#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #France, UCL AL #333 - Antipatriarchy, Injunctions: Grossophobia, another medicalized misogyny (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Fatphobia refers to the oppression of fat people. Faced with injunctions to

thinness, each year thousands of people in France have recourse to surgeries
pushed by the medical profession. Women are the first victims of these
injunctions and their consequences. ---- A reaction that we often receive when we
are a girl and we talk objectively about being overweight is the famous " but no,
don't say that, you're super pretty ! ". A sentence that is intended to be
positive and full of good intentions, but which says a lot about the frameworks
of thought in which we evolve. If thinness and beauty go hand in hand, the
reverse of this association has concrete, and often violent, material
consequences in the lives of fat people.
The discrimination suffered by fat people is often greatly underestimated and
minimized, whether in the private or public sphere. In particular, fat people who
belong to gender minorities find themselves at the crossroads between ableism and
(trans)misogyny, a most humiliating place on the spectrum of these oppressions,
and which is even more marked when these people also experience racism. The
mechanism at work is simple: the place of a woman in society is (among other
things) that of a desirable body.

The entourage as a vector of the norm
When you're a fat chick (or have an invalid body in general), the most common,
mundane violence is questioning your place as a woman. Aren't you desirable? Then
you are not a real woman. In fact, the social pressure that is exerted the most
on fat bodies is that of a return to " normal ", and for women, it is necessarily
coupled with an injunction to desirability.

The first place where a violent, intimate and prolonged control of bodies is
exercised is that of the family circle. The entourage often puts pressure, overt
or insidious (or both), on fat people, including from a very young age, to make
them understand that they are, at best, out of place. Let's say it does a little
stain on the family portrait.

As an extension of the family institution : the school. Peer control of bodies is
a commonplace practice, especially during adolescence. Mockery, rejection, even
harassment, are part of everyday life, so much so that fat and fat teenagers
suffer a real continuum of grossophobic violence that really never stops, and
which can start as early as primary school. Humiliating nicknames, injunctions to
sport, food control, grossophobic remarks, bullying, everything is good to push
fat and fat young people to hate their bodies and to want to get rid of them at
the slightest bulge that protrudes.

The impacts of this heteronormative social control often have traumatic and
profound psychological consequences, which mark the people concerned throughout
their lives.
Emmanuel Dufour
self-mutilate to conform
In girls, this pressure is so heavy that it also affects thin bodies. The shadow
of weight gain hangs over everyone, and with it its procession of shame and
eating disorders (TCA). In the line of sight : its desirability. " Careful, if
you get fat, the boys won't want you anymore ! "we regularly remind the order of
the girls of a dozen years, sometimes less. The message is clear: your value is
measured by the degree of desire that boys will have for you, and if you are fat,
then you are worthless. The impacts of this heteronormative social control often
have traumatic and profound psychological consequences, which mark the people
concerned throughout their lives, including when their body returns to normal.
One never ceases to have been fat or fat.

This control of the body is also carried out by a significant actor: the medical
community. We know the banality of dieting techniques used by women to achieve a
desirable weight, which often lead to dangerous behavior and can lead to eating
disorders. For obese bodies, this logic is pushed to the extreme and, unlike the
others, piloted, supervised and sanctioned by health professionals.

Under cover of a " health " question, which again hides validist biases and which
has little to do with the real comorbidities caused by severe overweight, the
obese are pushed by the medical profession towards drastic surgical operations.
and invasive, which often have serious consequences on their daily lives and
on... their health !

   Indeed, bariatric surgeries, which consist of reducing the stomach's ability
to swallow (gastric band, sleeve, bypass, etc.) and which are mostly
irreversible, are accompanied in addition to the usual surgical risks,
nutritional deficiencies and sometimes complications that make it impossible to
return to a normal diet.

A questionable result, when we know that this is a population already
particularly exposed to TCAs. Especially since the psychological consequences of
these operations are rarely presented by doctors and often minimized, so much so
that they do not appear alongside the lists of side effects of surgeries. In
fact, psychological follow-ups before and after the operation are not always put
in place, which has drastic consequences. A 2016 study indicates " 50 % increased
risk of suicide after surgery, excessive consumption of alcohol, narcotics,
medication or self-inflicted injury ".[1]

Curiously, the health issue seems to evaporate at this point in the pitches of
doctors pushing for these surgeries. Another figure: 82% of these operations are
undergone by women. An element that is all the more interesting to take into
account when we know the patriarchal biases and the proportion of men in the
medical services, and in particular the surgical ones. The control of the class
of men over that of women is, here too, legitimized and reinforced by the medical
institution.

Kill the body fat
Often presented as " last chance " operations, it is clear that their
consequences on our quality of life and our health are discredited and minimized.
As long as the bodies aren't fat anymore, then it doesn't matter. The message has
always been the same: our lives are not worth those of thin people. And as women,
they do not exist outside the gaze of men. And everything is good to get us out
of this big body, even if it means killing us.

Audrey (UCL Saint-Denis)

To validate

[1]"Five-figure obesity surgery", Lemonde.fr.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Injonctions-Grossophobie-une-autre-misogynie-medicalisee
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