Reading about this, my heart broke for fat kids everywhere who bear the burden of our obsession with thinness. There are two entry points in: if you’ve never thought about this before, if you’ve never thought about fatness and fat people in this dignity- and justice-centered way, there will be plenty of user friendly entry points for you. In her book, Gordon references sociologist Sabrina String’s Fearing the Black Body, in which Strings argues that fatphobia was never about health, but serves as a tool to “validate race, class, and gender prejudice,” dating back to colonization. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat - ScienceDirect What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat - ScienceDirect

A concern troll might ask a fat person what diets they’ve tried before asking them if they even want to lose weight, or even ask for their consent to engage in what might be a sensitive topic. There’s no question that anti-fat bias, and anti-fatness as a structure, is a direct outgrowth of anti-Black racism,” Gordon says. And I’d venture to guess you even hear it in your head, when your pants are suddenly fitting a little differently. People are MAYBE allowed to be fat, but they have to be healthy, or actively trying to become healthy.

A world where everyone – thin, fat, in-between – is encouraged to judge fat people and keep them ashamed and embarrassed. I don’t know that there is much that is more demoralizing to me than hearing people I love talk about how much better the world would be without people like me in it. The reviews and comments posted on this site reflect the opinions of individual posters and do not reflect the views of Cannonball Read.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey

Gordon opens her book with a story about being put in a middle seat on a plane as a size 28, and the anger she received from the man sitting next to her. In a world where thinness reigns supreme and diet talk is as normal as talking about the weather, fat folks rarely have the opportunity to share their stories without fear of being bullied or berated.And if you are a fat person who has thought about this a lot, my hope is to have created something that allows fat folks to see themselves reflected in a way that doesn’t usually happen. Advancing fat justice and changing prejudicial structures and attitudes will require work from all people.

What We Dont Talk about When We Talk about Fat | TikTok What We Dont Talk about When We Talk about Fat | TikTok

We just seem to be stuck in dogged pursuit of an answer to this one question: how do we stop having fat people? Fat people bear the brunt of it because we’re forced to be aware of our bodies in a different way and where we sit in the hierarchy of body shapes and sizes. We have managed to normalize something that is by almost every measure harmful to pretty much every person. where she edits stories in the health and wellness beat, in addition to specializing in gender and body politics. Because of fatphobia’s history as a structural means of body policing, Gordon says, “all of the ways that we level our bad behaviors at fat people are absolutely entrenched in oppressive systems, in violent forms of communication.Author Gordon, who describes herself as very fat, explores all the ways in which society fails fat people, offering suggestions for body justice. Leaving the religion of diet culture 🙌🏼 It’s a wild ride ✌🏼 Sources pictured: Anti-diet by Christy Harrison and What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat by Aubrey Gordon. This quote: “We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect,” has stuck with me. Studies show that fat survivors of sexual assault are less likely to be believed and less likely than their thin counterparts to report various crimes; 27% of very fat women and 13% of very fat men attempt suicide; over 50% of doctors describe their fat patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly and noncompliant”; and in 48 states, it’s legal—even routine—to deny employment because of an applicant’s size. As organizers, our job is to build a collective vision, make sure that folks are enrolled in that collective vision, and push together in concert to make some changes.

What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat: by Aubrey

The marginalization and public abuse of very fat people is so commonplace that it has become accepted, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. Like health and wellness, which many argue is the newest incarnation of diet culture, thinness has become culturally synonymous with moral virtue, thus making fatness its moral opposite. In her new book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Gordon seamlessly threads a personal narrative with data and history.You see it on TV, like when Miranda from Sex and the City joins Weight Watchers right after having a baby. More importantly than this, I’ve been raised in a society that seems to think that fat people don’t deserve kind or even humane treatment.