FAT FEMINISM: epistemology, health and media

Abstract

Fatphobia is a contemporary cultural, structural and institutionalized stigma: prejudice sustained by knowledge that identifies fat bodies as sick, without taking into account their subjectivities, histories, cultures. Health and the media support the discourse of pathologization of the fat body in the construction of an understanding of what it is to be healthy or sick. However, since the 1970s, fat women have denounced this condition as violence, since it does not take into account what this group thinks, knows and experiences. As resistance, a fat feminist movement emerges, which has as a central issue of their reflections and activism a denunciation of this violence, the revision of these pathologizing knowledges and the need to depatologize these bodies with the aim of providing dignity and respect to fat women, invisible in society. Such a process is demonstrated in this article through critical analysis, documentary research and bibliographic research, unraveling the mechanisms of pathologization and cultural depreciation of the fat body.