For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not. Blending stories with trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue.
...a breathtaking work of meticulous research, philosophical rigor, and personal anecdote ... Manne dares us to reject racism, sexism, and capitalist greed as forces that shape our bodies and minds, and instead aspire to a world shaped by justice and kindness, one that fits all bodies. It’s a profound challenge that is worth our time, as Manne makes clear in this superb book full of insight and hope.
Unshrinking is a project of deconstruction, archaeology, and care ... It is in her analysis of disgust that Manne’s own training as a philosopher comes to the fore ... Manne’s paradigm is radical in its reorientation of bodily purpose but surprising in its individualist bent. Early on, she promises "a political and structural, as opposed to a psychological and individualistic, intervention" into the discourse around fatphobia. And she delivers, illustrating fatphobia’s tentacled reach and horrifying fallout. Yet her solution is highly individualistic.
...a potent and unsettling piece of social philosophy – a broadside against fatphobia ... Manne clinically dissects a life warped from within and without by norms governing personal appearance and size. She revisits the searing words of childhood bullies, the cruel comments of graduate-school colleagues and cycle after cycle of dieting. In doing so she works to expose and contest the falsehoods of fatphobia ... As a polemic, Unshrinking works. Manne’s case for the harmfulness of fatphobia is compelling. But the book’s greatest strength is its author’s personal narrative and the sense of justified grievance that runs through the prose like a line of fire. And the weaknesses of the work, such as they are, can be figured as corollaries of this strength. Manne aspires to the wholesale reform of our fatphobic society, but the personal focus of the book functions to limit the breadth of its social application ... demonstrates amply the importance of aspiring to care a little less about the unruly behaviour of our irrepressible flesh.
