Episode 99 with Kate Manne
Unshrinking – Kate Manne
Show Notes & Full Transcript
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Kate Manne (she/her), philosopher and author of Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, shares her thoughts on why we struggle to see through diet culture, how the ‘thought-terminating cliche’ ends liberatory conversations, and if it’s possible to be anti-diet and also pursue intentional weight loss.
Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT and works in moral, social, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of three books, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, and Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, which came out in 2024. She writes a newsletter, More to Hate, canvassing misogyny, fatphobia, their intersection, and more.
Please connect with Kate through Instagram, X, her website, and her newsletter.
This episode’s poem is called “to approach” by Raquel Salas Rivera.
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A Fat Joy Podcast Book Review
Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia
Written by: Kate Manne
Respectfully reviewed by A. Cavouras
Book Summary
In Unshrinking Kate Manne delivers a searing critique of the societal structures that create and reinforce fatphobia. The research is detailed and unflinching leaving the facts to speak for themselves. Her personal narrative is deep and generous. Manne repeatedly delivers research and cultural commentary from leading experts, who are also fat. In doing so she centers the lived experiences of fat people and presents analysis offered by other fat activists. Manne deftly features a broad range of experiences and intersectionalities. All this leads to the fundamental truth; it is not fat bodies that are a problem, it is a failure of society to examine itself, acknowledge that it is no big deal to have larger chairs, and move towards a more equitable society.
What’s Special About This Book
Kate Manne has written a book that is a call to action, propelled by a narrative surrounded in personal story and scientific and social analysis. This book offers clarity to all the surrounding issues of fatphobia through a critical intersectional lens and leaves no doubt to the path forward.
This book uncovers the reality of fatphobia’s reach. Manne reports, “Harvard researchers reported in 2019 that of all of the six forms of implicit bias they investigated - race, skin tone, sexual orientation, age, disability, and body weight - anti-fatness is the only one that had gotten worse since 2007 when people began to research them.” (p.9)
Unshrinking will broaden your mind and crack open your heart.
Validating Lines for Your Heart, Your Mirror, or You Socials
P.138
“(Carmen Maria) Machado recounts her childhood reverence for the character of Ursula from The Little Mermaid, in all of her exuberant villainy and unapologetic agency and her sheer fatness. “And even though she had the power to be thin - literal magical power, the sort the weight loss industry would sell its soul to her to obtain - her fat mind chose her fat body.”
P.189
“I believe that fat bodies are part of the same kind of valuable, bodily diversity. I believe not only that fat people should be respected, and treated with dignity, and given access to adequate healthcare, and so on. I believe that our fatness contributes something worth having. We add something to the world with our size and shape and sheer existence.”
P.195
“The thought that has helped me the most, in navigating all of this, is that my body is for me. Your body is for you. My body is not decoration. Your body is not decoration. Our bodies are our homes, as the slogan has it.”
End Note
I had never stopped to think that fatphobia was contagious.
“One study showed that the stigma against fat people is so powerful that even being caught next to a fat body is enough to deter prospective employers: when a fictional so-called normal weight male applicant was pictured in a photograph sitting next to an “obese” woman, he was rated as significantly less desirable as an employee than when he was pictured next to a thin one.” (p.20)
But why am I surprised? Hatred is contagious. Anyone who has ever been shunned in a group and no one else stood up for them could tell you that. I keep replaying in my mind the myriad moments of fat shaming I have witnessed or been the victim of. The ripples of those comments, made usually with kind, (although ultimately harmful), intentions, reverberate through time.
As I look at my copy of Unshrinking on my desk, I think of seven-year old me who could never have imagined that this book would be in print, that someone out there would write something that would make me feel seen and whole.
Thank you Kate, and to all the truths you brought forth in your work, I am forever grateful.
Respectfully reviewed by A. Cavouras (a.cavouras@gmail.com)