You Have the Right to Remain Fat with Virgie Tovar

 

Episode 134 – You Have the Right to Remain Fat with Virgie Tovar

This week, Karin welcomes Virgie Tovar, author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity, to the show for our newest episode, ”You Have the Right to Remain Fat”

Tune in for a discussion on fat discrimination and oppression from diet culture, dissecting the meaning of fat phobia, weight discrimination facts, the ways body size shapes gender roles and stigma, self-hatred as a barrier to finding self-love, recovering from fat phobia in a culture steeped in stigma, keeping hope of recovery in the face the limitations of society, behind-the-scenes of her 2018 TedX talk, and more!

Virgie Tovar is an author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity. She holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. She is a contributor for Forbes where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work. She started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight in 2013 and in 2018 gave a TedX talk on the origins of the campaign. 

Virgie edited the anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012) and she's the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Feminist Press August 2018), which was placed on the American Library Association's Amelia Bloomer List, The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (New Harbinger Publications 2020) and her new interactive book, The Body Positive Journal (Chronicle Books 2022). Her Webby-nominated podcast, Rebel Eaters Club, is now in Season 3. In 2018 she was named one of the 50 most influential feminists by Bitch Magazine. 

Virgie has received three San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commissions, the Inspire Award from Project HEAL, as well as Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, and Yahoo Health. She lives in San Francisco.