Saving the Planet for All? How a Rhetoric of Anti-Fatness and Ableism Undermines Climate Change Activism

Posted on by Gesine Wegner

Three years ago, in August 2018, Greta Thunberg and other young climate activists gained international recognition when they missed school for three weeks to protest in front of the Swedish parliament, demanding a noticeable increase in political action to prevent climate change. While U.S. climate activism and its countermovement started to gain traction in the 1990s, the more recent protests in Sweden have inspired many people across the globe to follow suit, forming the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement. However, a rhetoric of anti-fatness and ableism threatens to undermine the movement’s attempt to engage a diverse group of people in its cause. With this blog post, I want to challenge the use of popular slogans like “BURN FAT, NOT OIL,”…

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How (Not) to Eat a Taco – Queering Mexican Food Practices in VIDA

Posted on by Carolina Faller Moura

“Tacogate” is what actor Mishel Prada calls it. Thanks to the way Prada’s character, Emma, eats a taco in the very first episode of the STARZ show Vida (2018), the series immediately caused a stir. In a scene set at a Mexican restaurant in the East LA neighborhood Emma grew up in but has long not visited, she douses her carne asada taco in Valentina hot sauce and brings it to her mouth straight on, rather than tipping her head and biting it from the side, letting pieces of meat fall all over the table as she tears the tortilla with her teeth and then with her fingers. Her way of eating and especially her choice of condiment took people to Twitter to share memes of shock and…

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Sexy Food, Tasty Women: Challenging the Soft-Core Pornographization of (Wo)men’s Appetites

Posted on by Natalie Jovanovski

In LOVE Magazine’s 2017 advent calendar, model Emily Ratajkowski is featured rubbing spaghetti on her body as she rolls around seductively on top of a dining table. In a post-photoshoot interview, Ratajkowski professes her love of pasta and “being greased up in olive oil,” urging women to “do what [they] want” in the name of feminism. The shoot – which was intended to promote a ‘feminist’ message about choice in response to sexual assault allegations in Hollywood – used food coupled with the thin, white, pornographized, female body to express ‘female empowerment’; a trope that has been used in advertising many times before. As some feminist researchers have argued, these themes are commonplace in a postfeminist media landscape; one that embraces gender stereotypes and…

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Changing the Game of Sports Nutrition, Challenging the Ideal of “Athletic” Men? The Game Changers and Hegan Masculinity

Posted on by Jan Weber

The controversial documentary The Game Changers seeks to debunk the myth that plant-based proteins will never be as good as their animal counterpart. For those who have not seen the documentary, a quick look at the film poster might help to better understand what is at stake here: in the documentary, vegan athletes are depicted as so ultra-masculine that they also make their dietary choice “manly” and, therefore, do not challenge hegemonic ideals of masculinity. We see a strong arm, a clenched fist, and enlarged veins with green blood circulating through them. Next to this arm, green and white letters proclaim: “Fueled by the Truth: The Game Changers.” At first glance, the poster seems to announce a remake of the…

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The American Dream of Being Enough: The Story of Jean Nidetch, a Slim Entrepreneur

Posted on by Maria Wiegel

In 1963, patriarchal social structures in the United States seemed to be getting stirred up by female voices challenging the hegemonic imaginary woman, when Betty Friedan published her seminal book The Feminine Mystique. That same year, Jean Nidetch started a company helping women reduce their body weight: Weight Watchers, now called WW. By losing weight, as Marisa Meltzer argues in her book This is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (and Me) (2020), Nidetch “basically earned the American dream” (8) and then sold it as a commodity. Meltzer explains that “Jean had a Cinderella story for the ages. She was a maven and mogul who lost weight, spectacularly found her calling, and helped to create a national pastime and obsession that endures today” (276).…

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