Super Fat Erasure: 4 Ways Smaller Fat Bodies Crowd the Conversation
[Feature Image: Photo of four people sitting on a bench against a light-colored wall. The person to the left has short white hair and is wearing a black sweater, blue shirt, brown skirt and black stockings and shoes. The person next to them on their right, is wearing a hat, a brown jacket, a blue shirt and has a white bag in front of them. The person to their right has short brown hair and is wearing a dark jacket, a blue shirt, blue jeans and white shoes. The person to the far right has short dark hair and is wearing a dark jacket and blue jeans. Source: CGP Grey]
For most of my life, and especially since coming into a fat identity, I have usually been one of the fattest people if not the fattest person in any given room I enter.
When I came into fat activism, I did it operating under the (false) assumption that my experience of fatness was the same—or at least similar, or perhaps comparable—as other fat people’s. The more my community and conversations expanded, particularly around experiences related to fatness and its intersections with and complications by race, gender, ability and especially size and shape, the clearer this became.
It would lead to confusion when I would see others I was in community with, others who shared a fat identity having experiences that I felt were not available to me—everything from sex and dating to clothing to seating to the ways our bodies were capable of moving. It took me a long time to unpack how different the fat experience is from body to body.
A product of the fat acceptance movement is a bigger and more diverse group of people embracing their bodies and claiming fat identity. There are so many reasons to claim fatness and so many ways to be fat. It’s an embodiment that is contextual depending on other variations like race, gender and ability especially. I don’t think that the destigmatizing and expanding the boundaries of fatness is necessarily a bad thing, but it can become complicated for me when the vast majority of these people are on the smaller end of the spectrum of fatness.
What do I mean by smaller fat people? This is a somewhat ambiguous term and is completely relevant on who is answering. Part of the ambiguity and flexibility of fat identity is that it can be relevant to so many different experiences. There is no hard and fast rule for this standard, but you might be able to decipher your position on the fat spectrum based on which of these experiences you relate to.
Here is some of the harm caused when fat communities focus on smaller fats.
1. It reimagines ideas of body—but not enough
In some ways, this can reify fat stigma and antagonism against larger fat people. When a bigger range of people begin to identify with fatness, but they all remain in a specific and smaller range, it can work to reformulate ideas of a standard and acceptable body size rather than integrate fat liberationist ideas of bodies and body size.
