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A review by stevia333k
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
informative
inspiring
tense
4.5
This is a good book when I'm trying to get a different angle on conversion torture because this book is geared for the intersection of fat activism & feminism. i recommend this book. basically, screw the myth of willpower. i would say the book is scary with its descriptions of street harassment & assault, but there's a sort of horror of oppression that's alluded to but not explicitly gotten to, even though there is a lot of connections talked about throughout the book. that being said i'm adding these next 2 paragraphs in order to help synthesize what i got from this book with other information i've seen, especially since i haven't read like academic journals about fat rights, fat liberation, fat studies, etc. while i have marked it with spoiler formatting, please note that i have added information that are from other sources.
That being said, I feel like the book has a lot of emphasis on hatred against fat people, when i noticed that a lot of the bullying i faced in school was connected to people trying to assimilate & suck up to the teachers. it's the trying to get closer to enclosured power as opposed to breaking that privatization & getting it distributed equitably.
like there's 2 things i think of at least: the military wanting a one-size-fits-all outfit to make gear standardized (they ended up having to make 3 sizes), and how fatness is used to play into desireability politics to cover up how white patriarchs raped black perceived-females. like, i sense those were meant to be simmering in the background, (we literally started out with how fatphobia is connected to militarism, and how fatphobia is compared to an "epidemic" like how bourgeois depictions of famine refugees as zombies & "great replacement" canard works with settler colonizers. but again, these are left lower-key.)
like there's 2 things i think of at least: the military wanting a one-size-fits-all outfit to make gear standardized (they ended up having to make 3 sizes), and how fatness is used to play into desireability politics to cover up how white patriarchs raped black perceived-females. like, i sense those were meant to be simmering in the background, (we literally started out with how fatphobia is connected to militarism, and how fatphobia is compared to an "epidemic" like how bourgeois depictions of famine refugees as zombies & "great replacement" canard works with settler colonizers. but again, these are left lower-key.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness, Hate crime, Sexual harassment, Transphobia, Forced institutionalization, Sexual assault, War, Ableism, Body shaming, Fatphobia, Grief, Stalking, Violence, Bullying, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Rape, Child abuse, Eating disorder, Gaslighting, Sexual violence, Medical content, Racism, and Sexism