deathfat

English

Alternative forms

• death fat

Etymology

death +‎ fat. Coined by Lesley Kinzel as a "counter-euphemism" for morbidly obese in a November 2008 post on the Fatshionista LiveJournal community.

Adjective

deathfat (not comparable)

1. (slang, sarcastic) Morbidly obese.
   • 2009 October 8, firefey [username], “Re: Obama with Goths”, in alt.gothic‎^[1] (Usenet):

     it's made of people you probably see everyday^[sic] and don't even think are fat, let alone deathfat.

   • 2012, Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body, unnumbered page:

     To put it more succinctly, I am death fat. I am superduper really-for-real mad fat. I am the kind of fat where doctors are friendly until they get me on a scale, and then after that they get very quiet.

   • 2014, Kala Heekin, "Fat Babes In Crop Tops: Representations Of Gender In Fa(t)shion", Society & Culture Undergraduate Research Forum, Volume 6, Spring 2014, page 148:

     Death fat individuals may find that smaller fat people are taking up more space in fa(t)shion and are more commonly seen in these blogs.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:deathfat.

Noun

deathfat (plural deathfats)

1. (slang, sarcastic) A morbidly obese person.
   • 2013, Maya Maor, "More: Fat Women in Israel-Genres and Issues in Identity Construction and Resistance to Social Oppression", thesis submitted to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, page 104:

     Some US fat activists distinguish between ‘inbetweenies,’ who are relatively ‘small’ fat people who enjoy privileges such as ‘passing’ as thin or ‘on their way to being’ thin, and ‘death fats,’ who suffer the worst of the sanctions society places on fat people (McMichael, 2010).

   • 2016, Laura Ellen Joyce, “Flesh Home: The Uncanny Female Architecture of Blake Butler's EVER”, in Helen Hester, Caroline Walters, editors, Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism, unnumbered page:

     The protagonist is aligned to the abject in this room as she wears her dress of rot but she is also aligned to the "death fats" and she exists at a great distance from the slender angels above.

   • 2017 June 12, Marie Southard Ospina, “A Body Project: Cynthia Rodriguez On Their Chin(s)”, in Bustle:

     "Even within the international fatosphere and rad places of the internet, a lot of the fat femme people have perfectly chiseled faces. Even the deathfats," Rodríguez later tells me in an interview.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:deathfat.

Usage notes

• Used within the fat-acceptance community to satirize the dire implications carried by the term morbidly obese (i.e, that such people are at a greater, possibly imminent risk of death due to their weight).