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This author says even before Ozempic, the body positivity movement didn't address deeper issues

Weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have thrown a wrench into the conversation about diet culture in America today. Especially since it comes after a decade of talk about body positivity and fat acceptance. 

From Lizzo to plus-size clothing to plus-size models on every runway, it seemed like we were starting to see real change when it comes to how we talk about fatness and healthiness. But then, came Ozempic.

Drugs like these were originally intended to treat type 2 diabetes, but it quickly became a cultural phenomenon, limiting supply as celebrities and wealthy clients ordered it up for its appetite-suppressing effects. 

So, what does it all say about how far we’ve actually come in body acceptance? Was body positivity a big lie? 

To talk more about it, The Show was joined by Breanne Fahs. She’s a professor in the women and gender studies program at Arizona State University and author of the forthcoming book "Fat and Furious: All About Resistance to Fatphobia in Our Diet-obsessed Culture." 

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: The body positivity movement of the last decade, what did it accomplish or didn't?

BREANNE FAHS: Well, I mean, we certainly saw some important shifts. So, you know, the, the visibility of Lizzo, for example, was huge. The the notion that different bodies could be even visible started to change. But, you know, these were pretty, pretty tepid things that really didn't get us where we need to be because really what it ultimately ended up happening is that it got absorbed into capitalism, right? So we got absorbed into a framework of consumption where good bodies just meant more ways sell you things. And so body positivity became a sort of tagline of ways to sell us things. Brands to identify themselves as, you know, kind of in favor of diversity in some ways, which then made them more profitable.

I mean, you know, it really, I think what really depresses me about it is not so much that body positivity was limited or not even its intentions, which I think were actually quite good, but just how rapid that process is where something that has a liberatory intent ends up getting taken up as a way to market and sell and make profit.

LAUREN GILGER: Do you think we at least were able to like, in the public conversation, kind of like separate the conversation around healthiness and fatness and sort of say like, you know, one isn't necessarily the same as the other?

FAHS: Yeah, I think that was a very important part of that. You know, my main critiques were that I just really wanted to see two things happen, that didn't happen. One was the structural analysis of fatness. So in the body positivity model, it focuses very much on the individual intrapsychic experiences and to a certain degree, a little bit into a community sense of you and your friend group or you and your family, or maybe you and your community can feel better about their bodies. But we missed the structural analysis and critique of why fatness is stigma in the first place.

The other thing it missed, which I deal a lot with in the new book, is thinking about emotion. So again, the the reasons why we feel so intensely negatively towards fatness and towards diverse bodies is a lot of ways because we think about those bodies with such contempt, disgust, negative affect. We have a whole specter inside of ourselves of bodies that we don't want to become or bodies that carry the weight of fear and paranoia and you know, right, sort of loss. So I think what we have to really look at when we think about taking the good parts of body positivity is really moving into those areas.

How do we translate the impulse to want to do better with this, to want to feel better about diverse bodies and make that a better structural critique? But also think about the role of emotions and just how intense those are in driving oppression and in driving hierarchy.

GILGER: OK. So we're kind of in the midst of that movement and then comes along Ozempic and it kind of drops a bomb into this conversation in a way. Like suddenly we have this injection that you can take and it will make you lose weight and just kind of not be hungry. There's all this talk about food noise and it disappearing. Everyone in Hollywood seems to be using it. It's all over social media. How much did that change the conversation or maybe reveal the true nature of that conversation, I guess?

FAHS: Yeah, there's so many thoughts I have about Ozempic. In part, you know, one of the big disservices I think that's happened recently is the overemphasis on celebrities taking Ozempic and that erasure of of what these drugs potentially mean in a broader sense, right. So again, we're, we miss the structural, we miss the emotional, we focus on the intrapsychic and we especially focus on the conversation around celebrities and wealth and sort of body optimization kind of conversations, which really don't get us to where we need to be in the conversation around Ozempic because really Ozempic is, you know, brings up a whole host of things who gets access to it. How much weight do people actually lose, right.

If we're talking about people who are on the fatter end of the spectrum, it's a, it's a smallish percentage of weight, but it certainly isn't some kind of drug that transforms fat people into thin people, for example. And I think we kind of have missed that in the cultural conversation. But I think it also, you know, brings up these questions of, you know, that some of the same questions that we saw being during COVID, which is what happens when we really start to think about this mass of people who are "overweight," right? Who, this mass of fat people in the country who may have particular medical needs and how badly we do with that, right?

So one of the things I can't stop thinking about with COVID is how we had doctor after doctor after doctor and medical researcher, after medical researcher, after medical researcher saying that fat people were at increased risk of severe negative outcomes from COVID and they should be bumped to the top of the list in terms of vaccinations. And we just didn't do that for the most part, right. So their health risks were considered significant and yet we don't, we can't really think about fat people as a group as deserving of particular kinds of care.

Now, we sort of see that transplanted into these conversations about Ozempic where you know it's all about deserving this, who should be given this drug, whether this is taking shortcuts, whether it's cheating. Like all these, the conversations are just totally wrong, I think, and what we're not asking is what are the medical needs of fat people? What are the social needs of fat people? How do we think about the scale of this in a meaningful way? I mean, I, I see lots of articles that keep saying things like, if we give Ozempic to all the people who need it, then we, we will bankrupt Medicare. We kind of like, you know, private health insurance will skyrocket. I mean the the fear mongering, the sense that fatness is an overwhelming problem is still the leading discourse.

GILGER: So let's talk about the resistance here, right? Which is what you're looking at in this forthcoming book. What does it look like? Like what does success in this arena look like from that point of view? Pushing toward a true conversation about fat phobia in our culture and particularly in the medical world.

FAHS: You know, I always like to think about resistance in terms of the two frames of liberal and radical resistance. So the liberal resistance is how do we work within systems to make them better, which I think is very important and valid. So again, how do we improve medical school training? How do we think about less job discrimination against fat people? How do we think about seeing different diverse bodies in terms of leadership roles? How do we deal with incredible amounts of gender stigma with regard to fatness and how that trickles into every aspect of life?

The ones that I'm even more interested in are the more kind of systemic radical critiques, the ones, and by radical, I don't mean extreme as much as going to the root. You know, how did fatness get linked to moral failure? How do we think about that in relation to Black bodies? I mean, I think at its core, when we think about fat phobia, what we're really thinking about are those issues, right? So bodies that do not conform to traditional femininity of smallness, thinness, not taking up much space, all that, the the processes of colonialism, right? So we have to sort of do these bigger critiques in order to get, I think where we need to be in a more like liberal social change sense, right? If we, if we're working within systems, we also have to have our eye on why these things exist in the first place and we're missing that a lot of the time.

But there's wonderful, amazing forms of resistance going on all over the place. You know, whether that's challenging the ways that doctors are trained or how they speak to patients, empowering people to really think about how do you sort of confront this? How do you speak about your body in open ways? How do you sort of advocate for yourself? You know, it goes way beyond the sort of very limited frame of these kind of Ozempic conversations and also just thinking about, you know, what does it mean, live in a fat body, like with less and less of a, of a framework of moral failure.

You know, I, as a therapist, I say to patients all the time that weight gain is not a moral failure. You haven't failed. Having a body that is doing things is not a failure, right. And I think we still are so far from being able to really understand that framework as well because that's fed to us every single day all the time.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.