Tracking sentiments toward fat acceptance over a decade on Twitter

The fat acceptance (FA) movement aims to counteract weight stigma and discrimination against individuals who are overweight/obese. We developed a supervised neural network model to classify sentiment toward the FA movement in tweets and identify links between FA sentiment and various Twitter user characteristics. We collected any tweet containing either “fat acceptance” or “#fatacceptance” from 2010–2019 and obtained 48,974 unique tweets. We independently labeled 2000 of them and implemented/trained an Average stochastic gradient descent Weight-Dropped Long Short-Term Memory (AWD-LSTM) neural network that incorporates transfer learning from language modeling to automatically identify each tweet’s stance toward the FA movement. Our model achieved nearly 80% average precision and recall in classifying “supporting” and “opposing” tweets. Applying this model to the complete dataset, we observed that the majority of tweets at the beginning of the last decade supported FA, but sentiment trended downward until 2016, when support was at its lowest. Overall, public sentiment is negative across Twitter. Users who tweet more about FA or use FA-related hashtags are more supportive than general users. Our findings reveal both challenges to and strengths of the modern FA movement, with implications for those who wish to reduce societal weight stigma.

Introduction

Fat (i.e., adipose tissue) is one of the most misunderstood, controversial organs in the body. Not a day goes by without it making the headlines or ‘breaking’ the Internet. Reports about the world’s healthcare system being crippled by preventable obesity-related diseases jostle against advocates’ calls for fat acceptance, while the masses witness improbably sculpted bodies strut along the red carpet and photographs of celebrities supposedly falling off the ‘slim’ wagon. Fat means very different things to different people and is routinely conceptualized in everything from biological, medical, epidemiological, social, economic, and aesthetic, to moral terms. This multi-dimensionality makes it inherently fascinating, controversial, and emotive, but the abundance of studies and conflicting narratives have also resulted in great confusion and uncertainty about fat. Waisted provides an opportunity to re-centre our understanding by reviewing the biology of adipose tissue, exploring its important relationship to body shape and metabolic health, and considering the myriad social meanings of this enigmatic organ.

Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are

This book examines how and why people use the concept of coming out as a certain kind of person to resist stigma and collectively mobilize for social change. It examines how the concept of coming out has taken on different meanings as people adopt it for varying purposes—across time, space, and social context. Most other books about coming out—whether fiction, academic, or memoir—focus on the experience of gay men and lesbians in the United States. This is the first book to examine how a variety of people and groups use the concept of coming out in new and creative ways to resist stigma and mobilize for social change. It examines how the use of coming out among American lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) people has shifted over time. It also examines how four diverse US social movements—including the fat acceptance movement, undocumented immigrant youth movement, the plural-marriage family movement among Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, and the #MeToo movement—have employed the concept of coming out to advance their cause. Doing so sheds light on these particular struggles for social recognition, while illuminating broader questions regarding social change, cultural meaning, and collective mobilization.

Health at Every Size (HAES™) as a Reform (Social) Movement within Public Health

This article uses situational analysis to examine the history and current applications of Health at Every Size™ as a reform movement within public health, supported by fat political/social movements. Situational mapping highlights the vast and diverse worlds of public health broadly conceived, and how fat politics intersects with HAES. Drawing on personal and organizational accounts of how HAES emerged through pathways of existing fat political activism and health professional work, the author shows how HAES aligns closely with public health by centering health and is sometimes critiqued for ignoring fat acceptance. However, HAES generally uses a “both/and perspective”—both health and acceptance as key and inseparable pieces of HAES. HAES’s position as a reform movement within public health highlights tensions between a politics of reform and a politics of radical change within and between body activism movements.