#69: Why do we need to de-medicalize fatness?

with Marquisele Mercedes

live September 8th

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In this episode we discuss…

  • what listeners should know about fat studies, and how scholarship on fat studies and race/ism intersects

  • how systems of oppression are replicated even in spaces where they are being challenged

  • why Mikey centers fat black people in her work

  • why we can’t discuss sizeism or weight stigma without discussing racism

  • lack of diversity on the full bloom podcast and its impact

  • how racism and sizeism show up on the playground

  • BMI report cards and Mikey’s painful personal experience with this intervention

  • what harmful messages children may internalize from well-meaning public health programs

  • Mikey’s concerns about the scientific quest to erase fatness

  • the problem with calling “obesity” an epidemic

  • how to address weight stigma at its root and go beyond education

  • the power of language

  • why Mikey recommends targeting change in the community rather than at an institutional or policy level

  • Mikey’s recommended resources for listeners

This week we’re joined by Marquisele Mercedes, a writer and doctoral student working at the intersection of public health, fat studies, and scholarship on race/ism. We discuss the need for intersectional representation in spaces challenging oppression, how racism and sizeism show up on the playground, why language policies don’t work, and much more. In this conversation encompassing both academic scholarship and lived experience, listeners will think critically about the language we use with each other and imagine how much safer, humane, and healthier the world could be if we learned to de-medicalize fatness.

Marquisele Mercedes is a writer, creator, and doctoral student from the Bronx, New York. As a Presidential Fellow at the Brown University School of Public Health, she’s crafted an interdisciplinary academic program to complement her work at the intersection of critical public health studies, fat studies, and scholarship on race/ism. She is broadly interested in how racism, anti-Blackness, and fatphobia have shaped health care, research, and public health promotion and training. She is an affiliated researcher with the Center for Body Image Research and Policy at the University of Missouri and the Stigma, Objectification, Bodies, and Resistance Lab at Western University. Her ultimate goal is to push the field of public health in alignment with the values of long-time movements for liberation, justice, and abolition.

She is passionate about using public scholarship and various mediums to make science and research more accessible to those outside of academic institutions, as well as reshape health-related scholarship and interventions at multiple levels to make the world safer for fat people of color. She writes frequently about fat politics and race/ism in the sciences and culture, often with a particular emphasis on the public health space. Her 2020 article “The Unbearable Whiteness and Fatphobia of “Anti-Diet” Dietitians” was viewed over 70 thousand times and is regularly used as a reference for the contemporary commodification of the body liberation movement. She is currently cultivating an educational community at Patreon through Fattening, an online space for her work and supporters.

She’s served as a member of the Future of NAAFA Committee for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and was the creator and convener of the Fat Studies Critical Reading Group, a discussion space for those connected to the critical study of fatness and related axes of oppression. She has a BA with honors in English Literature, Language, and Criticism from Hunter College, CUNY, where she was a proud Ronald E. McNair Scholar. She also has a certificate in Public Policy with an emphasis on social welfare policy from the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.

Connect with Mikey on her website, Twitter, Instagram, Medium, and Patreon.

Resources mentioned or recommended:

Jordan Best