Against Fatphobia!
Alex Woznica’s “Tax the Fat” article (The Link, Vol. 32, Issue 21) suggests fatness is the product of individual diet and exercise and thus a problem that can be solved by changing individual behaviours through taxation.
This ignores the fact that diet and exercise are questions of access. People who are marginalized by race, class, gender, or dis/ability have more barriers to accessing healthy food and leisure time.
Diet and exercise are also questions of spatial distribution such as public transportation, proximity of grocery stores, food banks, farmers’ markets, restaurants, housing systems, and recreational spaces. These components structure unequal social access to healthy food and leisure.
Most importantly, Woznica’s article reflects the discourse that fatness is unhealthy.
Fat people are shamed, policed, and marginalized on personal, social and institutional levels. For further reading, I suggest Julie Guthman’s Weighing In , available at the library.
Woznica’s article even makes fatness the scapegoat for economic crisis.
Rather than trying to make fatness disappear, we should challenge a society that causes such harm while it blames people for their own oppression.
In solidarity against fatphobia!
— Mike Lumsden
Independent Student
