At the beginning of this chapter, we defined gender. What the seven subjects walked us through after that is something we also agreed on at the start of the chapter: gender is only what we make it. All seven of them, in one way or another, talked about how much they had to almost force themselves into a space; how they had to forge their own paths, create their own gender within a gender, because their fatness had already denied them the ability to do anything but that. They each also presented this truth, even if unknowingly so: in so many ways, gender is defined by thinness in that for one to “fit comfortably” into the performance, they must always be pushing away from fatness to not otherwise be engaged as the Beast. If shedding oneself of fatness, or altogether removing themselves from fat as an identity, is the only way for one’s gender to be affirmed—both socially and surgically—perhaps gender is no longer a performance we can afford to keep in business.
Fat trans people are finding it nearly impossible to find binders that feel affirming for them; many are being forced to engage an inherently anti-Black and anti-fat medical system that uses body mass index as an indicator for whether or not they deserve to be affirmed in their bodies; we are being engaged as the Other, even in spaces that, in name, were created for our comfort and safety. Gender works in relationship to health and Desire as a means to further ostracize the Black fat, and as this is the case, only one solution will prove to be sufficient enough for our liberation: we must see to gender’s end, which means we must destroy gender.
7
Beyond Abolition
Throughout this book, I have hinted at in some places, and named explicitly in others, the need to move beyond. In the introduction, I wrote about the need to move beyond self-love, even a self-love that is radical. In the chapters that followed, I wrote about the need to move beyond health as a qualifier for the Black fat; I wrote about the need to move beyond Desire/ability, the need to move beyond the Human, or rather the need to move beyond the desire to be Human and the need to move beyond gender. In chapter 4, I offered something that, depending on where your politic is as you read this book, may have been more radical than the other ideas presented: the need to move beyond abolition. Beyond prison abolition, beyond the abolition of police, beyond the abolition of slavery. In recent years, the idea of abolition has become increasingly more popular. The ideology itself, however, is not new. Black feminist thinkers and abolitionist scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, and many others have done necessary, groundbreaking work within this particular field to provide a blueprint of sorts for what life can look like if abolition is made possible.
At its core, abolition is not just the closing of jails, disbanding of prisons, and the undoing of institutionalized policing, it is also intended to introduce necessary resources into communities that so often lack those resources. For example, one reason for defunding police could be to allocate those additional funds to education programs, or to fund affordable housing and shelters for folks without homes. Similarly, one reason to close a jail could be to allocate the funds intended to be put toward a jail during a city’s fiscal year toward building a community center in its place—increasing employment opportunities, providing more direct access to mental health services, creating afterschool programs, and more. As abolitionists, that is part of the work we do. Abolitionists also create the necessary language and environments to move our particular communities away from punitive and carceral responses to harm and abuse, introducing ways to deal with these issues through restorative and transformative measures. As such, abolitionists don’t ask, “How do we deal with abusers?” and instead ask, “How can we better the conditions of the communities most often impacted by police, prisons, and other forms of state violence so that they have the resources to not need or desire to commit this harm?” Meaning that, at the heart of it, abolitionists are focused on harm prevention as well as harm reduction. With this in mind, however, abolition is so often spoken about as though it is the end. If we abolish police, if we abolish prisons, if we abolish the criminal justice system, then the violence of the institutions themselves will be undone.
What is rarely ever examined, though, is that systems and institutions are maintained by power but are created first through an idea. At the root, liberation must mean cultural revolution as well as a destruction of the sociopolitical institutions that hold these systems in place, which means that abolition cannot be the end; it must only be the beginning. As we discussed earlier in the book, the end goal must be a complete destruction of the World itself—whereby I mean that the World only exists because anti-Black, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal systems of violence and domination exist and therefore must, itself, be destroyed. Systems are built by an idea and the power to actualize the idea, which means that if abolition is only about eradicating systems or providing resources to people within the World through which those systems are created, it cannot be and is not enough. In other words, the World gives birth to and incubates these institutions; it is not created by them.
Think about it: before policing was institutionalized, there were people so committed to seeing Black subjects only ever as property that they were willing to kill for it. The idea of a slave patrol was actualized before the first police force in the North was ever institutionalized—which came long before the first institutionalized police force in the South. The Thirteenth Amendment, passed and ratified by Congress in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States, and yet the Black is still disproportionately locked in cages, trapped by chains, and forced to perform labor for no more than a nickel and a dime. And as Strings notes in Fearing the Black Body, anti-fatness had already been an idea circulating before it was formed into a coherent ideology made possible through colonialism, Christianity, and anti-Blackness.
At the nucleus of all of these violent structures is anti-Blackness, on which the World is built. This means that unless and until we are committed first and always to destroying anti-Blackness, these institutions will always find a way to reinvent themselves. After reading this, some of you may ask, “So what comes after we destroy the World?” And my answer is that that’s not a question I can answer alone. Individuals don’t create new realities alone. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore states in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, “if it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a movement to undo an occupation.” And if it takes a movement to undo an occupation, it certainly takes a community to build a new reality. What I am certain of is this: what happens beyond can’t be answered until the Beyond is here. What we do know is that this—the World—can no longer exist. From its inception, the World has sought to kill the Black fat. And it has been successful. Through the institutionalization of health, gender, policing, and Desire—ideas made manifest by power—the Black fat has suffered. Abolition, then, must only be the start. If it is the end, as we have seen already, the Black fat will continue to suffer.
In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay refers to her body as a “cage” of her own making; one that she has been trying to figure a way out of for more than twenty years. I see the Black fat body not as a cage, but rather as a thing that has been caged. A thing, a Beast, bound by the structures of the World. And so, then, I echo and employ the words of the late Maya Angelou who wrote of why the caged bird sings. If that caged bird is the Beast, trapped and taunted by the idea of freedom, then like it, the Black fat sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still; we sit on graves of dreams not yet seen. In those dreams, which may never resurrect, there’s a place—not the World—where we live and breathe as beings not bound by identifiers and qualifiers predicated on anti-Blackness. Where we are not Black or white, not thin or fat, not cis or trans, not queer or straight, not bound or unbound. In that place, the caged bird is not freed from its cage; in that place, the cage never existed for the bird to ever be bound by.
Moving beyond aboliti
on requires that we destroy the World that produces the cage by which the Black fat is bound.
Notes
Chapter 2
1 .Janet Mock, “Being Pretty Is a Privilege, but We Refuse to Acknowledge It,” Allure, June 28, 2017, www.allure.com/story/pretty-privilege.
2 .Frank B. Wilderson III, “Unspeakable Ethics,” in Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–35.
3 .bell hooks, “Understanding Patriarchy,” 2010, https://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf.
4 .Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance, (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 76.
5 .Stuart W. Flint, et al., “Obesity Discrimination in the Recruitment Process: ‘You’re Not Hired!,’” Frontiers in Psychology 7, no. 647 (May 3, 2016), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00647.
6 .Areva Martin, “49 States Legally Allow Employers to Discriminate Based on Weight,” Time, August 16, 2017, https://time.com/4883176/weight-discrimination-workplace-laws.
7 .Jack Tsai and Robert A. Rosenheck, “Obesity among Chronically Homeless Adults: Is It a Problem?” Public Health Reports 128, no. 1 (2013): 29–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/003335491312800105.
8 .Your Fat Friend, “Why Don’t We Hear Fat Women’s #MeToo Stories?” Medium, August 15, 2018, https://medium.com/the-establishment/why-dont-we-hear-fat-women-s-metoo-stories-2e28f799b507?source=linkShare-61dcd8dfa08-1567785399.
9 .Your Fat Friend, “How Health Care Bias Harms Fat Patients,” Medium, January 16, 2019, https://medium.com/@thefatshadow/the-bias-epidemic-8f27e79bd21c?source=linkShare-61dcd8dfa08-156778544.
10 .Aisha Harris, “Was There Really ‘Mandingo Fighting,’ Like in Django Unchained?,” Slate, December 24, 2012, https://slate.com/culture/2012/12/django-unchained-mandingo-fighting-were-any-slaves-really-forced-to-fight-each-other-to-the-death.html.
11 .hooks, “Understanding Patriarchy.”
12 .Milo W. Obourn, Disabled Futures: A Framework for Radical Inclusion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020).
13 .Jessie W. Parkhurst, “The Role of the Black Mammy in the Plantation Household,” The Journal of Negro History 23, no. 3 (1938): 349–69, https://https://doi.org/10.2307/2714687.
Chapter 3
1 .Preamble to the Constitution of WHO as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19 June–22 July 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of WHO, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948.
2 .J. F. Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, third ed. 1795, in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), 145–276.
3 .James Denny Guillory, “The Pro-Slavery Arguments of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 9, no. 3 (1968): 209–27, www.jstor.org/stable/4231017.
4. “Teen’s Death at Camp Fuels Debate, Inquiry,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1999, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-05-mn-40755-story.html.
5 .Paul R. La Monica, “Weight Watchers Is Changing Its Name to WW,” CNN Money, 2018, https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/24/news/companies/weight-watchers-new-name-ww/index.html.
6 .Virgie Tovar, “Dear Virgie: What’s the History of Diet Culture?,” Wear Your Voice, February 24, 2016, https://wearyourvoicemag.com/dear-virgie-whats-history-diet-culture/.
7 .Harriet Brown, “The Weight of the Evidence,” Slate, March 24, 2015, https://slate.com/technology/2015/03/diets-do-not-work-the-thin-evidence-that-losing-weight-makes-you-healthier.html.
8 .Peter Rzehak et al., “Weight Change, Weight Cycling and Mortality in the ERFORT Male Cohort Study,” European Journal of Epidemiology 22, no. 10 (August 4, 2007): 665–673, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17676383/.
9 .American Heart Association, “Yo-Yo Dieting May Increase Women’s Heart Disease Risk,” ScienceDaily, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190307161902.htm.
10 .bell hooks, “Understanding Patriarchy,” 2010, https://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf.
11 .Adee Braun, “Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/looking-to-quell-sexual-urges-consider-the-graham-cracker/282769/.
Chapter 4
1 .Al Baker, J. David Goodman, and Benjamin Mueller, “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death,” New York Times, June 13, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html.
2 .Mike Lillis, “Pete King: Garner’s Obesity, Medical Condition Led to Death,” The Hill, December 4, 2014, https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/225956-peter-king-blame-garners-obesity-medical-condition-for-death.
3 .Associated Press, “Medical Examiner: Chokehold Triggered Eric Garner’s Death,” Fox News, May 15, 2019, www.foxnews.com/us/medical-examiner-chokehold-triggered-eric-garners-death.
4 .Associated Press, “Chokehold Triggered Eric Garner’s Death.”
5 .Baker, Goodman, and Mueller, “Beyond the Chokehold.”
6 .Sherronda J. Brown, “Within a White Supremacist System, Eric Garner’s True Crime Was Being Fat,” Wear Your Voice, June 17, 2019, https://wearyourvoicemag.com/eric-garner-fatphobia/.
7 .Jamelle Bouie, “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon to Anyone but Darren Wilson,” Slate, November 26, 2014, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/11/darren-wilsons-racial-portrayal-of-michael-brown-as-a-superhuman-demon-the-ferguson-police-officers-account-is-a-common-projection-of-racial-fears.html.
8 .Krishnadev Calamur, “Ferguson Documents: Officer Darren Wilson’s Testimony,” NPR, November 25, 2014, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/11/25/366519644/ferguson-docs-officer-darren-wilsons-testimony.
9 .Damien Cave, “Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony in Ferguson, Mo., Shooting,” New York Times, November 25, 2014, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/25/us/darren-wilson-testimony-ferguson-shooting.html.
10 .Bouie, “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon.”
11 .Eric Heisig, “A Breakdown of the Events That Led to the 12-Year-Old’s Death,” Cleveland.com, January 14, 2017, www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2017/01/tamir_rice_shooting_a_breakdow.html.
12 .Cory Shaffer, “9-1-1 Caller Says Gun Held by Cleveland 12-Year-Old Shot by Police Was ‘Probably Fake,’” November 23, 2014, www.cleveland.com/metro/2014/11/9-1-1_caller_says_gun_held_by.html.
13 .DiversityInc Staff, “Tamir Rice’s Age, Size Repeatedly Made an Issue in Shooting Investigation,” DiversityInc, January 11, 2019, www.diversityinc.com/tamir-rices-age-size-repeatedly-made-an-issue-in-shooting-investigation/.
14 .Harriet McLeod, “South Carolina Cop Staged Scene after Shooting Black Man: Prosecutor,” Reuters, November 3, 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-south-carolina-shooting-slager-idUSKBN12Y1XU.
15 .“The Shooting of Samuel DuBose,” Harvard Law Review, February 10, 2016, https://harvardlawreview.org/2016/02/the-shooting-of-samuel-dubose/.
16 .Alex Johnson and Gabe Gutierrez, “Baton Rouge Store Owner Says His Video Shows Cops ‘Murdered’ Alton Sterling,” NBC News, July 7, 2016, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/baton-rouge-store-owner-says-his-video-shows-cops-murdered-n604841.
17 .Jim Mustian and Lea Skene, “New Alton Sterling Shooting Videos Show Deadly, Heated Scene at Triple S,” The Advocate, March 30, 2018, www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/alton_sterling/article_209c1f62-33c7-11e8-a2c8-179ff7c92a3f.html.
18 .BBC Staff, “George Floyd: What Happened in the Final Moments of His Life,” BBC, July 16, 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52861726.
19 .Eric Levenson, “Former Officer Knelt on
George Floyd for 9 Minutes and 29 Seconds—Not the Infamous 8:46,” CNN, March 30, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/us/george-floyd-timing-929-846/index.html.
20 .Charlie Wiese, “Autopsy Report: George Floyd Died from Cardiopulmonary Arrest, Was Positive for COVID-19,” June 3, 2020, https://kstp.com/news/george-floyd-autopsy-report-shows-george-floyd-died-from-cardiopulmonary-arrest-was-positive-for-covid-19/5750262/.
21 .Lorenzo Reyes, Trevor Hughes, and Mark Emmert, “Medical Examiner and Family-Commissioned Autopsy Agree: George Floyd’s Death Was a Homicide,” USA Today, June 2, 2020, www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/01/george-floyd-independent-autopsy-findings-released-monday/5307185002/.
22 .Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, June 10, 1993, https://harvardlawreview.org/1993/06/whiteness-as-property/.
23 .Josh Sanburn, “All the Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown,” Time, November 25, 2014, https://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-brown-demon/.
Chapter 5
1 .“Defining Adult Overweight and Obesity,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, September 17, 2020, www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/defining.html.
2 .Eliot Marshall, “Public Enemy Number One: Tobacco or Obesity?” Science 304, no. 5672 (May 7, 2004): 804, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.304.5672.804.
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