Anonymous #1 7w

IM SAYING???

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Anonymous #1 7w

there are people who look exactly like this who Aren’t disgusting bigots, so I’m not sure why y’all feel the need to focus on his appearance

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Anonymous #3 7w

No his appearance has nothing to do with it I just deadass thought this post wasn’t real. AI makes everything look fake nowadays tbf

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Anonymous #1 7w

well OP was definitely focusing on his appearance, so all I’m saying is that there are in fact plenty of real people who look like this

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Anonymous #3 7w

That’s on me fr I didn’t really think before I posted 😔 I just genuinely thought this guy wasn’t real 😭

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Anonymous #5 7w

I do not know anyone that looks like THAT 😭

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Anonymous #7 7w

i’ve never seen anyone miss the point so badly, damn

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Anonymous #7 7w

you can just substitute in “people viewing this post who share similar individual physical traits” (i.e. atypical eye orientation, uneven flushed complexion, being large and bald) if getting too hung up on exact wording is preventing you from understanding the point of the image

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Anonymous #9 7w

six year-old tweet, and OP really dug this shit up just for the sake of announcing that when they see a fat uneven-complexioned bald dude with a disability that makes his eyes look unusual, they consider him a “thing” rather than a person

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Anonymous #3 7w

i saw it in an instagram post last week and i’m directly quoting the retweet

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Anonymous OP 7w

i should have noticed the problematic implications that i overlooked in the post yeah the post is from @neoliberalhell on ig and it’s a screenshot of the retweet i was tryna find the retweet bc someone sent me a thirst trap snap with fox news in the background?? and then i was like why do all yt old conservative men look the same but yeah that is a problematic way of thinking

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Anonymous OP 7w

i still need to decolonize my ways of thinking bc mine still have eurocentric beauty standards. though i do believe that the fatphobic implication is **downstream** from the gcidal white supremacy and homophobia the senator espouses, it’s worth addressing fatphobia. medical institutions pathologize fatness using outdated BMI metrics rooted in 19th century eugenics not actual health which becomes another weapon used to justify stigma and surveillance of populations espec. racialized women

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Anonymous OP 7w

appreciate you owning it, OP what do you mean by “downstream” in this context /genq

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Anonymous OP 7w

thank you for hearing me out 🤝 I don’t think it’d be a big deal to say “why do all these white old conservative men look the same” tbh, since that’s not singling out any particular physical traits (also because it avoids suggesting that everyone who looks similar must be one of them). I just take issue with the over-the-top revulsion on the basis of appearance

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Anonymous OP 7w

oh! rarely do I talk to people on here who already understand all of that about how fatphobia works—the history of the BMI system and the relationship to white supremacist rhetoric and whatnot. I’m constantly begging people to read the work of Sabrina Strings and DaShaun Harrison 😭 so yeah, I trust that this is stuff you usually think critically about, and knowing that makes me feel less heated over it

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Anonymous #5 7w

yeah mb i should’ve just screenshotted the article because it gets worse-he basically insinuates that he’d k1ll his kids if they were queer? as for downstream: i meant it like in the sense that it’s relative. yes, it’s def worthy of condemnation, absolutely. intersectionality verbiage’s js flawed tho. race is downstream from class dynamics, class is racialized in USA; in the same vein, sexuality is downstream from race in the context of human rights NGOs exclusively policing the global south.

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Anonymous #3 7w

i don’t think i’ve read Harrison, but i read Strings for a class on body politics last semester!

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Anonymous OP 7w

but ya i still think those are *material* examples of ‘intersectionality’; they don’t really defend the immediate visceral revulsion to his appearance bc it’s an entirely different context

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Anonymous OP 7w

i see what you mean, but that doesn’t really change anything in this instance imo. like, maybe it’s chronically online of me, but like…just because someone did something Super Fucking Awful doesn’t mean that you should make Just Kinda Bad generalizations about a completely unrelated group

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Anonymous OP 7w

that’s just where i started using the word ‘downstream’ i guess; i initially used it in a dissertation on intersectionality and its co-optation + the weaponization of identity politics to uphold regressive institutions, manufacture consent for and justify continual repression but yeah the word is operational in that sense so i should prob avoid it in colloquial contexts. especially bc im reallyyyy incoherent right now and probably falling into common reductionisms bc this is a lot to explain

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Anonymous OP 7w

what he was saying was obvs exponentially worse than anything you said, I don’t think anyone here would disagree with that. nothing wrong with condemning that guy or finding him disgusting on the basis of him being a fascist, I’m just saying that when you make your disgust a reaction to his appearance instead, then that’s additionally hurtful to people who don’t deserve it

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Anonymous #3 7w

they are on my reading list but my reading list keeps growing 😭 right now i’m rereading Césaire

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Anonymous #3 7w

yes it’s not the right context because none of this is actually identity reductionism & that’s the only time you should talk about that to someone and i misappropriated the verbiage in hindsight. i guess the reason i resorted to using it is because i used to be a ‘liberal’ and used to be obsessed with kimberlé crenshaw until i read the Combahee River Collective and realized how intersectionality has been weaponized 😭 TLDR basically my opposition 2 intersectionality is still in works/new

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Anonymous OP 7w

I was mainly mentioning those two bc what you were saying about fatphobia was largely stuff I first learned from engaging with their work—I thought maybe you’d already read Fearing The Black Body and/or Belly of The Beast so like, while I do still enthusiastically recommend them both, many of the main takeaways are gonna be facts you’re already familiar with. tbh my fat liberationist politics started in the “mid-2010s white feminism” vein so I would’ve been cooked without their insight 💀

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Anonymous #3 7w

ohh i see i actually haven’t read them *yet* but have engaged with a lot of literature on antiblackness, misogynoir, misogyny, racializing populations, racial sciences (phrenology at berlin, racialization of africans in europe + the absolutely disgusting desecration of circassian remains after tsarist russia’s genocide of them + sending the skulls to berlin to be studied for ‘inferiorities’) which has a lot of visible overlap w/ fatphobia. also the amount i’ve read about eugenics in amerikkka

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Anonymous OP 7w

and tbh as you read more the connections become so so glaring and the contradictions become so so salient. you realize how *everything is interconnected & the way populations are stratified/organized always has some material function that concentrates power into a majoritarian group that benefits from the ‘extraction’ (doesn’t even have 2 be labor at this point in spite of it naturalizing socioeconomic stratification, it’s repurposed) of an underclass. that in of itself is relative tho/overlaps

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Anonymous OP 7w

yesssss exactly! basically I just am someone who didn’t have the proper context to understand how contemporary fatphobia is historically rooted in (and thus inextricable from) antiblackness until I encountered Harrison’s work. but then having those dots connected for me did a TON to facilitate my grasp on a whole constellation of other intersections

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Anonymous OP 7w

or like, Harrison’s work in tandem with deliberately learning more about eugenics as part of me getting serious about disability justice. the latter part became kind of a personal survival necessity thanks to the pandemic, but at least that served as motivation to keep learning

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Anonymous OP 7w

I’ll cut off my rambling after this, but what I really love about Harrison’s writings is the super clear & coherent analysis of conventional desirability as a hierarchy that was developed for the sake of punishing visible markers associated with oppressed demographics. that filled in a whole lot of gaps in my understanding

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