Thinking about intersections between fatness and disability today, because they are there, and there are many ties between ableism and fat hatred. There’s a lot of ableism in the good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy, in the obligation to be healthy put on fat folks who are told it’s okay if they’re fat as long as they are healthy, in the insistence that fat people can be fat if they’re good, if they exercise and eat the right things and check the right boxes.
And it’s interesting to see the same kind of hateful language used against both fat folks and people with disabilities (and, of course, those who share both identities). The exact same arguments are used to exclude people from public spaces, to tell them they do not belong, to insist that they are not welcome. NPR tells me that ‘one in three adults are obese’ and statistically around 20% of the population is disabled. These are not small numbers of people; fat people, and people with disabilities, are everywhere, and not going away.
Yet the same rhetoric comes up over and over and over again. ‘Drain on the system.’ ‘Lazy.’ ‘Choosing to be a burden.’ ‘Should just work harder.’ ‘Be more like the model fat/disabled person.’ ‘It’s too expensive to accommodate your needs.’ ‘Businesses would go bankrupt if they had to cater to people like you.’ ‘You must not be that fat/disabled if…’ ‘You’re being unreasonable with your expectations.’ ‘Oh, I wasn’t talking about you, dear, but the other fat/disabled people.’ ‘It’s gross, no one wants to see that.’ ‘You have to accept your limitations.’ ‘You’re setting a bad example.’
That’s why the fat and disability communities need to be working in solidarity, because we have a lot in common, and together, we could accomplish a whole heck of a lot. That’s why I proudly hold hands with my fat comrades. And that’s why I want to make sure people living at the intersection, those who are both fat and disabled, are not left out by either community.
This is a really good point & really interesting—because even when I am reading/writing about mental illness, I’m not thinking of myself as a fat crazy person, and when I’m doing fat activism, I’m not thinking about doing it as a crazy fat person. Part of it is that I’ve come really really far mental health-wise in the last year. I’ve learned to manage my anxiety really effectively and I’ve done such a good job normalizing living with anxiety that a lot of the time it’s invisible even to me. It’s only once or twice a week that something happens that makes me remember “oh, most people’s brains are NOT like this,” whereas I am constantly reminded of my fat on the bus, in the store, etc. Food for thought, for sure.
↧
Solidarity
↧