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597 reviews for:
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
Da’Shaun Harrison
4.54 AVERAGE
597 reviews for:
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
Da’Shaun Harrison
4.54 AVERAGE
josieplyep's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
cocoonofbooks's review against another edition
2.5
I've found that there's a particular strain of activist writing that doesn't work for my brain, one that presents bold statements as self-evident and, inasmuch as they do present evidence, do so by quoting others at length. It's not clear what Harrison's central thesis is throughout the book; they rely on the work of Sabrina Strings and Hortense Spillers for many of their key points but don't share what led these authors to their conclusions (the way they do with an extended passage from Aubrey Gordon at one point), so the reader is left to assume Harrison has drawn the correct interpretations and then immediately follow Harrison onto further points without clarity on how they got there. Harrison then says at the end that, in fact, their actual thesis that they've previously referenced only briefly is that an abolition of prisons and policing isn't enough and we need a destruction of the World. It's a conclusion disjointed from what came before and not explained in any depth, so it's unclear what Harrison even means by destroying the World.
As with other nonfiction books I've struggled with, Harrison is all over the map on what type of writing this is. The conclusions are too sweeping, the evidence too scant, and the work too short to be a thorough argument for anything, particularly if made to those who aren't already on board with their conclusions. If it were a straight manifesto, then they likely wouldn't have included so many quotations from other authors and a whole section of interviews. It's not memoir, though Harrison includes a small bit of their personal experience, but maybe it should have been more of that, as Harrison seems to assume their own experiences are both universally shared by everyone with their same identities as well as unique to those with those identities. The chapter with the interviews would have benefited from some synthesis rather than presenting each interview in sequence, and the questions Harrison asked their interviewees were painfully leading. It's also unclear who Harrison envisions their audience to be, but on the whole they seem uninterested in convincing anyone of anything who doesn't already agree with them, or else they might have taken a more coherent, methodical approach leading to a clearly articulated conclusion.
There are undoubtedly points throughout that speak powerfully to the intersections of race, gender, and body size, most notably when speaking about the large Black men killed by police in the 2010s and the ways that these victims were spoken about afterwards as if their physical attributes made them an inherent source of danger. I think Harrison could have gone further in exploring these intersections, but instead they fell back on broad statements like "As already covered, the Black is the fat." (I'm not sure where they thought they already covered that; as noted above, they referenced Strings' Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, but noting that anti-fatness is rooted in anti-Blackness is not the same as saying that all Black people are viewed as fat.)
I could have given this a lower rating if strictly reflective of my own reading experience, but I recognize that Harrison likely shares a lot of ideas in this book that speak directly to lived experiences that are not my own and provide a valuable mirror in that way, and that I don't need to be intended audience for every book. That said, if Harrison would like more allies in their "beyond abolition" endeavors, they're going to need to be willing to spend more time connecting the dots for their readers than they were in this book.
As with other nonfiction books I've struggled with, Harrison is all over the map on what type of writing this is. The conclusions are too sweeping, the evidence too scant, and the work too short to be a thorough argument for anything, particularly if made to those who aren't already on board with their conclusions. If it were a straight manifesto, then they likely wouldn't have included so many quotations from other authors and a whole section of interviews. It's not memoir, though Harrison includes a small bit of their personal experience, but maybe it should have been more of that, as Harrison seems to assume their own experiences are both universally shared by everyone with their same identities as well as unique to those with those identities. The chapter with the interviews would have benefited from some synthesis rather than presenting each interview in sequence, and the questions Harrison asked their interviewees were painfully leading. It's also unclear who Harrison envisions their audience to be, but on the whole they seem uninterested in convincing anyone of anything who doesn't already agree with them, or else they might have taken a more coherent, methodical approach leading to a clearly articulated conclusion.
There are undoubtedly points throughout that speak powerfully to the intersections of race, gender, and body size, most notably when speaking about the large Black men killed by police in the 2010s and the ways that these victims were spoken about afterwards as if their physical attributes made them an inherent source of danger. I think Harrison could have gone further in exploring these intersections, but instead they fell back on broad statements like "As already covered, the Black is the fat." (I'm not sure where they thought they already covered that; as noted above, they referenced Strings' Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, but noting that anti-fatness is rooted in anti-Blackness is not the same as saying that all Black people are viewed as fat.)
I could have given this a lower rating if strictly reflective of my own reading experience, but I recognize that Harrison likely shares a lot of ideas in this book that speak directly to lived experiences that are not my own and provide a valuable mirror in that way, and that I don't need to be intended audience for every book. That said, if Harrison would like more allies in their "beyond abolition" endeavors, they're going to need to be willing to spend more time connecting the dots for their readers than they were in this book.