When philosophy professor and author Kate Manne sat down to write her third book, Unshrinking, she knew she was in for a new experience. The Cornell University academic and leading feminist scholar has previously authored two books about misogyny and male privilege, and this time, decided to tackle a more personal matter – the size of her body.
“I often departed from personal experience, and really had to delve deep into my history in ways that felt quite raw,” she told Women’s Agenda.
But writing it was also liberating — “The exercise felt like lifting my head out of shame, and trying to meet the gaze of the reader, to ask “You too?” with respect to having been marginalized or punished on account of our bodies–particularly our body size.”
Manne is widely known for coming up with the term himpathy, back in 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. She was also once threatened with a lawsuit by Jordan Peterson, who wasn’t happy when she called his work misogynistic.
In January, Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia was released to universal acclaim. The book is a searing exploration of the prevalence and harmfulness of size discrimination, and argues against the structural oppression of fat people. We were able to interview Manne between her busy touring schedule in the US.
Jessie TU: You’ve written two books firmly based on feminist ideas. What made you decide to write this book on fatphobia, and to turn inwards on a personal subject?
Kate MANNE: Because my first two books, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, were about misogyny, I found myself often being asked the question: what made you get interested in the subject? It’s a pretty grim topic, after all.
And I found I couldn’t really tell my story about misogyny without also telling a story about fatphobia and their intersection. As one of three girls at a previously all-boys’ school, the year it integrated, during my final two years of high school, I encountered a lot of misogyny.
And the form it typically took was weaponized fatphobia against me as a then chubby teenager. I was called a “fat bitch,” repeatedly told to lose weight, and voted the person “most likely to have to pay for sex” at the high-school leavers’ assembly. I came to think that what I faced highlighted what so many fat girls and women face in our society: the sense that we are less than, aesthetically, sexually, intellectually, and morally, because we are larger.
JT: I read in this wonderful review of your book that you reached a point in your life where you decided you had to “sort out my head, regarding my body, for the sake of my daughter.” Has your feminism changed since becoming a parent to a girl?
KM: Absolutely. I had inhaled fat activism in the early 2000s, thanks to the work of Kate Harding, Marianne Kirby, Lesley Kinzel, and many other wonderful authors. I was instantly convinced of the politics of the movement, and found enormous liberating potential in its message after having been so bullied for my weight in high school.
I desperately wanted to be in solidarity with other fat people. But it wasn’t until I had a girl of my own that it felt like not just a political belief but also a personal mandate: I couldn’t bear the thought of her absorbing my own negative view about my fat body and watching her mother perpetually trying to shrink herself on various futile diets (which, spoiler alert, don’t work).
I wanted to finally address the personal piece of my own body politics, and resist the patriarchal norm and expectation enforced by misogyny that I found the most difficult to resist: the pseudo-obligation to be thin, or at least thinner, and to never give up on the project of trying to be smaller in order to be a “good fatty”–and hence less of a “bad woman” by the lights of bankrupt patriarchal norms and expectations.
JT: How has your career as a philosopher and a feminist informed your views about fatphobia? Do you address this in your book?
KM: Yes, I think there are a lot of tools in the feminist and moral philosophical toolkit that are quite useful for cutting through a lot of fatphobic baggage rather quickly. For example, given the moral principle that “ought implies can”–or equivalently, if you can’t do something, you’re not obligated to do it–and the empirical premise that being thin just isn’t possible for the majority of fat people, this negates the idea that we’re under an obligation to be so.
Similarly, feminist work on gaslighting has influenced my belief that there’s something about diet culture that gaslights us into being perpetually on the diet treadmill, even though many of us know–both through incredibly robust scientific evidence and personal experience–that diets don’t work to reduce people’s weight in the long term in the vast majority of cases. But we keep trying anyway, out of a sense of guilt and shame, oftentimes–almost feeling “crazy” for letting go of the project of trying to be smaller.
There’s also a pernicious assumption at work in fatphobia that fat people are less able, competent, and intellectually authoritative. This means that, despite the potential of philosophy to help play a role in fat liberation, it’s rarely done so, historically–instead, we’re gatekept out of the profession, which is dominated by thin, white, non-disabled, cis, het men.
I delve into that in a chapter on the intellectual strand of fatphobia, using philosophy’s biases as a microcosm for what fat people face in so-called “thinking professions” and in society more broadly. For example, teachers think students are less gifted academically as they gain weight, even when their test scores haven’t changed. It’s pure prejudice, and it’s really insidious.
JT: In your recent The Cut piece, you make the argument that we can’t understand or address misogyny without facing fatphobia. Can you explain why?
KM: I think misogyny is a matter of girls and women facing the policing and enforcing of patriarchal norms and expectations, and one of the most potent of those is that we be small, thin, athletic, lithe, feminine, and also that our skin be light, smooth, and supple. In other words, there are misogynistic expectations that our bodies conform to fatphobic as well as racist, ageist, transphobic, and ableist expectations. We are punished for not conforming–and rewarded for coming closer to those (largely, for most of us, unachievable) norms.
I don’t think there’s any way to truly address misogyny without combating fatphobia, in consequence: the downranking of fat bodies is such a powerful way of controlling girls and women in particular. And we see that in horribly misogynistic practices like that of “hogging” or a “pig roast,” where fraternity brothers compete at universities to see who can bed the heaviest or fattest woman. Certainly men face fatphobia too; but there’s no equivalent practice targeting men. I also think the fatphobia faced by non-binary people is a vital subject, and although I’m not ideally positioned to address it, I hope other authors continue to address it.
JT: In one piece from 2022, you described writing about fatphobia as “tremendously freeing, albeit tremendously confronting” and that it also “invites speculation and scrutiny.” How do you negotiate that see-saw of joy in the freedom, and discomfort in the confrontations?
KM: I think remembering that, for every reader who judges you, there are so many more who are finding comfort and solidarity and even liberation in reading vulnerable writing–hopefully anyway!
JT: How do you emotionally and psychologically deal with critics of your work?
KM: I think there’s little substitute to simply feeling it. I often feel wounded and upset by personal attacks and mean comments, but that’s OK. These are valid feelings, and I have the luxury of having enough safety and privilege in my life at this point to ride the feelings out and then, eventually, move on. Sometimes when the hurt lingers, or becomes a sort of anxiety spiral, talking to my therapist about it can really help too.
JT: In your book, you recommend this idea of “body reflexivity” – the notion that “our bodies are just not there for serving or pleasing or placating others.” I love this idea. How do we practise it collectively?
KM: Thank you! The idea is that body positivity, which says that we should take a positive view of our bodies, and body neutrality, which says we should be neutral, are still implicitly assigning a kind of numerical quality to our physical forms. They also can be a bit oppressive, demanding we take one monolithic attitude toward our bodies–or else we are failing. So, instead of being positive, or neutral, or negative, I think we need to throw out the scales altogether.
There should be no implicit or explicit assessment of any kind. We need to transcend anything like a ranking. So my own mantra became, “My body is for me, your body is for you.” I call this body reflexivity, and the idea is that our bodies are not there for comparison or correction or consumption. One’s own perspective on one’s body is the only one that matters. This is connected with the radical politics of autonomy with respect to our bodies that I hold dear.
Kate Manne will be appearing at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival, including the closing address on Sunday 26 May. She will also appear at the Wheeler Center in Melbourne in the same month.