Co-healthism in Health at Every Size®-aligned TikTok activism: Transforming the definition of healthism via feminist-of-color disability studies theorizing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a feminist-of-color disability studies-oriented TikTok critical discourse analysis of 100 popular Health at Every Size® (HAES®) TikToks. It evaluates the power relations surrounding how HAES® frameworks are disseminated on TikTok and unpacks the implications for fat liberation. HAES® frameworks of care capacitate the eradication of medical fatmisia and the weight-centered health paradigm. While popular among online fat activists, HAES® frameworks have been widely accused of perpetuating healthism. My analysis makes clear how HAES® discourse is often steeped in ableist, white supremacist, and colonial healthism. Through this analysis, I ultimately argue that the definition of healthism needs to shift to center ableism, white supremacy, and colonialism, as well as the co-constituting nature of how systems of oppression aggregate to weaponize health against those with embodiments marked as “unhealthy.” I argue that this shift is necessary to produce analyses committed to radical solidarity. I mark this shift by coining and utilizing the term co-healthism. To demonstrate the need for my argument, I organize the results into three themes: healthist ableism, healthist white supremacy, and healthist colonialism in HAES® discourse. In the discussion, I clarify the co-constitutive nature of these themes and argue for the shift from healthism to co-healthism. I also define the concept and explain its methodological potentialities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".