‘Critical Disability Studies’ Professor: Fatphobia ‘Undergirds’

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Over the past few years, #bodypositivity activists have gone full-on schizophrenic trying to square their nagging internal desires to not be physically unappealing blobs by taking advantage of what many believe to be a golden opportunity to achieve their deepest desires to lose weight with minimal effort and virtually no lifestyle adjustments — the glutton’s holy grail — with their stated ideology that looking like a beached whale is an act of self-empowerment.

Square peg, meet round hole.

Exhibit A of this ideological struggle within the fat community is Fady Shanouda, a “critical disability studies scholar” who has quite the pedigree:

I am a critical disability studies scholar who draws on feminist new materialism to examine disabled and mad students’ experiences in higher education. My scholarly contributions lie at the theoretical and pedagogical intersections of disability, mad, and fat studies and include socio-historical examinations that surface the interconnections of colonialism, racism, ableism, sanism, and queer- and transphobia. I have published scholarly articles on disability-related issues in higher education, on Canadian disability history, and on community-based learning. I am an assistant professor at the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University. I conduct this research diversely-positioned as a disabled, fat, POC, immigrant and settler who is living, working and creating on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Algonquin nation.

Jiminy Cricket! What a mouthful.

As he/she/it— I’m not trying to be mean, but I literally can’t tell based on its profile picture (in the link above) what sex it’s supposed to be, and it probably doesn’t know either — is very evidently a bona fide expert on all things Social Justice™, let’s let it explain the intersection, as it were, between pharmaceutical solutions for modern living and fatphobia.

Via The Conversation (emphasis added):

Time and again, dubious and ineffective solutions for obesity gain prominence. Pills, tonics, elixirs, Zumba, Noom and now Ozempic.

The latest wonder drug is a semaglutide drug invented to help diabetics regulate blood glucose levels, but has the notable side-effect of severe weight loss — for which it is prescribed off-label. It has been heralded by many to culminate in the elimination of fat bodies*.

The fatphobia that undergirds such a proclamation isn’t new.

What makes this moment different from the others, however, is the dangerous rhetoric in which it is lodged. This rhetoric elevates the banal and commonplace fat-shaming that fat people must endure and resist to an unprecedented level.

*I have been unable to get to the bottom of the origin of this unsettling jargon, but for whatever reason Social Justice™ activists and academics refuse to refer to people as “people”; instead, “people” has been replaced with “bodies.”

These “bodies” and those “bodies” — all manner of “bodies” — are discriminated against in various ways, or, in this case, “eliminated” via a kind of fat genocide unleashed somehow by Ozempic.

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