Disrupting normal: Toward the ‘ordinary and familiar’ in fat politics

As a nascent movement, fat activism must look critically at the tactics and strategies it chooses precisely because the movement is helping to produce ‘Fat’ as a mode of subjectification and identification. I argue that the desire of some fat activists to bring fatness under the banner of ‘normal,’ particularly through attempts to link certain forms of fatness and health, is a losing battle. Further, this strategy may lead to an ethic of assimilation that leaves behind the very people that fat activism should most benefit and represent. By drawing the connections between queer theory, disability studies and fat activism, I suggest that bodily normativity is an unstable category that must be constantly re/performed because it is always, in effect, failing (McRuer 2006). Given this, fat activism should resist the seduction of normal and instead develop a more critical politics of embodiment and more effective challenge to healthism. I suggest that Eli Clare’s (2002) notion of the ‘ordinary and familiar’ offers one such framework.