5 Questions with Marquisele (Mikey) Mercedes

Meet the Experts

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Mikey Mercedes is a powerful voice in the world of fatness and public health, and I am excited and honored to bring you this interview!

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your work

This is like the hardest question! I’m Marquisele Mercedes, but I go by Mikey. I’m a Black, queer, disabled fat liberationist from the Bronx. I write (or try to), but I also participate in speaking engagements where I generally talk way too much about fatness and public health. Sometimes I’m also a doctoral student at the Brown University School of Public Health in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences (which is basically “Obesity Prevention” Central). When it comes to my work, I like to blend academic scholarship, non-academic work, personal narrative, and fat politics to critique things like health care, research, training, and promotion for their, often, blatant fatphobia and anti-Blackness. The “personal” part is really crucial to my work; a lot of the things I critique now were things I always thought about as being fucked up, but now I have the language to articulate how and why and who benefits from certain forms of targeted suffering. Most recently, I started a podcast called Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back with my fellow fat liberationists Da’Shaun Harrison, Caleb Luna, Jordan Underwood, and Bryan Guffey; we re-answer and critically pick apart advice columns discussing weight from fat liberation lenses. I’m also a Pisces if anyone is into that sort of thing. And my power color is red. 

2. How did learn about the concept of weight-neutral, body affirming care?

The notion of healthcare or public health being “weight-inclusive” or “fat-affirming” wasn’t something I became aware of until I switched my research focus to weight stigma in my first semester of grad school a couple years ago. It’s incredibly important work, of course, but the quality of that work, as well as its capacity to actually accommodate fat folks who are multiply marginalized, varies wildly depending on who is doing it. In general, there aren’t very many people working to bring about the paradigm shift needed for a  “weight-inclusive public health” who are specifically in public health schools or departments. Many experts on public health’s fatphobia are activists outside the academy or people who are Fat Studies, Sociology, or Science Studies scholars; there are actually no people doing anything close to “weight-inclusive public health” at Brown besides myself. I’m so grateful for all the activists (including you, Ragen!!), academics, and practitioners who have contributed to my learning and work from afar. 

3. How have you/do you apply those concepts to your work?

The goal of my work is, at the most basic level, to assert the inherent value of fatness and fat people. I look at a public health practice or idea or institution or figure and I ask myself “how does this thing/person/place rely on the idea that fatness is inferior?” And things sort of unravel from there. For example, one of my current projects is a scholarly article about the desperate need for public health research and practice to be fat-inclusive. I want this piece to be a comprehensive break down of how public health’s approach to weight has been shaped by stigma, has no substantive evidence base, and is a result of the field’s historical relationship to eugenics, whiteness, and the state. The goal is to create a reference for other folks in the field doing this work who, for many reasons, will not step the fuck up and divest from fatphobia without another, more vulnerable person starting the conversation in an “acceptably academic” space. But it all started with that one question: “how does public health rely on the idea that fatness is inferior?”

4. What’s one thing that you wish people who are still working from a weight-focused paradigm could learn/know?

For public health people, I would say this: You can’t promote health while hurting fat people. Because it's really that simple. There is a dangerous cognitive dissonance that occurs in public health settings when people are confronted with the terrible implications of their “obesity prevention” work. They think they can be a good person who is doing good public health work while also actively participating in the system that kills fat people. And that is bullshit. For people in medicine, I would say this: Your education did not prepare you to treat fat patients. Your education taught you the socially and professionally acceptable way to harm us. Whatever field you’re in—from general medicine to physical therapy to dietetics—your education did not teach you how to treat fat patients. That means you have a lot to learn and you need to seek out knowledge from experts—fat people themselves. You need to seek out work from fat people of all perspectives, of all walks of life and you will not only learn how to do better, but develop the knowledge base necessary to truly serve the people placed in your care.

5. How and where do we find you and your work?

I spend so much time, too much time, on twitter @marquisele.

I spend less time on Instagram @fatmarquisele.

Most of my new work goes on my Patreon (patreon.com/marquisele)

Some also goes on my website (marquiselemercedes.com), where you can learn more about me and what I do.

And if you’re starved for even more, you can check out Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back wherever you get your podcasts.