Reflections on centering race and fatness in health and social care: Theoretical considerations for intersectionality


Sonia Meerai, Wilfrid Laurier University; May Friedman, Toronto Metropolitan University

Health and social care practices have discriminated against and excluded racialized fat bodies historically and into the present day. Recently, the literature has connected the historical, social and cultural implications, including anti-Black racist, and racist histories of measurement of BMI (body mass index) (Harrison, 2021; Strings, 2023). This measurement is highly utilized in western approaches to health and social care. Broadly, intersectionality theory has been part of health and social care research taking into consideration identities as impacted by structures. However, the essentialization of racialized fat bodies continues to permeate research pursuits, often making invisible the intersection of race and fatness altogether. This has made invisible the nuances of experiences of diverse racialized fat bodies. We have made contributions to expanding the literature on centering race and fatness within fat studies scholarship (Meerai, 2019; Friedman and Meerai, 2023; Adjei-Manu et al., [in press]). We have also engaged in research where fatness was centered for documenting experiences in health and social care settings (Martel et al., 2021; Heidebrecht et al., 2024). Although an intersectional framing guides our work, explicitly naming and centering the intersection of race and fatness has been and continues to be a priority in our community research pursuits. What we have learned from the centering of race and fatness has brought forward the pause to reflect on how we take up feminist approaches to intersectionality. Based on two community research projects, we engaged in a critical reflexive dialogue guided by critical reflexive process (Cooper and Burnett, 2006) and thinking with theory (Jackson and Mazzei, 2017). Critical reflexive process and thinking with theory provided us theoretical and methodological openings to uncover assumptions when applying an intersectional framework. One project centered fatness in experiences of health and social care. The other project explicitly centered race and fatness in overall experiences within and beyond health and social care. We documented the varying ways feminist approaches to intersectionality have made visible the intersection of race and fatness topically. In contrast, in our project where we centered race and fatness explicitly within an intersectional framing, highlighted the historical, social, cultural, political implications on issues beyond health and social care. It opened further possibilities for those involved in the research process, including ourselves. Race and fatness as an analytic framing provided space to document experiences as desirable and expansive rather than only as a site of deficit (tuck, 2009). An anti-racist and affirming stance to nuancing the theoretical application of feminist approaches to intersectionality by centering race and fatness is critical to moving away from essentialization of experience, eradicating the positioning of the racialized body as deficit and moving towards taking up expansive space. We conclude with an urgency on how to name and utilize a feminist approach to intersectionality that centres both race and fatness (strings, 2019). Working from a place of radical self-love, and taking up expansive space, we propose a new analytical framing that explicitly centres race and fatness.

This paper will be presented at the following session: