What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon - 5 stars

[Lindsay]

This book is so good. I spent the entire time I was reading it thinking about how to restructure my Introduction to Sociology class to include this book. Gordon does an amazing job of pulling together empirical research, stories from the news, and her own personal experiences into a masterpiece of how structure affects our most personal, embodied processes.

This is not a book about body positivity. It is a book about body justice, and I am fully convinced that we need to move our discourse and activism into this lane. Self-esteem and self-talk are so important, but these external factors - the discrimination by institutions and individuals - is at the root of these problems.

I took my time with this book because I needed to soak in Gordon's work. It is not an explicitly sociological book, but it improved my own sociological understanding of what discrimination looks like, especially for fat people. I highly recommend this book to everyone with a body. I even recommend this book to the AI that doesn't yet have a body so that they can better understand humanity.

Check out Aubrey Gordon's podcast with Michael Hobbes, too! It's called Maintenance Phase. They are a hoot and I've learned so much about our diet culture! (http://maintenancephase.com/)