Fat Liberation and Activism

Roman Kavanagh

Opinions Editor

The human body is politicized in so many ways. Whether it is sex, gender, race or color, we are often defined by these little things that make up our identities. But what about size? On 7 April, 2025, Wesley Bishop came to Rhode Island College to deliver a workshop on Fat Liberation and Activism. In it, he discussed the ways in which body size activism is growing and adapting to our ever changing world.

Bishop is an assistant professor of history at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. There, he teaches public and American history. His most recent book “Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism,” explores how body size activists have engaged with social media to promote their messages and the drawbacks that they have faced throughout.

Fat liberation and body size activism began largely on the platform Tumblr, Bishop says. It has spread onto many platforms since and has taken on multiple names and approaches.

The first approach is body positivity. This is one that many people have heard of before, essentially a line of thought that says we should have an internalized sense of positive body image that focuses on “feeling good about yourself no matter how you look.”

Photo by Roman Kavanagh

This approach is countered somewhat by body neutrality, a second approach which came out in response to body positivity. Body neutral activists argue we should feel “neither good nor bad about your body.” Instead, this approach argues, we should treat it as a non-moralized part of ourselves that is individual in its needs and form. This approach is particularly useful to doctors, who have often stigmatized what a “good” or a “bad”  body looks like and altered their treatment as a result.

Finally, there is fat liberation activism. This branch is more historical and political than the other two. It originated through “different groups in the 1970s that formed groups like the Fat Collective.” Their primary goal was to address the ways oppression externalized itself in our society and to address structural inequality. Things like “public transportation, seating, and health care” are all things which fat liberation activists seek to make more inclusive in order to accommodate different body sizes in the infrastructure of our communities. Broader movements such as the anti-corset movement and several anti-colonial movements can also be associated with this branch.

A large part of Bishop's argument dealt with social media and censorship. He talked about the ways in which a bias in technology exists against body size influencers and fat individuals in general. One example he gave was with the algorithm, particularly robot scans. Sites such as Instagram use robot scan technology which surveys their platforms for nudity, removing or hiding posts which are at risk of nudity according to robot censors. However, this technology is not advanced enough to recognize that more skin does not necessarily mean more nudity, and therefore users with larger bodies are more subject to this type of discrimination. Another way in which many people are targeted is through user reporting. Bishop argued that user reporting can and often is weaponized against body size activists and fat users. Misogynistic users often target women for harassment, using the reporting feature as a weapon to punish them for rejecting their advances or not giving them the attention they believe they deserve. With user reporting, “You’re basically inviting hate campaigns into the arena to judge these things,” Bishop says.

It's extremely important that college students understand and engage in body size activism. Especially for those younger among us, body size activism is an often overlooked but important branch of pursuit. The result of body size discrimination is prominent in our society in the form of harassment, eating disorders, and infrastructural injustice. Increased understanding of these issues is the pathway towards dismantling these injustices.