Revisiting rights across contexts: Fat, health, and antidiscrimination law

Abstract

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.

Citation

Kirkland, A. (2009), "Revisiting rights across contexts: Fat, health, and antidiscrimination law", Sarat, A. (Ed.) Special Issue Revisiting Rights (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 48), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 121-145. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000048008