Moving beyond Defense: Prejudice in Conversation
The diversity of People Magazine panel of three "celebrities who have publicly battled weight issues" which included two women who had taken (extreme perhaps) actions of stomach reduction surgery towards "thinness", and a plus size model is more than a little problematic. This is not to say that their opinions on the question of images of “fatness� is invalided -as the discussion proves. But it's important to consider what kind of conversation is being advances? What is revealed in their comments like “I still work day and night to be thin, because that's who I want to be� (Holiday) or “I feel better about myself physically, but I still have skin that's just hanging because I lost 155 lbs. So that makes me uncomfortable,� (wilson) which, in the context of this particular article, seems to suggest a certain problematic idea about thinness and beauty in their opinions (and by extension People's).
The claim of fatness being the last acceptable prejudice is determinately problematic as it's not in any sense qualified by Emme. The fact that by no means do we live in a world that has overcome racial, class, ethnic, religious, sexual, differences nor even has it become what one might argue “political incorrect� to broadcast such prejudice (obvious examples include how media covers Muslim identities, how race and crime is approached, how the questions of undocumented immigrants is handled... the list is almost indefinite as there is not shortage to the ways that a white supremacy, patriarchal, heternormative, and capitalist society produces prejudice and significantly the way it justifies the existence of such prejudice).
Considering the “justification� of “overweight� being “problematic�, “stigmatized� or even “ugly� is so heavily rooted in pseudo-scientific ideas about health, we can extract the fact that “Fatness� in many respects, has not received the same scrutiny that other forms of discrimination have undergone in questioning the logic of their underpinning. The fact that this article doesn't really provide a challenge to concepts of “thinness� and “beauty� nor “health� particularly, I don't believe advances the conversation around prejudice and “fatness� very far.