This event is in partnership with WIDIC (Weight Inclusive Dietitians in Canada)
Journalistic coverage of new weight loss drugs seems to have taken over the North American media sphere, alongside a new discourse of “weight stigma.” Anti-obesity actors are aggressively redefining “stigma” against “people living with obesity” so that it can be used to sell weight loss drugs and rehabilitate the image of pharmaceutical companies. Against this backdrop, how can dietitians, nutritionists, and allied health professionals differentiate “weight stigma” discourses and initiatives that hurt fat people from the ones that help? What criteria should we use to evaluate new claims about what “weight stigma” is and how it should be combatted?
This workshop will help participants develop the skills to critique fat oppression in the age of Ozempic – the ability to assess whether a piece of “weight stigma”-related research or media perpetuates fat oppression and illustrate how it does so. This kind of critique depends on a novel, structural understanding of the connection between anti-obesity efforts and fat oppression, which Fox has termed “the anti-obesity assemblage.” The workshop will begin with an exploration of this new concept and how it facilitates critique of fat oppression. Workshop facilitators and participants will then collaboratively work through examples of material that claims to be “anti-weight stigma” but actually perpetuates fat oppression. Finally, workshop participants will have the opportunity to work through an example with their peers. Participants should leave feeling confident in their ability to detect covert anti-fatness and explain how medicalizing discourses of stigma entrench fat oppression in a new and deceptive way.
Presented by: Rachel Fox, Monica Kriete, MPH, Marquisele (Mikey) Mercedes
This event is in application for 1.5 CPEU hours for RDNs.