ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the intersections of race/racism, fat, and medical discourse. Specifically, the intersection of racism and fat phobia will be explored through my racialized fat body’s experiences in the health care system. I use an autoethnographic method to describe and analyse my experiences of racialized fatness through the following themes: how flesh becomes “problematic” or the instigation and reinforcement of racist fat shaming through fashion; and how I re-signify my flesh, or reimagining of my embodied realities through counter-discourses of race and fat pride. I use autoethnography to illustrate the processes by which medical discourses manifest at the intersections of fat and race, and of fat phobia and racism, highlighting spaces where my racialized fat body is perceived as evidence of an epidemic. I offer a site of resistance by shifting from oppressive perceptions to a new imagining of how we engage with medical discourse in order to reject and destabilize the quantification of health.
