When she wrote her feminist manifesto about fat forty years ago Suzie Orbach never imagined it would continue to be relevant today. In this article, she revisits her ideas and discusses what’s happened in the intervening years.
The story of the past 40 years is grim. It’s a story of malice, of greed and of mendacity. Not content with destabilising the eating of many western women and exporting body hatred all over the world as a sign of modernity, the combined forces of what investigative health reporter Alicia Mundy so aptly termed “Obesity Inc” set about to create new so-called disease entities; these would medicalise and pathologise people’s relationship to food and bodies so successfully that vast industries would grow up to treat problems that these industries had themselves instigated.
In the intervening years the body has become a political project she says. And she ends with the admonition that “we need more rage, more refusal, and more love.”
Forty Years Since Fat is a Feminist Issue | The Guardian
