Belly of the Beast

Paperback, 152 pages

English language

Published Aug. 10, 2021 by North Atlantic Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-62317-597-9

(1 review)

The 2022 Lammy Award Winner in Transgender Nonfiction Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing.

To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.

Da’Shaun Harrison–a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer–offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired …

The 2022 Lammy Award Winner in Transgender Nonfiction Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing.

To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.

Da’Shaun Harrison–a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer–offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated.

Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed Belly of the Beast by Da'Shaun L. Harrison

4 stars

Belly of the Beast is a non-fiction book about, as the subtitle says, how the politics of anti-fatness are inherently anti-blackness. (From this white person's perspective), it does a really good thorough job of looking through how anti-fatness in self-love, desirability, "health", police violence, as well as gender (esp trans folks) exacerbates anti-blackness.

It gets into the racist roots of the BMI (and thus how health is something that has been created for black fat people to never have access to) and how this can lead to worse health outcomes especially for fat black people (due to crap doctors believing "obseity" is the thing that needs to be solved). Regarding police violence, I was certainly aware of the shitty and racist views of cops, but it hammered home how much black body size and fat (and therefore "intimidating") comes up repeatedly in cop excuses.

This is my own gender bias …

Belly of the Beast is a non-fiction book about, as the subtitle says, how the politics of anti-fatness are inherently anti-blackness. (From this white person's perspective), it does a really good thorough job of looking through how anti-fatness in self-love, desirability, "health", police violence, as well as gender (esp trans folks) exacerbates anti-blackness.

It gets into the racist roots of the BMI (and thus how health is something that has been created for black fat people to never have access to) and how this can lead to worse health outcomes especially for fat black people (due to crap doctors believing "obseity" is the thing that needs to be solved). Regarding police violence, I was certainly aware of the shitty and racist views of cops, but it hammered home how much black body size and fat (and therefore "intimidating") comes up repeatedly in cop excuses.

This is my own gender bias speaking, but my favorite part of the book was probably the snippets of personal interviews with trans people about how anti-fatness shows up in their communities and how it's shaped their paths and relationship with their identities.

I found myself highlighting a million quotes out of this book, so here's a few if you want a taste.

This is what is violent about "body positivity"; it is benevolent anti-fatness in that it masqueraded as some sort of semblance of acceptance for fat people when it is, instead, an opportunity for Thinness to reroute, but not give up, its hold on fat people's collective liberation.

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Every specifically 'transmasc' space I've been in has embraced fatphobia, diet culture, and gym culture as the norm. I've found it helpful to be in wider trans spaces (i.e. inclusive of trans women and nonbinary people) rather than specifically transmasc spaces for this reason.

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Attraction is a real thing and I can't get rid of it, but as a fat person, there are very few people that I"m not attracted to. Thin folks have conversations about identity and attraction, and it basically comes down to thinness.

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Self-love, even a radical one, cannot and will not disrupt or bring an end to systemic violence.