ABSTRACT
Anti-fatness exists as an extension of white supremacy operating as structural surveillance as Kathleen Lebesco describes, “[in] attempts by the state to enlist individual citizens in the war on obesity [in an] effort to responsibilize the individual citizen […] to preserve our good health.” Surveillance is ubiquitous for fat subjects often encountering anti-fatness in public spaces like grocery stores, and private spaces like doctor’s offices, causing issues within the individual around food and body image. This anti-fat surveillance creates a dissociation in fat consciousness between an embodied fat subject, who instead becomes preoccupied with the medical gaze powered by white supremacist anti-fat constructions of health. For fat subjects who are also Black or otherwise colonized people, anti-Black policing by the nation state will compound the effect of this surveillance-induced double-consciousness. Dissociation disrupts the ability for fat subjects to experience public pleasure, communicate assertively, and have shame-free sex, all of which are also symptoms of surviving complex trauma. This chapter will introduce anti-fatness as a new trauma context, in order to understand surviving fat surveillance as inherently traumatic while offering several interventions for fat subjects and the trauma-informed clinicians who treat them.
