Fat politics and dieting

Rebecca Rabinowitz is one of my favourite fat activist bloggers; she's good in various places, mostly talking critically about children's books from a fat positive and generally anti-oppressive perspective. Her home base is diceytillerman, which she updates rarely but it's very much worth reading. She's not really a polemical writer; if you start from the belief that being fat is morally bad she's probably not going to convince you otherwise.

Anyway, I really like her latest piece about the relationship between fat activism and dieting. A lot of the time there's a perceived conflict between activists who want fat people to be treated better, and people who want to lose weight. I am never quite sure how to feel about that perception. So I found Rabinowitz's analysis really perceptive:

But know that when you talk about [weight loss dieting] you’re not talking only about yourself. You’re talking about the fat person near you and all the fat people who aren’t near you. You can’t help but. There is no neutral.

( everything about fat and dieting is fraught )

I seem to be in a controversial mood today; I did something I very rarely do and posted an overtly political update to Facebook, namely a ranty post about the fact that it's never appropriate to post explicit photos of the bodies of murder victims to social media in order to make a political point. And that's a lot more like direct criticism of people in my FB circles than I would normally ever allow myself. We'll see how that plays out.