Fat social justice now

The theme for this special issue is Fat Social Justice Now. When originally conceptualizing this issue, I was thinking about the various pathways by which fat studies and activism have sought to create social change to better the lives of fat people and communities over time and across contexts, and the new directions that we might consider as we engage in the project of working toward fat social justice today. Over the past several decades, the field of fat studies has produced work focusing on legal pathways to fat social justice and the turn toward health at every size (HAES®) and fat-and-size-acceptance approaches. Yet, fat people continue to experience deep and nearly unfettered social stigma, discrimination, depictions, and outcomes across myriad arenas (health and health care, work, education, media, partnerships and family, and access to various physical and social spaces) that impact their lives, wellbeing, and life opportunities on a daily basis.

In this special issue, authors offer reflections, provocations, and possibilities for next steps in the fight toward fat social justice today. I won’t take up space here summarizing their work, but will instead note a few areas of overlap and offer some thoughts about what future work might explore. One of the themes that recurs across many of the pieces herein is the need to better attend to intersections of identity, embodiment, and experiences in the lives of fat people today. A second theme is ensuring greater focus on multiply-marginalized fat people and groups in order to develop better and more effective approaches for working toward fat social justice for all fat people. Finally, all of the work herein attests to the power of fat people to form alliances, initiatives, self-concepts, and communities that serve to empower and affirm their dignity, worth, and to underline their deservingness of freedom from discrimination, stigma, and oppression.

I find myself wondering whether fat-and-size acceptance and health at every size (HAES®) approaches are the most effective – or even necessary – pathways toward fat social justice or whether they simply reinforce ableist and healthist trends so rampant in late-stage capitalism and neoliberal society. It would be impossible not to notice the degree to which bariatric surgeries and pharmaceuticals (most notably GLPs) are transforming bodies, behaviors, and the social landscape. Fat studies has largely resisted and rejected these trends, likening them to eugenic attempts to erase fat bodies, people, and communities. Access to these medical technologies and pharmaceuticals is highly socially stratified and tied to socioeconomic privilege. Further, because some of these medical technologies and pharmaceuticals are relatively new, there is little data on the effectiveness and potential long-term impacts of their prolonged (or even lifelong) use.

Those pursuing intentional weight loss through these pathways are often seen as dupes and attributed with false consciousness by fat studies researchers and activists, who describe them as the tragic outcome of insidious and pervasive anti-fat bias. Their actions are also often viewed as ableist and privileged, seeking to gain access to the public, private, and social privileges, interactions, and spaces that thinner bodies and people often have. This begs the question: does working toward fat social justice require personal acceptance of one’s own fatness or size? Does the personal desire to experience or access other embodied and lived experiences (even if only temporarily, or with potential negative consequences) obviate one’s capacity to work toward fat social justice? Indeed, there are other identities and embodied experiences in which one’s desire to pursue medically-facilitated bodily and social transitions, while hotly socially contested, is certainly not anathema to fighting for social justice for members of these groups. Fat social justice must certainly include the right of fat people to be fat without societal discrimination or expectations for pursuing intentional weight loss. But are dogmatic mandates toward personal fat and bodily acceptance the most promising pathway toward fat social justice? I certainly don’t have the answers to these messy and complicated questions, but I do know that members of fat social justice communities – as with many other communities today – often find themselves engaged in adversarial relationships that seem not to contribute to their wellbeing or capacity to work collectively toward the aim of fat social justice. Part of imagining fat social justice now is considering the promises and perils of the various pathways we use to pursue it.

In this editorial introducing the special issue, we also continue our collective celebration of the outstanding work and contributions of Fat Studies’ inaugural editor, Esther Rothblum – an icon in the world of fat studies and contributor to decades of effort to create fat social justice. In the previous issue, I offered my own reflections on Esther and what her work and mentorship has meant to me and the power of this work to scaffold critical scholars, scholarship, and fat social justice. In this issue, we now offer space for others to celebrate Esther and to share their reflections on her impact, mentorship, friendship, scholarship, activism, and contributions to fat social justice.

Esther Rothblum and Me: The Early Days of Our Relationship and Careers

Ellen Cole, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology, Emerita

Russell Sage College

Although Esther is probably a decade younger than I am, she has been my role model for the past four decades. Her desk was always neat; mine was a mess. She responded to e-mails, and in the olden-days letters and phone calls, immediately; I was a bit of a scatterbrain. She lectured to large student audiences at the University of Vermont; I was at teeny Goddard College, teaching small groups of unconventional students who typically sat in a circle, sometimes on the floor.

It was 1981 when we first met. Esther was guest editing the journal Women & Therapy, and I’d just submitted only the second article I’d ever written. It was a case study of one of my students, a survivor of sibling incest. At my student’s request (insistence, actually), I naively used real names. Esther phoned to explain that that was unethical and illegal. She wanted to publish my article, but only if I changed the names and disguised all identifying information. I eventually complied, and The Myth of Benign Sibling Incest was published in 1982.

Soon after, I was asked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to form a team of psychologists to investigate their gender imbalance and make recommendations for retaining more female employees. Mind you, I lived in rural Vermont, and this was before I became active in professional organizations. I could think of only two psychologists who had any stature in the field. One was Esther, and the other a local psychotherapist with an excellent reputation, Marcia Hill. They both agreed to join me. I could go on for pages about the sometimes-hilarious adventures of three young Vermont psychologists traveling to Washington, DC to work for the federal government. We actually rose to the occasion, and I believe we made a contribution to gender equity, at least in the USDA.

A few years later Esther was offered the editorship of Women & Therapy, provided she found a co-editor who was actually a therapist (Esther herself was a researcher/scholar in psychology and women’s studies). To my everlasting gratitude, Esther invited me, and we co-edited the journal from 1984 to 1995. The very first issue we co-edited, reprinted by Harrington Park Press as a paperback book, Another Silenced Trauma: Twelve Feminist Therapists and Activists Respond to One Woman’s Recovery from War, received the 1987 Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology. We were ecstatic. I cried tears of joy for three days.

Esther has written extensively about our co-editorship, but I want to say that from my point of view we worked hard, had a lot of fun, and made a great team. In addition to our first issue, we published many special issues about topics that were important at the time and relevant personally to one or both of us: lesbian mental health, refugee women, sex therapy, woman-defined motherhood, wilderness therapy, feminist foremothers, women’s mental health in Africa, and much more.

I want to mention two more early-on Esther/Ellen activities. Beginning in 1988 we gave many workshops in various parts of the U.S. on writing for publication – for the American Psychological Association, the Association for Women in Psychology, and the Advanced Feminist Therapy Institute. Titles included “How to Publish and Why People Still Say There are Few Great Women Writers” and, my personal favorite, “Learn to Love Your Rejection Letters.” Over the years I have heard from many psychologists that our workshops gave them the courage to submit their writing for publication.

Finally, in 1992 Esther and I were two of 700 delegates, nearly all of them African women or women of African descent, at a conference, “African Women and the African Diaspora: Bridges across Activism and the Academy,” held at the University of Nigeria, in Nsukka, Enugu. Along with a colleague, Sandra Davis, we were invited to present a workshop on writing for publication, this time titled “Women and Publishing: How to Overcome Evaluation Anxiety and Increase Productivity.” We brought many of our special issues, most of them reprinted as books, to demonstrate the range of possible topics. One of my most vivid memories is seeing African women, one after another, picking up one of our books, Overcoming Fear of Fat (co-edited by Esther and Laura Brown), and laughing – in a good-natured way. A typical response was, “Why would anyone be afraid of being fat?” What a positive cultural lesson this was for us! In the end, we gave what I think was a good workshop, with the hope that many of these attendees, too, went on to publish their work.

None of this would have been possible for me without my brilliant, funny, extremely well-organized friend, colleague, and inspiration, Esther Rothblum. Each of us has moved on to a myriad of new professional endeavors, but nothing in my life will be more memorable than the years described above.

Lara Frater

Former Editorial Board Member, Fat Studies

Author of Fat Chicks Rule! How to Survive in a Thin-Centric World

I didn’t know Esther that well. Met online. Brief visits at NAAFA conferences. Occasionally doing some peer review for Fat Studies. But she was such a powerhouse in the fat positive community. The Fat Studies Reader and Fat Studies (the journal) pushed the size acceptance moment to the mainstream. Her retirement is bittersweet. She totally deserves it for her tireless work, but she will be missed.

Jana L. Fikkan, Ph.D.

Clinical Associate Professor

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Services

University of Washington School of Medicine

I first became aware of Esther Rothblum’s work when I was researching graduate programs in 2002. I had a long-standing interest in the area of women’s relationships to their bodies, but the stigma of women’s weight (one of her areas of scholarship at the University of Vermont) was a new lens for me. I had the opportunity to work as her graduate student for her last years at UVM, before she left for the West Coast. She gave me several opportunities to publish with her even well after I was no longer her graduate student and our 2012 paper for Sex Roles is one of the contributions of which I am most proud. I am so grateful to her leadership and advocacy in this field, to the incredible scholars whom I met through her and was influenced by, and for her modeling of mentorship as a woman in academia.

Reflections on Esther Rothblum, Ph.D.

Nanette Gartrell, M.D.

Distinguished Visiting Scholar, the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law

Guest Appointee, University of Amsterdam

Fellow, American Psychological Association

In 1979, Esther Rothblum was told by a well-meaning mentor, “Don’t study women, it’s too narrow.” She spent the next four decades proving him wrong. It is my great pleasure to share my reflections on Professor Esther Rothblum’s groundbreaking work as a researcher, writer, editor, teacher, mentor, and member of the psychological profession.

RESEARCHER ON SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES, WITH A FOCUS ON LESBIANS

Dr. Rothblum is one of my principal collaborators on the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study. It is the longest-running investigation of lesbian parent families in the world, with 90% still participating after 37 years. I founded this study in 1986 when the mothers were pregnant, and invited Dr. Rothblum to join the team during wave 6 (when the offspring were age 25). We are currently analyzing our wave 7 data (when the offspring were 30–33 years old).

Dr. Rothblum’s research has focused on methodological issues, including factors unique to lesbians as well as ways that gender and sexual orientation intersect. Before the advent of national population-based studies that included items about sexual and gender identity, she compared lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals to their heterosexual siblings, and transgender women, transgender men and genderqueer individuals to their cisgender brothers and sisters. There was little research on sexual and gender minorities that used appropriate comparison groups, so she created this methodology to study the feasibility of using siblings for demographic and mental health studies.

In July 2000, Vermont was the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex relationships in the form of civil unions, before any other U.S. state and before any nation had legalized same-sex marriage. Dr. Rothblum was the first to conduct a study about these couples and follow them over time. What was unique about civil union couples was that civil union certificates were public information, so her research team had access to a population, not just a convenience sample. Of the 2,475 same-sex couples who had civil unions that first year, only 21% resided in Vermont, so this was a national sample. And when she contacted all couples by mail, 42% wanted to participate in the study, a very high response rate for this kind of study. Dr. Rothblum decided to compare same-sex couples in civil unions with same-sex couples in their friendship circle who did not have civil unions, and with their heterosexual married siblings. This longitudinal study was funded by a number of national grants and consisted of three assessment periods over 12 years.

Dr. Rothblum has also conducted research on queer identity, asexual identity, lesbian/bisexual parenting, and transgender parenting as part of the Generations Study at UCLA, connected to her role as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Williams Institute. She was the first to publish results of the National Lesbian Health Care Survey that consisted of close to 2,000 lesbians and bisexual women in the 1980s. And she collaborated on numerous studies of lesbian relationships and mental health with her graduate students.

RESEARCHER ON FAT STUDIES, WITH A FOCUS ON THE STIGMA OF WEIGHT FOR WOMEN

Dr. Rothblum’s second area of research is the field of fat studies, with a focus on the stigma of weight for women. Fat studies is a field of scholarship that critically examines societal attitudes about body weight and appearance, and that advocates equality for all people with respect to body size. It seeks to remove the negative associations that society has about fat and the fat body. Fat studies scholars ask why we oppress people who are fat and who benefit from that oppression. For several decades, Dr. Rothblum conducted research on the stigma of weight for women (before there was such a concept as fat studies).

Specifically, Dr. Rothblum has published research on weight among female job applicants, the relationship of weight and employment discrimination, the effect of clients’ weight and gender in therapy settings, the effect of sexual orientation on weight preoccupation and dieting, weight, and social relationships, and sizeism in mental health training and supervision, among other topics. Her edited book The Fat Studies Reader was reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, MS Magazine, and The Women’s Review of Books, among other media, and also received the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology and the Susan Koppelman Award for Best Anthology from Popular Culture/American Culture Association.

RESEARCHER OF OTHER SCHOLARSHIP ON WOMEN

Dr. Rothblum has edited a total of 28 books and over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles about women. She edited her first book, The Stereotyping of Women: Its Effects on Mental Health, while still a graduate student, and her latest book, The Oxford Handbook of Sexual and Gender Minority Mental Health, was published a few months ago. Her other books have focused on lesbian friendships, lesbians in academia, lesbians in romantic but asexual relationships, preventing heterosexism and homophobia, and women in the Antarctic. Books that were reprinted from special issues of journals included those focused-on women’s mental health in Africa, refugee women’s mental health, women and sex therapy, professional training for feminist therapists, psychopharmacology from a feminist perspective, feminist foremothers, feminist perspectives on couples’ therapy, classism in therapy, failures in feminist therapy, funding lesbian activism, and lesbian communities,

Dr. Rothblum’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Lesbian Health Fund, the Placek Award of the American Psychological Foundation, the Scrivner Award of the American Psychological Foundation, the APA Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Kellogg Foundation. She conducted several studies of academic procrastination, finding that women predominate in a combination of high standards of perfectionism, low self-esteem, and evaluation anxiety. Her first study on procrastination, that included the creation of the Procrastination Assessment Scale for Students, has been cited by over 2,000 published articles according to scholar.google.com. She has also conducted research on women in the Antarctic.

Her research has been cited in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Time Magazine, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Reader’s Digest, APA Monitor, Psychology Today, Manchester Guardian, Israel Nachrichten, Ottawa Citizen, Times of India, Montreal Gazette, Forsight (Japan), Press Afrik, and Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), among many others.

JOURNAL EDITOR

Dr. Rothblum co-edited (first with Ellen Cole and then with Marcia Hill) the journal Women & Therapy for 14 years, beginning in 1984 when there were few sources for research and writing on women. The first issue of the journal – a special issue in which 12 therapists responded to a case of a woman Navy nurse in Vietnam who had post-traumatic stress disorder – received the Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology.

Dr. Rothblum was the founding editor of the Journal of Lesbian Studies in 1995 and is continuing to edit that journal until 2022. She was also invited by Taylor & Francis/Routledge to start Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, which is thriving in its 14th year. Dr. Rothblum has served on 17 additional editorial boards.

MENTOR

The vast majority of published writing is authored by men, and Dr. Rothblum’s goal is to mentor women and members of other under-represented groups to publish their work. During her tenure at San Diego State University, beginning in 2005, Dr. Rothblum published 48 book reviews with 103 different students. A number of students published book reviews and articles on their own after that.

Dr. Rothblum published extensively with graduate and undergraduate student research coauthors. Her work as a journal editor also enabled her to invite feminist colleagues to serve on the editorial board, as guest editors, and as authors. Many authors had never published before, and she made a conscious and strenuous effort to publish articles by women of color and lesbians, groups that had been clearly underrepresented in the scholarly literature. She invited graduate students to be editorial assistants, authors, reviewers, and even guest editors of thematic issues. For many years she facilitated a workshop at AWP with Ellen Cole called: “Writing for Publication: Learn to Love Your Rejection Letters.” To this day women seek her out to thank her for encouraging them to submit their first article for publication.

TEACHER

During her 23 years as Professor of Psychology at the University of Vermont, Dr. Rothblum taught undergraduate courses in the Psychology of Women and graduate courses in Feminist Therapy. She also emphasized intersectionality in undergraduate Abnormal Psychology and graduate Adult Psychopathology courses. As Director of Clinical Training for the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology, the program decided to develop as one of its foci the theme of “sociopolitical oppression” with specific emphasis on sexual orientation, physical appearance, and minority status.

Dr. Rothblum was hired at San Diego State University in 2005 as Professor of Women’s Studies for a position in lesbian studies, body image, and psychology of women. She taught undergraduate courses in the Psychology of Women, Lesbian Lives and Cultures, and Women Madness and Sanity. She also taught the graduate Feminist Research Methods course and the Seminar in Sexuality. She received the award for Most Influential Faculty Member by the Outstanding Senior in LGBTQ+ Studies and also the Most Influential Faculty Member by the Outstanding Senior in Interdisciplinary Studies. She also served as Graduate Advisor and Interim Department Chair.

FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF LGBTQ+ STUDIES AT SDSU

Professor Rothblum founded the minor (in 2009), major (in 2012) and graduate certificate (in 2014) in LGBTQ+ Studies at San Diego State University. SDSU became the first university in the California State University system, the first in California, and only the second in the U.S. to have an LGBTQ+ Studies major. The program received extensive media attention for this new major. Professor Rothblum was interviewed, and the program was featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Advocate, San Diego Union Tribune, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Bay Area Reporter, among others. SDSU was rated one of the top LGBT-friendly college campuses each year since 2009, including #1 in California and #10 in the U.S. by Campus Pride Index. Under her leadership, the program offered over 50 different courses at the undergraduate and graduate level from 18 departments, across 5 of the 7 colleges at SDSU. The program offers 18 community internships with LGBTQ focus.

Professor Rothblum organized Lavender Graduation each year in collaboration with the director of SafeZones@SDSU. Professor Rothblum met with potential donors (the event is free for students), publicized the event, kept track of graduating students, and ordered the supplies. SDSU held its first Lavender Graduation in May 2009 for 18 LGBTQ+ graduating students and allies; by Spring 2020, over 100 student graduates participated in Lavender Graduation via zoom. Professor Rothblum was faculty advisor to oSTEM (“Out in STEM,” for LGBTQ+ students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and also faculty advisor for Gamma Rho Lambda, a queer sorority on campus.

MEMBER OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFESSION

Professor Rothblum is Fellow of seven divisions of the American Psychological Association, including Division 1 (General Psychology), Division 2 (Teaching of Psychology), Division 9 (Psychological Study of Social Issues), Division 12 (Clinical Psychology), Division 29 (Psychotherapy), Division 35 (Psychology of Women) and Division 44 (Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity). She was chair of the Committee of Lesbian and Gay Concerns (as it was then called) and President of Division 44 (Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity).

For APA Division 35 she was a member of the Task Force on Nonsexist Research in Psychology, the Standing Committee on Clinical Practice and Training, the Section on Feminist Professional Training and Practice, and the Task Force on Feminist Perspectives on Sizeism, as well as a member of the Fellows Committee and a reviewer of convention proposals. For the Association for Women in Psychology she co-founded the Size Acceptance Caucus, was cochair of the Committee on Feminist Research, was a member of the Distinguished Publication Award Committee and the Program Committee, and was a reviewer for the Student Research Prize and for convention proposals.

Dr. Rothblum has also been active in other divisions. For Division 12 (Clinical Psychology) she was Program Chair for the Section on Women and reviewer of convention proposals. For Division 44 (Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity) she was chair of the Fellows Committee and member of the Awards Committee, Program Committee, and the Malyon Smith and Bisexual Foundation Awards Committee. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, was a member of the Speaker’s Bureau of the National Women’s Studies Association, was Treasurer of the Mayor’s Council of Women (in Burlington, Vermont), chair of the Committee on Women and Minorities of the Vermont Psychological Association, member of the Extended Scientific Committee of the International Congress of Psychology, Fellow at the Rockway Institute (A Think Tank for LGBT Public Policy), Program Scientist at the Center for Population Research in LGBT Health at The Fenway Institute in Boston, Member of the National Advisory Committee of the Lesbian Health and Research Center in San Francisco, Member of the Vermont Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, and member of the Board of Directors of the Multicultural Council of Vermont, among other roles.

In sum, Dr. Rothblum has made sustained and substantial contributions to the field of psychology of women and gender. She has been an excellent and innovative scholar, researcher, teacher, mentor, and leader of the psychological profession. An internationally sought after guest lecturer, Dr. Rothblum is an outstanding researcher, teacher, and mentor. She has mentored and supervised graduate students who themselves have become leading researchers in the LGBT community, such as Dr. Kimberly Balsam.

Dr. Rothblum has spent over 40 years studying LGBTQ+ people. As her resume demonstrates (https://womensstudies.sdsu.edu/_resources/docs/people/rothblum-cv-9–2023.pdf), she is one of the most prolific researchers in the LGBTQ+ community. Her studies have transformed the way that the world thinks about LGBTQ+ people. Even though I consider myself a peer, professionally, I feel honored and fortunate to work with and learn from Dr. Rothblum, and to model my own studies after hers.

Commemorating Esther Rothblum’s “Retirement”

Robert-Jay Green, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Clinical Psychology PhD Program

California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP)

Alliant International University – San Francisco Bay Campus

How do you solve a problem like E. Rothblum?

How do you keep a wave upon the sand?

How do you solve a problem like E. Rothblum?

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

I think of Esther Rothblum, who was born in Austria, in the opening scene from the Sound of Music. Not that Esther is anything like Julie Andrews character, a Nun-in-training, or even prone to wearing dirndls in the Alps. In fact, when I met her, she was more likely to be sporting Hawaiian shirts in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

However, like Maria in that very different Austrian context, Esther is free-spirited and willing to challenge the status quo, taking big risks in her career. We all know that becoming the editor-in-chief of journals like Women in Therapy, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Fat Studies would not have endeared her to many of the most powerful people in the field of clinical psychology at that time. Nor would her other prolific publications and leadership activities have been of much interest to mainstream psychology, which is often dismissive of research focusing on minority populations. However, this single personality characteristic (which one might call “academic courage”) has been key to Esther’s enormous success and widespread contributions to so many different but interrelated topics: psychology of women; LGBTQ+ mental health; same-sex couples; relational impact of marriage equality; psychological well-being of children raised by lesbian and gay parents; and fat stigma.

Another striking characteristic of Esther is her determination to finish projects and not procrastinate. Among the first things she told me about herself was that she was a “finisher,” meaning a person who likes bringing stuck writing projects to completion. This drive and ability to finalize projects is extraordinarily rare, and she has helped many students and colleagues (including me) bring unfinished efforts to fruition.

Interestingly, her earliest research focused on procrastination and its treatment, and perhaps she benefitted personally from doing studies on that topic. I’m not quite sure how she does it, but I do know that she writes first drafts on a strict time schedule without letting any perfectionistic concerns distract or slow her progress. Whatever her secret is for “finishing,” I think we’ve got to codify it and “bottle” it for sale as this surely would at least double our wealth and productivity as a field. Ultimately, this trait has contributed to her own prodigious output which, in turn, has increased her eminence as a scholar. Academic courage and high conscientiousness are a winning combination!

I began with a musical allusion and will end with one too. The other day, while contemplating writing this piece, I heard the Academic Festival Overture on the car radio. It was written by Johannes Brahms in 1880 to commemorate his receiving an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Breslau in Poland. To my ears, the music represents courage and determination. It also sounds more than a little iconoclastic in the way it makes light (as Esther might make light) of academia’s pretentiousness. So I leave you with a link to the Academic Festival Overture (Brahms, 1967)—a musical performance symbolizing her triumph in academia and becoming Professor Emerita at San Diego State University. Congratulations to Esther on reaching this milestone.

Click Here: https://youtu.be/XPBh17qkDXI?si=VRmc4tcJ1RyU1qSR

Homage to Esther

Marny Hall, Ph.D.

Fellow, Division 44, American Psychological Association

Author of The Lavender Couch: A Consumer’s Guide to Psychotherapy for Lesbians and Gay Men; Sexualities; and The Lesbian Love Companion: How to Survive Everything from Heartthrob to Heartbreak

Esther will tell you she was named after her grandmother. A quick search for more remote origins of her name will turn up other illustrious foremothers. Online sources reveal that Esther is probably a derivative of the ancient Mesopotamian deity Ishtar. Aptly, Istar was the guardian of the storehouse. Despite her zealous protection of provisions, Ishtar was never a Mother Goddess. Rather, she was worshiped as the deity of love and fecundity.

By the fourth century BCE, Ishtar had morphed into Esther. In this incarnation, Esther saved her people by daring to “come out” – to claim her Jewish identity – at a perilous moment.

Esther’s unswerving determination to protect lesbian, feminist, and fat activist communities proves that she is the uncontested heir of Istar/Esther.

Ishtar/Esther also means star. Esther has been mine since our paths crossed at a lesbian/feminist conference decades ago. Since then, she has been my mentor and muse. She has encouraged my research, guided my articles to publication, and nominated me as a Division 44 Fellow in APA. She even tried her best to persuade a school that had expelled me for lesbianism to grant me an honorary degree.

Esther is also a stellar BFF. Her dedication to her friends is best illustrated by a recent episode. First, some background: A few years ago, a BART passenger was shot and killed in the same car Esther happened to be in. Ever since that terrifying episode, Esther had avoided BART.

Last week, a vehicle malfunction left Esther without the means to meet me for a lunch date. Rather than miss our date, Esther got back on BART. She was waiting at the café table when I arrived. As anyone who knows her can attest, Esther prioritizes friendship over all other considerations. Such dedication is even powerful enough to eclipse PTSD.

Esther has also consoled me during heartaches, supported me through sickness, and – with a few choice words – rescued me from my characteristic imprudence. She is also an impeccable host. When we both happened to be in Vienna, her family’s hometown, she offered to be my tour guide. She hiked alpine trails with me, showed me baroque palaces, and took me to Sacher Hotel for the best chocolate torte (mit schlagsahne) I have ever tasted.

In addition to all her other gifts, Esther is a superb athlete. She would need an airplane hangar to contain all the trophies, medals, and ribbons she has won at racket sports over the decades. That she is a court warrior is not surprising. She faces down homophobic, sexist, fat phobic adversaries with the same fierce tenacity. Did I mention that Ishtar was also the Goddess of war?

Move over Ishtar/Esther. Make room in your ancient, illustrious firmament for your contemporary counterpart.

Marcia Hill, Ed.D.

Author of Diary of a Country Therapist

Do any of your friends mark the “friendship anniversary” of when you met? Esther does, and for us it has been over 40 years. That’s how important friendship is to Esther. She is absolutely loyal. If I needed help getting rid of a body, Esther would be there with a plan that covered all possible contingencies, information about how to get what we needed for the job, and chocolate for afterward. She prioritizes our time together, and it is always clear to me that our relationship matters to her.

Esther’s encouragement is what started me on the path to writing. Since that first invitation, she and I have edited journals and books, and because of that I have gone on to edit books with other colleagues, write professional articles, and have a memoir published. We have traveled together, including a drive across the U.S. and another across Canada as well as more conventional travel. She is an easy and collaborative co-editor and travel companion. I have learned a lot from her.

But those things fade in importance beside the value of simply being her friend. My life is immeasurably richer because Esther is in it.

Alexandra Kanovsky, Former Journal Portfolio Manager at Taylor & Francis

Esther has been a joy to work with and has provided immeasurable advancements to the field of Fat Studies. Her dedication to her scholarship and contributions to the field cannot be understated. I’m so grateful to have worked with her on Fat Studies.

Krystal Kittle, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Community Health Education

School of Public Health and Health Sciences

University of Massachusetts Amherst

I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Rothblum in my role as project coordinator for Dr. Ilan Meyer’s studies: Generations and TransPop. In my role, I was given the opportunity to join various publications that I was interested, and Dr. Rothblum’s publication “Asexual and Non-Asexual Respondents from a U.S. Population-Based Study of Sexual Minorities” was one of them. I had a particularly enjoyable experience working on this paper because of Dr. Rothblum, who was kind, insightful, and encouraging. Even as a very junior researcher, Dr. Rothblum treated me as a colleague even though she embodied a rank much higher than mine. I appreciated her willingness to, along with Dr. Meyer, include me on the publication, one in which I felt very interesting and provided me with the opportunity to grow my research skills. I am happy and honored to have Dr. Rothblum’s name on my CV forever!

Audrey Koh, MD

Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences

School of Medicine

University of California, San Francisco

Esther Rothblum’s reputation preceded her by many decades before I have had the honor to work closely with her for the past handful of years on the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study. She first came to my attention with her innovative study of same-sex civil unions in Vermont (the 1st state to legalize these unions, while she was teaching at U of Vermont) studying the outcome of these same-sex unions using a control group control of the participant’s sibling. What a brilliant idea for a hitherto difficult-to-find control group. After this, I looked into her other impressive research in the field of women’s health, lesbian health, and fat stigma. I remember being so impressed by her clear and immediate grabbing of her audience, even with her titles: in 1994 - “I only read about myself on bathroom walls – the need for research on mental health of lesbian and gay men;” also 1994 - “I’ll die for the revolution but don’t ask me not to diet: feminism and the continued stigma of obesity;” in 1996 - “the rich get social services and the poor get capitalism;” in 2001 - “lesbians aren’t gay: depression;” and in 2018 - “slim chance for permanent weight loss.” These are some examples of her wonderful sense of humor and ability to encapsulate an issue in the opening salvo of the title, much less in the introduction with the following serious paper. Getting to work with her on the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, she brings her sharp mind and wit, and her prodigious writing and editorial skills to our research in all phases, from hypotheses to manuscript review. For this, I am grateful. For her contributions to the fields of psychology, LGBTQ studies, and sexuality, all people should be grateful.

Sharon Rostosky, Ph.D.

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

University of Kentucky

I was privileged to collaborate with Esther on a 2012 NICHD-funded longitudinal study that continued her ground-breaking work with Dr. Kimberly Balsam on legal status, stigma, minority stress, and psychosocial outcomes in same-sex couples. For five years or so, we worked together to survey and interview the original sample of same-sex couples who had obtained civil unions in Vermont ten years prior when that legal status was first available. The complex and ingenious design included comparison groups of same-sex couples and heterosexual couples who were in the civil union couple’s social and family network. The study evolved in real time as marriage equality at the state level and then at the federal level was achieved. It was an exciting time to interview same-sex couples, some of whom had traveled from state to state over the years to (repeatedly) get legally married. In addition to the exciting work we were doing, I recall our meetings, which would usually last several days and delicious food and personal conversations that deepened our connection and cohesiveness as a research team. I learned important lessons about showing up authentically and recognizing, affirming, and marshaling one’s own and others’ strengths. Esther shared her observation that in her experience, some researchers are “starters,” and some are “finishers;” and it is important to know which one you are so that you can build a research team that includes people with both strengths. I continue to recall that advice and pass it along to graduate students and colleagues. We accomplished a lot during the years I was fortunate enough to work with her. I personally think Esther is a starter and a finisher. I deeply admire Esther’s intellectual gravitas and how quickly she can produce a paper of novel ideas that move multiple disciplines forward. Without a doubt, I am one of many who have benefited personally and professionally from all that she has started and finished!

Brief Reflection on Esther Rothblum

Marika Tiggemann, Ph.D., FASSA

Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Psychology

College of Education, Psychology & Social Work

Flinders University

I first met Esther in 1984 when she was a visiting northern summer scholar at Flinders University, having come to work with Professor Leon Mann on academic procrastination. She came back again in the summer of 1985. Of course, we were both young and junior back then: Esther was an Assistant Professor and I was only a Senior Tutor. We became friends. We shared many of the same world views and the same research interests. I was just beginning to develop an interest in body image and Esther in fat stigmatization. During that time we hatched some research culminating in the publication of a paper in Sex Roles in 1988 titled “Gender differences in social consequences of perceived overweight in the United States and Australia.” This was near the beginning of the work on weight stigma, which had to wait some decades before proper recognition. Indeed, Esther Rothblum was the force behind that recognition, culminating in the new field of Fat Studies. Her co-edited book (Rothblum & Solovay, 2009) The Fat Studies Reader caused quite a stir in both academia and the public domain. Then, in 2012, Esther became inaugural editor of the journal Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society. In addition, Esther served as the editor of the Journal of Lesbian Studies from its inception in 1997 until 2023. So there is no doubt that Esther Rothblum is a true pioneer. She is both a serious thinker and a social mover, as well as being a generous and lovely person to know.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carla A. Pfeffer

Carla A. Pfeffer is Editor-in-Chief of Fat Studies, Chair-Elect of the section on Sex and Gender of the American Sociological Association, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University.