Fat Lives

This chapter provides an introduction to critical research on fat lives drawn from geographical and Fat Studies scholarship. The first section outlines the dominant ways in which fat bodies are framed within medicalised understandings of obesity in public health policy, medical research and geographical work. Deploying a critical geographical approach, which questions and challenges these approaches, it explores the ways in which fatness is associated with slow or premature death through research which rarely engages directly with the lives of fat people. In contrast, the second section outlines work which explores fat peoples’ lived experiences and the spatial contingencies of fat embodiment. This section focuses on the exclusions and stigma that fat people encounter in difference spaces alongside those spaces which enable fat joy and acceptance. Relatedly, this section also considers different forms of fat activism and the significance of crip, critical race, postcolonial and feminist theories and an intersectional approach for centring the rights and ambiguities of fatness which align with the theoretical and methodological possibilities afforded by cultural geographies. We conclude by offering some suggestions about what future, fat, cultural geographical research can do.