In an episode about Angela Lansbury’s fitness book-video-combo, Positive Moves, Maintenance Phase co-host Aubrey Gordon observed that “it is really difficult to disentangle our motives for weight loss from our attitudes towards fat people.” This small statement captures a central thesis of the incredibly popular podcast. That is, our cultural imagination of “fatness” – or… Read more →
Tag: Fat-talk
Bodies of Uncertainty
I hadn’t even entered my brief, early-pandemic bread baking phase when other people’s fears about “pandemic weight gain” became unavoidable. I have been fat for my entire life, and as a fat person who does not diet I have become very skilled at avoiding conversations about other people’s fear of weight gain that might cause… Read more →
Anti-Blackness as Anti-Fatness: An Interview with Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s recent book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is a call for revolution. “Out there is a reality where fat Black folks are experiencing the harms of anti-Blackness as anti-fatness,” they write; “Black liberation is the end goal, and for it to happen, fat liberation must also be… Read more →
Love on Credit: Meditations on Fatness, Queerness, and Transformation
It is a strange thing, learning to love your body on credit. I grew up in Southern California in the 1990s, in a multiracial, deeply loving, and profoundly Evangelical Christian family. This upbringing came with so many wonderful memories as well as a casual, if not ill-intentioned daily dose of homophobia. One of the more… Read more →
The Racist Misogyny behind Your “Does My Butt Look Fat in This?”: Reading Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Every so often, a book comes out that arrives as both an answer to a question and an answer to a prayer. For me, Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is emphatically both. My scholarly superpower, and an annoying one it is too, is finding the holes in the… Read more →
The Problem with Fat-Talk at the Pediatrician’s Office
“His BMI is on the high side of normal. See?” The pediatrician showed me a chart. “This is something we need to keep an eye on.” I had brought my younger child for his seven-year-old checkup, a pro forma ritual as far as I was concerned. Our pediatrics practice always asks my kids if they… Read more →