petra thinks

"glorifying obesity"

…[P]rivilege nurtures blindness to those without the same privileges.

One of the biggest mistakes people make around accessibility is by starting only with access. I think access is a tool, a practice, an intervention for justice, but that access has to happen inside of a political container and that political container is disability justice; it has to happen for the sake of something. Access has to be done in service of something. What I mean is that access for the sake of access is not necessarily libratory, but access for the sake of connection, breaking isolation, love, justice and liberation is libratory.

Fat acceptance doesn’t simply advocate in favor of fatness. Fat acceptance is also about rejecting a culture that encourages us to rage and lash out at our bodies, even to hate them, for looking a certain way. It’s about setting our own boundaries and knowing ourselves, and making smart decisions about how we live and treat ourselves, and ferociously defending the privacy of those choices. It’s about promoting the idea that anything you do with your body should come from a place of self-care and self-love, not from guilt and judgment and punishment. It’s about demanding that all bodies, no matter their appearance or age or ability, be treated with basic human respect and dignity. That’s the world I’d like to build. For all of us.

I was talking with a friend, Ivette González-Alé, about fat identity and she asked, “fat according to whom?” She said her body is just like everyone else in her family; their indigeneity forms a body foreign to white standards of height/weight/body fat distribution. Fatness is set against white bodies, with no consideration for other groups, creating an identity irrelevant to her brown body.