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

by Aubrey Gordon

Making space for an emerging constituency in any movement is a straightforward, albeit difficult, task. Its ingredients are simple: listening, believing, adjusting, and collaborating. But sharing power has never been easy, and, like acknowledging other axes of oppression, making room for fat women within feminism will require some discomfort of the thinner women around who it has been historically centered. It will require their willingness to entertain the idea that their bodies are not accomplishments and that fat bodies are not failures. It will call upon the willingness to believe that they themselves might become fat someday and might still need feminism then. And it will rely upon those feminists’ willingness to sit with the discomfiting knowledge that, despite the relentless, whipping winds of misogyny all around them, their bodies have still afforded them some shelter that others don’t have.