By Dr. Angela Meadows

Dr Caitlin (Cat) Pausé passed away in her sleep on March 26th, 2022. Cat was a force of nature. She was a scholar, a mentor, a teacher, an activist, and a tireless advocate for fat rights. She also hosted a successful radio show in New Zealand called Friend of Marilyn (referring to formidable activist Marilyn Wann) and available as a podcast, in which she interviewed researchers, practitioners, activists, and people engaged in all forms of fat liberation work around the world, from plus-size models to political campaigners, as well as sharing others’ writing and providing commentary on topics that were on the public radar. You can access most of Cat’s work including her scholarship, activism, podcast, blog, tumblr and more on her website www.friendofmarilyn.com.

In the days since learning of Cat’s death, I have been reading about how much she also supported others doing all kinds of work in fat scholarship and fat activism, supporting producers of all kinds. Those of us who were lucky enough to have Zoomed with Cat will have seen the amazing gallery wall behind her desk showcasing the photography of Substantia Jones and the Adipositivity Project. She impressed on me the importance of changing our visual diet, surrounding ourselves with images of beautiful fat bodies to counter the normalization of fatphobia and our own acquired body hatred.

I have been trying to remember when I first came across Cat, and to begin with, I couldn’t. I was surprised to remember how many years I had known her. Revisiting her work to write this, it came back to me. It was in response to Dr. Geoffrey Miller’s fatphobic tweet in 2013 where he explicitly mocked fat individuals who were applying to graduate school. Cat responded by setting up a tumblr, “F*ck, yeah! Fat PhDs” to feature fat people proud of being “fatlicious in academia.” Page after page of Fat PhDs and other graduate students, beginning with her own doctoral graduation photo. I had only just started my own PhD studies at the time, and scrolling through page after page of smiling fat people receiving their doctorates was incredibly powerful.

I still don’t remember when I first spoke to Cat directly – I can’t imagine a time when she was not in my life. I think many of us are just starting to comprehend the amount of time that Cat dedicated to building and nurturing these relationships, building a closer fat community, and making every person she spoke with feel truly special.  

One of Cat’s passions was elevating the voices and work of fat activists around the world, in particular, providing a platform for those working outside North America and Western Europe and beyond the English-speaking mainstream. Dr Pausé’s loss to the fat studies and fat activism community can barely be captured in words. There is a hole where Cat used to be. But her influence extends way beyond those of us whose lives she touched personally, with the ripples extending to fat people around the world who will never know her name. 

The world is a better place for having had Cat in it.

Note: A longer version of this piece can be found at the Weight Stigma Conference Website. The conference created the Dr. Cat Pause Travel Bursary, which will award students from the Global South to enable them to attend the WSC.

Click here to give to the fund in honor of Dr. Pausé life and legacy. 

Note: Dr. Pause was featured on the NAAFA Webinar Series in April 2021 as part of our COVID-19 series. Click here to see Cat interviewed by NAAFA Chair Tigress Osborn about “Medical and Government Bias is the Unethical Scapegoating of Fat People”.

Dr. Angela Meadows is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Essex, UK. She is a social psychologist specializing in prejudice and discrimination relating to weight and body size. Her research focuses on how fat people respond to the stigma they encounter in their daily lives, especially those who reject and challenge weight stigma. She has published a number of articles and book chapters and has been interviewed by numerous media outlets internationally. In 2013, she founded the Annual International Weight Stigma Conference, now in its eighth year.

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