Moralizing hunger: Cultural fatphobia and the moral language of contemporary diet culture

In this paper I examine and analyze the moral language surrounding food and eating in contemporary diet culture. I look to three dieting subcultures - 'thinspiration' (or 'thinspo', the idolization of extreme thinness), 'fitspiration' ('fitspo', the idolization of 'fit, toned' bodies) and contemporary 'wellness' culture. I argue that the vocabularies of these three subcultures are on a continuum, in that their moralizing messages reflect and embody the same gendered and racialized social prohibitions, taboos, and normativity around food, eating, and bodies. All three dieting subcultures reflect and reproduce cultural fatphobia - the social and material discrimination against fat people, and the gendered and racialized ideology in which fat bodies are seen as threatening and cast as socially abject. I argue that thinspo, fitspo, and wellness subcultures emerge as spaces which recognize fat abjectness and provide their members with different strategies for managing or mitigating the social 'danger' of food and the risk of becoming fat and socially abject. I also argue that the different moral vocabularies these subcultures use to discuss food and eating reflect these different strategies.

Arguing that these three vocabularies are on a continuum with regards to the bodily and behavioral normativity they transmit is significant because while thinspo is popularly regarded as extreme and damaging, and while there is some popular critique of fitspo, mainstream ‘wellness’ culture receives much less popular critical scrutiny and is presently socially normalized. Seeing these rhetorics on a continuum enables us to see how the same social prohibitions and taboos against fatness (particularly against women's fatness) are just as operative in mainstream society as they are in ‘fringe’ spaces recognized as harmful.