Hunger by Roxane Gay

Hunger, by Roxane Gay

A quote by Roxane Gay ironically posted by Lane Bryant, a plus-size retailer that Gay has criticized for not selling clothes in her (and many others') size. 

Indeed, in our society there are at least two forms of discrimination that are so accepted, many do not blink an eye at them. These are sizeism or fatphobia and anti-Blackness: I would argue that they are two forms of discrimination that many seem to proudly exhibit.

In this blog post I will reflect on the work of a feminist and activist who is at the intersection of both: Roxane Gay. Both brilliant and charming, Haitian-American academic Gay rose to cultural prominence by writing articles for websites and journals including the New Yorker. She captured my heart through her memoir "Hunger." Hunger is a poignant and striking recount of Roxane's life, as told through her experiences with her body.

Roxane details the traumatic, life-altering experience that set off her life-long weight journey. At 12 years old, she was gang-raped by a boy she thought was her boyfriend and his friends. Shattered, she kept it to herself for fear of disappointing her parents and learned to cope by eating. She wrote that she ate to make her body a fortress that would be impermeable and make her feel safe from male desire. Roxane is a fierce critic of rape culture and she showed how the mental health issues stemming from that event catalyzed her weight gain. This is such an important point for the fight against fatphobia: you never know why or how someone became fat. A lot of the time, what is considered excessive fat is a result of physical or mental illness. This reminds me of a mantra Oprah (who has also promoted dangerous weight loss products) used to say on her talk show: what are you hungry for? Some fat people gain excess weight by eating to fill an emotional void, just as some people use drugs or alcohol to. So why are people so quick to criticize a fat person for being unhealthy when they will not do the same for smokers or alcoholics?

Another common misconception is that weight loss is as easily achieved by individuals as it is for everyone else. This is a form of ableism: some people are genetically predisposed to and become more susceptible to fat gain through environmental and other life circumstances. In other words, it is considerably harder for some people to be thin and/or lose weight than it is for others. This misconception leads to the moral blaming and shaming of fat individuals for being lazy, not working hard enough to lose weight or having the willpower to eat less and healthier. This erases the natural advantage that people born with faster metabolisms and the ability to eat more and exercise less while maintaining a "fit" or "healthy" thin body possess. Which brings me to my next point: a slim body is not synonymous with good health and a fat body is not synonymous with bad health. Slim people can be unhealthy while fat people can be in good health. In fact, a scientific theory dictates that fat people can live long and healthy lives as long as they regularly exercise, even if they don't lose weight.

At a size 42 at her heaviest, Roxane describes the hypocrisies of the body positive/fat acceptance movement. While she admires the women reclaiming their bodies as desirable and valuable, Roxane does not feel that she can do the same. For starters, Roxane states that she is about 100 pounds heavier than the women typically fronting this movement, who shop at Lane Bryant; as mentioned earlier women like Roxane are sized out of Lane Bryant. They must find alternative routes to find clothing because mainstream plus-size retailers typically do not carry all plus sizes. I have discussed the body positive movement's recent commercialization and bias towards size 14 or smaller plus women in my blog post Plus-Size. A size 14 plus woman or even a size 38 plus woman cannot claim to know or understand Roxane's experience: her size exposes her to a completely different world of fatphobia. The abuse she experiences for being fat in public includes having strangers complain about sitting next to her on airplanes so she resorted to buying two seats for herself, strangers scolding her and taking food items out of her cart when out grocery shopping and having to call a venue ahead of a speaking engagement to ensure that their furniture can accommodate her. One of the most heartbreaking stories in Roxane's memoir described a speaking engagement where the venue was not accessible to her. The engagement was in an auditorium with an audience and a stage with chairs for the speakers. Without any stairs to climb up the stage, Roxane struggled to jump onto the five foot platform for an excruciating five minutes before another speaker helped her onto the stage. Then to add insult to injury, she sat in one of the chairs only to realize that it could not accommodate her; after it broke she popped an excruciatingly painful and humiliating squat on the stage for the entire event. Afterwards, she went home feeling like crying. This story is a prime example of how the world must learn to accommodate people of different sizes sufficiently. If Roxane Gay's life struggles mean that she does not want to be a body positive, fat advocate then she is more than entitled to her story and her opinion. In an effort to unsettle the small plus woman bias, I am highlighting Roxane as a fat theorist, role model and all-around awesome person.

Roxane recalls a personal struggle that many fat people will relate to: desiring the acceptance of her family. She clearly loves her family, as depicted through her glowing descriptions of them and her Haitian culture. Her parents immigrated from Haiti, speak French and English and are whip smart. They are also extremely loyal and loving, continuing to support Roxane as her mental health decline led her to drop out of the Ivy League, disappear from her family and friends and work as a phone sex operator while living with a much older man she met online in a different part of the country. Of course, her parents still did not know about the incident that harmed her mental health and catalyzed her weight gain; she did not want to tell them. Her father eventually hired a private investigator who found her and when she was ready, she came back to live with her family while rebuilding her life. Roxane recounts the hurtful behavior from her family that rings a bell for me: a constant nagging and reproach to lose the weight. Although it may come from a place of good will, after a while, it can break a person down. I began to feel the way Roxane did: it's been long enough, you are my family, so why can't you just love me for me? This is a sentiment that may be familiar to fat people with unaccepting thin families; we can love them, but sometimes we just gotta do us. Families don't get to decide who their children become, but they get to love who they are.

Hunger shed light on aspects of fatphobia that I had not been fully aware of: the medical industrial complex and reality TV's exploitation of fatness. I had grown up watching the weight loss infomercials advertising (what looked to be black market) weight loss pills or gastric bypass/weight loss surgery. I did not know that weight loss pills can trigger schizophrenia and result in death  or that gastric bypass surgery is a life-threatening procedure that can require the rearrangement of one's internal organs (though I knew the procedure surgically reduces the size of the stomach). This news reminds me of the fatality of being fat which includes institutional discrimination from doctors who refuse to treat fat patients or accurately diagnose illnesses in favor of "lose weight" diagnoses. Roxane calls out Oprah herself for peddling unhealthy weight loss products to fat people. She also describes reality TV's unethical profit off of fatness: the advent of the weight loss show e.g. The Biggest Loser, where overweight contestants undergo inhumane and demeaning rituals to lose weight and win money. It was later revealed that this show employs abusive tactics of a hazing nature that are extremely taxing on contestants' health, forcing them to lose large amounts of weight in short periods of time. It was also discovered that the contestants went on to gain back the weight that they had lost on the show. This speaks to capitalist industries' immoral use of the vulnerabilities of fat people to make money at the expense of their health and wellbeing.

While Roxane skewers our society's fatphobia, she is also highly critical of rape culture and sexism. Accordingly, she reminisces on how her mental illness stemmed from that traumatic incident which then led to her weight gain. Mental illness, another stigmatized status in U.S. society, is illuminated by Gay through this highly public platform. Additionally, her love of pop culture and humor shine through in different essays in Hunger, giving the reader a full view of the author. Roxane has definitely left her mark on cultural discussions of rape and sexual assault, fat theory and mental illness.

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Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher