Anna Kirkland

The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism

There is an emerging consensus among public health advocates that combating obesity is best done by restructuring the environment rather than by stigmatizing individuals. Although feminist scholars have not been major participants in debates over antiobesity policy, recently there has been a move toward adopting the environmental account of obesity as a feminist solution because of its potential to respond to health inequalities along race, class, and gender lines. This article aims to trouble the embrace of the environmental approach by feminist scholars, however, and to resurrect and redirect feminist criticism toward attendant problems of moralism, backlash, and the surveillance and rehabilitation of poor women of color. Despite its overwhelming popularity among policy elites and health researchers, I argue that the environmental account of obesity is not likely to promote structural change and broad redistributions. Rather it makes problematic assumptions about the relationship between health and fat and about the efficacy of intervention strategies, masks moralism with health discourse, and legitimizes punitive, ineffective, and patronizing interventions.

The Legitimacy of Vaccine Critics: What is Left after the Autism Hypothesis?

The last dozen years have seen a massive transnational mobilization of the legal, political, and research communities in response to the worrisome hypothesis that vaccines could have a link to childhood autism and other developmental conditions. Vaccine critics, some already organized and some composed of newly galvanized parents, developed an alternate world of internally legitimating studies, blogs, conferences, publications, and spokespeople to affirm a connection. When the consensus turned against the autism hypothesis, these structures and a committed membership base unified all the organizations in resistance. This article examines the relationship between mobilization based on science and the trajectory of legitimacy vaccine criticism has taken. I argue that vaccine critics have run up against the limits of legitimate scientific argument and are now in the curious position of both doubling down on credibility-depleting stances and innovating new and possibly resonant formulations.

Credibility Battles in the Autism Litigation

That vaccines do not cause autism is now a widely accepted proposition, though a few dissenters remain. An 8-year court process in the US federal vaccine injury compensation court ended in 2010 with rulings that autism was not an adverse reaction to vaccination. There were two sets of trials: one against the measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccine and one against the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. The MMR story is more widely known because of publicity surrounding the main proponent of an MMR–autism link, British doctor Andrew Wakefield, but the story of thimerosal in court is largely untold. This study examines the credibility battles and boundary work in the two cases, illuminating the sustaining world of alternative science that supported the parents, lawyers, researchers, and expert witnesses against vaccines. After the loss in court, the families and their advocates transformed their scientific arguments into an indictment of procedural injustice in the vaccine court. I argue that the very efforts designed to produce legitimacy in this type of lopsided dispute will be counter-mobilized as evidence of injustice, helping us understand why settling a scientific controversy in court does not necessarily mean changing anyone’s mind.

What's at stake in transgender discrimination as sex discrimination?

A federal court recently held that discrimination against transsexuals is illegal sex discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The linchpin of the ruling is the legal concept of sex stereotyping. Feminist legal theorists have celebrated cases protecting gender non-conformists from discrimination and harassment, but we have not yet fully evaluated what we get when we get legal protections based on stereotyping. How does the concept of the illegal sex stereotype govern sex discrimination law? What does it mean to enfold transgender discrimination into sex discrimination law without naming and describing it separately? Perhaps law can be used merely instrumentally, and so any route to a winning verdict is acceptable. But if law is constitutive of identities in important ways, perhaps even as it is also instrumental, then calling transgender discrimination sex discrimination will have significant consequences. This study takes stock of those political and legal implications, arguing that although the winning case is worth celebrating, it depends upon an untrustworthy jurisprudence.

What Is Wellness Now

Wellness is a popular buzzword these days. One finds wellness programs, wellness centers, wellness contests, wellness conferences, wellness journals, wellness administrators, wellness awards, wellness tourism, and even a Wellness brand cat and dog food (complete with its own blog and website asking, ‘‘What is true wellness?’’). Like ‘‘intersectionality’’ in feminist scholarship (Davis 2008), the rise of ‘‘diversity’’ over affirmative action (Kelly and Dobbin 1998; Edelman, Fuller, and Mara-Drita 2001), ‘‘sustainability’’ in approaches to the natural world and its use and development (Scoones 2007), and ‘‘sexual health’’ in place of panic over sexually transmitted infections (Epstein and Mamo 2011), the hegemony of the buzzword wellness signals its usefulness for framing consensus in contemporary American society. That consensus is that health is more than just the absence of disease, that health promotion and prevention of disease should be a top governmental and personal priority, and that each individual can and should strive to achieve a state of optimal functioning. But in

Revisiting rights across contexts: Fat, health, and antidiscrimination law

Doctors need to consider all kinds of traits and risk factors about a person in a treatment situation, while antidiscrimination law puts significant restrictions on what an employer can consider about a person in hiring. These two contexts – health care and the antidiscrimination-governed workplace – seem to adopt entirely incompatible conceptions of how to regard the person, and hence, what rights she is considered to deserve. Therefore, how can we make sense of the claim by fat acceptance advocates that doctors discriminate against them based on their weight? Even when little or no formal rights exist for fat citizens in either sphere, there are nonetheless transformative discourses available that cross-pollinate each context. Revisiting rights by bringing these two discordant contexts together helps illuminate problems of injustice that must be confronted in the future as we move toward a more universal and equitable health care system in which conceptions of rights must have some place.

‘Health’ is not fit for purpose

The idea of “health” has become too much of a sacred cow to challenge. Time to slaughter the beast, say Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland