Not so simple

[firecat]

This is largely a response to this Body Impolitic post, but the issue has come up recently in some other places I hang out too, so I am discussing it in my journal.

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

There are certain things that people try to make more simple than is possible.

Specifically, there is no "the [fill in the blank] community" unless you're talking about a single group of people who meet for one purpose only.

There's no "the fat acceptance community," "the poly community," "the Buddhist community," and so on.

People say "the FITB community" as a way of shorthand when they're talking about all the people interacting around certain ideas. But sometimes they seem to start believing in their own shorthand. Sometimes they seem to act as if all the FITB people will be forced to spend the rest of their lives together in a small confined space so they'd better all think a lot alike.

But if you're talking about many people geographically distributed who share an interest in a certain idea, and especially if that idea is complex, then they do not form a single unified community. They have multiple different relationships with the idea and multiple different ways of interacting with other people who are interested in the idea. For most ideas, that's not only OK, that's good.

When I embrace this understanding of how people interact around ideas, I feel a lot more relaxed. If I believe in X and Z, and someone else believes in Y and Z, we don't have to fight it out about whether the community should be either X+Z believers or Y+Z believers. We can both take part in groups interested in Z and retain our beliefs about X and Y. Then we might be able to discuss X and Y productively instead of feeling like we have to stomp out all those X-believers or Y-believers.

Comments

[sqbr]

YES.

This really annoys me about feminism: since they are doing X to fight the Patriarchy, anyone doing not-X must be trying to support the Patriarchy and vice versa from the other side. It turns into a lot of "No, you are a tool of the Patriarchy and I am a true feminist!!"

With regards to the topic of that post, I've found anyone with a dogmatic attitude to dieting (one way or another) has trouble with my particular medical history:
-I have reflux which really does get worse when you gain weight
-I have chronic fatigue which gets worse if I exercise (like, at all) and is leading to me slowly getting larger
-I have a heavily restricted diet that amongst other things mostly cuts out fats and sugars and means I am hugely neurotic about what I eat.

Noone really knows how to deal with someone with good self esteem about their appearance who honestly does just want to lose weight for the good of their health.

[firecat]

Noone really knows how to deal with someone with good self esteem about their appearance who honestly does just want to lose weight for the good of their health.

But see, that's part of my point. I know lots of people who share your beliefs. So many that if I start asking myself who belongs in the community my answer is that there are more of them than me*, and so they belong and I don't.

On the other hand, when I think along the lines of "There are people who support changing the dialogue about fat in my society and who are choosing to lose weight, and there are also people who support support changing the dialogue about fat in my society and who are choosing not to focus on their weight," then I don't feel so isolated.

*My situation is that weight loss might help my physical health, but most actions that lead to weight loss for me seem to harm my mental health, and so far I've decided my mental health matters more.

[sqbr]

I was very confused there and kind of missing your point. Sorry about that.

*pokes at my brain and tries again*

I'm kind of like one of those women who's in favour of women's rights but ambivalent about feminism: I definitely think Western society is screwed up and absurdly, hurtfully anti-fat, but have never felt comfortable aligning myself with, or spending much time around, the Fat Acceptance movement as I've perceived it.

So when I said "noone knows.." I wasn't talking about FA people, just the people I've talked to in every day life (mostly either pro-weight loss or vaguely pro-fat-acceptance but not actively identifying that way)

And I found trying to lose weight was incredibly bad for my health as well (mostly physical, but it also interacted really badly with my neurotic disposition. I stress enough about food without counting points!) So I can totally understand wanting to find a space where you can feel not pressured to lose weight even though it would be "healthier" in some ways, and I'm sorry that you haven't found the FA movement to be that space. I would have assumed it would be, but that's what I get for assuming :(

To respond to your actual point: I think I have been too inclined, as an outsider, to see FA as a single movement, and thus when I react against the views of some parts of it I assume everyone feels that way and thus the movement is not for me. I get narky every time I see "healthy at every size" for example: I am unhealthy at every size! I think what I really need is an approach which is particularly aimed at people with my sorts of stomach problems, since the way I have to approach food is quite different to that usually suggested. But since my weight is not that big an issue for me I'd rather look for the FA parts of disability activism than the disability-friendly parts of fat activism.

From my experiences with feminism (and, to be shallow, fanfic fandom) I do understand feeling isolated when it feels like there's a single consensus and it doesn't include you, and the freedom of realising that while a lot of people ACT like there's a consensus and it agrees with them there's actually not, that there's lots of different valid POVs some of which align with your own.

[firecat]

So when I said "noone knows.." I wasn't talking about FA people, just the people I've talked to in every day life (mostly either pro-weight loss or vaguely pro-fat-acceptance but not actively identifying that way)

That makes sense.

I'm sorry that you haven't found the FA movement to be that space.

Well, I would say that some FA people and groups are accommodating of what I need and believe, and not others. My post about how there is no the community but multiple interacting communities was partly intended to soothe myself over a fear that I would get "kicked out of the movement" for being intolerant of pro-diet-weight-loss talk as part of FA. But I won't get kicked out because there's no the movement.

I get narky every time I see "healthy at every size" for example: I am unhealthy at every size!

"Healthy at every size" would bug me too, because to me "healthy" implies some kind of perfection, and certainly not everybody is perfectly healthy.

A phrase I'm more familiar with is "health at every size," and in my opinion it means "You can do things to benefit your health no matter what size you are." For decades doctors have been giving fat people the advice "All your health problems are because you're fat, and if you lose weight all your health problems will go away," and I think the phrase is meant to get people to question that.

I'd rather look for the FA parts of disability activism than the disability-friendly parts of fat activism.

That makes sense too.

[sqbr]

But I won't get kicked out because there's no the movement.

*nods*

I have perhaps been misinterpreting the slogan. I had the misfortune to encounter a really irritatingly ableist FA blogger bugging one of my friends and I think it's made me overly sensitive.

[firecat]

Yuck. May I ask who is the ableist FA blogger in question?

[onyxlynx]

Agreed.

(Also, almost everything I believe is heresy to somebody.)

[anansi133]

This.

Generally when I hear someone trying to speak out of turn on behalf of the community, there's an attempt to wrestle false consensus out of the institutional shell. 'We should all speak with one voice in order to be heard at all' kind of a dangerous slippery slope.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Excellent! Blogging it.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, and I have the same objections to terms involving "culture" when they take in huge heterogeneous groups, such as "black culture" or "white culture." These simply are not groups of people who all share anything other than the single quality named in the description.

[mdlbear]

I'd have to disagree with you here. "Community" covers a lot of ground, and even in a small town -- which would be a community by anyone's definition -- there's plenty of disagreement about everything except the geographical location and name of the town. And even there there's room for disagreement.

Similarly, it makes sense to talk about an LJ "community", the "filk community", the "Ubuntu user community", and so on while still allowing a wide range of views and beliefs. Again, such a community is defined by a web site, a musical genre, an operating system and its associated blogs, ... within which people who consider themselves part of the "community" interact.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

One of the flip sides of the coin is that we have to cut others a proper amount of slack when they generalize to a reasonable degree. Thought/language 'is' abstraction.
I had a nasty experience a couple of years ago. I was new to an online conversational circle which is very preoccupied with issues of race and representation. A context came along in which I made a couple of brief, general introductory remarks, tossing out a couple of my own opinions for illustration and triangulation. One or two were about my being Jewish; I feel good about the uses American Black culture has made reprocessing our stories. I got flamed for over-generalizing about one big homogenous black culture . . . which, from context, I hadn't done, and within two more exchanges I was barred from the group.

[doctorpsycho60.livejournal.com]

I have certainly seen enough of this sort of thing in, for instance, home-schooling groups (the Evangelicals and the Hippies often have more in common than just wanting to teach their kids themselves, but there is plenty to divide them, too).
But the limitation I see on this is that you wind up supposing that you can just have an affinity group for every little interest and subdivision thereof, and have no need of a larger "community" or even of an encompassing "nation" or "civilization". This is the fallacy that Ayn Rand embraced (or rather, tucked under her arm and ran with, full tilt).
There is, indeed, such a thing as "the wider [ ] community". We just need to keep in mind what it is, and what it isn't.

[leback.livejournal.com]

This is well put.

I've also been trying to be more careful lately about distinguishing references to people sharing a particular anti-oppression ideology from references to the relevant oppressed group. "The disability community" doesn't have to mean the same thing as "the disability rights community," and using the former when I mean the latter seems like potentially a good way to stir up the kinds of fights you're talking about.