ABSTRACT
As public discourse has increasingly entrenched a view fatness as a major cause of disease burden in western countries, so too has stigmatization of fat people become an endemic feature of cultural, social, and psychic life. One of the main goals of fat acceptance movements is to remove this stigma, and a considerable body of research in social psychology and related fields has developed around creating and testing the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce weight stigma. In reviewing the extant body of work around weight stigma reduction, we are less interested in the outcomes or effectiveness of particular approaches; instead, we turn a critical lens on the types of interventions carried out and the materials and the messages presented to participants as part of these interventions. Although weight stigma reduction interventions are clearly motivated by a desire to reduce animosity and improve the lives of fat people, we worry that elements of their design may have the paradoxical effect of perpetuating and legitimizing some aspects of the negative stereotypes of fat people. In this chapter, we will review the typical forms of stigma reduction interventions with a critical eye towards the issues that researchers need to consider in designing interventions that embody the values of critical fat scholarship.
