Unshrinking

How to Face Fatphobia

By: Kate Manne

Narrated by: Kate Manne

Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it—from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled

“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, and our culture.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.

Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.

In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.

©2024 Kate Manne (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Unshrinking is an incisive polemic that brilliantly dissects fatphobia, the way it encroaches upon our lives, and how ultimately we can, if we are willing, do the challenging work of unlearning damaging ideas about fatness, health, and happiness.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

“A tour de force that only someone with Kate Manne’s particular mix of rigor, clarity, and writerly skill could pull off—Unshrinking is a must-read, no matter your body size, and an unignorable call to action.”—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even

“If you have ever struggled to feel safe in your body as it is, or if you have ever wondered who your body is for, Manne has articulated the answer: Our bodies belong to us.”—Virginia Sole-Smith, author of Fat Talk

Revolutionary

I was compelled by the author’s reasoning, statistics and conclusion. It blew my mind. I would recommend it to anyone who has dieted.

All! The! Yes!!

This is an exceptional book, revealing so many of the deeply embedded, insidious beliefs that have made so many people hate and destroy our bodies, cast aspersions on others and destroy the mutuality and respect required for healthy enough community.

Her understanding of the intersectionality of racism, genderism and transphobia is pivotal in truly excavating, breaking up and destroying the culturally accepted erasure of people whose wrappers “fail” to accommodate someone else’s comfort.

Thank you, Kate Manne! Let’s burn Fat Phobia and Diet Culture to the ground so that we may rise from the ashes and live in the whole of our lives with authenticity and joy.