Addendum to Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy

I was talking to Brandon and he made a critique of the last paragraph of the "Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy" post, which I would like to share–he thought that the last paragraph sounded rote and abandoned the thoughtful analysis of the rest post for a kind of identity politics stance. In the spirit of clarification and more thoughtful analysis, I'd like to elaborate on a few things I said in the last paragraph of the post because while I think identity politics can be useful in mobilizing individuals to fight against discrimination they face as a group, I'm also really wary of identity politics because I think they negate the specificity and complexities of individuals' lives.

The urge to tie an argument up into a neat little bow is one that's easy to succumb to, but in this case, I would rather not: I make a super-structural argument that Americans are fat because food and the quality of life in this country is so bad and then at the end I say that people have the right to be fat without being judged. In some ways this comes off like I'm talking out the side of my mouth because I start by saying that there is a problem of obesity in the U.S. (a claim that a lot of fat activists deny as a paranoia spread by the diet and healthcare industries) and then I say there's nothing wrong with being fat. Admittedly, I do think that there's something in the water and the food here that's wreaking havoc on our collective pancreases and making us fat as a country. This becomes particularly apparent when you travel outside the U.S. and see just how full of terrible additives our food is and how low our quality of life is, compared to other countries (and I'm not even necessarily talking about western Europe, although yes western Europe). Additionally, we not only have a historical crisis of fatness, but a historical crisis of thinness so that not only are fat people contending with bad food, but with a much more punishingly thin standard of "normality" than ever before. But then, I do think that you can be fat and beautiful and healthy (the medical establishment has not been able to concretely prove one way or the other whether being fat or thin or "normal" is healthier) and that you shouldn't be discriminated against for the shape of your body. These two positions are perhaps slightly irreconcilable, especially if you hold either the public health scare stance or the fat activism stance strongly. But really, the original spirit of my post is that when the law starts to sanction discrimination against people based on what they look like, then we're in for dark times.