Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

In Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (pub. January 9, 2024), Kate Manne has gathered current research and writing about fatness, anti-fat bias (fatphobia), and diet culture, and added her own philosophical analysis (she is a philosophy professor at Cornell), creating something completely original.

I’ve been aware of the possibility of being a fat person who doesn’t diet since the late 1980s, thanks to the beloved BBW magazine. I’ve been trying to follow a weight-neutral, nondieting, fat positive approach to my own life for nearly as long. I have collected and read most of the “body positive”, anti diet-culture, fat liberation writing that has been published, and a lot of what exists online, in the last thirty-plus years, But I’ve never read an analysis of anti-fatness and diet culture from a philosophical point of view. I am so glad that Manne has done this work!

With the first several chapters collecting research about fatness and dieting, quoting many other fat activist authors, such as Aubrey Gordon, Ragen Chastain, Hanne Blank, Roxane Gay, and many others, Manne also weaves in her own story of her body, how it has changed and what she has done about it through her life. It is exhaustively researched and the Notes are an essential part of the book.

After all of the background, Manne shows that dieting with the intent to change one’s body size is not just an unpleasant, ineffective activity, but it is also an immoral one because it requires that we learn to ignore bodily imperatives. She further argues that we are all being gaslit by diet culture, and that by refusing to participate, we can become “unshrinking: reclaiming space in a way that is unapologetic, fearless, graceful.”

Those of us who resist diet culture are:

putting your body on the line for the sake, in part, of fat representation in particular and body diversity more broadly. You’d be showing up in the world in a way that resists narrow and, frankly, fascist body norms and ideals and values. You’d be standing in solidarity with people othered and marginalized on account of their fatness . . . You would stand, moreover, with countless silent others who are yet to tell their stories, or whose stories are yet to unfold, within a fatphobic social world that we have the collective power to make so much better.

Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

It’s out today, so don’t wait. Please get this book, which is an essential addition to all fat positive, anti-diet culture libraries.

Thanks to NetGalley for the e-Galley in exchange for an honest review. I had only one week to get it read and reviewed before publication day, but I did it!