Unshrinking

Description

The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it—from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled

“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, and our culture.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

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 the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne 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.

In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation 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.“Manne’s argument draws on personal experiences . . . and on trenchant analyses of the ways in which fatness has been regarded throughout history.”—The New Yorker

“Unshrinking is an incisive polemic that brilliantly dissects fatphobia, the way it encroaches upon our lives, and how ultimately we can, if we are willing, do the challenging work of unlearning damaging ideas about fatness, health, and happiness.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

“Kate Manne tears down the fortress of Western fatphobia. . . . Unshrinking is a project of deconstruction, archaeology, and care.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“[Manne] writes in harrowing detail of her own experiences of discrimination and the cycle of shockingly disordered eating. . . . Claiming total ownership of one’s own body ought not to feel radical, but perhaps it is.”—The New Statesman

“Manne brilliantly ushers forth scientific studies and powerful anecdotes to dispel us of the [notion] that a fat body is necessarily an unhealthy body. . . .”—Chicago Review of Books

“The personal is political when it comes to fatphobia and Kate Manne has written this intimate and razor-sharp examination to expose the gaslighting, double standards and conditioning behind size discrimination.”—Ms.

“Unshrinking is a must-read, no matter your body size, and an unignorable call to action.”—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even

“If you have ever struggled to feel safe in your body as it is, or if you have ever wondered who your body is for, Manne has articulated the answer: Our bodies belong to us.”—Virginia Sole-Smith, author of Fat Talk

“An essential book of impossible-to-overstate importance, Unshrinking is a lucid, vital addition to the fat canon.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

“Both trenchant and moving, Unshrinking is a long-overdue reckoning and a manifesto for true intersectionality.”—Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-editor of Critical Race Theory

“Trust Kate Manne to provide the clearest statement of one of the major problems of the twenty-first century.”—Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are

“This rich text for the ages is one we should all read, especially if we desire to create a world that treats fat people with more dignity and less disdain.”—Evette Dionne, author of Weightless

“Unshrinking is a deft autoethnographic work that brilliantly weaves together indisputable research with parts of Kate Manne’s own personal story.”—Da’Shaun Harrison, author of Belly of the Beast

“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.”—Jessica DeFino, writer, The Unpublishable

“[A] brilliant takedown of fatphobia . . .”—Booklist, starred review

“Incisive . . . A brave, thought-provoking book.”—Kirkus ReviewsKate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT and is the author of two previous books, Down Girl and Entitled.READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Fat activists would have us use the word “fat” not as a bad word or as an insult, but as a merely neutral description of some bodies, much like the words “short” and “tall.” How do you feel about the word “fat” after reading the book? Is it possible and realistic to reclaim “fat” in this way? 

2. How did Kate Manne’s relationship with her body—and specifically the way her fatness made her vulnerable—resonate with you? Have you experienced feeling vulnerable as a result of your appearance, either now or during childhood? 

3. Do you agree that attitudes need to change, sometimes in radical ways, to accommodate fat bodies and make the world just for everybody—helping us all shrug off what Manne calls “the straitjacket of fatphobia”? Did the straitjacket metaphor speak to you? What are some of the injustices faced by fat people, according to Unshrinking? What are their implications? Can you think of other injustices faced by fat people not mentioned in the text? 

4. What are some examples of the ways that fatphobia intersects with racism, misogyny, sexism, classism, ableism, transphobia, and more? Do you agree with these connections? Are there other forms of fatphobia’s intersectionality not highlighted in the book? 

5. Fatphobia is likely on the rise, especially when it comes to the implicit bias against fat people. Why do you think that might be? Are there other forms of bigotry that seem to be on the rise in your circles, and how, if at all, do they intersect with fatphobia? 

6. Of the three strands of fatphobia—moral, sexual, and intellectual—described in the book, which was the most resonant for you? What was the most surprising? Do you think disentangling these strands is helpful, or are they all inextricably connected? 

7. What did you think of Manne’s argument that diet culture gaslights us into dieting, even when we know that dieting doesn’t work to reduce people’s weight in the long term in the vast majority of cases? Have you ever felt gaslit by a person or a whole social system? What are some of the other ways gaslighting might work systemically to make whole groups of people feel that they are crazy, lazy, guilty, bad, or otherwise defective? 

8. Are you persuaded by Manne’s argument that hunger is authoritative, and that we should grant our bodies’ hunger cues the authority they deserve, rather than diet constantly? Why or why not? And if you’re familiar with the idea of intuitive eating, how do Manne’s ideas compare and jibe with that idea? 

9. How does the idea of body reflexivity compare to body positivity and neutrality? Does body reflexivity resonate with you? Why or why not? What about the idea of dismantling beauty culture completely? 

10. What misconceptions did you have about fatness that were corrected by this book? What did you think the book’s limitations were when it came to wrestling with our ideas of fatness and health and bodies? Who in your life, if anyone, would you like to read this book and/or absorb its main messages? Chapter 1

The Straitjacket of Fatphobia

When Jen Curran, thirty-eight, went to see a kidney doctor, she was prescribed weight loss. “Can you start dieting and exercising? Try to lose some weight,” she was counseled. Jen played along, despite serious misgivings. “Okay, yeah. I can do that.” Jen had a five-month-old baby at home. The doctor continued, “Take the baby out for walks, eat less salt, nothing from a box, eat plants.”

Jen noted that she didn’t need the instructions: she was already “painfully well-versed” in weight loss. She had lost some 115 pounds earlier in her life, not for the sake of her health, but for the sake of her appearance. She had since decided, some years earlier, to let go of her self-described obsession with her weight and to embrace her body as it was. She felt strong and resilient, despite the high levels of protein in her urine that her ob-gyn had flagged with concern during her pregnancy, along with high blood pressure. She had been put on bed rest during her second trimester and induced at thirty-seven weeks, before delivering her baby daughter, Rose.
But, contrary to her ob-gyn’s hopes, the protein in Jen’s urine had not resolved itself after the pregnancy was over. She was advised to see a kidney specialist at the earliest opportunity.
“And if I lose weight, the protein will go away?” Jen asked the doctor at her appointment. “Yes. Lose weight, the protein will go away. Come back four months from now.”

Jen’s weight was not the problem, though: she had bone marrow cancer. If she hadn’t been suspicious of this doctor’s advice and sought out a second opinion a month later, the cancer would have continued to ravage her body, and her protein levels would have remained as high as ever. “There’s nothing diet or exercise can do to touch this much protein,” the second kidney specialist told her.

Fortunately, Jen’s cancer—multiple myeloma—was caught in time to allow it to be treated with six months of chemotherapy and steroids. Jen’s prognosis is, at the time of this writing, a good one.
Other people are not so lucky. When Laura Fraser’s sister, Jan, fifty-nine, came to visit her, Laura told her she looked great. Jan had lost sixty pounds. She hadn’t been trying to: for months she had been in so much pain that she hadn’t had much of an appetite. She was experiencing postmenopausal vaginal bleeding and near-constant pelvic pain. Her eyes welled with tears as she described her attempt to get help from an ob-gyn. He had performed a routine examination and then effectively shrugged. Jan felt dismissed as a “fat, complaining older woman.” She tried to address her own pain by experimenting with dietary restrictions—cutting out dairy and gluten—and taking over-the-counter pain medications. A physician’s assistant she saw months later thought she was jonesing for an opiate fix. But at least he ordered blood work.

Jan received a call early the next morning, telling her to go straight to the ER. She was admitted to intensive care in critical condition, with extremely high levels of calcium in her blood. An MRI revealed a huge mass in her abdomen: the largest endometrial tumor her surgeon had ever seen. Her pelvis was filled with cancer; her bladder had also been invaded; there were even spots on her lungs.

Jan lived just six months longer. She continued to waste away throughout her rounds of chemotherapy. And people continued to compliment her on her weight loss.

The straitjacket of fatphobia is a source of pressure and discomfort for most, if not all, of us. But it makes life even harder when our bodies do not fit within certain rigid confines, which some bodies—including mine—will always strain against and spill over. And much like a straitjacket, fatphobia serves as a powerful social marker: it signals that some bodies should be ignored, disregarded, and mistreated. It marks fat bodies as undeserving of care—and of education, employment, and other basic forms of freedom and opportunity.

The straitjacket starts tightening early. It’s well known that fat children face widespread ridicule in school; a child’s weight appears to be the most common basis for schoolyard bullying. I remember being seated in a circle of kids, eating our lunches in a grassy playground, when a prepubescent boy pointed at each of us in turn: “skinny,” “medium,” or “fat,” he casually pronounced us. When I was the only girl classified as fat, the sound of social static buzzed in my ears. There was no doubt in my mind that I had been accorded the lowest ranking. And it affected not just how I perceived myself but how my peers did too. “Mangoes make you fat!” one said, turning up their nose in disgust at the contents of my lunch box. “And mangoes make your breath stink!” another added for good measure.

Such treatment, like any form of early weight stigmatization, places larger children at increased risk for depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and body dissatisfaction. There is even increased risk, in extreme cases, of suicidal behaviors.

Fat children are also subject to discrimination and bias from their teachers—yes, their teachers. Educators frequently express negative weight-based stereotypes about their larger pupils, assuming they will perform worse in reasoning tasks, struggle more with physical education, and have poorer social skills. I flash back to a teacher clapping an avuncular hand on my shoulder and declaring me a “brick house” when I was fourteen years old. I immediately felt my stomach lurch, seeing myself through his eyes as stocky, stolid, stupid. And indeed, teachers tend to perceive children classified as normal weight as having above-average abilities and children classified as obese as having academic challenges. It’s true that there is some (mixed and inconsistent) evidence that students classified as overweight or obese do tend to perform worse in school. But this is plausibly because, as one study showed, these students tend to disengage from school, and even avoid going altogether, when they are subject to weight-based teasing. Another study showed that when such weight-based teasing was duly controlled for, the performance gap disappeared. Hence, inasmuch as educators hold larger children responsible for not performing as well as their peers, this is effectively victim blaming—and the result of noxious, wrongheaded stereotypes about fat people’s lack of acumen.

Moreover, even if students perform just the same, they are perceived differently as they gain weight. One large longitudinal study found that, from fifth to eighth grade, an increase in a student’s BMI led teachers to deem them less academically capable, despite unchanging objective measures in the form of their standardized test scores. Specifically, girls were perceived as less able readers and boys as less able mathematically—which, interestingly, tracks the areas in which each group is expected to do the best according to gender stereotypes.

Some studies suggest that these forms of fatphobic educational bias may be particularly pronounced for girls. Adult women classified as overweight or obese frequently report having experienced weight stigmatization from an educator, with a third recalling at least one such incident and 20 percent recalling more than one.

One of the most galling studies I came across while researching this book showed that parents in the 1990s were less willing to offer financial support to their fat daughters to attend college, compared with their thinner ones. I am grateful that my own parents never saw me, whatever my weight, as any less bright or industrious or worthy of a good education. Indeed, they celebrated my intelligence along with my appetite. But many girls and women are not so fortunate. Many of us never have the chance to develop our voices, owing to the sense that someone with a body like ours wouldn’t have anything valuable to contribute. It strikes me as a heavy, if seldom-noticed, silence.US

Additional information

Weight	14.8 oz
Dimensions	1.0500 × 5.6500 × 8.5100 in
Imprint	Crown
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780593593837
ISBN-10	0593593839
Author	Kate Manne
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO026000, PHI005000
Subjects	stigma, feminist theory, sociology books, philosophy books, cultural anthropology, implicit bias, overweight, obese, social activism, phobia, womens studies, fatness, fat, body image book, fat shame, weight bias, victimization, biased, fatphobia, size discrimination, fat phobia, kate manne, unshrinking, american culture, feminism, BIO026000, culture, social justice, biography, discrimination, Gaslighting, Prejudice, Sociology, activism, philosophy, human rights, activist, body image, PHI005000, ethics, stereotypes, obesity, plus size, morality, bias