unwanted weight loss after pregnancy
Theres been a little burst of articles recently, blog posts, pieces for independent websites as well as big media, about how thin women have it hard too, and that skinny-shaming is as bad as fat-shaming.
(First, a slight digression. Although I think that shame is fairly central to these concepts, I think the term shaming is a bit limited here because of its individualism. I think that the interactions between people that happen at the sharp end of fat hatred are not only about that moment or the people involved, but that they are underscored by broader social values. The guy on the escalator looking at me and berating his kid for not taking the stairs because they dont want to get fat may be a fatphobe, but hes acting within a context where concepts such as obesogenic, childhood obesity, the National Child Measurement Programme, and the global obesity epidemic are in full swing, for example, and have real, material effects on people. These concepts havent come from nowhere, either. I use fat hatred and fatphobia too, though these are also limited terms for the phenomenon. We need more language.)
I think of these articles as a kind of backlash that illustrates how arguments central to fat activism, once extremely marginal, are becoming part of the mainstream. Theyre by women who are disgruntled that fat activism has not stopped them bearing the brunt of hateful comments about their bodies.
I am sorry that anyone has to defend their bodies against socially-sanctioned hate. Sometimes, as these writers explain, hateful comments come from fat people who use hate to refute the hate directed at them. Clichés about real women being curvy for example (if ever there was a word saturated with self-hatred it is the substitution of the euphemism curvy for fat), and the use of skinny bitch or stick insect as insults are part of this strategy of bolstering up oneself at the expense of others. This is certainly a problem within the movement. Creating a counter-attack that demeans thinner people is not a viable route to liberation. I dont think that thin people are the enemy. Upholders of institutional fat hatred are usually normatively-sized, but that doesn’t mean that every thin person has it in for fat people.
But it is also a mistake to think of thin as the opposite of fat, and therefore essential to fat activism. This is an easy mistake to make because of the popular assumption that anorexia/starvation and obesity are mirror images of each other, as well as the argument that the social hatred of fat peoples bodies affects people of all sizes. Nicky Diamond, a feminist academic writing in the 1980s, argued that fat and thin are in an unavoidable relationship with each other, they define each other and are meaningless alone. But I think that this is becoming less so as fat community and culture become established; I see this as being about acknowledging and communicating the particular qualities and experiences of being fat. Mostly the fat in fat activism is really just about fat.
Thin is not fat. Just as my experiences of fatness will differ from others, especially those who are much fatter than me, or relatively normative, so thin peoples experiencing of their bodies is different to fat. In addition, sure, most of us live in circumstances where it is difficult to feel free in our bodies, but fat people experience this in particular ways that thinner or normatively-sized people dont. Access to healthcare is different, for example, so is representation, and so on.
Perhaps it is unrealistic for thin and/or normatively-sized women, including those recovering from eating disorders where they have become very thin, to expect to find all the answers they are looking for within this movement. Fat activism may have the indirect outcome of enabling thinner women to live more freely, but that is not its primary purpose. There are a rash of, rather weak in my opinion, body-image activist interventions, which thinness is much more central, and which tend to have the usual problems associated with corporate sponsorship of activism, a conservative agenda and the like. Perhaps the task here is for thinner people, including women, who want social change, to reinvigorate a body-related activism with some radical politics.
To me, there is quite a bit of irony in the idea of thin people being disappointed with fat feminist activism because fat people have been locked out of the conversation about our bodies for a long time. This is especially true in medicine and health, but also happens where youd think there would be a more nuanced and liberatory approach. Normatively-sized feminists continue to dominate discourse about fat in academia, for example. Susan Bordos Unbearable Weight is still required reading on curricula about the body, and Lauren Berlant and Elspeth Probyn have published articles groaning with fatphobia, yet maintain their status within the canon. Even the successful academics who are more sympathetic to Fat Studies tend to be thin.
This post is not an argument for separatism. I do think there is potential for fat activism that includes people of all sizes, and not as fat people/allies, but as equals. I started The Chubsters as a mixed intervention, for example, and its been great to see normatively-sized people get on board with that and realise that they can contribute to things too. I guess Im asking thinner people, the kinds of women who have been writing these gripey articles, to wake up a bit and stop blaming fat activism for not fixing their lives, perhaps not to assume that its always all about them, to notice that this might be a different way of seeing, understanding and acting in relation to our bodies.
References
Berlant, Lauren. (2007) Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency), Critical Inquiry, 33, 754-780.
Bordo, Susan. (2003) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and The Body, 10th anniversary ed., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Diamond, Nicky. (1985) Thin is the Feminist Issue, Feminist Review, 19, 45-64.
Probyn, Elspeth. (2008) Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat, Feminism & Psychology, 18(3), 401-404.
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