Commonalities are not similarities

[firecat]

This post on riotsnotdiets.com promotes the notion that fat people should adopt a disabled identity. That's too simplistic.

http://riotsnotdiets.com/post/4058647475/fat-disability

fat people—just like all people with devalued, non-normative bodies—are disabled. NOT because our bodies can’t do things, but because we live in a world that STOPS our bodies from doing things.

I am all in favor of coming up with an analysis of the sociopolitical experience of "people with devalued, non-normative bodies."

And I think there can be common cause between disabled activism and the fat activism. Some societal changes would benefit people who identify as disabled, fat, or both.

But I definitely don't think being fat, in and of itself, counts as being disabled, and I think it does damage to fat people and disabled people and people who are both to conflate them.

I'm saying this as someone who has been fat all my life and who has developed some mobility and pain problems over the past five years. Having both things going on is way different for me from having only one of those things going on. And the not-fat people I know who are disabled don't have the same experience of the world that I do.

Comments

[redbird]

The other reason I don't think this one works is that it's missing some important points about discrimination and bodies: in the culture I live in, an African-American person has a devalued, non-normative body, and people are stopped from doing things because of assumptions and prejudices about those bodies. There are senses in which being female, in many places, is having a devalued and non-normative body.

Not all discrimination fits that model: there are religious prejudices that don't map closely only ethnic/racial ones, for example. But given that none of us are beings of pure thought—we are all experiencing the world as, or in, bodies—so much does that I don't think this is a useful equivalence (or assertion of a subset relationship: "fatness is a disability" doesn't imply "all disabled people are fat". Yes, some fat people are disabled. Some women are disabled. Some African-Americans are disabled. Or, if you prefer, some disabled people are fat, some are African-American (or of other non-white groups), some are women, some are in more than one of these groups.

That said, I think there might be value in looking at the ways that some discriminated-against groups, identities, or behaviors are more volatile than others. Fat is more like disability than like some other sometimes-stigmatized identities in this regard, I think. Most people think of gender as binary. Religion is a yes/no for a variety of properties: a person is considered to be, or not be, Jewish or Catholic or Buddhist or Muslim or…. While that gets into "Is s/he really a Christian?" sort of questions, those are more likely to be about what qualifies a person as a member of a group than about the idea that someone could be partially Christian, while "partially disabled" is a fairly common idea, and people talk about increasing or decreasing disability. Race is an ambiguous one here, because race as a cultural thing is different from ancestry, and those differences and entanglements produce different answers at different times and places. We're expected to be willing/able to define ourselves briefly in terms of sexual orientation: even people who accept that there are more answers than lesbian/gay and straight may become uncomfortable with complicated answers that try to include something like the real-world variety of a person's experiences.