Hunger

I wasn’t going to buy Roxane Gay’s Hunger initially. Truthfully, I haven’t read anything of hers except her tweets. I was given Bad Feminist for my 21st birthday, but I left it on the shelf alongside all the other books I planned on getting to eventually.

Then the Mia Freedman thing happened. Mia embarrassed Roxane in a way many fat people are intimately familiar with, and feminists everywhere analysed and argued over her actions and what they meant. Suddenly, people were upset that someone had experienced fatphobia. This was new.

I’ve been writing about life as a fat person since the age of 19; I’m 23 now. The majority of the support for these articles have been from other fat people, as well as women of all body shapes who are dealing with or who have dealt with an eating disorder. Outside of these groups and my circle of friends, it seemed that people largely didn’t care.

Roxane Gay changed that.

Suddenly, discussions of fatphobia were being had worldwide, particularly in Australia. While I suspect many were outraged that Mia had embarrassed the country on the international stage, others recognised the fatphobia that Gay had been criticising in the lead up to Hunger’s release was exemplified by Mia’s actions, and they were actually talking about it, and even better, criticising it.