Unshrinking: Facing Fatphobia - Kate Manne

Joeita speaks with Kate Mann, Associate Professor Cornell University's Sage School of Philosophy & author of "Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia," which draws on personal experience & rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it.

Highlights

• The Insidiousness of Fatphobia - Opening Remarks (00:00)
• Society’s Fixation on Weight & the “Ideal Body” (01:07)
• Introducing Kate Manne, Author of “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia” (01:59)
• Philosophical Interest in Misogyny & Fatphobia (02:22)
• Defining Fatphobia (04:17)
• Complicated Relationship Between Fatness & Health (06:03)
• Fatphobia in the Healthcare System (10:15)
• Weigh-In Process & Weight-Inclusive Physicians (12:27)
• Diabetes, BMI & Stigma (13:19)
• Intersections of Fatphobia, Race, Class, Ability & Gender (16:22)
• The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (18:28)
• Thin-Privilege (19:36)
• Beyond Body-Positivity (22:24)
• Thinsplaining - Book Excerpt (24:22)
• Find the Book “Unshrinking: Facing Fatphobia” (27:51)
• Show Close (28:33)

Guest Bio -

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT and is the author of two previous books, Down Girl and Entitled.

“Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia” By Kate Manne from Penguin Random House

“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, and our culture.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

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.

Articles:

In 'Unshrinking,' a writer discusses coming out as fat and pushing back against bias - NPR Interview

Fighting Fatphobia and Embracing ‘Unshrinking’: The Ms. Q&A With Kate Manne - MS Magazine

Reference:

Belly of the Beast The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da'Shaun L. Harrison

To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.

Da’Shaun Harrison—a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer—offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in forty-nine states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated.

Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.

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