Podcast Tell Me About It is here to help you navigate life under the patriarchy, hosted by Stuff journalists Kirsty Johnston and Michelle Duff, with guests who share their personal experience of the weekly issue. Listen to all episodes here.
Accepting your body isn’t always easy.
But being unapologetically fat? In an image-obsessed world where thin is the norm, it’s a radical and brave feminist act.
That’s how American fat liberation activist Sonya Renee Taylor sees it, and why she felt an instant connection with the late Dr Cat Pausé, the New Zealand-based fat studies academic who died suddenly in March 2022.
“What I love so much about Cat was her willingness to always be first and foremost, unapologetically fat,” Renee Taylor, The New York Times bestselling author of Your Body is Not an Apology, told Stuff’s Tell Me About It podcast this week.
“If you have a society that is structured around the idea that thinness is capital, that thinness is currency that thinness gets you a certain level of access and privilege in the world, then it makes you manipulable. It makes you willing to exchange so many things for the capital of thinness.
“So when you see people being unapologetically fat, when you see people being unwilling to buy into that, it is so inherently defiant, and so inherently disruptive. And I think that enrages people.”
Pausé left behind a large and influential body of work, including the Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, a collation of writing in academia and activism across the field which Taylor co-edited at her invitation.
Taylor said Pausé sought to understand oppression in all its forms, such as the way fat discrimination intersected with racism. “Fatness has its own set of experiences and biases and prejudices and structural and systemic marginalisation that exists inside of it,” she says.
”When you add fatness to Blackness, you're looking at it as a new and often more extreme, even more marginalised experience as a result of the intersection of those identities.
“Ultimately, what [Cat] cared about was disrupting all of those systems, what she cared about was creating a world that was equitable, for all bodies.”
Taylor also talked to Tell Me About It about the difference between fat liberation and “body positivity.” She says fat liberation is an inherently political ideology begun by queer people and women of colour as a way of pushing back against oppression, while body positivity twisted that to make money.
“Now body positivity has become a corporate campaign for the mainstream, because it has been de-politicised. The intention, which was to create justice, and equity and challenge inherently oppressive systems, got taken away,” Taylor says.
It was replaced by these lovely, but ultimately vacuous affirmations about loving your body without any context about society, or about systems built around body hatred.”
Pausé was a fierce critic of the use of the BMI (Body Mass Index) tool for surmising health, argued against the correlation of size and health and advocated for weight discrimination to be treated as a social justice issue.
Before her sudden death in March 2022, Pausé had been pushing for the routine use of longer needles in Covid-19 vaccinations for larger people. While longer needles are available on request, their use is not routine and those receiving vaccinations often do not know to ask. Vaccinations need to get past outer layers of body fat into muscle to be effective.
She also co-authored a study arguing fat people are used as scapegoats for Covid-19 under preparedness, and questioning the data linking fatness to Covid-19 risk factors. (The World Health Organisation lists obesity as an “underlying medical condition” that increases the risk for severe illness from COVID-19. The CDC also says being obese may triple the risk of hospitalisation due to a Covid infection) She was part-way through a larger research project when she died.
Renee Taylor said her legacy would continue. “There are so many people who are committed to seeing the work that she's done continue to have powerful impact long after her time in the physical realm.”
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This story was originally published on Stuff
