Self consideration

Fatuousity's enthusiasm for Kathleen Le Besco's book makes it seem rather attractive!

It enabled me to see, to say, after all those years in classes about ‘the body’, that fat mattered.  That fatness was an embodied difference.  A socially dis-empowered identity.  And that it was a valid object of scholarly enquiry.

The self always should be in some way or another. It feels as if fat people are only just discovering that we are worthy of thought, whether inside or out of academe. It's a notion that sadly hasn't gone very deep. A lot of people try to shame fat people out of it, trying to keep us in the position of stepping over ourselves to hear about anyone but us.

The essentialist position on fatness is the same as the mainstream one, in reverse, that's understandable. Fat acceptance is not a radical movement and doesn't particularly want to be despite its claims. It's too centred around the desire to fit to get much beyond the narratives we already know.

I have to say though, I am curious about the causes of weight if you like. I'm interested in how our bodies work. I find metabolism's to be like some people think of computers, somehow unreal and yet material.

That especially holds a lot of promise when it comes to changing other aspects of our being. 

Fatness, to me anyway, is a mystery, more than that of thinness. In the same way, tallness is in some ways more of a mystery than shortness. I don't really get why people question curiosity itself, rather than the form curiousity takes.

I'm not sure of any difference between creation of meaning and causal factors. Concentrating on the first one is a bit like insisting on focusing on liberal feminism. Without radical feminism, feminism would be incomplete, whatever you  think of either. The latter tends to come from the former.

In terms of bodies, it's just different ballparks, one science, one sociopolitical.  I don't feel fat as kismet either. I don't believe I was either born to be fat or not, never have. I believe this doesn't make my fatness any less real and that's what's so tricky.

It also to a certain extent invites curiousity as it flits between fat as destiny and cause. It says, fat is not my destiny, but I am, and I'm interested in why. This disdain for cause seems to follow gay people's irritation, but they too are deluding themselves if they think no one will seek to change sexuality for reasons other than for gay people. 
 
Ditto fat people. I don't bother to ignore it, because it's part of a puzzle. And if you find out about slim people, you often find out about fat people and vice versa.

Fat is treated as volitional..........so the tendency when dealing with this regressive attitude is to suggest that fatness cannot be helped.  I wonder what would happen if, instead of giving up our volition, we worked to alter the terms of the choice, to emphasize that subjectivity mustn’t be predicated on perception of innocence.

Ummm, I've explained that fatness is not a choice, but I wasn't so much saying that it "can't be helped", because that is the truth as I see it. Or more accurately, the level of choice that would be assigned to me to have chosen to be fat, goes way beyond our accepted norms. i.e. it would easily eclipse things about the shape of our noses or the tone of our skin. Things like neuroses and certain illnesses would also fall under "choice."

That isn't to say I'm denying any hand in being fat, that seems unlikely.  Just that it would be so indirect that I would not be able to connect action with result. How much of a choice-as we understand it-can that be? We can challenge the terms of choice, which I think obesity does, unwittingly. But that would be deeply unpopular, if it wasn't, fatness would not be such a vehicle for the need to insist we choose.

I agree about innocence, that's a problem replete through the general purview of a polarity of either being knowing or naive.

I always think we should have created our own discourse, not bothered to engage with answering so called science that isn't. Refused to answer any so called 'questions' i.e. prejudice ill logic framed as if its a question. Define fatness as it is, not through the lens of other self advocacy movements and then compare and contrast.