Introduction

Having a fat body in a neoliberal society poses many challenges. The physical structures I inhabit—seating, aisles, washrooms—are built for small (unimposing) bodies, bodies that support the functions of a neoliberal system. This is life writing, I explore parallels between fatness and disability within a neoliberal social order. I also explore how the medical-industrial complex and the weight loss industry unite under the umbrella of capitalism to transform fat bodies into perfect consumers of a supposed “cure” within diet culture. The disabled/fat body is made to feel incompatible with the neoliberal model without some kind of “cure,” and I seek to disrupt these imperatives. I draw on fat academics and disability theorists (such as Rosemarie Garland Thompson and Eli Clare), who examine fatness using a feminist disability framework to illuminate what fat activists can learn from disability studies and the impact of activism. I rebel against the implication of “cure” for these body-minds.

Understanding the Fat Body

A fat body is interesting to inhabit; it is evident and present and simultaneously relegated to a realm of invisibility. I lived in a fat body for most of my life until the pull of diet culture became overwhelming, and I embarked on an obsession of my own undoing: villainizing food and exalting thinness. I admit that I have commented on other fat people’s bodies, affecting their relationships with their own body-minds. But as Selina Thompson writes so succinctly: “Weight loss is not freedom” (2018, 48). I spent years disguised in thinness, seemingly separated from the issues of fatness with which I fought for two decades. But, I remember the sting of being in a big body-mind in a fatphobic world, and that’s what once brought me to examine fat activism and fat bodies, even as a straight-sized person.

Two years ago, I was enjoying the “cake” of thin privilege and a realization that I could find peace and freedom with food and my body. I felt untouchable. I entered new fitness pursuits, met many milestones, and completed a graduate degree that extended well beyond its promised timeline. Now, my body-mind is tired. My body-mind is also far more lived in. The sting returns as I navigate a new world of being midsized. Here, I am liminal: all and yet nothing, too much and not enough for clothing, activism, or representation.

Today I would argue that not only is weight loss not freedom, as Thompson says, but that weight loss is a life sentence. Changing the physical body is not freedom from the institutions that villainize fatness. Weight loss is a life sentence of hyper-vigilance around food, of watching steps accumulate, of weighing in, and having weight weigh on the mind. Had I continued in diet culture, I would be sentenced to a life dedicated to monitoring my body: to feel I had failed if it changed without my permission, as if I were in control of all of its biological inner workings. I’m sure there are some who feel I have let myself go.

And I have. I have let myself go to find peace in my body and expand my mind beyond what I was “supposed” to do. I have let myself go in different directions, meet and speak to different people, and forge new paths. Diet culture is not freedom or happiness; it is a life sentence of doubting one’s own body-mind, and I am grateful to have set and made bail.

Fat activism may be a recent introduction to the academy, but fat academics have long tried to document the challenges of living in a fat body-mind. More recent writing, like Roxanne Gay’s 2018 Hunger, explores her body’s growth after trauma and the realities of being a fat person of colour. She writes:

When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. … People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes. (82)

As Gay explains it, the bigger you are, the harder it is to hide and the more desperately you want to. However, this passage by Gay also touches on the intersectionality of big bodies, what it means to be big and black, or perhaps big and disabled, or even big and queer. Is it possible that the oppression of racism or ableism leads a body to become bigger? Or that the fear of a fat body becomes extricated in society because of race or disability?1 In writing about fatness, theorists must contend with the fact that a fat white body experiences the world much differently than a body also experiencing other factors of oppression. I cannot speak as a fat man or a non-binary individual, but being a fat woman affected my femininity and womanhood in every way imaginable. I often wonder if that is why, post weight loss, I presented as decidedly less feminine than I had before. Was it because, in my smaller body, I felt innately more feminine in shape (read: frail), no matter how I chose to dress? I am outraged that size and gender expression seem inextricably related.

The negative impact of fatness reaches far beyond trying to hide in non-descript clothing. Still, nondescript clothing can be next to impossible to find, let alone from companies that are ethical, local, and within budget. The lack of access to clothing is oppression and erasure for fat women and AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) individuals. Gay writes about her struggle finding clothes in her size, often not finding stores that carry anything larger than a size 28. I know firsthand that a size 30 is beyond the purview of a fatphobic society. My size (18/20) is already outside the realm of possibility for meaningful fashion; that is, fashion that sparks joy, fills needs, or represents the wearer. Clothing is about more than fit; for those with straight-sized bodies, it is an outward expression of personality. Unbeknownst to consumers, the fashion industry has discovered those beyond a size 14 are clothed by the ether, not the designer.

Size 30 bodies deserve clothing: nice, beautiful, ethically made clothing. But realistically, we must address the stigma emerging at size 14, and likely into size 10 and 12, before we see sizes 30+ be given the time and respect they deserve. Fatness is posited as a social ill for all bodies; that is why thin women are not free from the effects of dieting and restriction. Fat is seen as beastly, problematic, unnatural, wrong. Gay puts beautifully what my soul felt as I shopped in my teens. To want beautiful clothes may seem silly, and yet “these are trivial wants but they aren’t” (2018, 119).

My research brought me to grapple with the liminal space of the “midsized” body. The body I inhabit today occupies a middle space in which nothing is truly made to fit my sized body. The stigma of the changing and re-shaping female body is one that I had not been previously confronted with. This need to be clothed is not a trivial need for me at all. I’ve had this conversation with women of all sizes. These clothes are not made for us, we say. We yell this into the marketplace, and no one answers. So we buy someone else’s clothes and go home.

Today I write in a frilly pink polka dot dress. It is fuchsia, matching the vagina-shaped earrings I wear that confuse my mother and to gain respect from the women I want to emulate as I grow up. My hair is pink, fading with the sun, and braided in two milkmaid braids. I have long fingernails. I feel silly in an effervescent way. I have found more femininity than ever before. It suits me. While I am larger now, I am far less certain that my gender expression and size are related and probably more convinced that my self is pink, sparkly, silly, and loud and that the earlier me was not yet enough of my true self to bask in the joy of those things.  

The Rebellion of Fatness

The fat body becomes the docile body when fat individuals begin to internalize moralizing narratives of body size. Fat individuals who outwardly show love for their bodies do so as an active rebellion against sociocultural ideals of health and bodies. Susan Bordo (1997) discusses society’s propensity towards limiting women through diagnosis, most prominently through Hysteria, Agoraphobia, and Anorexia. I would add Body Dysmorphia and Bulimia to that list, but also the term “morbid obesity.” The central unifying factor of these diagnoses is (gendered) bodily control. The diagnosis of fat as near-death limits the female body, looking only at the physical form and neither at the environmental factors influencing it, nor the individual residing inside of it.

In Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, he briefly addresses Michel Foucault’s “docile bodies” concerning the female body. Clare writes, “female bodies become docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to eternal regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’ ” (2017, 91). Clare’s writing moves me to write. His style is effervescent in how it arrives in my mind and bubbles against my own ideas. I rarely begin to write without first considering his writing style and absolute refusal to sacrifice artistry within academic writing. I want to write honestly and yet in a style protected from the harsh confines of academic shoulds and shouldn’ts. Clare becomes my strength to forge projects that allow my voice its space without disingenuous anxieties of using and manipulating stylistic differences.

I resonate deeply with Clare’s reading of the female body and its connection to the fat body. Fat bodies are only acceptable when trying to change, shrink, and “improve,” as Clare notes. Fat bodies are not acceptable when they exist without external regulation. Not to say that the small female body is not subjected to societal expectations, comments, and pressures. But the fat body occupies a unique space where it is rebellion when it remains static without apology.

A Fat Understanding of Disability

While there are many similarities between fat studies and disability studies, it is crucial not to co-opt disabled experiences for fat activism’s gain. However, I use principles of feminist disability studies to understand experiences of fat-ness, while being careful to honour the origins of the theory. The social constructivist method understands disability not as a biological error but as an issue within a society that fails to accept and make space accessible for differently-abled individuals. Garland-Thompson explains a social constructivist view of disability as “a system of representation that marks bodies as subordinate, rather than an essential property of bodies that supposedly have something wrong with them” (2005, 1557-58). Employing the social constructivist theory for disability pushes me to ask: who gets to decide normal? Who gets to determine what bodies are “right” and which are relegated to the other? What weight is “normal,” and for whom? What constitutes “over” (weight) that isn’t arbitrary or, as was the case historically regarding insurance brokers, tied to capitalist restriction/gain?2 The social constructivist model of disability allows for an understanding of seating as simply too small, of aisles as too narrow, and of washroom stalls as too tight to allow for more people per square inch rather than bodies that are “too” big.

Translating this line of knowledge onto fat bodies, the issue becomes not the fat bodies themselves but a society that deems them inferior. The issue becomes the airplane seats being extraordinarily small (to maximize profit) and not the large body that cannot occupy them. The issue becomes clothing manufacturers who, in search of elitism, refuse to make clothing big enough for even medium-sized bodies. The “problem” becomes a society that misconstrues “fat” as “ugly” and not a fat person’s ability to give or receive love. Using a feminist disability lens allows a focus away from the individual and onto a society that is only built to support one body and refuses to acknowledge the faults in its system.

Some disability theorists include fat bodies under the umbrella of disabled bodies. At first, this inclusion confused me. Is the fat body really disabled when it can temporarily change through weight loss? And yet, with social constructivism, the fat body is disabled by a society that is neither structured nor productive for fat bodies. Garland-Thompson writes, “the fat body is disabled because it is discriminated against in two ways: first, fat bodies are subordinated by a built environment that excludes them; second, fat bodies are seen as unfortunate and contemptible” (1582).   

Relatedly Clare is deeply engaged in understanding the impact of “cure.” He is interested in how “cures” impact disabled folks and what cure—as a tangible concept—says about how society views disability. Part of his understanding of cure lies in diagnosis. What I found most gripping about Brilliant Imperfection is that he does not claim to have all the answers but instead, grapples, allows the ideas to “jostle” him and he still paints a detailed picture of the world he inhabits as a disabled, gender-queer person: “in spite of what the medical-industrial complex tells us, diagnosis is a tool rather than a fact, an action rather than a state of being, one story among many” (2017, 45). Through his personal experiences, he urges readers to question the real purpose of diagnosis, what diagnosis means, and the benefits that might exist if we ignore the expectations that accompany it. Since reading Clare, I have begun to see the world differently, questioning whether how I exist within it is typical or if I have adapted to suit a world that isn’t built for me.

My graduate work brought me even further into understanding the realities of navigating medical spaces while inhabiting a fat body-mind. There is no hiding fatness from doctors or strangers on the street. There is certainly no hiding it from oneself. Many people claim they are “trying to help” by announcing and then quickly denouncing a person’s fatness as if this were a revelation, new knowledge that would transform the fat body instantly into one that does not face stigma and marginalization. The diagnosis of fat becomes a means of control and also a way for non-fat individuals to place their displeasure onto the site of that particular fat body. In this way, weight loss becomes a cure. While Clare means diagnosis in the sense of medical labels and processes, I think it is critical to consider diagnosis as social as well as medical. For now, as my body grows larger than it has been, and while I wear clothing that brushes against plus size, I have not yet been socially re-diagnosed as fat. According to the jury of my peers I must not be as immediately in need of “cure,” weight loss, for when they were invested in a cure, they were sure to inform me.

I want to repair a gap I should have addressed earlier. While theorists Mairs (1997) and Clare (2017) question diagnoses’ usefulness in the context of disability, I denounce the usefulness of diagnoses in relation to fat bodies as it only seeks to control and reduce the individual to their body. As research states, intentional weight loss is, in fact, never helpful for health-related quality of life.3 While other diagnoses may be a necessary step towards treatment, the fat body cannot access or benefit from “cure” and, perhaps most importantly, is only reminded of public opinion that deems their body a body in error.

The Capitalist “Cure”

While the neoliberal state disdains the fat body, capitalism loves the money it can produce. Diet fads produce the most amazing money gougers. Companies like Sarah’s Discovery utilize ketone pills and apple cider vinegar; Beach Body creates expensive meal replacement shakes and small portion size containers to accompany their fitness videos; diet clinics claim the cure for the scourge of fatness as disease. The weight loss industry is so successful because a dieting body is never finished. As Thompson states, “I would go even further and say that the fat dieting body is not only the perfect consumer body, it also becomes the perfect advertisement—as a success story when weight is lost and a cautionary tale when it is not” (2018, 44). This plays into a politics of recognition for fat bodies, only visible in the media when used to market the cure for fatness. What effect does this have on how society treats fat people? I see a connection between the “before” photos that garner massive responses to ingest diet pills and the fear that relegates the fat body as unruly or wrong. What is scary about fat? Is it the fat itself, or do thin people see the sting of stigma around fatness and already recognize it as socially debilitating? The fear then attaches itself not to the body-mind but to a society that callously discards bodies that do not serve their purpose.

How do we become so perfectly indoctrinated into the collective fear of fat? At what age do we forsake bodily joy for constant monitoring and external regulation? Even though there have been studies presenting the risk of bariatric surgeries, thousands are performed every year. Despite the science that diet pills are, at best, ineffective symbols of desperation, countless women and men continue to consume them year after year. Although plastic surgeons are not directly related to weight loss, they are still beneficiaries of the hundreds of thousands of dollars from the weight loss industry. Clare writes, “the quest for slenderness, for an eradication of fatness, is seemingly worth all the failures, dangers, dubious medical procedures and direct harm” (2017, 77). The fat body represents the unruly, yes, but it also largely represents the inevitability of the changing body. All bodies change. For a society that predicates so much on a normative standard of beauty and a normative standard of the neoliberal worker, the fat and disabled body are feared because they are real. Fat is scary because the social stigma that accompanies fatness, which we all in some way contribute to, is not far away. No one wants to be socially ostracized, and yet that fear works to uphold the fatphobia and oppression of disabled and fat individuals.

In Clare’s discussion, I believe there is an underlying concern for the erasure of individuality associated with cure. In a neoliberal society that values bodies that fuel the capitalist machine, both disabled and fat bodies fail to meet the standard of production. Cure strikes me as produced out of fear: fear of what is different and unknown. For that reason, I see the rejection of cure as a rebellion against the neoliberal system. I wish I had been able to participate in that rebellion, as well. I bought the lies of the medical-industrial complex and a society that told me I was “wrong.” This is why I push this rebellion for others.

Cure also has a way of pushing a monoculture of human beings. Why should everyone have to function in the same way? Why should all bodies look the same? Even with cure, we know that bodies come in various sizes, shapes, and abilities. For cure to thrive, the diagnosis of “troubled” or “wrong” has to precede treatment. Thompson states the struggle of weight loss is “exhausting. It’s maddening. It leaves one enraged” (2018, 44). It is exhausting to be expected to change. It is maddening that bodies cannot exist as they are. It leaves me enraged that our society feels the need to change any “unruly” body. I’m enraged at more than just a social need to (re)shape and control. I’m enraged at the thousands of hours I spent starving, sprinting, obsessing to find the “thin” at the end of the tunnel. I’m maddened at how well I bought their lies. I’m enraged that I fed the capitalist machine of diet culture not only my money but new customers. Every post and subsequent praise for my body pushed more divergent bodies like mine into a never-ending cycle of diet, crash, guilt, and repeat. They turned to me for inspiration, and I am maddened that I have no way to tell all of them that I am so sorry. I am so sorry that I brought you into the madhouse with me.

What are the consequences of comparing fat bodies’ experience with dis-abled experience? Disability theorists have long fought to have their struggles and their personhood recognized by society. Co-opting their experience for the furthering of fat activism’s cause is problematic. But with academics like Garland-Thompson including fat bodies under the umbrella of disability, the line of what constitutes disability begins to blur or expand. Are there consequences for calling a fat body disabled? If any, I think the implications would be social. Socially, is it worse to be considered disabled or fat? Does this stigma compound if you are both? Does it instead lighten societal expectations? In my view, labeling the fat body-mind disabled is, in effect, calling out the impact of bodily control and marginalization imposed by society, and while it may be a label which is disheartening, what should be more so is the lived realities of individuals rendered superfluous by the system that should support them. The stigma of being labeled disabled, or the issue of expanding the disability beyond the traditional, becomes the concern. There is so much theory and understanding of “ill-fitting” body-minds that fat activists could learn from disability theorists. However, is there a difference between bodies that could be forcibly changed but do not want to and bodies that cannot change and perhaps want to? As Clare would say, “I ask because I don’t know the answers” (2017, 87).

I have had to grapple with why I worried about conflating fatness and disability. Initially, I knew it was because I was told, “Don’t co-opt disability theory in your work! Don’t conflate the two in your attempt to merge ideas!” But I know it stems beyond that. I know that there was more fear buried beneath my resistance to name the fat body-mind as a disabled body-mind. Both of those words, “fat” and “disabled,” carry with them a history of hurt. Not only socially but from my lived experience, those words lay heavy on my mind and reside deep in my body. It is a recent revelation that I claim the word disabled, knowing now that I am an autistic woman and that my lived experience, diagnosed or not, is worthy of the accommodation and acknowledgement I am deprived of. I am/have been/may be, fat and disabled. But in 2020, when I started writ-ing about these ideas, both words were distant and terrifying. I was an avid dieter who relished the distance she had put between her body and fatness. ADHD felt socially less of a disability and more of a personality trait. I felt the guise of privilege from both terms. To have conflated fatness and disability, or to have acknowledged their shared experience back then, would have been to have connected with my former body-mind. To have acknowledged that my present and past states were one and the same. It would have been beyond my mind’s capacity, having been drained by my needs as a dieter. It would have crushed me.

Writing about this remains challenging. I am proud of my work to accept my body-mind as ever-changing, fluid. I feel most seen in an understanding of the fat body as disabled because I am both always; my mind and my body are divergent. This theory is no longer terrifying but connective, linking my thoughts and fears spanning years of my young life. It is liberatory.

Claiming Fatness

Living unapologetically as fat is rebellion: a rebellion from the normative standards of beauty, a stance against what a “working body” should look like, and a big Fuck You to the negative comments spewed on fat bodies. Just like there have been 20 years of writing on the experiences of stigma and shame faced by fat people, there is a newly emergent body of writing on loving the fat body just the way it is. Sonya Renee Taylor encourages women to examine the origins of their body shame to free themselves of that hatred. She advocates for radical self-love, which she describes as “a port far beyond the isle of self-acceptance,” working from activist Angela Davis’ famous declaration to “change the things I cannot accept” (2-3). Or theorists like Selina Thompson who writes, “Your body is your own—let it be chaos, let it be anarchy, let it be animal, let it be you. Know that this is a radical act, an act of pure feminism. Know that your agency and power are always in dialogue with each other” (2018, 49). Thompson’s “radical act” is the same concept as my rebellion; it is the audacity to exist as a fat body. But this concept is not without fear or worry. I am not talking about an easy rebellion but, like Taylor and Thompson state, one that is truly radical to current conceptions of bodies. Difficult, but worth it, to protect the validity of fat bodies.

This rebellion comes in the smallest acts. It happens every single time a fat body-mind silences the conditioning of society saying they are unworthy of love and unwanted as they are. I still struggle with this today, even though I am no longer classed as a fat body. I still have fat on my body, but I seem to have shrunk enough to convince people it does not exist. I chuckle at how simple this fear of fat is. We all have fat, we eat fat, and some of us are/were fat, yet socially, it is a black death.

But it is not the fat we fear. Like all marginalization, those who experience the privilege of freedom from stigmatization do so with the knowledge that others are treated worse. The fear of being othered pushes the fear of the fat itself. Those closest to the pinnacle of body power and privilege have the most to lose from the disentanglement of worth and body weight. What will dinner conversation become when white women no longer define their social value in relation to their Pilates-yoga-CrossFit-running-swimming-stretching-walking dedication? To rejecting the “bad” body that sits in peacefulness rather than constant movement?4 What might change if we re-imagined movement as for the soul rather than the body? How might we then change our relationships to our own body-minds?

Fat activism, like disability activism, is another step towards allowing all lives to matter and for all body-minds to be given the ability to live freely. I wish that fat activism was a term I had heard growing up, but it was not. I wish that my mother’s yearbooks hadn’t been filled with nasty comments about her body, but they were. I wish that hadn’t sparked an intergenerational fatphobic cycle, but it did. As I see it, I can wish all I want, but just as “hope” and “cure” aren’t the same, neither are “wish” and “change.” If I want to see a world in which all body-minds are valued, I have to change how I talk about bodies. Like many others, I am guilty of prolonging the legacy of fatphobia. As Heather McAlister writes, “We will never have our freedom if we only live ‘from the neck up.’ Yet that is the way many fat people live, even, or especially, the activists and academics among us” (2009, 311). As I write this, I know I am guilty of stalling progress. I know that I lived 20 years “from the neck up” and accepted that as my penance for being fat. Every single person deserves to be more than a face to ease the discomfort of others. Everyone should be able to live boldly and loudly, in full body-minds, in all their complexities and differences.

Conclusion

Fat activism can benefit from feminist disability studies if academics remember that the experiences of fat bodies, while similar to disabled bodies, do not encompass the full reality of disability as fat alone. It is essential to respect the origins of theory when applying it to other areas of study to protect the sanctity of the hard work required to build it. Fat activism is a relatively new area of study compared to disability theory. To co-opt disability theory would be to forget the years of struggle, policy, and projects that went into making disability theory what it is today.

Exploring the struggles of being a fat body-mind allows theorists of all sizes to understand the social stigma attached to being a deviant body. Fat activism is, after all, very similar to feminism in that it is for the benefit of all bodies, not just those who are fat. When fat body-minds are uplifted and respected, then the dialogue around bodies of all kinds, including disabled bodies, and those that are always both can change. Fat activism is for more than just those bodies that are only represented in the “before” photos of weight loss ads. It is for bodies too big for “one size fits all stores” and even for skinny bodies that hear “fat” as a promise of death. When the dialogue about what bodies are acceptable changes, then the creation of spaces accessible to more than just small bodies can begin, and the radical self-love that Taylor (2020) promises in her writing can be unlocked.