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peer-reviewed ; Mass communications frame fatness and COVID-19 as a dual threat. This discourse furthers well-established tendencies to degrade bodies labelled overweight or obese, positioning them as deficient and requiring correction. Empirically, this article draws from an online US right-wing news media platform, Campus Reform, including readers' comments (n ¼ 135) on an article denouncing professors working in fat studies during the COVID-19 lockdown. This status degradation ceremony—backed by 'big money' that funds campus culture wars—not only targeted fat people but also academic disciplines, expertise, universities and social justice agenda. Analytically, this study draws from ethnomethodology and literature on media and bodyweight, meddling or health fascism, weaponized stigma and the politics of cruelty. Going beyond the flesh and a particular case study, it also challenges the ways in which cruelty enacted towards those deemed fat (especially women) can spiral into corrosive nationalist discourse in pandemic times

It is not just publicly funded universities that are facing a cold and hard future in the aftershock of the 2008 global banking crisis. Nations, such as Ireland, are similarly affected as states seek to appease 'the markets' and cover private banks' losses at the public's expense. As this wave of neoliberalisation, or market fundamentalism, proceeds we may ask: what is the role of sociology? Drawing from an exploratory study of financial activism, notably silver vigilantism and the Crash JP Morgan Campaign, this paper endorses global public sociology among threatened publics. As per Michael Burawoy's calls for public sociology, this entails promoting reflexive knowledge and democratic dialogue in the defence of civil society. After outlining the core tenets, strengths and weaknesses of silver vigilantism, the role of public sociology and the need for further research are underscored as the economic crisis continues in post 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland and beyond.

Using Ritzer's McDonaldization of Society thesis as a reference point, this article contributes sociologically to burgeoning critical obesity studies. It does this using qualitative data from a study of men and weightrelated issues undertaken in northern England. Taking a counter-intuitive approach, it explores whether slimming proceeds in accord with the rationalizing principles of the fast-food restaurant: calculability, efficiency, predictability and technological control. Rather than reproducing a simplified and ultimately stigmatizing account, where fatness is a pathological bodily state caused by fast food, this article explores the degree to which fatness is actively made into a correctable problem using McDonaldized principles. Irrationalities and meaningful resistances associated with the public and private fight against fat are also considered.

Using embodied sociology, this article offers a virtual ethnography of 'fat male embodiment'. Reporting and analysing qualitative data generated online, it includes a typology of big/fat male body-subjects and supportive/admiring others. These fat-friendly typifications are unpacked by referencing advocated codes of self–body relatedness, sexualities and the relevance of food. The virtual construction of acceptable, admirable or resistant masculinities is then explored under the following headings: (1) appeals to 'real' or 'natural' masculinity; (2) the admiration and eroticization of fat men's bodies; (3) transgression, fun and the carnivalesque; and (4) the pragmatics and politics of fat male embodiment. While alternative (positive) understandings of fatness are presented online, discrepancies between virtual and actual identities render stigma an ever-present possibility for those with 'real' fat male bodies.

Door supervisors or 'bouncers' are charged with privately policing Britain's nighttime leisure economy, sometimes using 'normal' force to ensure order inside and at the entrances to urban licensed premises. Using ethnography generated in Southwest Britain, this article explores the lived realities of legal risk among these predominantly male workers. As well as empirically charting interrelated factors associated with the imposition, amplification and avoidance of legal risk, this article supports an embodied, non dualist approach to socio legal study. Such an approach, in rethinking unhelpful dichotomies (for example, mind–body, reason–emotion, victim–oppressor, conformity–deviance, order–disorder), incorporates the 'lived body' and 'sex specific corporeality' when exploring legal risk, violence and society.