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6:16pm May 14, 2013

➸ My Manifesto on Health Care for Fatties

adelenedawner:

clatterbane:

youneedacat:

Here’s the thing: I can accept that my weight might exacerbate my back problem. The problem comes when I internalize my body’s limitations as a moral failing and start to decide that it means that I don’t deserve good health care. I mean, if I was naturally very thin, I wouldn’t decide that having osteoporosis was something I did to myself and hesitate to get treatment.

I feel like I need a manifesto — so damn it, I’m going to write one.

Fat people deserve comprehensive health care that doesn’t stop at the “well, you’re fat” line. Fat people deserve health care that addresses them as whole people and not just a collection of fat cells. Fat people deserve equal treatment by doctors and other medical professionals. No person should believe that they are somehow so “bad” that they don’t deserve to feel good. Every body is a good body, and every body deserves proper care. Fat bodies, thin bodies, broken bodies, whole bodies, tall bodies, short bodies — all bodies.

Why do I get so weirded out when people start talking about “bodies” this way. Like everybody, that makes sense, that word. But when we start about what care “fat bodies” and “thin bodies” get it just throws my brain off the track completely. I love this post otherwise. But I’ve seen a lot of people use that phrasing, like talking about people, but calling us bodies, like saying disabled bodies, or queer bodies, or black bodies, or something like that, instead if disabled people, queer people, black people. And while I’m extremely connected to my body, I can’t call myself a body, it just feels very wrong and off. I mean except like when you call yourself somebody or “a body has to…” Or that kind of thing. But this is different. It virtually only happens in conversations like this one. And Idk WTF is going on.


I don’t know if this is part of the weirdness for you, but it doesn’t always sit well with me, given the whole mind-body dualism thing. The way bodies and people are treated as different things. (Very much like you were talking about in a post not too long ago, with “not letting your body win” in a disability context.) Fat people are also supposed to feel like their bodies are betraying them, and basically torture them into line. Even though I know that it’s not generally getting used in those icky compartmentalized ways in contexts like this post, it still doesn’t work so well for me. Because there are just so many messages out there that our bodies are not really us. :/

See, what you just said is actually part of the reason that wording is a good thing, I think.

These messages seem to usually be aimed at people who are already stuck in that mind-body-dualism, you-against-your-body, torture-it-into-submission mindset. So, there’s two problems for them - seeing themselves and their bodies as separate, and seeing their bodies as bad. Fixing both of those at the same time is much harder than fixing just one, and convincing someone that they are their body while they think their body is bad is a recipe for destroying any self-esteem they still have, so it does make sense to convince them that their body is okay first before tackling the other thing.

I don’t think the wording has anything to do with helping people overcome mind body dualism. I think it has to do with a specific academic way of talking about people, that I really don’t like. Partly because when people talk about people as bodies in this context, it makes me think of dead bodies, because that’s how most people use the word bodies when talking about people. I don’t distinguish between people and their physical form. But that doesn’t mean I like hearing people replace the word “people” with “bodies”. I can’t explain. It grates, and it takes my mind out of what they are writing into some truly morbid territory. I’m not saying people shouldn’t write that way, I just don’t like it, at all.

(And this usage is totally separate from the way some people say “a body” for “somebody”. I can’t describe how it’s different, but it is.)

I don’t usually get hung up on words, but this one just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And it’s definitely not a usage that exists in order to help anyone in any way, it just evolved in academia in a context that probably DOES come from separating people from their bodies, weirdly enough.