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.
In this absurd, self-deluded book virtually immobile bodies are deemed as healthy as slim ones and obesity is no more linked with type 2 diabetes than, apparently, using mouthwash ... This book is a super-processed sausage of identity politics and fat activism.
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.