Not your good fatty

On 23 November 2017, dr. Cat Pausé (Fat studies) from Massey University, New Zealand gave a lecture 'Not your good fatty'. She discussed how queering fat embodiment, disrupts the normative obesity discourse and rejects the demands of the neoliberal system.

A good citizen of the 21st century is one who accepts responsibility for their own personal health, well-being, and success. Individuals who require structural support, or refuse to (re)produce white, cis, able-bodied, and heteronormative systems threaten the status quo and face marginalisation,

Fat people, for example are viewed as irresponsible citizens. They consume too many resources and fail to uphold the new social contract (the moral obligation to be healthy). In modern neoliberal contexts, this results in hostile environments and the development of spoiled identities (stigmatised identities in which the bearer is held responsible for the stigma).

Individuals in the Fatosphere, an online community of people who have come out as fat, are engaging in anti-assimilationist activism. They queer fat embodiment, disrupting the normative obesity discourse and rejecting the demands of the neoliberal system. They are defiant resistors, performing their fatness in inappropriate ways. They are, in shot, doing fatness wrong.

You can read a blog about the lecture here.

Cat Pausé makes podcasts that you can listen to here.