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Each month, the SELF Well-Read Book Club highlights a timely, delightful, and crucial book on a subject that helps readers live better lives and be better people. This month, we’re reading Aubrey Gordon’s “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People. Here, feast your eyes on an exclusive excerpt from Gordon’s book, which comes out tomorrow, January 10, 2023, along with a special introduction she wrote for SELF readers. Learn more about this month’s pick here—and stay tuned for more details on how to watch a special conversation between Gordon and Rachel Wilkerson Miller, SELF editor in chief, on January 26 at 12 p.m. EST.
Myths about fatness follow fat people around everywhere, stubborn as a shadow we can’t shake. Our imagined reputations precede us: We are presumed to be unloved and unlovable, dead people walking, liabilities to movements for social justice—including the ones we found. Even in spaces that advertise themselves as body positive, we still face exclusion, albeit a softer sort, a kind that insists on our happiness and health, all the while defining both things by fat people’s omission. We can’t be healthy—just look at us. And who could possibly be happy looking like that?
Though countless new supporters have flocked to the body positivity movement in the last two decades, few are aware of its considerably more radical roots in fat activism, and fewer still seem to have any commitment to justice work that extends beyond their personal relationship to their own body. Even body positivity’s newer substitute, body neutrality, is designed to right individuals’ relationships with their own bodies, but not to change the cultural context that has created such widespread discrimination against fat people, and such negative body image in people of all sizes.
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There’s a more just, kinder world that we can build together—one that ends our wars with our own bodies and one that blunts our biases against others’. And that starts by making room for those of us who don’t appear to be happy and healthy.
The body positivity movement has become increasingly contested territory in recent years. Online and in person, arguments abound about who the movement is for and what it is intended to accomplish. Is body positivity a clarion call to body confidence, a way of repairing all comers’ damaged body image, regardless of their size? Is it a social justice movement, designed to organize to end body-based oppression? Or has it gone too far, tipping into what comedian Bill Maher calls “fit-shaming”? Like many movements, body positivity’s goals are disputed, held in tension by conflicting visions and strategies proposed by constituents, leaders, opponents, and onlookers alike. While the movement’s future is debated, looking to its past can lend some clarity to increasingly muddy conversations about its provenance.
Body positivity’s deepest roots lie in the fat acceptance movement, which itself is built on a foundation laid by fat Black women in the civil rights and welfare rights movements. Johnnie Tillmon was the first chair of the National Welfare Rights Organization, and she refused to forgo any core parts of her identity and life experience: “I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare. In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all.” Famed civil rights activist Ann Atwater, too, noted the impact of her fatness on how she was perceived and treated as a Black woman on welfare, telling a Duke University historian that her weight was brought up at the welfare office, where she was regularly asked if she was pregnant.
Source: SELF
