Weighted: Designing Towards Fat Liberation
Margarita Zulueta’s thesis, Weighted: Designing Towards Fat Liberation, investigates how anti-fat bias affects fat-identifying women through the lens of design. Anti-Fat bias is the discriminatory belief that the social stigma against fat people, in the tradition of fat activists reclaiming the term, is justified. Anti-Fat bias is normalized and affects the 1.9 billion adults who are considered to fall within this group. Having experienced the pain of anti-fat bias in her own life due to falling within the small-fat to mid-fat range, Margarita explores and creates products of design to create structures that move towards fat liberation.
Fat-Femme Identifying People consistently receive the message from others and the structures around us that “we just don’t fit”.
Weighted investigates five spaces of anti-fat bias that obstruct, discourage, forget, ridicule, and scrutinize fat-femme identifying people. The projects look into how those spaces can be changed to be open, supportive, and create room to remember, celebrate, and let fat people be. These five spaces are commonly seen in the fat-community as areas of pain upheld by specific points of interaction. In her thesis, Margarita looks to modify and transform these spaces into places of safety.
Margarita’s products are derived from her thorough research on fat activism and topics related to anti-fat bias, which is sourced from inclusive secondary readings of academic studies, memoirs, and subject matter expert interviews across the United States and Canada. The products range from a speculative design that opens up air-travel access; to a dating platform that acknowledges fat dating challenges; to a fat-femme supporting microloan platform; to a celebration of the fat form through physical products; to a fat-positive dining experience for fat-femmes and allies.
Experiences of anti-fat bias are real, painful, and upheld by the structures around us, but we have the power to change those structures.
Flex
Flex is a speculative air fleet with fat-friendly airplane structures that addresses the challenges fat-passengers experience in-flight.
Flex changes the physical airplane seating structure and the seat booking process to better accommodate fat passengers to reduce the instances of in-flight aggression and physical pain fat passengers currently deal with.
Flex redesigns the airplane interior through the Flex Seat, which converts the current airplane seat to a bench seat with a privacy screen on a track to reduce fat travelers’ space anxiety and hostile co-passenger interactions. The Flex cabin offers a mix of both current seating and Flex seating.
To book the Flex Seat, choose the amount of space needed via the slider on the seating map. The amount of space required is determined by the passenger in the privacy of their choosing where they can measure themselves to determine how much space they need, which was inspired by this business model. Margarita also investigated the potential of Flex by looking into airplane business practices focusing on customer needs, such as Delta’s business model during the pandemic, which saw positive results even though they removed the middle seat.
Affirmd
Affirmd is a dating platform that acknowledges fat dating challenges by encouraging fat positive behaviors and community building. Affirmd seeks to disrupt the current structure of discouraging fat-femme identifying people to creating a safe and acknowledged dating space.
Affirmed addresses four areas of fat negative behavior in dating spaces: that apps rarely acknowledge fat daters, that swiping can be dehumanizing, that reporting is not taken seriously, and that the lack of fat-community while dating is isolating.
Affirmd responds to a lack of fat acknowledgment by creating rules of conduct inspired by Lex and asks users to consent to no anti-fat bias, AND when users accept a rule, a pop-up appears showing what that consent means. Affirmd responds to the swipe interaction by changing matching to liking two aspects of a person’s profile instead of swiping.
Affirmd responds to reporting not being taken seriously by blocking people based on breaking the rules of conduct. When people are blocked, they are told why based on the rules and redirected to a browser window with educational resources. Affirmd responds to the lack of community by creating a community forum in Affirmd that offers methods of support via video chat, audio calls, and comment threads.
Plus Futures
Plus Futures is a community-based microloan platform that supports fat-femme owned businesses that focus on working to increase fat-accessible consumer options.
Fat-femme consumers currently face a lack of product options in the plus-size market, even in the midst of greater awareness. However, there are fat-femme-owned businesses that are working to increase options. Unfortunately, these businesses do not receive much funding.
Plus Futures addresses this lack of investment by facilitating micro-loan transactions between fat-owned businesses with members of the fat community. These transactions can provide funding to these businesses by those who are the most impacted more directly. Micro-loan transactions, in particular, give fat women, who are at a higher risk of downward socio-economic mobility, the ability to earn on their loan without taking ownership away from the business owners.
Venus Bebere
Venus Bebere is a new drinkware line that celebrates the fat form.
Venus Bebere subverts the trend of fat-related products falling under the narrative of being related to ridicule and death by exploring the beauty of the fat form in drinkware. Venus Bebere increases visual exposure and leads to a greater appreciation of fat people.
The Fat-Positive Dinner
The Fat-Positive Dinner is a food-positive, co-created experience for primarily fat-femmes and allies to create community through nourishment. This dinner creates a dining space for fat women to eat without shame and scrutiny by reflecting on and sharing memories of food joy and food empowerment in the community.
The Fat-Positive Dinner consisted of looking through fat-positive literature and art and then reflecting on guest experiences regarding what both fat-positivity and food-positivity meant to the participants, as well as sharing the memories and reflections with each other.
The memories of food joy and empowerment were also used to source the meal, which the guests partook together. These memories and dishes were combined together to create the Fat-Positive Dinner recipe book to be shared in the fat community to celebrate the act of eating together within the fat-femme identity.
To learn more about Margarita Zulueta’s work, take a look at her projects in more detail at margaritazulueta.com.