Social Justice Usage
Source: Aphramor, Lucy. Quoted here.
Health-ism is a belief system that sees health as the property and responsibility of an individual and ranks the personal pursuit of health above everything else, like world peace or being kind.
It ignores the impact of poverty, oppression, war, violence, luck, historical atrocities, abuse and the environment from traffic, pollution to clean water and nuclear contamination and so on. It protects the status quo, leads to victim blaming and privilege, increases health inequities and fosters internalized oppression.
Health-ism judges people’s human worth according to their health.
New Discourses Commentary
“Healthism” is the belief that matters of health are relevant to—or “too” significant a component of—well-being and that, all else being equal, it is better to be healthy than not to be healthy. It is defined as a hegemonic “ideology” according to the Theory of Critical Social Justice, particularly the critical theory known as fat studies.
Healthism is sometimes defined as the “dark side of healthy living,” and is characterized as an attitude or way of living that prioritizes health, considers it a moral good, and, perhaps most importantly, sees it as a matter of personal individual responsibility (see also, responsibilize and individualism). It is considered an ideology that judges human worth according to health, and it is believed to be a significant cause of oppression, particularly to fat people (by fat studies), some disabled people (by disability studies), and environmental concerns (by eco-warriors).
The most important piece of baggage to unpack in the concept of healthism is that it is viewed as an ideology that produces and maintains injustice, marginalization, minoritization, and oppression (and the inequitable status quo) against people who prioritize it less or who struggle with health concerns. This means that under Critical Social Justice, health is best considered a social construction, and as such attitudes about it can be problematic sources of oppression. Viewed as an ideology that maintains hegemonies—which is how Critical Social Justice views it—healthism is either a distraction from other priorities (like climate justice and health equity) or a direct means of marginalizing and oppressing those who fall outside of what would be considered healthist norms, including smokers, the chronically ill, and the obese. It also places (some) onus for one’s health on the individual, rather than upon society and its systems, which responsibilizes people. Responsibilization is, in the Theory of Critical Social Justice, a problematic that shifts responsibility to make change onto individuals when the system itself should be the thing that needs to change.
An example of a healthist narrative is that it is healthier (read: better, both physically and morally) to maintain a normal (read: healthy) body weight than it is not to, and it is the primary responsibility of the individual to undertake the dietary and lifestyle choices that facilitate this. This healthist narrative is particularly problematized, even reviled, by fat studies and critical studies of diet and nutrition (see also, nutritionism). In its place, fat studies forwards the alternative that there is little or no meaningful relationship between one’s body weight status and health, including in the case of obesity (which is a medicalizing narrative), but believing that such a relationship exists causes harm by creating fat stigma, fat shaming, and fatphobia while upholding thin-normativity. It is problematized in critical studies of diet and nutrition by insisting that there’s little relationship between the nutritional status of one’s food and health (i.e., nutritionism) and that it is more the responsibility of society to improve access to better foods via something like health equity or to be more open-minded about different cultural traditions around food than it is a responsibility of the individual to improve her relationship with healthy foods.
While it is possible for people to become too concerned with ideas related to being healthy (e.g., orthorexia, obsessions with supplements or “superfoods,” or some forms of obsessive fitness), it is admittedly difficult to see anything positive to say about casting healthism as a problematic, especially in a critical fashion. In fact, while a bizarre fixation on being “healthy” might be a genuine problem, healthist attitudes, as they are defined, would be corrective of that fixation, as it would lead one to prioritize actually being healthy over becoming unhealthy by obsessing about ideas about health. In this sense, it seems that the best that can be said for “healthism” is that it has been poorly defined (due to being defined via critical theory) and is therefore a missed opportunity to label a genuine threat to health via obsessive ideas and behaviors erroneously believed to be healthy.
Healthism in the Theory of Critical Social Justice would have some roots not just in the critical theory approach, which seeks to problematize everything, but also in the postmodern Theorizing of Michel Foucault, particularly the way his concept of biopower has come to be applied in many openly anti-scientific projects in Critical Social Justice (see also, fat studies, queer Theory, gender studies, and disability studies). This understanding of biopower sees scientific knowledge as capable of establishing a hegemonic power structure through dominant discourses that exclude, marginalize, and oppress anything abnormal (see also, normativity). As it is quite normal to prioritize one’s health, treat it as a moral good, and accept it as an individual matter on some level, the critical perspective on biopower would naturally seek to disrupt it and dismantle the assumptions upon which it rests.
Within fat activism (see also, fat studies), healthism is challenged directly and perhaps most specifically by the Healthy at Every Size movement, which carries a self-explanatory name. Its primary agenda is to problematize the idea that body weight (or fat) status necessarily has anything to do with health and, increasingly, well-being. This is, of course, a failure to think statistically and based on the common fallacy of cherry picking. That some fat people are also in relatively high health does not imply that there is no relationship between obesity and any number of health conditions. Healthy at Every Size is also, and as a result, invested in the concept of body positivity (see also, body equity), roughly holding that the fat stigma and other deleterious impacts of fat shaming on one’s well-being outweigh the negative health associations of obesity, insofar as it will admit these exist at all. Thus, Healthy at Every Size attempts to disrupt healthism by expanding and shifting the meaning of the word “health” (to a broader category of “well-being”), arguing that “size” has nothing necessary to do with health (in either regard), and promoting self-esteem projects for fat people that rely heavily on these beliefs.
Related Terms
Biopower; Body equity; Body positivity; Change; Climate justice; Critical; Critical Theory; Disability studies; Discourse; Dismantle; Disrupt; Dominant; Eco-warrior; Equity; Exclusion; Fat activism; Fat shaming; Fat stigma; Fat studies; Fatphobia; Foucauldian; Gender studies; Harm; Health equity; Healthy at every size; Hegemony; Identity; Ideology; Individualism; Injustice; Knowledge(s); Marginalization; Medicalizing; Minoritize; Narrative; Normal; Normativity; Nutritionism; Oppression; Postmodern; Power (systemic); Problematic; Problematize; Queer Theory; Responsibilize; Science; Social construction; Social Justice; Status quo; Structural; System, the; Theory; Thin-normativity
Additional Examples
Source: Aphramore, Lucy, and Jacqui Gringas. “That Remains to Be Said: Disappeared Feminist Discourses on Fat in Dietetic Theory and Practice.” In Rothblum, Esther, and Sondra Solovay (eds.), The Fat Studies Reader. New York University Press, 2009, p. 103.
Imagination nurtures dietetic theory and practice, whereas an impoverished imagination glorifies the status quo by silencing and repressing vulnerable, feminist texts. Poetry is born of the imagination, instigates rather than routinizes, and illuminates alternative ways of telling, knowing, and being a dietitian. Poetics enlivens the emotional capacity of dietetic practice, which buttresses a feminist dietetic ethics because our work is at its core a fundamentally human endeavor. Our intention with this chapter is to bring forward contemporary examples within dietetics where anti-fat, healthist discourse enacts a type of violence; to integrate social feminist theories on the body and gender performativity with dietetic theory, practice, and agency; and finally to offer mindfulness and poetics as reconciliatory discourses whereby difference is not viewed as deviance, and complicity is rarely tolerated.
Revision date: 8/7/20
3 comments
We are programmed to be on a see food diet. Not a seafood diet. See food and eat it. We evolved as hunter gatherers. Food was scarce. Now food is plentiful, but we have the same genetic programming, so we see food and we eat it. We just do it more often than we were meant to. And the food we eat is processed in ways that the food we evolved to eat wasn’t.
So we have to take personal responsibility, and recognize these facts, and adjust our behavior and dietary choices if we want to stay healthy.
I think there are some very clear moral issues related to maximizing one’s health (within reasonable bounds). For example, a parent of small children isn’t being very responsible if they don’t take reasonable care of their health, and end up increasing the risk that their children will be left with nobody to care for them. If nobody depends on you, then perhaps the only moral issues related to your health are ensuring you don’t infect others, and minimizing the risk that a sudden health problem – stroke, heart attack, etc. – might cause something like your car going out of control and killing people.
“In this sense, it seems that the best that can be said for “healthism” is that it has been poorly defined (due to being defined via critical theory) and is therefore a missed opportunity to label a genuine threat to health via obsessive ideas and behaviors erroneously believed to be healthy.”
I believe that to be a fair assessment, though I would probably go farther than you on questioning the adherence to health as a moral good. Then again, I am often compelled by a sort of inherent liberalism of mine, and cannot shirk the suspicion that it has to do less with knowledge and more with establishing your usefulness to society and capacity to conform to its ideals. Which, don’t take me wrong, can be argued to be very necessary functions of a social system, but the excesses of such thinking are a good part of what drove the liberal backlash against a “tyranny of propriety” since the 18th century, and for what I estimate to have been good reasons.