This short book is more speculative on the topic of fat rights—rights people might claim because of their weight—than its title suggests. Anna Kirkland puzzles through the various ways in which the issue of weight could be incorporated into American antidiscrimination law. The book's major contribution is therefore to identify a number of frameworks, or logics, as she calls them, for thinking about the legal recognition and protection of difference and to reveal the strengths, shortcomings, and possibilities of each. The book is not a detailed study of cases in which weight has been the basis of a legal dispute, although a number of such cases are discussed briefly and reiterated throughout the text. Moreover, those cases Kirkland does discuss are drawn exclusively from employment law. Despite its subtitle, Fat Rights is not an exploration of the ways in which weight might influence identity: Neither the views of people who perceive themselves as fat nor the views of others are discussed in great detail. Instead of connecting the conception of personhood mentioned in the subtitle directly with weight, Kirkland unearths different conceptions of personhood in the different logics she adduces for thinking about difference, rights, and nondiscrimination. In general terms, she posits that “[l]aw's stories about why people are different and what justifies their differential treatment are explained through logics of personhood” (p. 72).

There are six such logics, according to the author. The first is “functional personhood.” According to this style of thinking, what matters is whether a person can fulfill a specific task, such as driving a bus, rather than what his or her size, race, gender, or ethnicity might be. The second logic is “embedded personhood.” The insight here is that features that appear arbitrary from a functional point of view can actually be constitutive of identity and are not, therefore, readily bracketed as irrelevant. Gender is one such facet of embedded personhood, for, according to Kirkland, “appearances in the world as visibly gendered persons are so foundational to identity … that it is difficult to imagine ourselves without gender…. [O]ne might want gender to be very different from what it is now, but … it is hard not to place it centrally in one's self-concept” (p. 77).

In what strikes me as an unfortunate choice of terminology, Kirkland calls her third logic “blame shifting.” Focusing solely on what a person can or cannot do is too atomistic—there might be wider structural forces that influence a person's capacities. So if whole groups of people have been excluded from certain social functions on the basis of race or gender, just focusing on what an individual can or cannot do occludes the bigger picture of systematic injustice, privilege, and disadvantage. Kirkland depicts the civil rights movements of the 1960s as exemplifying this logic of blame shifting.

The fourth logic is “diverse personhood”; accordingly, organizations should have a wide array of different sorts of people on their staffs, and so a mixture of races, ethnicities, and genders is desirable. This, in turn, sheds additional light on the idea of embedded personhood because from the standpoint of diverse personhood, it matters greatly what race, gender, or ethnicity the employee is. These features are not arbitrary; rather, recruiting employees with a range of such identity traits is seen as enhancing an organization's strength. In the cases of blame shifting and diverse personhood, what we have are not, however, merely alternative logics. Instead, Kirkland suggests that diverse personhood has superseded blame shifting as a way of thinking about race in American law (p. 56).

“Actuarial personhood” is the fifth logic. This perspective amasses information about groups, calculates averages, and draws conclusions about individuals on these bases. Thus, the logic of actuarial personhood might recommend that irrespective of his or her actual capacities or condition, an overweight person should not be employed because of the greater risk of health problems. Such a person is therefore likely to cost the organization more in insurance payouts. Finally, the logic of “managerial individualism” has grown out of the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to this style of thinking, workplaces should make reasonable accommodation for disabled employees, and a process of negotiation between employee and employer is needed in order to decide what these accommodations are and what is reasonable for each side to the employment contract to accept. This process can be carried out only in a case-by-case, context-specific way.

As indicated, these different logics underpin the ways in which factors like race, gender, and ability have been construed in American antidiscrimination law. Throughout the book, Kirkland reflects about which logic might prove most suitable for people pursuing rights on the basis of weight. Should fatness be thought of as diversity or disability? Does discrimination against fat people trade in damaging stereotypes? She concludes that none of the logics will guarantee rights for fat people and that each of the six logics has its pros and cons. The same uncertainty applies to those seeking rights on any other new basis—such as transgendered or transsexual individuals.

Along with its open-ended response concerning the most promising logics for advocates of rights for fat people, this book left me with many questions. One was about the social meaning of fatness. Is there such a thing as fatness that would create the basis for group formation and solidarity, or do perceptions and interpretations of fatness vary with gender, race, age, class, and ethnicity? In other words, do we ever encounter weight in a way that is unmediated by other axes of identity? Another question is about American exceptionalism. Is weight primarily an issue in many of the cases Kirkland discusses because of the way health insurance is tied in this country to employment—or provided by Medicare and Medicaid? In systems with universal health insurance, how powerful is the idea of actuarial personhood? Kirkland gestures in this direction in a footnote (p. 181), but a more extensive comparative study of how the issue of weight appears in the political-legal realm in other Westernized countries would have been extremely illuminating.