TBR Pile: Queering Fat Embodiment, edited by Cat Pause, Jackie Wykes and Samantha Murray

Blurb

Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged ‘obesity epidemic’, this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment.

Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses.

A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality.

My Review

Queering something means to disrupt and deconstruct normative expectations, whether that’s gender, sexuality, neurotype (see Neuroqueer Heresies by Nicky Walker), disability and in this case, body type, specifically fat bodies.

I’ve had this book for a while, and I’ve been reading it on and off for six months. This book was first published 9 years ago, and in the last decade fat activism has become more visible online – you can listen to podcasts about it, read books on the subject, and follow Instagram accounts about it. Cat Pause, the lead editor, died in the last year, and her loss caused a lot of grief in the the fat studies and fat activism communities.

I’ve been vaguely interested in fat activism for about five years, what with being a life long fat person and I’m quite frankly fucked off that people still think it’s acceptable to tell me that I need to lose weight and make assumptions about my nutrition and movement. Even my dietitian, who knows about my issues with food insecurity in the past, my disordered eating in the past and my mental health issues, praises me for losing weight and recommends smaller portions, and wants to refer me to a weight management programme. Its weird because she also accepts that I probably have better cardiovascular health than she does because I’m so active.

This book made connections that I hadn’t picked up before, or at least not in this context. I honestly believe out current social system needs to be burnt down and excavated from the soil, and a new social system rebuilt on a foundation of equity, justice and civil rights for all. Many social movements just want to muck around a bit with the current system, rather than build a new world. That’s the difference between ‘rights’ movements and ‘justice’ movements. Civil rights movements are bandages on open wounds; social justice movements want to remove the source of injury in the first place. I had mainly considered these things in terms of neurodiversity and disability rights, but had some thoughts along these lines while reading Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism. If all the social justice movements formed true alliances with each other, imagine the changes we could make? We could really have a livable world!

I can’t review each chapter, because I read some of them six months ago, although I read chapters 5 to 11 over the last few days. I did enjoy the entire volume and found lots to consider in reading it. My highlights from the last few days:

• Chapter 6 Chubby Boys with Strap-Ons: Queering Fat Transmasculine Embodiment, by James Burford and Sam Orchard. It started a conversation with a friend of mine about the medical gatekeeping around trans healthcare. Essentially, doctors will hold your hormones and any surgical interventions you might want hostage to weight-loss or the BMI, yet nobody says ‘I’ll put you on testosterone blockers if you don’t lose weight’ to cis men, or refuse to give cis women breast enhancements if they put on a couple of kilos. It’s all about enforcing normative body types and gender expectations on trans people more rigidly than on cisgender people.

• Chapter 7 ‘Causing a Commotion: Queering Fat in Cyberspace’ by Cat Pause. This chapter sets out what words mean in this context, which is really helpful. Might have been useful at the beginning of the book but also helpful to tell who has actually read the book before reviewing it. The meat of the chapter is about the online fat activism world. Things have changed since the chapter was written but if you weren’t around at the time it is a good foundations for understanding where we are now.
• Chapter 9 Queering the Linkages and Divergencies: The Relationship between Fatness and Disability and the Hope for a Livable World, by Zoe Meleo-Erwin. This chapter explores fatness, disability and queerness as aspects of each other or ways to interpret embodiment in ways that are not considered normative.

This book covers everything from healthism and disability in relation to fatness; the performance of fatness – in both the sense of how fatness is viewed by society (good fats and bad fats), and fat performers; transmasculine and gay fat men; fat fashion as activism; and, fat activism online. It’s all foundational stuff, building on work that has been going on for 50 years at this point, and at the time of first publication the topics were cutting edge. If you’ve already been involved in fat studies or fat activism this book might be a bit ‘beginner’, but if you’re only just learning about these things, it’s a good place to dip your toes into the academic end of the pool. There’s some really good essays in here, but some of them are less accessible to non-academics. You may need a dictionary at times.