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*Taps lecture mic*
#Thread
#Privilege means you’re given unearned advantages based on a social norm or value. #Race, #gender, #class, #disability, & #sexuality are all major social systems which value certain bodies & behaviors over others.
#Thread
#Privilege means you’re given unearned advantages based on a social norm or value. #Race, #gender, #class, #disability, & #sexuality are all major social systems which value certain bodies & behaviors over others.
Fatphobia & slim/size privilege are produced by systems of gender, race & class. How? By the production of beauty norms & medical standards of health which are based on middle class whiteness & directed mostly violently at women.
Thought big booties are recently valued (notably most when they are not on the bodies of black women, especially fat black women), the bodies historically most celebrate were/are thin white women. This is an ideal that harms all women & encourages us to all hate our bodies.
What does that have to do with class? Women with economic privilege can afford personal trainers, nutritionists, diet pills, & plastic surgery to work against any genetic disposition toward fatness.
Further, fatness is demonized in our country contemporarily in relationship to class (those people just be lazy, uneducated, living in food deserts, etc) which we know corresponds with race. That is, people of color are more likely to be impoverished in the US.
We also know there are genetic differences in people’s size and that weight is not a clear indication of health. The #BMI, in particular, bullshit.
npr.org/templates/stor…
npr.org/templates/stor…
Further, this country doesn’t give a shit about people’s health until it’s blaming fat, poor, disabled and radicalized for their health & the cost of their healthcare rather than actually supporting health & wellbeing throughout one’s life.
So yea, thinness is privileged because it is overvalued in our society & fatness opens one up to societal isolation & violence including harassment, medical neglect, & physical attacks.
Just like white, straight & men folks don’t choose their privilege, thin folks don’t either but one can recognize that privilege & work against the systems which privilege you & oppress others.
Like all oppressions & discriminatory systems, size, healthy & beauty are socially constructed (defined & understood through social values) & can be deconstructed. They’re also constructed within/by race, class & gender so those dynamics can’t be ignored.
That’s all for today’s lecture on “Is Slimness a Privilege?: A black feminist response” #YoureWelcome #ClassDismissed
There’s a bunch of typos in this but nothing that changes the clarity I think. That’s what I get for lecturing from bed on a Saturday morning. 🤷🏾♀️
