A Companion to Public Philosophy

16Public Philosophy and Fat Activism

LACEY J. DAVIDSON AND MELISSA D. GRUVER

1 Introduction

Fat activism is a fight to change the material conditions of fat people’s lives. Like other forms of activism explored in this volume, the theorizing that happens as a part of activism isn’t just an intellectual exercise, one that can stay within the walls of our institutions or the heights of our ivory towers. The theorizing must be public in order to be done at all, let alone be effective. One driving force of fat activism is to change beliefs and structures so that all people can live full and complex lives exactly as they are today. As noted by the historian Charlotte Cooper (2016), fat activism isn’t just one thing; as she puts it, “fat activism is a multifaceted affair” (Cooper 2016, p. 65). In this chapter, we aim to review what we take to be the primary philosophical claims or concerns of fat activism and introduce a framework for understanding a primary strategy of fat activism as public philosophy.

Before we delve into the primary work of this chapter, it will be useful to make some preliminary notes about terminology that reflect our thinking. For the purposes of this chapter, we will use professional philosopher for those who obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy and now work in academia. Within the academic discipline of philosophy, these are sometimes the only folks who get counted as philosophers at all. Starting with this view of what counts as a philosopher, public philosophy ...