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Size discrimination harms everyone. Acclaimed philosopher Kate Manne shows how to combat it.
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 trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia matters, now more than ever. Over the last decades, bias has waned in every category except one: body size. Here she 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. Fatphobia is a social justice issue.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of ‘body reflexivity’ - a radical re-evaluation 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
Author: Kate Manne
Trade paperback Published 9 February 2024 320 pages
"As someone raised in the era of 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' I am beyond grateful to Kate Manne for ushering in the era of Unshrinking. This book is a tasty, tasty takedown of diet culture and a firm-but-gentle guide to finally getting free from fatphobia - individually, collectively, and within society at large. Is it too much to say that Manne has written a big, fat masterpiece?" JESSICA DEFINO
"Required reading for everyone who lives in an unruly human body. Manne has crafted an elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, our culture." ROXANE GAY