LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 'Required reading for everyone who lives in an unruly
human body... elegant fierce and profound' Roxane Gay Size discrimination harms everyone.
Acclaimed philosopher Kate Manne shows how to combat it. 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 intimate stories with trenchant analysis
Manne shows why fatphobia matters now more than ever. Over the last decades bias has waned in
every category except one: body size. Here she examines how anti-fatness operates - how it
leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's 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. Fatphobia is a social justice issue. In this urgent call
to action Manne proposes a new politics of 'body reflexivity' -- a radical re-evaluation 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.
