Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health,
and the violence of policing.
To live in a body
both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that
creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness.
Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs,
and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black
people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically
sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.
Da’Shaun
Harrison–a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer–offers
an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as
anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat
Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical
analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat
Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive,
insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday
life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat;
they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates
from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be
sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness,
disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated.
Taking on
desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection
between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health”
and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and
vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They
offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural
programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world
as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on
their subjugation.