My dissertation examines how scientific discourse around weight and health functions rhetorically to provide a scientific imprimatur to the marginalization of fat people. I highlight how such sanctioning of fatphobia is intertwined with ideology and ethos, taking as my primary objects of study North American health-and-nutrition documentaries from the past two decades.

My work seeks to address the following questions: How do these documentaries leverage the epistemic privilege afforded to scientific discourse and discursive strategies and twist, inflect, and infuse material presented as fact with fatphobic sentiment? How do uses of expert opinion, experiment, and medical evidence shape our understanding of the objectivity and ethos of different speakers in the conversation around “epidemic obesity”? And how, in the moments they are afforded, might fat speakers resist fatphobic narratives, unsettling dominant assumptions about the relationships among weight, health, and expertise?