ABSTRACT
As a scholar-activist invested in tending to fat life, embodiment and world-making practices, I am struck by the ways in which Fat Studies scholars and activists have gravitated towards the language of the human as a means to mobilize empathy and dignity for fat people. This work of translation is hard. How can I put the pain of my wrists into the palm of your hands? As fat activists and scholars have struggled and organized to create more liveable worlds for marginalized and non-normative bodies, there has been a particular suturing of the desire for dignity with the desire to be recognized as human. Within the context of Western liberalism, Enlightenment, and modernity – to be human is to be hailed as a proper, fully-functioning citizen-subject worthy of rights and protections by the state. To be human means to be seen, to love, and to be loved; to be human means to live, in Judith Butler’s terms, a grievable life. Yet, as critical race, postcolonial and queer scholars have noted, the human is contingent on a politics of exclusion, racial alienation, displacement, and colonial violence. The human hinges on the occlusion of racialized, colonized, and non-normative others. I am at love’s altar with an almost indecent proposal: to grow a love that is not beautiful; to grow a love where death pre-describes your body. I begin from a moment of fat dysfunction to note the mutability of bodies – where the fat body’s excess marks it as non-human/other, while it simultaneously oscillates between death and future dreams of normalcy. Fat Inhumanisms is a loving look towards dead-ends – a look that makes no promises of good feeling or easy futures. Through Fat Inhumanisms, I argue that the rhetoric around health, fat, and humanness collapses the complicated function of the human as a category of colonial inclusion/exclusion necessitated through regimes of racial capitalism and bodily regulation/autonomy. This paper asks: how does routing dignity through humanity reproduce whiteness, coloniality, and capitalist economies of attraction? 1 How might a politics of fat inhumanity and dysfunction build bridges of mutual dignity and contingent coalition across fat/racialized/colonized/gendered bodies?
