In Fat Activism, Cooper responds to mainstream and scholarly writings on fat activism that she claims create negative assumptions or “proxies” of fat people. These constructed proxies serve to efface, reduce, and oversimplify the voices and the lived experiences of fat activists and fat activism. Through proxies, fat people are further marginalized and estranged from writings about what it means to be fat and what it means to be an activist. In this context, fat is a descriptive word that rejects medicalized terminology and encompasses non-normative embodiments of adipose tissue. Fat is not a bad word: it is powerful, political, and not without controversy.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Kuyvenhoven, C., (2025), "Fat activism: A radical social movement by Charlotte Cooper", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.158)

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1. fat activism
2. fat politics

Original publication: Kuyvenhoven, Cassandra. "Fat activism: A radical social movement by Charlotte Cooper." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 133-135. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.158. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.