Combating Fat Stigma Through Narrative

A series of narrative workshops helping make life better for fat people. Drawing on training in social science and medicine respectively, Rachel Fox and Kelly Park describe a series of workshops for medical students and fat participants designed to combat weight stigma. They outline their quantitative and qualitative findings, including the importance of physical presence in tackling the physiological and phenomenological aspects of fat phobia, the importance of narrative cues in permitting obliquely creative transformations of difficult experiences, and the importance of getting beyond one-sided correction of prejudice towards a more equal and reciprocal learning process.