Weight Stigma, Citizenship, and Neoliberal Democracy

Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has illuminated how the rhetoric of an “obesity epidemic” in public health converges with everyday fat-shaming rhetoric to mark particular bodies as indicative of moral failing, intellectual debility, and civic unfitness. Sabrina Strings, Rachel Sanders, Amy Farrell, and others have shown that this stigmatization also reinforces racialized, gendered, and neoliberal conceptions of responsible citizenship. Yet critical analysis of these discursive effects rarely highlights their relationship to democratic theory and practice. Accordingly, this paper examines how anti-obesity and fat-shaming discourse casts doubt on the worthiness and capacity of fat subjects, especially women of color, to participate as full members of the demos whose needs, desires, and concerns merit democratic consideration. Crucially, the mechanisms of marginalization through fat-shaming function across a range of approaches to democratic theory, including liberal, republican, and deliberative approaches. Furthermore, the exclusion of fat subjects from the demos contributes to an impoverished and perverse image of democracy itself as a politics of austerity, self-denial, and separation from others.