Fat Body Politics

Putting together a guest lecture on personal autonomy, fat embodiment, thin privilege and deconstructing health. Yeah fuckers we talk about this stuff off the internets. 

Yesterday there was a post floating around on tumblr that was a drawing of a fat disabled woman with the signs “Fuck Diets” covering her naked flesh. What many people saw was a person rejecting diet culture and the shame that comes along with not only being fat but also being disabled. Something that was suppose to be positive was turned into a conflict due to a few trolls that wanted to decide that this fictional person was disabled due to an illness not being taken care of. I find it pointless to discuss the semantics of the whole conversation because I find the idea that people are putting a label of disease on a fat body, a disabled and fictional drawing of a body ludicrous.  It is truthfully the sign of how much fat stigma is alive in our society that even a drawing meant to be positive and show body diversity is turned into something it isn’t.

What I want to talk about is the reaction from the people who were trashing the drawing by saying that their response was a hypothetical situation the drawing could be depicting. When people say that they are speaking hypothetically what they really mean is that they are not talking about you, so you don’t have the right to find what they are saying offensive. This kind of response to a push back against negative comments is not only meant to try and negate the emotional reaction of those people who are offended, but is also a way to try and silence the ability of anyone who takes issue with the person’s harmful stance. By saying that they are talking about a hypothetical situation it also makes it so that a person who has had their own body read in a similar fashion has no space to speak out, because clearly they are not speaking about actual situations that have happened to actual people.

Attacking a drawing, that doesn’t depict a real person, gives people who are blinded by their own prejudice an ability to try and remove their own responsibility that is connected to the harm their words cause. The issue really isn’t that they are reading a drawing of a person that was meant to be positive, but that they are trying to negate the reality that their words have been said about real people, with real bodies that live in reality. Their lives and body should never be used as a hypothetical situation.

When fat disabled bodies are read as a being the result of an inability to take care of ones self that is not only fat phobia but also ableism in action. When someone sees a fat disabled body and automatically assumes that the state of their body is the end result of mismanaged care that is directly related to growing up in a society where you are socialized with fat phobic thinking. We are continually taught fat people have X illness and that illness results in X state of body, then our minds fill in the blank. Without challenging social conditioning no one is able to break away from the fat stigma that is so ingrained within our society.

By not breaking away from prejudice, people create these hypothetical situations while forgetting that there are real people with real bodies who have and continue to deal with people who do not think hypothetically about the way they read their body. All of us learn to read bodies in a way that doesn’t allow for us accept difference in others but question why someone else’s body exists as it does. Instead of allowing for bodies to merely exist many react with fear and push back trying to understand through ableism and fat phobia, speaking in hypothetical’s to try and protect their own discomfort.

If ANOTHER person tries to tell me that being called mean names or told to eat a sandwich is the same as government backed campaigns to make fat people no longer exist I’m going to blow a fucking gasket. Body shaming is horrible no matter who it happens to but the idea that people are comparing words to numerous industries that are trying to find a “cure” for fatness is ridiculous. I’m going to need all of the readers of Bitch who wrote on their facebook page about this story to sit down and shut the fuck up when discussing a girl who seriously believes that girls are taught being fat is the ideal and started a kickstarter campaign to make a book that looks like every fucking magazine in the history of forever.

I would really love for someone to find an industry whose main purpose is to find a cure for thinness. If you answer with the food industry you have already failed. Go and find out who owns Jenny Craig asshat.

You don’t get to say “I’m an ally” and expect people to back off when you are saying harmful things. This is why “ally” is an identity that I am uncomfortable with since it always seems to support someone being ignorant, if you seriously want to support a movement that means you will be in a continual never ending process of unlearning. That means listening when other people who you are suppose to be an “ally” for when they tell you that you are doing something harmful. It means not dismissing the entire movement because you refuse to acknowledge or understand the privileged space you take up. It means not expecting a cookie because you are such a good “ally.”

Further reading..

The Do’s and Don’ts of Being a Good Ally

10 Ways to Be an Ally

And fuck people who support them even when they know they make this community feel unsafe for other people.

I apologize to all my followers who have to suffer through trolls acting like idiots and being generally harmful. I would suggest we eat a donut in their honor but that would be a waste of a perfectly good donut.