New Year, New Class, New Assessment

I fully intended to keep up the blogging. Nevermind. Here's my first piece for the subject Diversity, Democracy and Dissent (GSD3DDD). Originally posted on the uni LMS, but my posts are always too long for 200 word limit so here it is in full:

Task One: nominate a topic and explain why.

I’ve chosen to spend the semester relating the readings and discussions to one of the newer social movements: fat acceptance.

Why? Several reasons.

Firstly, although I know this is an academic exercise I believe the intellectual is restored and improved by the personal, by the emotional. The personal is political, yes? I’ve copped a lot of hatred this past month for having a fat body, for draping my fat body is things deemed “unflattering” or “unnecessary”. And I am F@!$ing angry about it. So I want to get in people’s faces; I want to make people question their comfort zone, their beliefs and the way they view the world. If you’re taking a class like DDD and you don’t feel uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong.

Secondly, because this topic, this social movement, makes people uncomfortable. Intellectually, emotionally, socially uncomfortable. It pisses people off. People deride it, don’t believe it’s necessary, don’t think it should exist, don’t think it’s relevant. So I want to show just how necessary and relevant it is. People accept the validity of traditional social movements: women’s liberation, GLBT rights (although maybe not so much the T - people are awful), race and/or minority rights, class struggle. I’m a GSDS major, and this is my pet topic, one that I want to write on academically til I’ve exhausted myself.

Thirdly, because it IS relevant to the course. Democracy, diversity and dissent right? Isobelle Carmondy (2010) writes of the liberal market-based democratic project; the conversion of savages on the periphery into good liberal subjects. The post- WWII order; “civilising mission, mark II”. She speaks of finding the new enemies that fester away within us, the dangerous practices that will destroy the nation unless they are caught, liberated and remade. Carmondy is of course talking of Islam and the spectral threat of terrorism; of the veil and its hidden women, complicit in their oppression because they know no better. I am talking of fatness and the threat to both the polity (oh the medical bills! the economic burden! the softening of security and borders as our bodies become softer) and the person (poverty, greed, uglyness and lazyness, the loss of control as bodies break out of containment). If democracy is truly about freedom, the freedom to participate in the market, then the fat body is not free, it does not belong. Indeed, the only section of the market in which fat people are actively encouraged to engage in is the diet industry. A multi-billion dollar industry predicated upon the undesirability of the very thing it’s marketed to; dedicated to transforming the wayward fat body into a controlled, moral and deserving body that finally engage in the marketplace fully. In the buying and selling of goods; in the trading of affections; in the economy of freedom.
Oh, and the gross academic market place that treats fat bodies as dismembered fodder.


And yes, I only recently discovered tumblr.