Blaming the Body: Fatphobia as a Response to Family Trauma
In these families, “avoiding being fat” is considered literally the same as “not hurting the family” or “avoiding a traumatic event like that from ever occurring again.”
Welcome to the seventh installment of my Substack vertical, VOLUMINATI. This vertical is a monthly series of experimental audiotextual (audio + text) essays. The full essay is available for paid subscribers. You can listen to this month’s edition by scrolling all down to the bottom of the article and hitting play.
I’ve educated people on weight stigma for over 10 years, and there’s something I’ve anecdotally come to notice that might surprise you. Most people I’ve talked to, when informed about the harms of fatphobia, immediately understand that weight stigma is wrong. I ask, “Hey, have you ever noticed that people treat higher weight people poorly? We probably should stop doing that, right?” and almost always they have a moment of realization and agree.
In my experience, there are three noteworthy exceptions to this majority:
(1) Teenagers, who (generally speaking) have a terror of not fitting in.
(2) Hateful people who are often also bigoted in other areas, such as race, gender, ability level, etc.
(3) People who come from families where fatphobia plays a significant role in family storytelling/mythology around trauma.
It’s this third category of people I’ll be discussing in this article.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
A few years ago, I was leading a training on how to curb weight stigma at work. Everyone seemed to be understanding and appreciating the material, but one person in the group was clearly super triggered. He started raising his voice and getting hostile toward me.
When a person reacts this way — defending fatphobia despite the clear moral case against it — I’ve learned that it usually means that fatphobia has played a significant role in this person’s family history and they’re reacting defensively because body positive messaging poses a threat to their worldview.
In the training, this person went on for a long time about how fatness “kills people,” but eventually the real story began to emerge: his aunt - a very beloved and central part of his family - died at a young age. She was fat. Instead of honoring her legacy, respecting her body, and truly grieving her loss, this person’s family landed on being angry at and blaming this aunt for “not taking care of herself.” The family (from what I could gather) saw her fatness as a “selfish” act that led to them needlessly suffering when she died. Her death became a type of grievance that had been committed against them, and in their mind, this grievance could and should have been avoided through weight-loss. This story became part of the family lore.
His anger at me for suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with being fat was a continuation of his family’s misdirected expression of unresolved grief.
For people in families who misdirect their pain through fatphobia, usually there are a few conditions in place:
(1) Something traumatizing happened to the family (like, in the example above, the unexpected death of a beloved person or an unexpected illness)
(2) Fatness or weight gain was part of the experience in some way, and