Deeply Problematic | Why I use that word that I use: Fat

The word fat holds a great deal of sway in the popular imagination. Everyone has a particular and often arbitrary standard for what fat means, where it begins and where it ends. In most cases, fat as an adjective is applied in an unambiguously negative way (e.g. “Mariah Carey got fat”) , and denied in an unambiguously positive way (“what are you talking about? you’re not fat at all, you’re gorgeous!”). But as with the bodies it describes, “fat” is for my purposes value-neutral and relative: not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, and dependent on the context in which it exists.