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This article explores how ‘fat shaming’ as a practice that encourages open disdain for those living in larger bodies operates as a moralising tool to regulate and manage those who are viewed as ‘bad citizens’. It begins by outlining the problematic use of fat shaming language that is often used as a tool to promote ‘healthy’ lifestyle choices by those who view it as not only an acceptable way of communicating the health risks associated with obesity, but also a productive way of motivating people with overweight and obesity to lose weight. I then go on to discuss how shame as it relates to body image and excess weight is culturally produced through both objective conceptualisations of deviance and subjective judgements about the moral character of those who are living with excess weight. Adopting a feminist theoretical perspective, this article further considers the reciprocal nature of fat shaming by calling attention to how shame as a felt emotion is dependent on understandings of oneself in relation to others, as well as the relationships that one forms with others. In this way, I argue that shame in general, and fat shaming in particular, is performative to the extent that it exists as a relational construct that is iteratively produced through the language and actions that give it meaning.

This article explores the dynamics between fat shaming, neoliberalism, ideological constructions of health and the ‘obesity epidemic’ within the UK, using the UK Government’s recent Tackling Obesity campaign in response to Covid‐19 as an illustration. We draw attention to how fat shaming as a practice that encourages open disdain for those living with excess weight operates as a moralising tool to regulate and manage those who are viewed as ‘bad’ citizens. In doing so, we begin by outlining how the ideological underpinnings of ‘health’ have been transformed under neoliberalism. We then consider the problematic use of fat shaming discourses that are often used as tools to promote ‘healthy’ lifestyle choices by those who view it as not only an acceptable way of communicating the health risks associated with obesity but also a productive way of motivating people with obesity to lose weight. Drawing on Graham Scambler’s theoretical framework regarding shame and blame (2020), we discuss how ‘heaping blame on shame’ has become a ‘wilful political strategy’ under neoliberalism, particularly as it relates to individuals with obesity, and how the Tackling Obesity campaign leverages concerns around ‘choices’ and ‘costs’ as a means through which to encourage normative models of self‐care and self‐discipline.

How does Judith Butler’s theory of ‘grievability’ relate to the neoliberal imperative to assume personal responsibility for one’s actions? And how can this be conceptualised in relation to a broader biopolitics of disposability that renders some lives dispensable and others worthy of protection? Focusing on the particular case of obesity and the UK government’s drive to reduce obesity rates in response to COVID-19, this article shows how conditions that are seen to arise from poor lifestyle ‘choices’ complicate Butler’s articulation of grievability by revealing how state and public investment can coincide with a general consensus of apathy that renders those lives both grievable and ungrievable. By simultaneously straddling the two subject positions, I argue that people living with obesity are often rendered failures within a neoliberal context that equates grievable life with productive life, thus giving way to a new ontology that renders life valuable only when it is not directly harming, or is in the service of, others.

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