“ Today I woke up feeling fat ”. How many times have you come across and/or said this phrase, especially on social media? I run into her at least once a day. It's amazing how a bodily feature turns, in some 'magical' way, into a feeling. And it's frightening how many skinny people wake up 'feeling fat'. And that statement is violent on so many levels that I shouldn't even need to write this text. But, from the height of my exhaustion, I do!
And I come to say that: no one wakes up feeling fat. And no one becomes fat because they feel that way. And, more: why do you feel bad about not fitting into the standards imposed by society.
Being a fat person means having the right to come and go hampered and existence systematically questioned by the whole of society, in a structural way and this has nothing to do with the possible joke that you may have sometimes heard in childhood/adolescence or at home, because she ate more the night before, because she is more swollen or something like that.
You are not/are a fat person just because you want to hear someone saying that “imagine, you are thin” or “what the hell! you look great like that”. It doesn't actually make you a fat person. While being called 'chubby' by your partner does not constitute bullying and does not make you a person who swells the statistics of what is called overweight and, therefore, of people who suffer from fatphobia.
You don't suffer from fatphobia because the store where you buy it doesn't have a size 44. Fat is not a feeling.
Fatphobia is not defined by the absence of one or two privileges that you have always enjoyed, but by the set of exclusions and lack of access that various bodies, like mine, face on a daily basis. Like exist, you know?
Therefore, when you want to get a treat, a cookie, feel good about your appearance, etc., do it in an honest way and not in a way that encourages prejudice and discrimination against fat people. If you're not fat, you don't know what it's like to inhabit a body that is and you can't imagine what it's like to wake up not only feeling fat, but knowing that you are - and that's not a problem, but
“Ah, but am I fat?”. My love, if you need to ask yourself this question, it means that you are not. Anyone who is fat knows they are. No amount of rhetorical juggling will guarantee it any place other than that of discrimination. Any fat person is well aware of their condition and their denied place in the world , and it is certainly not a mannequin 44 that hasn't closed that will say that, or a feeling when waking up.facing the society that tells you all the time that you shouldn't exist and/or occupy the spaces you occupy is exhausting.
Finally, this whole text just to say: stop wanting to be the protagonists of oppressions that you don't experience. Stop forcing your belly when taking a photo just to post 'chubby lol' and receive floods of comments saying: 'stop it, you're beautiful'. This is violent with fat people and I'm sure you don't want to thicken the statistics of the countless number of daily violence we suffer just because of a rain of likes, followers or hearts on the photos. I bet you're bigger than that, but not big enough to be fat and take our place in a fight that's serious and arduous.
And I'm sorry if today I'm a little 'pokas ideas', it's just that I woke up feeling a bit crossed with fatphobia.
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Jessica Balbino is the type of electric woman, who mixes journalism, cultural production and literature with pepper, caffeine, phosphorus and gasoline.
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1 comment
essa frase se encaixa perfeitamente em ser uma mulher, mas aparentemente as opressões de uma mulher que são definidas pelo seu sexo (bebês em corpos femininos já sofrem opressão e violência sexual), virou um sentimento. E um belo dia homens começam a se sentirem como mulheres. Ser mulher também não é um sentimento. Diz respeito a uma materialidade opressiva, gênero é uma prisão, não é libertação.