Weight Stigma and Public Health: Challenges to Policy-Making

Dear colleagues,

Weight stigma is the experience of encountering adverse attitudes or treatment based on one’s size or weight. Weight stigma comprises intra- and interpersonal discrimination and systemic and structurally rooted discriminatory biases, such as those in policy. While weight stigma is increasingly acknowledged as a social justice issue and contributor to poor health (Hatzenbuehler, Phelan, and Link, 2013), stigmatizing discourse and initiatives can still infiltrate public health messaging, health services, and health policy. Actors from numerous sectors express concern over “body shaming” as a means to motivate citizens, yet alternative structural interventions to remediate weight stigma are lacking. What appears most glaringly absent is a critical engagement of the structural roots of weight stigma and how those roots engage intersectionally with other forms of oppression (Combahee River Collective, 1977; Crenshaw, 1990). The intent of this Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health entitled “Weight Stigma and Public Health: Challenges to Policy-Making” is to interrogate the manifestation, prevalence, and experience of weight stigma in underexplored health contexts, policies, and discourses, and identify strategies for intervention.

The editors welcome inquiries regarding submission topics. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• How has health policy and policy-making inscribed weight stigma throughout history from national and/or international perspectives?
• How does weight stigma function as a social determinant of health? How does weight stigma intersect with other social determinants of health?
• What are the epistemological and methodological challenges in measuring weight stigma, and then using that data in developing policy to counter weight stigma?
• What are the implications of weight stigma among child and adolescent populations who are also subject to weight-based policies in the name of population health?
• How does the framing of health policy discourse reinforce/challenge weight stigma?
• What health policies would benefit wellbeing without re-inscribing weight stigma?
• How do boundaries among co-existing permutations (body positivity, fat acceptance, fat activism, fat studies, etc.) that seek to end weight bias bolster or detract from socially just policy?
• How do novel health threats produce policies that re-inscribe weight stigma?
• What social structures, including health policy, reinforce or disrupt weight stigma?
• What interventions, policies, language, and legislation have or have the potential to disrupt weight stigma and in what contexts? What approaches have proven effective?
• What other forms of marginalization intersect with weight stigma in health policy, messaging, and practice?
• How do other progressive social movements (i.e., food movements, feminism, LGBTQ rights, etc.) re-inscribe or challenge weight bias, and how might alliances help to advocate for health policy that counter weight bias?
• What would constitute weight-politicized public health?

Prof. Dr. Natalie D Riediger
Dr. Andrea Bombak
Dr. Jennifer Brady
Dr. Jacqui Gingras
Guest Editors

References

1. Combahee River Women’s Collective (1977). Combahee River Collective Statement.
2. Available online: https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/the-combahee-river-collective-statement.html (accessed on 8 May 2020).
3. Crenshaw, K. Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Legal Review 1990, 43, 1241.
4. Hatzenbuehler, M.L.; Phelan, J.C.; Link, B.G. Stigma as a fundamental cause of population health inequalities. American Journal of Public Health 2013, 103, 813–821.

Manuscript Submission Information

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