WEIGHTLESS

A feminist culture writer examines the challenges plus-size Black women must overcome on a daily basis.

Dionne, author of Lifting as We Climb, began writing these essays in order to raise consciousness about “fatphobic culture that’s bolstered by a billion-dollar dieting industry.” By the time the book was completed, she had been diagnosed with heart failure and pulmonary hypertension, conditions caused by doctors’ inability to see beyond her “fatness.” Drawing on personal experience and popular culture, Dionne shows how “fat people” are mistreated by being "dismissed, willfully misinterpreted and sidelined." The problem begins in childhood when boys and girls are taught “to associate thinness with discipline [and] fatness [with] laziness” and made the objects of weight-bullying when they do not fit size expectations. The medical establishment has its own fat prejudices that only compound the issue. Dionne writes about how doctors routinely lectured her about her weight in young adulthood and focused on adjusting her diet. When she exhibited problematic symptoms like “swollen ankles, unrelenting lower-back pain, hot flashes and uncontrollable weight gain,” they immediately blamed her fatness. Even the excessive bleeding from which she also suffered wasn’t enough to convince Dionne’s gynecologist that fibroids had caused the problem. “Three in four Black people with uteruses will develop fibroids in their lifetime,” she writes. Later, decisions doctors made on how to treat her pulmonary hypertension robbed her of the ability to have children via vaginal birth. The author argues persuasively that the media plays a huge role in promulgating negative fat-girl stereotypes. The few positive images it has offered—e.g., Queen Latifah's sexy, confident character Khadijah James on the 1990s sitcom Living Single—provide plus-size Black women life-changing visions of a positive lifestyle. Vibrant, intimate, and intelligent, this book lays down the unapologetic demand that women of size finally be allowed “to be fat in plain sight.”

A provocatively necessary collection.