting anti-fat attitudes and structural oppression experienced by fat individuals.
Fat people face discrimination in most settings in our world, including education, employment, housing, relationships, and in accessing healthcare. Anti-fat attitudes also impact on the health and wellbeing of non-fat people as well, as evidenced by children who diet, teenagers who develop eating disorders, and adults who struggle to engage with their lives fully because of weight anxiety.
Doctors are also less likely to speak about diet and exercise with non-fat patients; perhaps making assumptions about the individual's lifestyle and health behaviours based solely on their size.
As a discipline, Fat Studies is similar to Women's Studies, Mori Studies, Queer Studies and Disability Studies. These disciplines arose in response to negative debate around these identities.
Scholars began engaging in research that looked critically at what was known about each group and began to provide an alternative story. It has been argued by some that such qualifications have no place in tertiary institutions. I strongly disagree. These courses are a critical use of public investment, playing an important role in academia by asking questions, highlighting inequities in knowledge and developing ethical research practices. They are critical to scientific, historical, political, and historical debate. They should be central to our understanding of what it means to be a New Zealand citizen in the 21st Century.
Similar courses have been offered at Macquarie University in Australia and Dickinson College at Oregon State University and Lake Forest College at Chicago State University in the United States.
The primary textbook for the course is the Fat Studies Reader (New York University Press) which defines the discipline as, "an interdisciplinary field of scholarship marked by an aggressive, consistent, rigorous critique of the negative assumptions, stereotypes, and stigma placed on fat and the fat body".
The structure of the class has been largely guided by the interests of the students. Topics include the biopolitics of fatness, the pathologisation of fat bodies, anti-fat attitudes in healthcare and an alternative to traditional weight-based health models.
Students completing the course are identifying and discussing mainstream and alternative debate on fatness, analysing size as a social justice issue and critically appraising size oppression in society including health, media, employment and education.
It is my hope that this course will contribute to the growing recognition in New Zealand that fat-shaming and weight-based health models fail in their efforts to make us a country with lower human biomass while contributing to the oppression of fat people.
The Government should work to ensure that all citizens, regardless of size, are protected from oppression (as opposed to embarking on a programme to combat obesity).
One way the Government could fulfil their commitment to fat citizens is by updating employment and discrimination laws to include physical size alongside race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and religion. Maybe that's part of the plan?
-Cat Paus is a senior lecturer in the Institute of Education at Massey University.
-Business and civic leaders, organisers and interest groups can contribute opinions. The views expressed here are the writer's personal opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz
