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Doctors need to consider all kinds of traits and risk factors about a person in a treatment situation, while antidiscrimination law puts significant restrictions on what an employer can consider about a person in hiring. These two contexts -- health care and the antidiscrimination-governed workplace -- seem to adopt entirely incompatible conceptions of how to regard the person, and hence, what rights she is considered to deserve. Therefore, how can we make sense of the claim by fat acceptance advocates that doctors discriminate against them based on their weight? Even when little or no formal rights exist for fat citizens in either sphere, there are nonetheless transformative discourses available that cross-pollinate each context. Revisiting rights by bringing these two discordant contexts together helps illuminate problems of injustice that must be confronted in the future as we move toward a more universal and equitable health care system in which conceptions of rights must have some place. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

This essay takes up the suggestion that fatness might be (or become) a disability, and uses the observations it yields to propose a new account of a way American antidiscrimination law governs identity categories and manages individuals. It would seem to be an improvement from a fat-rights perspective to gain coverage under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and to be able to enjoy accommodations at work and in public places. This article offers an integrated alternative to the medical and social models of disability, using fat discrimination as a case study to illuminate its implications. Fat identity is likely to be absorbed into what I call managerial individualism, characterized by on-site regulation and negotiation of people's functional capacities in an indeterminate process. The study sets out a new concept of identity in the law–a managed process, not a status–and proposes to turn scholarly discussion about governance, resistance, and identity formation toward recognizing the full implications of such a concept. Identity as a managed process has very little leverage on politics, I conclude, and showcases a type of individualism that is very easily overwhelmed.

Author Interview on The Brian Lehrer Show. America is a weight-obsessed nation. Over the last decade, there's been an explosion of concern in the U.S. about people getting fatter. Plaintiffs are now filing lawsuits arguing that discrimination against fat people should be illegal. Fat Rights asks the first provocative questions that need to be raised about adding weight to lists of currently protected traits like race, gender, and disability. Is body fat an indicator of a character flaw or of incompetence on the job? Does it pose risks or costs to employers they should be allowed to evade? Or i