Ending Fatphobia Reading List

 

During 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, from November 25 to December 10, we call on everyone to take action.

TODAY 1pm Yukon time and 3pm Eastern, we’re chatting with Kira-Lynn Ferderber from SPARCC Sarasota. More info about how to tune in here.

What’s on your ending fatphobia reading list?

The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
By Sonya Renee Taylor

Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.

The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all.

  • From Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Every Body Yoga: Let Go of Fear, Get on the Mat, Love Your Body
By Jessamyn Stanley

I wrote this book for every fat person, every old person, and every exceptionally short person. I wrote it for every person who has called themselves ugly and every person who can’t accept their beauty. I wrote it for every person who is self-conscious about their body.

I wrote it for every human being who struggles to find happiness on a daily basis, and for anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the mere act of being alive. I’ve been there. We all have.

Yoga is for everybody and EVERY BODY. You don’t have to be thin and you don’t have to be fat. You don’t have to be a specific color or commit to a specific diet. You don’t have to earn (or have access to) a certain amount of money.

You don’t have to embody anything other than your truest and most honest self in order to practice yoga. You don’t have to omit the sadness, the anger, and all of the other “ugly” emotions that flavor our lives. You don’t have to be anyone other than yourself. And I think it’s high time that someone shouted it loud enough so everyone can hear.

  • From ‘Every Body Yoga’

Shrill
By Lindy West

Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible — like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you — writer and humoristLindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but.

From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jokes; to her struggle to convince herself, and then the world, that fat people have value; to her accidental activism and never-ending battle royale with Internet trolls, Lindy narrates her life with a blend of humor and pathos that manages to make a trip to the abortion clinic funny and wring tears out of a story about diarrhea.

With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss, and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.

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