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Fat Lib: How Fat Activism Expands the Obesity Debate

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Book cover Debating Obesity

Abstract

‘Nothing About Us Without Us!’ is a slogan that was popularised by disability rights activists and has been since taken up by other socially marginalised groups, for example transgendered people. It is a slogan that could easily apply to those seeking to create social change within fatphobic systems and discourses that dehumanise fat people. Such systems make us abstracted and absent, passive or pitiful sites for intervention. Yet where fat people are ironically ignored in statutory initiatives designed to ‘tackle obesity’, fat activism makes us very much present, it enables us to develop a voice, a sense of self, agency and collective power, and it awakens us to self-determination. It creates new possibilities not just for fat people but also for anyone with an interest in fatness.

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Authors
  1. Charlotte Cooper
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bath, UK

    Emma Rich

  2. University of Limerick, Ireland

    Lee F. Monaghan

  3. Coventry University, UK

    Lucy Aphramor

Copyright information

© 2011 Charlotte Cooper

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Cooper, C. (2011). Fat Lib: How Fat Activism Expands the Obesity Debate. In: Rich, E., Monaghan, L.F., Aphramor, L. (eds) Debating Obesity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304239_7

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