Fed Up With Split Subject-Hood: Redeeming Size Acceptance

Abstract

This paper endeavours to offer the feminist scholar interested in fat studies an argument for the complex attachments that many women have to size acceptance and fat activism despite the charges that movements/entities such as these are structurally bound by the same understandings of the  subject and the similar reliance on mind/body dualism found in the dieting industry. I modify an argument that Dr. Cressida Heyes espouses with regard to women's complex relationships with dieting in order to address size acceptance and fat activism in a similar way. I ultimately argue that despite the formal challenges that size acceptance and fat activism face with regard to subject-hood, the material relationships that women have with size acceptance and fat activist communities is such that they are invaluable to women. The larger issue at stake here, though not developed due to space constraints is the extent to which the structural coherence of a practice in which a Foucauldian 'care of the self' is said to be employed meaningfully affects those who have embodied relationships to those practices.