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lack of privacy. 64 Stereotypes of African American women as having unbridled appetites inform discussions not only of their sexuality but also of their food consumption and body weight. 65
    Science studies scholar and MD Robert Aronowitz has argued that upper-middle-class Americans’ concerns about an alleged obesity epidemic is largely fueled, albeit unconsciously, by the desire to put symbolic distance between themselves and people from lower socioeconomic classes. He argues that the primary purpose of the medicalization of fatness may, in fact, be to signal and maintain “social difference” between the upper and lower social classes. 66 I would go farther and argue that these discussions also serve to put limits on social solidarity. Discussions of lazy, fat people as a drain on public resources echo discussions of lazy, black “welfare queens,” which have been evoked to limit solidarity and the scope of U.S. social welfare programs. 67 To the extent that fat people are also poor minority women, discussions of irresponsible “fatties” shore up prejudices against women of color. However, such discussions also further limit solidarity on the basis of body size. Stated differently, fatness has become an independent (but understudied) dimension of inequality.
    Body size also intersects, however, with class, race, and gender in important ways. 68 For instance, weight-based discrimination has been shown to be most salient for middle-class white women, who are penalized more for being fat—in the workplace, in the marriage market, and in public spaces—than are both white middle-class men and also, according to several studies, women of color. 69 The reasons for this are not entirely clear. For the gender comparison, the greater premium put on beauty for women, compared to men, may explain the difference. In comparison with women of color, white women have more class and racial privilege to lose by being fat, whereas the prospects of women of color of all sizes are limited by racism. For instance, in an interview with me, Bill Fabrey, the founder of the National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA, later renamed the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), explained how he was outraged when The New York Times declined to publish a photo of his fiancée in the marriage announcements in the late 1960s. Because their class and racial background was similar to those whose wedding announcements were published, Fabrey chalked this up to weight-based discrimination. If he and his fiancée had been poor blacks, however, they may not have sent in a wedding announcement in the first place and, if they had, may very well have assumed the rejection was due to racial or class bias. And yet, in a context in which overt expressions of racism are decreasingly tolerated, and in which rates of “obesity” are disproportionately high among the poor, African American women, and Mexican American men and women, condemnation of people for being fat may offer a socially acceptable way of expressing racism and classism. 70
    FAT DEVILS AND MORAL PANICS
    Previous research has shown that particular issues are more likely to become lightning rods for cultural anxieties when they evoke deeper fears about marginal populations. Thus, U.S. legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has shown how heightened public concern in the 1980s United States about a “crack-baby epidemic” drew on fear and hatred of poor black women and led to greater social control and punitive policies concerning them, while obscuring other forms of substance abuse that were more common among wealthier white women (and men). 71 Based on this line of work, we would expect higher rates of “obesity” among the poor, African American women, and Mexican American men and women both to intensify public concern over the “obesity epidemic” and also to color how this issue is discussed. 72
    Indeed, U.S. political scientists James Morone and Rogan Kersh have shown that