Western Massachusetts Anticapitalist Network

Graphic design by Alla Sonder. Fatties Against Facism stamp by Fat Rose

Fat Liberation Syllabus for Revolutionary Leftists

Confronting Fatphobia on the Left AND Liberalism within the Fat Liberation movement

This syllabus was compiled by Sam. Sam is a fat working-class Jewish, anti-Zionist, anarcho-communist. Sam has done disability justice, abolitionist, and transborder solidarity organizing. This syllabus was edited through discussions with Alla Sonder, a social anarchist and border abolitionist passionate about mutual aid, through a series of weekly discussions lasting from April 16th, 2020 through May 23rd, 2020.

If you would like to get in touch with the author of this syllabus, please email wmassanticapnetwork@gmail.com.

        Fat liberation is a radical anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-state movement that was started by fat Black and Brown disabled queer and trans people. It aims to abolish systematic discrimination against fat people, and recognizes fatphobia as intrinsically entangled with white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and capitalism. Unfortunately, in revolutionary leftist spaces, fatphobia is still rampant and fat liberation is often either trivialized or ignored altogether. This needs to stop immediately. FAT PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF EVERY LEFTIST MOVEMENT. There is both an issue with fatphobia on the left and revolutionary leftists not talking about fat liberation, AND fat spaces being very liberal, centering white cis fat women, and not making the connections between fatphobia, the state, and capitalism.

It is important to take a moment to acknowledge that Fat Liberation was started by fat Black and Brown people, especially fat queer, trans, and disabled Black and Brown people. It would not exist without their brilliance and work. We would like to name some of these activists, artists, performers, scholars, healers, and organizations and encourage white people (ESPECIALLY thin white people) to support them financially:

Other Great Resources

Fat Liberation 101

  • Fat people deserve to be treated with respect and live free of oppression PERIOD.
  • Unfortunately, when Fat Liberation comes up, there is almost always backlash, claiming that it is unhealthy to be fat. We should not have to touch on this. I want to make it very clear that health is not a moral obligation, a measure of one’s worth, and often falls outside of individual control.

SOURCE: Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality edited by Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland

SOURCE: Disability Justice: A Working Draft by Patty Berne and the Sins Invalid Collective

SOURCE: “Why I’m No Longer Talking About Health” by JerVae

  • Refusing to moralize health is a crucial political stance for anarchists and communists that extends not only to fat people but also to other oppressed and repressed people, who have been targeted by anti-Black, white supremacist, anti-sex worker, and homophobic state violence, due to being labeled as “diseased” or “unhealthy,” specifically due to drug use, HIV/AIDS status, and Hepatitis C. Rejecting health as a moral obligation sets the stage for powerful and necessary coalitions between Fat Liberation, HIV/AIDS activism, harm reduction, and sex worker organizing.

SOURCE: “Developing an Anarchist Response on Hep C & HIV” by Zoë Dodd & Alexander McClelland

SOURCE: “Harm Reduction As An Anarchist Practice: A User’s Guide To Capitalism & Addiction in North America” by Christopher Smith

SOURCE: “The revolution will not be sober: the problem with notions of

‘radical sobriety’ & ‘intoxication culture’” by Zoë Dodd & Alexander McClelland

  • When we refuse to moralize health, we come closer to dismantling the Medical Industrial Complex, which Disability Justice scholar and organizer Mia Mingus defines as:

“The Medical Industrial Complex is an enormous system with tentacles that reach beyond simply doctors, nurses, clinics, and hospitals. It is a system about profit, first and foremost, rather than “health,” wellbeing and care. Its roots run deep and its history and present and connected to everything including eugenics, capitalism, colonization, slavery, immigration, war, prisons, and reproductive oppression. It is not just a major piece of the history of ableism, but all systems of oppression.”

  • Mingus provides this definition and illustration of the Medical Industrial Complex: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/medical-industrial-complex-visual/
  • Fat people deserve respect, support, and freedom from oppression, regardless of whether or not we’re healthy. Period. There are many fat people who are disabled and/or chronically ill (whose disabilities may or may not be related to their fatness. It really doesn’t matter and is no one’s business but theirs). They will never be healthy by normative standards, and they still deserve respect. All that aside, body size is not an indicator of health. Health is multi-dimensional, and not visible. It’s impossible to tell how healthy someone is by looking at them. There is a burgeoning field of medical research known as Health At Every Size, which is very easy to look up and learn about. The final point to make about the question around health and fatness is that it’s very telling that we’re eager to single out fatness as “unhealthy,” yet capitalism encourages destructive states of being, such as the overexerted, stressed out worker who is unable to rest, and/or afford healthcare. Our culture glorifies football players who bash each others’ heads-in. Yet, there is nowhere near the same outcry towards capitalism or football, as there is towards fatness.
  • Health At Every Size & The Obesity Myth

SOURCE: https://haescommunity.com/ 

SOURCE: Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Lindo Bacon

SOURCE: Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health by Glenn Gaesser

SOURCE: Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic by J. Eric Oliver

SOURCE: The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health by Paul Campos

SOURCE: Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American “Obesity Epidemic” by Natalie Boero

SOURCE: What’s Wrong With Fat? by Abigail Saguy

SOURCE:https://danceswithfat.org/2012/04/19/study-healthy-habits-make-healthy-fatties/

  • This is the last time we’re going to use pathologizing medical language like “overweight” or “obese.” Those are stigmatizing terms. Our bodies are not diseases.
  • In the words of activist and scholar Charlotte Cooper: “I use the term Fat Studies because of what I regard as its inherent critique of the medicalised concept [of] obesity. As an activist I am interested in the use and reclamation of the word fat, to expunge shame from the term and reinforce its signification as a term of pride and identity.”
  • Weight Stigma and anti-fat bias from medical professionals are the real threats to fat people’s health

        SOURCE: “Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong” by Michael Hobbes

        SOURCE: First, Do No Harm: Real Stories of Fat Prejudice in Healthcare

        SOURCE: Fat Patients Humiliation, Misdiagnosis & Neglect by Virgie Tovar

  • Fat people are paid less and are more likely to live in poverty (this is exacerbated by race and gender)

SOURCE: “No Fear of Fat” by Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum

  • One particularly common objection to fat liberation is the claim that we should discourage fatness because it leads to Type 2 Diabetes. There is often a pretty disgusting implication that type 2 diabetes is some sort of punishment for being fat. First of all, we NEED to end the shame and stigma around type 2 diabetes, which I often do not see applied to other chronic illnesses. Fat people who have type 2 diabetes deserve respect. Period. It is an extremely complicated chronic illness that is not caused by fatness or only by eating too many sweets/processed foods. The biggest factors in developing type 2 diabetes are genetics, yo-yo dieting, and stress (often caused by living under white supremacy, settler colonialism, and/or fatphobia.)

SOURCE: “You Can’t Sweets Your Way Into Diabetes” by Alysse Dalessandro

SOURCE: Food Psych Podcast Episode #224: “Diabetes, Diet Culture, and Intuitive Eating For Blood Sugar Regulation”

  • The Weight Loss/Diet Industrial Complex funds “obesity science,” lobbied the American Medical Association to classify “obesity” as a disease, so they changed the definition of it
  • Fatphobia is the root cause of eating disorders. We cannot successfully address eating disorders without dismantling fatphobia. Fat people (ESPECIALLY fat Black and Brown people) often do not have their eating disorders taken seriously, and medical professionals often encourage or ignore eating disorders in fat people because it’s presumed to lead to weight loss. Furthermore, when fat people do have their eating disorders recognized, it’s almost always only binge eating disorder that is talked about (even though statistically most people who have BED are not fat). While binge eating disorder is very real, restriction is almost always at the root of it.

SOURCE: Food Psych Podcast Episode #149:” The Truth About Binge Eating With Amy Pershing”

  • That said, using food as a source of comfort is not inherently a bad thing and it is certainly not the same as having an eating disorder.
  • Shaming thin people (even very thin people) is NOT comparable to fatphobia. It’s wrong and harmful to comment on anyone’s body or appearance. However, thin people do not face the same structural violence as fat people, from medical institutions, the media, the state, clothing, cosmetic, corporations, and the Weight Loss Industrial Complex. There are not entire websites and Reddit forums dedicated to hating thin people. Hurtful comments are not comparable to oppression. While all bodies are good bodies, fat people are constantly bending over backwards to include thin people and reassure them that we don’t support “skinny shaming.” We should not have to do this and we’re exhausted.

SOURCE: Ashleigh Nicole Tribble on thin people/others who fit into Eurocentric beauty standards taking up too much space in the body positive movement.

SOURCE: Yes, Very Skinny Women Still Have Thin Privilege: Here’s Why by Melissa Fabello

SOURCE: Skinny Shaming is Not the Same As Fat Phobia

  • The public abuse of fat people continues to be normalized through shows like “The Biggest Loser” and “My 600LB Life”

SOURCE: “‘The Biggest Loser’ Is One of the Most Harmful Reality Shows on Television” by Your Fat Friend

SOURCE: Quotes from “The Biggest Loser.”

        Fatphobia & Capitalism

 In order to abolish capitalism and settler colonial states like the US, we must obviously be doing the work of relinquishing stolen land, mutual aid, abolishing prisons and police, and direct action. We must equally be doing the work to dismantle the fundamental ideology and logic on which these structures and states are built. The fatphobic logic of productivity, discipline, and personal responsibility is inherent to capitalism. The “personal responsibility” myth is central to both conservative and liberal ideologies.  For example, conservatives believe that fat people are simply lazy and need to go to the gym. Similarly, liberal fatphobia looks down on fat people with pity and views us as abject and “diseased,” the result of structural problems like GMOs and food deserts. Anti-fatness relies on the neoliberal “boot straps' ' fantasy of corporeal malleability. That is to say, the notion that weight loss is the result of personal responsibility and discipline, and thinness should be idealized because it is achievable through self-discipline, personal control, and restriction. We must differentiate between personal responsibility and personal accountability. As communists and anarchists, we do have personal accountability to our comrades, our commitments, and our political education. This means unpacking how we can perpetuate and internalize all systems of oppression, treating our comrades with kindness and compassion, and showing up when we say we’ll show up.

  • The stolen land that is now called the US was originally invaded by Puritan colonizers, who brought with them The Protestant Work Ethic. The Protestant Work Ethic was therefore fundamental to both the US and to capitalism. In her article, “Consuming Bodies: Fatness, Sexuality, and the Protestant Ethic,” sociologist Lesleigh J. Owen establishes the connection between fatphobia and the Protestant Work Ethic:

 “The theories of American individuality; the Protestant Ethic’s condemnation of hedonism and materialism; and the belief that fat persons, as seeking gratification in ungodly places and things, combine together to form a coherent picture of sizeism built on the foundations of U.S. individualism and asceticism. This is why, as LeBesco notes, Protestants are especially intolerant of fatness, tied as it is in popular discourse to notions of laziness and overindulgence (2004). However, this concept of fat folks as embarrassingly lazy and greedy is not confined to Christians. As Weber so brilliantly demonstrates, the Protestant Ethic contributed to the work-hard-now-delay-gratification-till-later ethos still buttressing capitalism. While its roots lie mostly in Protestantism, I would argue that the notion of working hard to get ahead in this land of endless opportunities is quintessentially capitalistic and American. It is no longer, in other words, confined to teachings from the pulpit.” Abolishing the USA entails abolishing the logics on which it was founded.

        Consequently, as we organize to ultimately abolish capitalism and abolish the USA, we cannot do so until we abolish the ideologies on which they are built, such as the Protestant Work Ethic.

        SOURCE: https://escholarship.org/content/qt4gw1m18r/qt4gw1m18r.pdf

        SOURCE: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Fatism: Fundamentalism, Authoritarianism, and Sexism in Weight-Related Bias by Sofia T.

SOURCE: Fat Shame: Stigma & the Fat Body in American Culture by Amy Erdman Farrell

  • “Boot straps rhetoric”--->Weight loss is the result of hard work and discipline
  • There are 2 models of Fatphobia: Conservative contempt and liberal pity. Disability historian Douglas C. Baynton describes the functions of both conservative contempt and liberal pity in regards to disability and understanding ableism in “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,”  (page 41). We can similarly use the framework of conservative contempt and liberal pity to understand fatphobia. Conservative contempt (i.e. fat people are just lazy and need to put down the donuts!) OR Liberal pity (i.e. “Obesity” epidemic is the result of structural problems like food deserts and GMOs, fat people need intervention, see Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move Program”). These are NOT polar opposites, both are equally harmful. We need to make a radical intervention.

SOURCE: Fat People Must Become A Priority to the Left by Da’Shaun L. Harrison

SOURCE: Can't Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos by Julie Guthman Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, Vol. 7 No. 3, Summer 2007; (pp. 75-79) DOI: 10.1525/gfc.2007.7.3.7

SOURCE: “Money For Your Fat! Health, Moral, and Capitalism,” by Hanele Harjunen in Food, Fatness, Fitness: Critical Perspectives

SOURCE: “The Ninety-Five Percent: Fighting Neoliberalism and Fatphobia Together” by Anna Mollow in Food, Fatness, Fitness: Critical Perspectives

  • Under liberal individualism, there is a fixation on “fixing” people’s habits that are seen as “unhealthy,” such as eating in response to anxiety and depression, using drugs, or certain parenting habits that don’t align with upper middle-class and/or white superficial parenting morals (such as bottle-feeding, giving your children plastic toys, letting your children play video games and watch TV). We need to look at the broader structures: capitalism, the state, white supremacy and understand that it’s no wonder that people feel anxious if they are worried that police will murder them or their landlord will evict them. As communists and anarchists, we need to look at the violent structures in place and stop criticizing and judging people’s coping mechanisms in the face of state and structural violence.
  • Importantly, some Indigenous models of health focus on communal and collective wellness, rather than individual physical health. https://healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/learn/cultural-ways/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-concept-of-health/ 

        Fatphobia & the COVID-19 Pandemic

  • The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many of the deadly realities of capitalism, anti-Blackness, and ableism within medicine, where hospitals become overcrowded, essential workers’ lives are put at risk, and Black people are more likely to die from COVID-19 due to structural anti-Blackness in medicine.
  • Some hospitals are using high BMI as a disqualifier from ventilator treatment.

SOURCE

SOURCE

SOURCE: Covid-19 Does Not Discriminate Based on Weight by Christy Harrison

  • The intersections of capitalism, anti-Blackness, ableism, and fatphobia behind eugenicist triage policies make it so the more marginalized a patient is, the more likely they are to die from COVID-19.
  • In response to eugenicist triage policies,fat and disability activists have formed the #NoBodyisDisposable Coalition, providing medical advocacy for fat and disabled people, and a sending petition to hospitals and healthcare providers, demanding that they resist eugenicist triage policies, which deny life-saving COVID-19 treatment to disabled people, fat people, elders, people who are HIV+, and people with other illnesses. Please sign and share the petition! 

Fatphobia & Anti-Blackness

  • The white supremacist capitalist imperialist state uses sizeism as a lens for creating the lethal heirarchies of human value that dictate life chances based on assumed productivity and supposed danger to the state.
  • Sizeism is heavily intertwined with white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Historically and currently, anti-Black state and medical violence use sizeism as a lens to dehumanize Black people (especially Black women) and label Black bodies as uncontrollable, diseased, pathological, and threatening.
  • A central part of rejecting the notion that medicine is NOT objective or neutral requires an understanding of the long ongoing history of anti-Blackness within medicine. Medical institutions and the Medical Industrial Complex were founded on anti-Black violence.

SOURCE: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

  • Medical institutions continue to enact anti-Black violence through refusing to take Black patients’ pain seriously, and the fact that Black women are significantly more likely than white women to die during childbirth.

SOURCE: “Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” with scholar, poet, artist Bettina Judd and Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble

  • Therefore, anti-Blackness often amplifies anti-fat medical bias for fat Black patients.
  • We cannot talk about Fat Liberation without prioritizing Black Liberation and joining in coalition to abolish institutions responsible for anti-Black state violence, such as prisons and police.
  • Much of current anti-fat discourse originated through 19th century eugenics and phrenology, fatphobia was an important tool used to establish white bodies as the norm and designate Black people’s bodies (especially Black women) as “primitive,” “uncontrollable,” and inferior. One notable example is Body Mass Index (BMI), the very tool of medical establishments used to measure “obesity.”
  •  Dr. Sabrina Strings lays out this ongoing history in her must-read book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origin of Fatphobia READ THIS BOOK, ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE A THIN WHITE PERSON.
  • As Dr. Strings details in her book, one of the most notorious examples of anti-Black fatphobia is the story of a woman named Sarah Baartman. Baartman’s story is often only written about through extremely dehumanizing means, through white people continuing to circulate exploitative images of her body. In remembering Sarah Baartman, we must honor her as a human being, not an object. Fat Studies scholar Taylor Chapman summarizes Baartman’s story as such:

“One of the first documented cases we have of fatphobia is in the story of Sarah Baartman. She was a Khoisan woman from South Africa who was enslaved in the 1800s and was exhibited like a circus animal because of her Blackness and the fatness of her body. When she died very young from disease (and some people would also argue heartbreak) her body was given to a scientist to dissect because he wanted to figure out why her body looked the way it did. He didn't give a shit about her life or why she died - he wanted to intimately understand what he thought were aberrations - her Blackness and her fatness. Her body was not considered to be her own because her Blackness and her fatness were considered public property - only of value as long as they turned a profit or created knowledge for white, anti-fat scientists after she was dead.

Her body was not returned to her homeland until 2002!!!!!! Her remains were displayed in museums for many, many years. People could still pay to see this woman's body exhibited like a circus animal.

There is something uniquely horrifying about the way racism and fat-hatred work in tandem in our society to make people's lives seem like they don't have value.”

Sarah baartman was known for being very intelligent and having an exceptional memory, especially with faces. She spoke multiple languages. She was born in 1789 in the Camdeboo valley and moved a few years later with her family to the Gamtoos valley. She wore a small tortoise shell necklace, most likely given to her by her mother after she went through puberty rites, for her entire life. She could play the mouth harp and was extroverted. It is important that we honor and remember aspects of her life that are not just about the trauma and exploitation she was subjected to.

  • White savior “anti-obesity” campaigns by non-profits that target working-class Black and Brown communities (i.e. “they need to learn to eat better”). This is similar and related to white savior non-profits doing “financial literacy” campaigns. Oftentimes, “anti-obesity” campaigns are a tool of the state to obscure the looting of resources from Black communities, and ignore the fact that the health disparities that Black people (especially Black women) face are due to the stress of living under white supremacy; NOT fatness.

SOURCE: https://www.facebook.com/HessLove9/posts/831877850547510

  • The stories of Kayla Moore, Eric Garner, and Emmett Everett speak directly to the connections between fatphobia and anti-Black state and capitalist violence.  State violence continually dehumanizes people after death by treating those who have been murdered by state violence as objects for speculation who can be used as talking points for academics. None of these individuals should be defined by the violence they experienced. When discussing each of these lives, we instead must be coming from a place of remembrance and celebration of each person in their unique and multi-dimensional lives. One key way that we can remember and honor these individuals is by showing up for fat liberation as a part of movements against state violence.
  • Kayla Moore was a fat Black trans woman from Berkeley, California who lived with neurodivergence. She was a loving sister, aunt, daughter, friend. She was a brilliant poet and loved dancing. She was very fashionable and sexy. In 2013, the Berkeley police murdered Kayla in her home after she dealt with a mental health crisis. They blamed her death on “obesity.”

This joint statement in solidarity with Kayla Moore’s family from the Sins Invalid Collective and Fat Rose provides more information about Kayla Moore’s life and the way the carceral state completely dehumanized her:

https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2019/12/29/joint-statement-of-solidarity-with-the-family-of-kayla-moore-from-sins-invalid-and-fat-rose

  • Eric Garner was a fat Black man who was described as generous and kind. He was a loving father, husband, and grandfather, who worked as a horticulturist for the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. In 2014, he was murdered by the NYPD. The NYPD denied responsibility for their murderous actions by claiming that Mr. Garner’s weight caused his death.
  • This very important article by Sherronda J. Brown lays out how the carceral state uses fatphobia as a lens to justify the police murdering Black people, such as Eric Garner  https://wearyourvoicemag.com/eric-garner-fatphobia/
  • Emmett Everett was a fat Black man, originally from Honduras who grew up in New Orleans. He had a great sense of humor, and was part of a large family: siblings, wife, children, nieces & nephews, grandchildren. In 2005, when he was 61 years old, he needed surgery, as many people do. He was in the hospital when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The hospital lost power and communication with the outside world. As medical personnel worked to evacuate patients via boat and helicopter, they categorized the patients that remained into three groups. Those who could walk would get rescued first. Those who were sickest or fat, would either go last or be killed by lethal injection with the drugs morphine and versed.

Emmett Everett, at 380 lbs, was deemed by doctors as too fat to be rescued. So, the hospital murdered him alongside 21 other patients. Unsurprisingly, the legal system acquitted the doctors who murdered him, concluding that he did not die from being injected with a lethal dose of morphine but instead died of an enlarged heart. Emmett Everett was ultimately not just murdered by the doctor who injected him with a lethal dose of morphine, but also by the ways in which anti-Blackness, the Medical Industrial Complex, and fatphobia worked together to create a value system that labeled him and many others as disposable, especially in the face of environmental disasters like Hurricane Katrina that disproportionately impact marginalized communities

SOURCE: “Stop Excluding Black Women From Fat Acceptance Movements” by Sesali B

SOURCE: “The Plus Size Community Needs to Proclaim #Blacklivesmatter” by Hunter Shackelford

        Fatphobia & Settler Colonialism, Fat Liberation & Indigenous Sovereignty

  • Settler colonialism depends on the logic of domination over nature: exerting violent control over natural resources like water and land, and turning them into commodities to turn a profit for capitalism. This also extends to how capitalism and settler colonialism thus transform the body into a commodity that we must exert control and domination over through often harmful means like dieting and weight loss-under the guise of self-control and discipline.The Diet Industry/Weight Loss Industrial Complex thrive off of  dominating over nature.
  • Decolonization is not a metaphor. Stolen land must be relinquished and returned. Settler colonial nations (such as the US and Israel, just to name a couple examples) must be abolished. Simultaneously, decolonization requires dismantling all the logics of settler colonialism, very much including fatphobia.
  • Nalgona Positivity Pride, a “Xicana-Indigenous Body Positive and Eating Disorder Awareness Organization,” has done a lot of amazing work to highlight the colonial and white supremacist roots of fatphobia and diet culture.
  • In the words of Ken Thomas, MSW:

“White supremacy breeds perfectionism, competition, and scarcity thinking. It’s the air we breathe. Scarcity thinking (hoarding of wealth/resources) and rampant fatphobia (instigated largely by racist “race science”) lead to food deprivation through unequal access to food and a culture obsessed with dieting.

I’m learning that perfectionistic and power-driven ideas I take for granted as "just the way it is" were created by white supremacy/imperialism. By naming white supremacy where it shows up (especially in ourselves), we’ll be more equipped to dismantle it.

Credit/big recommendation to Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia (Sabrina Strings) and Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups (Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones).”

Fatphobia & State Violence

  • The police and the military (i.e. state-sanctioned colonial murder institutions) idolize thinness and “fitness.” The fact that the military literally has fatphobia written into its requirements for joining should illuminate the necessity of Fat Liberation in our anti-imperialist and anti-state movements to abolish the military and settler colonial nations as a whole.

SOURCE

SOURCE

SOURCE: Pure Evil: The Entwined History of White Supremacy and Fat Hatred by Shannon Weber

Fatphobia & Cisheteropatriarchy

SOURCE: The Intersection of Fatmisia and Transmisia by Kivan Bay

  • Fatphobia is used as a vehicle to perpetuate the myth of biological sex.

SOURCE: This article by Gillian Giles explains how diagnoses like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) (which is often associated with fatness), can serve as another lens to medicalize and pathologize bodies that do not fit into white supremacist, anti-Black, fatphobic, and cissexist standards of what so-called "normal" bodies that are assigned female at birth should do and look like. The piece offers a necessary shift in paradigm, that PCOS could be reframed as a natural part of human variation, including the Intersex spectrum, instead of being medically pathologized.

SOURCE: This article by Nadia Mohd Rasidi examines the possibility to accept and validate fat bodies who have PCOS, instead looking to eradicate.  

        

Fatphobia, Ageism, & State Violence

  • One of the most destructive forms of fatphobia is when it is directed at children, under the guise of “fighting childhood obesity.”

SOURCE: “How Childhood Obesity Fight Damages Self-Esteem” by Lesley Kinzel

SOURCE: “On Strong4Life and the Ideology of Health” by Stacy Bias

  • When children are told to lose weight or are put on diets, it is always harmful, no matter the justification. The best thing you can do for your fat child is accept and affirm their body exactly as it is.

SOURCE: “Forcing Children to Lose Weight is Child Abuse” by Da’Shaun Harrison

SOURCE: Nutritionist Christy Harrison on the Harm Caused by Weight Watchers’ App Marketed Towards Children

SOURCE: Dr. Maria Paredes on the best way to prevent eating disorders in children being to affirm your child’s fat body exactly how it is.

  • There are numerous heart-wrenching cases of state institutions like DCF removing fat children from their families, placing them in foster care, or sending them to extremely abusive weight loss camps, solely based on the fact that they are fat.

SOURCE: “The HAES Files: There’s No Place Like Home-Unless You’re a Fat Kid” by Jeanette DePatie, MA, ACE

SOURCE: “The HAES Files: JAMA Proposes a Medical Mugging,” by Deb Burgard, PhD

  • While it is very difficult to find official statistics on the race and class breakdowns of fat children who the state steals from their families, Black and Indigenous feminists and abolitionists have pointed to how child welfare institutions disproportionately remove Black and Indigenous children from their families for the purpose of what Black feminist scholar Dr. Dorothy Roberts defines as, “monitoring, regulating, and punishing poor families and Black, brown, and indigenous families.” Child welfare institutions continue the colonial legacy of Indigenous boarding schools through removing Indigenous children from their parents. Due to Black and Indigenous communities constantly being cited as having “high obesity rates,” it can be inferred that the state uses fatphobia as a justification for continuing the carceral and colonial legacy of stealing Black and Indigenous children from their families, under the guise of “protecting children.” Advocating for fat kids means abolishing carceral, colonial institutions like foster care. Simultaneously, abolition includes an understanding of how those institutions use fatphobia as a lens for carceral and colonial violence against Black and Indigenous children. When we talk about “protecting children,” children actually need protection from the carceral state, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and fatphobia.

SOURCE: “Black Families Matter: How the Child Welfare System Punishes Poor Families of Color” by Dorothy Roberts and Lisa Sangoi

SOURCE: The New Boarding Schools: Racial Biases in the State of South Dakota Continue to Fuel Constant, Willful Violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act: A Report by the Lakota People’s Law Project

Bringing Fat Liberation into Revolutionary Leftist Spaces

  • No more diet/weight loss talk in leftist spaces. This sends a clear message to fat comrades that you want to do everything in your power to avoid looking like them.
  • It is important for leftists to actively show up for Fat Liberation and engage with it in theory and practice.
  • End the use of fatness as a metaphor for bosses/capitalism/cops. Seriously knock it off right now.
  • Revolutionary leftist movements must reject the moralization of food. We must understand how fatphobia, anti-Blackness, hatred of poor people, and capitalist logic of individual responsibility are deeply embedded within the hatred of fast food and processed food. There are so many pervasive fatphobic, racist, and classist cultural stereotypes around who eats (or is presumed to eat) fast food or processed food, that we cannot separate those stereotypes from our hatred of fast food, no matter how much we try to masquerade it as anti-capitalist or condemning the corporations that produce the food. Really ask yourself, when you think of people who eat fast food, who do you think of? Hating fast food/processed food is often  code for hating fat people (especially poor Black and Indigenous fat people). Furthermore, trying to hide your hatred and disgust for fast food behind anger at the corporations’ exploitation of their workers, does NOT help fast food workers unionize, build power, and organize. As a former fast food worker myself, I can attest to how alienating this attitude is to fast food workers.
  • We must stop using a bastardized, white-washed version of “food justice” as an excuse to be fatphobic/moralize food. Specifically, there are many white-led/white-centric non-profits or state institutions (Again, Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign is a prime example) that enter working-class, historically looted Black and Brown communities and claim to do “food justice” work by “fighting obesity.” While there is nothing inherently wrong with planting community gardens or increasing access to vegetables, we must question institutions doing so from through a fatphobic, white savior lens that further pathologize fatness by claiming that fat working-class Black and Brown people simply require the intervention of liberal non-profits to be “taught to eat better.” Fatphobia and “obesity prevention” in turn becomes a specific tool for the White Savior/Non-Profit Industrial Complex. It’s very easy to plant community gardens, and work to increase vegetable access without mentioning body size or moralizing food. When people have access to healthy, nutrient-dense, nourishing food, they will be all sizes. Fat people always have and always will exist. All people should have the resources and support to eat whatever food they want. When we try to impose cultural norms of what people can and cannot eat, we neglect the immense variety of people’s needs and experiences. Food is very personal and so many factors go into it (cultural, eating disorder history, personal experience, medical, religious disability, personal taste-some people just don’t like certain types of food and that’s okay). We need to respect and not question people’s food choices.
  • The solution to food deserts is not “obesity prevention” or moralizing food. It involves radical, anti-capitalist, autonomous structural change such as: anti-gentrification work, fighting against landlords, developers, and gentrifying businesses that are raising the cost of living, recognizing and organizing against businesses like CVS and Duane Reade buying entire blocks in cities like New York, so that residents often cannot easily access grocery stores, recognizing and organizing against how millions of people (OF ALL SIZES) are starving and food insecure because capitalism fundamentally denies people access to basic resources, organizing against welfare workers by literally “inspecting” the fridges of people on welfare to determine whether or not the state deemed the food “acceptable” for people on welfare to buy.

SOURCE: The Foodscape Argument: When Fatphobia Poses as Radical Social Critique by Anna Mollow

  • It’s very possible to fight for food sovereignty (i.e. dismantling the capitalist colonial food system which includes “healthy” food/the diet industry and Black and Indigenous communities taking back land and food systems) without talking about “obesity,” moralizing food, or judging people for what they eat.
  • Leftists must abandon diet culture narratives that moralize certain foods (such as vegan or plant-based foods) as inherently “better” than other foods. Hating fast/processed food is NOT radical or helpful to leftist causes at all. There are so many pervasive racist, fatphobic, and classist stereotypes around who eats fast/processed food. We cannot separate them from hatred and disgust towards fast food.

SOURCE: Dr. M.M. Allen @fiyaangelou on food trauma

  •  Factory farming and the capitalist colonial food system is a problem of capitalism, and colonialism. It is reactionary to blame the food choices themselves (meat, dairy, processed food), instead of the systems. After the revolution when we eliminate factory farming, people will still have the options to eat hamburgers, fried foods, and sugar, if they want and there’s nothing wrong with that! Being vegan or adopting any other dietary practice is a personal choice, that’s all. Vegan and so-called “healthy” foods are produced through just as much exploitation of workers, the carceral state, US imperialism, gentrification, occupation of Palestine, and environmental destruction because, again, the problem is capitalism and colonialism, not the meat or dairy consumption in and of themselves.
  • We need to ask ourselves which corporations do we see the most outrage at and ask why is this outrage not targeted at all corporations. For example, there is a lot of justified outrage at McDonald’s. In no way should we be defending McDonald’s, however we need to ask ourselves why so much outrage is directed at fast food but not at military contractors like Raytheon? Or Whole Foods? Or Sabra Hummus? A lot of the selective outrage has to do with how our culture associates fast food with fat people and poor people. That is certainly not to say that we should defend McDonald’s or other fast food corporations, simply that our outrage at McDonald’s must be accompanied by outrage at ALL corporations, very much including green-washing corporations like Whole Foods, whose marketing relies on diet culture and moralizing food and health.
  • Fat Liberation potentially offers a lens to dismantle the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and stop viewing the state/the law as a tool for social change. It’s very hard to pass laws against anti-fat discrimination, which is only illegal in 1 state (Michigan). Unlike other marginalized communities (i.e. LGBTQI+), there are only 1 or 2 non-profits that explicitly focus on fat people, they’re very liberal, and do not have an analyses around anti-Blackness, colonialism, or cisheteropatriarchy. See: Fat Rights: Dilemmas in Personhood and Difference by Anna Kirkland: https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Rights-Dilemmas-Difference-Personhood/dp/0814748139
  • Instead of trying to work within the state by passing more laws against anti-fat discrimination or create more non-profits, fat liberation offers an abolitionist, anti-state lens that allows us to imagine alternatives outside of the law and the state.
  • As anarchists and communists we must reject state communist and authoritarian discourse like, “we need to get the proletariat fit so they can fight Nazis,” that’s just the same liberal fatphobia/moralizing exercise like Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign repackaged as leftism. Fat liberation is certainly not opposed to exercise but it’s not a moral obligation. There are many different ways to fight Nazis. You could kill Nazis on a moped.
  • The revolution must empower every member of the proletariat. The means are the ends. Consequently, as part of revolutionary organizing, we must treat each other and incorporate structures and tactics that we want to see after the revolution. We cannot wait until after the revolution to do so.
  • We must be vigilant about making sure that toxic fitness culture does not enter leftist spaces. Aspiring to a fatphobic ideal of fitness (i.e. being thin and muscular) or constantly working out to the point of overexertion is NOT part of revolutionary organizing. There’s nothing wrong with working out but no one needs to work out in order to be dedicated to revolutionary organizing. 
  • This is located within the broader context of rejecting authoritarian leftist discourse that expects the revolution to be formulaic and follow very specific patterns based on past revolutions that happened in very different contexts. The revolution is not a video game. Revolutionary organizing requires doing unglamorous work, mutual aid, and prioritizing relationships and lived experiences over books.
  •  As leftists, it is our duty to incorporate our politics into our personal lives and how we treat our friends, lovers, family members, acquaintances and community members. While we understand that we are always learning and growing, our politics mean nothing if they are only lip service and not integrated into our lives beyond organizing or leftist spaces. This is particularly true for Fat Liberation. Your fat comrades need you to show up for us by doing internal work as well. Leftists need to ask themselves:
  • Are you afraid of becoming fat? Why? What would it mean for you to let go of that fear?
  • Do you have fat friends? If not, why? Do you treat fat people in your life differently than thin people?
  • Do not project a maternal, comforting role onto your fat friends (especially for fat women/women-aligned people).
  • Fat people are not here to console you about your eating disorder/body image issues. We do not want to hear about them without consent and certainly not in graphic detail.
  • Do not give fat people back-handed “compliments” on their “confidence” or “courage.” This is extremely demeaning. It reinforces the hierarchy of positioning thinness above fatness. I have literally never heard anyone compliment a thin person for being “confident” or “brave.” That’s because the “compliment” relies on the belief that fatness is inferior and fat people need to “make up” for their fatness with confidence.
  • Would you date a fat person? One of the tired strawman arguments against fat liberation is that fat people are somehow trying to “force” others to date us or find us attractive. I can attest to the fact that we could not care less whether or not you find us individually attractive. The last thing we want to do is encourage fat-hating assholes to date fat people. However, we also need to unpack the notion that fatphobia/universally finding fat people unattractive is a personal preference. Eliminating an entire marginalized identity from your dating pool is not a personal preference. Sexual and romantic attraction do not exist in a vacuum. White supremacy, anti-Blackness, transmisogyny/transphobia, ableism, and fatphobia heavily influence who we are taught to find attractive. Attraction is not static or biologically fixed. It can and does change! Not everyone is going to be attracted to everyone and that’s fine. However, all fat people look different, have different interests, lifestyles, and experiences. Therefore, there are no excuses for the sentiment of, “I’m not attracted to fat people, it’s just a personal preference.” As leftists, the hope is that we would call out or at least challenge the refusal to date all people of a marginalized identity.
  • On the flip side, do not be creepy or fetishistic when dating or sleeping with fat people.  This includes wanting to sleep with fat people but only dating or having serious relationships with thin people.

        Confronting Liberalism in the Fat Liberation Movement

  • Fat liberation has been heavily co-opted into the liberal self-help movement of “body positivity” by clothing and cosmetic companies and Instagram influencers (many of whom are thin/socially acceptable size, white and/or light-skinned: i.e. Ashley Graham, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Megan Jayne Crabbe, Tess Holliday to name a few).

SOURCE: “Body Positivity is a Scam” by Amanda Mull

SOURCE: “5 New Directions for the Body Positivity Movement”

SOURCE: The Commodification of the Body Positivity Movement on Instagram by Jessica Cwynar-Horta

SOURCE: The Fragility of Body Positivity by Evette Dionne

SOURCE: Body Positivity: Is Capitalism Ruining This Movement?

  • Cosmetic, clothing companies, and thin white celebrities like Miley Cyrus  use body positivity and liberal principles of diversity by putting fat people (as well as disabled people, trans, and gender non-conforming people) in ads, music videos, or social media posts in order to make a statement about how “progressive” they are. There is certainly value in seeing positive representation of people who look like you. However, fat people, disabled people, trans, and gender non-confoming people are not props for corporations and celebrities to prove how progressive they are. Fat, disabled, and trans/GNC positive representation should be the norm.
  • Even within more leftist fat activist spaces, liberalism is still pervasive.Fat liberation MUST be rooted in anti-capitalist, pro-Black, internationalist and anti-state politics.
  •  We must not pander to liberal and Democratic Socialist politicians, regardless of whether or not they support legislation against anti-fat discrimination, especially if they support bombing Palestine, or US imperialism in Latin America.
  • We must not allow cops, active military, or Zionists in the Fat Liberation movement.