Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

What is called for is a thoroughgoing political reckoning and subsequent moral recognition: being fat, like being trans, is a valid and indeed valuable way of being in the world.

There’s also an individualistic—and, arguably, masculinist—assumption at work in diet culture, which minimizes the role of food in shared pleasures, both daily and during special celebrations. But there is something immensely valuable about being tied to the world, and our bodies, and each other, by the thrice-or-so daily practice of satisfying our

The lessons are clear: First, people routinely misinterpret their visceral disgust reactions as moral disgust, leading them to judge morally bad actions more harshly, and even to deem neutral actions morally problematic. Second, when this occurs, people reach for reasons to justify their moral ill feelings, engaging in post hoc rationalization of a

Even if these interventions were perfectly safe and costless and painless—which they’re currently far from being—I would still find them objectionable at a social level of analysis. For they flatten out difference, in the form of human bodily diversity, which I believe we ought to value. They flatten out such difference not at random, moreover, but

Your body is for you, and the ways it has been impugned stem from the many people and practices and structures that have missed this fundamental idea, instead perpetuating the lie that your body is meant to please or serve or placate others.

It is indeed an example of what we might call the “harder-better” fallacy: that which is the most difficult to achieve is judged the most praiseworthy, regardless of its actual desirability or value.

It’s hard to see how the general mandate to be positive about our bodies could avoid the features that can make positivity curdle into something toxic. True, such positivity isn’t necessarily toxic, considered at an individual level. But the documented propensity for it to turn toxic when it is billed as obligatory and socially enforced is a huge p

Misogyny, as I’ve argued, finds in fatphobia a powerful and convenient ally: it constructs a ready-to-hand hierarchy among girls and women based on the infinitely gradable metric of body mass, usefully complicated by body shape, breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, and various markers of privilege.

Body reflexivity offers an escape from the apparently exhaustive options of positivity, negativity, or neutrality, by proposing a different focus. Rather than changing how bodies are assessed, it urges us to transcend the mode of assessment entirely. (“I don’t look at you with a critical eye,” is something often said to me by my husband—which means