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A review by jamieruwen
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
emotional
informative
medium-paced
4.0
An essential for the modern leftist. Fat justice is one the most underexposed topics in our conversations about justice, and Gordon delivers here an insight into fat life, fat suffering, fat marginalisation and medicalisation that body positivity has epically failed to do. She also shines a light on an alternative approach: fat justice. Ultimately, we cannot achieve full bodily autonomy and liberation without including fat justice, and this becomes obvious especially in the last chapter of this book. The suffering of fat people at the hands of thin friends & family, the concern trolling, the exclusion of fat people from our conversations about self-determination, the absolute disdain of the medical establishment towards fat people, the societal abuse of fat children: Gordon covers it all, and she does it with grace and accessible language. Her inclusion at every turn of disabled people and transgender people, highlighting the way those groups often suffer intersecting marginalisation is enlightening and shows Gordon has done the work necessary to comfortably write a book like this. You will find no crescendos of “as long as you’re healthy” here.
What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat is in many ways, especially when covering personal experiences, quintessentially American: many societies have different body standards, not all countries are as size-exclusionary as the U.S. However, do not be fooled by this: systemic fatphobia exists in your society too, and fatphobia exists within you. The fat people in your life know this already. There is no escape, as Gordon shows, from the diet industry and it’s Western, thin, white, able-bodied, cisgender beauty ideal. I especially latched onto Gordon’s bold and completely true critique of the Body Positivity movement. What body positivity has failed to do is show us how our discomfort with bodies that deviate from that standard seep into other aspects of our society. As Gordon puts it:
What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat is in many ways, especially when covering personal experiences, quintessentially American: many societies have different body standards, not all countries are as size-exclusionary as the U.S. However, do not be fooled by this: systemic fatphobia exists in your society too, and fatphobia exists within you. The fat people in your life know this already. There is no escape, as Gordon shows, from the diet industry and it’s Western, thin, white, able-bodied, cisgender beauty ideal. I especially latched onto Gordon’s bold and completely true critique of the Body Positivity movement. What body positivity has failed to do is show us how our discomfort with bodies that deviate from that standard seep into other aspects of our society. As Gordon puts it:
Over time, body positivity has made its constituency clear. It has widened the warm and fickle embrace of beauty standards ever so slightly. Now it showers its affections not only on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 4 but on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 12.
Body positivity has widened the circle of acceptable bodies, yes, but it still leaves so many of us by the wayside. Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life.
Our greatest challenges are not internal. They are systemic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fatphobia
Moderate: Child abuse and Eating disorder