Unshrinking
How to Face Fatphobia
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it—from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled
“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, and our culture.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Chicago Public Library
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She’s been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.
Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Philosopher Manne (Down Girl) returns with an impassioned but somewhat overextended treatise against fatphobia, which she contends is rampant across society, including in education, healthcare, the job market, and the dating sphere. Drawing on a wide range of literature, philosophy, sociological studies, and personal anecdotes, Manne shows how widespread and insidious is the assumption that weight reflects willpower, self-control, and moral fiber, and contends that fatphobia has historically been used as a means of race, class, and gender discrimination. She uses her own experiences of navigating fatphobia as the scaffolding of the book, arguing that when fat people's personal stories are ignored, it is a form of "testimonial injustice." She also argues directly against medical justifications for promoting an ideal body weight by citing studies that assert weight is largely based on genetics and unaffected by dietary habits, and that higher weight is not as clearly correlated with negative health outcomes as is commonly believed. While Manne's debunking of what she considers the myth of the obesity crisis is a thought-provoking exercise, it can feel as if to make her point she understates the structural social injustices, such as poverty and discrimination, that can lead to food inequality, food insecurity, and unequal access to healthcare. Ultimately, this fails to convince.
