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Fat liberation and joy
Oct. 5th, 2021 07:01 pmFor the New England Aces book club we decided to read Angie Manfredi’s The (Other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce, a collection of short pieces on fat activism. We picked it because it has one entry by an asexual woman, “To All the Pizzas I’ve Loved Before,” which discusses some of the intricacies of being fat and aroace.
The book covers a wide range of topics and forms--there’s poetry and prose, there are deeply personal stories and well-researched persuasive pieces on politics and science. Some pieces are primarily educational, and some are primarily celebratory. It’s definitely an intra-community work--many of the pieces are written in the second person, or addressed to the author’s younger self--but there’s plenty of information in it that straight-sized people should know, too. I learned a lot and it certainly gave me plenty to think about that I don’t think about nearly enough. I think I do have to admit that as a reader--or at least, in the headspace I’m in lately--I sort of just dislike the format of “collection of a large number of short pieces”; both this book and Disability Visibility did exactly what they set out to do with that format, but left me feeling less like I had just read a book on the subject than that I had just read a collection of articles and should go read A Proper Book on the subject. This is not a criticism of the book, which set out to do exactly what it intended to do, it’s just the sort of thing that happens sometimes when I subordinate my reading choices to book clubs.
The “All the Pizzas” essay was extremely good and I’m excited to discuss it. It’s short, but it packs in some really interesting things about navigating both societal narratives about fat people being undesirable and the prominence of romance in the limited canon of fat-positive media. The writer likes romance, but also notes its function as being what constitutes a happy ending, which can feel a bit off when that’s not what you want in your own life. It’s a clear call for the expansion and diversification of both the limited fat-positive canon and the limited ace-positive canon. I’ll probably reread this essay more closely before discussion on Sunday, since I expect that’s what we’ll spend the bulk of our time talking about.
The book covers a wide range of topics and forms--there’s poetry and prose, there are deeply personal stories and well-researched persuasive pieces on politics and science. Some pieces are primarily educational, and some are primarily celebratory. It’s definitely an intra-community work--many of the pieces are written in the second person, or addressed to the author’s younger self--but there’s plenty of information in it that straight-sized people should know, too. I learned a lot and it certainly gave me plenty to think about that I don’t think about nearly enough. I think I do have to admit that as a reader--or at least, in the headspace I’m in lately--I sort of just dislike the format of “collection of a large number of short pieces”; both this book and Disability Visibility did exactly what they set out to do with that format, but left me feeling less like I had just read a book on the subject than that I had just read a collection of articles and should go read A Proper Book on the subject. This is not a criticism of the book, which set out to do exactly what it intended to do, it’s just the sort of thing that happens sometimes when I subordinate my reading choices to book clubs.
The “All the Pizzas” essay was extremely good and I’m excited to discuss it. It’s short, but it packs in some really interesting things about navigating both societal narratives about fat people being undesirable and the prominence of romance in the limited canon of fat-positive media. The writer likes romance, but also notes its function as being what constitutes a happy ending, which can feel a bit off when that’s not what you want in your own life. It’s a clear call for the expansion and diversification of both the limited fat-positive canon and the limited ace-positive canon. I’ll probably reread this essay more closely before discussion on Sunday, since I expect that’s what we’ll spend the bulk of our time talking about.