For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be smaller. I can tell you what I weighed on any significant occasion: my wedding day, the day I became a professor, the day my daughter was born. I've been bullied and belittled for my size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, I wanted to believe that I was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But I was not.
Part memoir, part polemic, and part (all?) philosophy, this book aims to show why fatphobia is a vital social justice issue, and provide an analysis of what fatphobia is and how it works. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. I examine how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s character, attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.
I close by proposing a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
Unshrinking will be out in January 2024, and you can preorder the book via the links here (in the US) or here (in the UK).
Part memoir, part polemic, and part (all?) philosophy, this book aims to show why fatphobia is a vital social justice issue, and provide an analysis of what fatphobia is and how it works. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. I examine how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s character, attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.
I close by proposing a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
Unshrinking will be out in January 2024, and you can preorder the book via the links here (in the US) or here (in the UK).
EARLY PRAISE
"As someone raised in the era of "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," I am beyond grateful to Kate Manne for ushering in the era of "Unshrinking." This book is a tasty, tasty takedown of diet culture and a firm-but-gentle guide to finally getting free from fatphobia—individually, collectively, and within society at large. Is it too much to say that Manne has written a big, fat masterpiece?"
~Jessica DeFino, author of The Unpublishable substack newsletter
"Kate Manne's Unshrinking is an incisive polemic that brilliantly dissects fatphobia, the way it encroaches upon our lives, and how, ultimately, we can, if we are willing, do the challenging work of unlearning damaging ideas about fatness, health, and happiness. Manne is a beautiful writer with a consummate research ethic. The depth of her knowledge and how she synthesizes it is clear from the first page to the last and she deftly navigates personal narrative and cultural examination to demonstrate that the personal truly is political, particularly when you live in a fat body. What elevates Unshrinking is the keen awareness that there is no universal experience of fatness and that fatphobia, like everything else, is affected by the intersections of the identities we inhabit. Unshrinking is required reading for everyone who lives in an unruly human body. In Unshrinking, Manne has crafted an elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, our culture."
~Roxane Gay, author of Hunger and Bad Feminist
~Jessica DeFino, author of The Unpublishable substack newsletter
"Kate Manne's Unshrinking is an incisive polemic that brilliantly dissects fatphobia, the way it encroaches upon our lives, and how, ultimately, we can, if we are willing, do the challenging work of unlearning damaging ideas about fatness, health, and happiness. Manne is a beautiful writer with a consummate research ethic. The depth of her knowledge and how she synthesizes it is clear from the first page to the last and she deftly navigates personal narrative and cultural examination to demonstrate that the personal truly is political, particularly when you live in a fat body. What elevates Unshrinking is the keen awareness that there is no universal experience of fatness and that fatphobia, like everything else, is affected by the intersections of the identities we inhabit. Unshrinking is required reading for everyone who lives in an unruly human body. In Unshrinking, Manne has crafted an elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, our culture."
~Roxane Gay, author of Hunger and Bad Feminist