What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

by Aubrey Gordon

In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Wendy Brown describes tolerance as “a discourse of power.”29 Despite its pacific demeanor, tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgment, and aversion. Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It involves managing the presence of the undesirable, the tasteless, the faulty—even the revolting, repugnant or vile. [. . .] As compensation, tolerance anoints the bearer with virtue, with standing for a principled act of permitting one’s principles to be affronted; it provides a gracious way of allowing one’s tastes to be violated. It offers a robe of modest superiority in exchange for yielding.