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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Leaving aside your cheap "boo wokes" applause lights, it's not hard to decipher: fat has been a feminist issue since at least the 70s. Short version: a lot of women are fat, losing weight is hard, fat women get shit on a lot, physical attraction is part of the whole patriarchy/"male gaze" memeplex, therefore it's appealing to women for a number of obvious reasons to try to persuade the public that being fat is not unhealthy, unattractive, or their fault. Since it's a lefty/feminist issue, it's a woke issue.

This book is outdated and does not coincide with today's body liberation movement, finding health at every size, and fat activism. This book is incredibly fat phobic and the psychoanalytic approach to being fat is BS. It suggests that women who are fat subconsciously want to be fat, it includes no other contextual factors. I thought this book would be about how fat women are treated by our patriarchal society. It does mention this concept, but the bulk of the book is a self-help guide to overcome compulsively eating to ultimately lose weight.

It appears to be very out of date and problematic compared to modern truths of "queer fat multiplicities that can disrupt dominant systems of subjugation and hierarchies"

There was already a "Fat Studies Reader (An Invitation To Revolution!) in 2009, and by 2019 we had "Queering Fat Activism: A Study in Whiteness" "argu(ing) for a thickened politics of white recognition within Fat Studies, so that scholars can better situate queer codes as aligned with the rejection of white civility"

It's certainly an expanding movement whose goals seem to have changed massively over time.

It's been a long time since I read Fat Is A Feminist Issue, but my recollection is that its basic thesis was:

  1. Fatness is a problem caused by compulsive eating.

  2. Compulsive eating in women develops as a way of coping with psychological conflicts, partly but not entirely attributable to unfulfilable and contradictory social expectations, and as an attempt to fulfil unmet needs for security and self-efficacy.

  3. The pathway out of compulsive eating involves becoming aware of the unconscious processes that drive it, recognising their futility, and supplanting them by being more assertive about one's rights and boundaries. There is an emphasis on group therapy that, while focused on compulsive eating, doubles as political consciousness-raising.

It's definitely not in total agreement with contemporary mainstream feminist attitudes about fatness, as can be seen by reading some of its Goodreads reviews.

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