Kate Manne
autor
Unshrinking
Size discrimination harms everyone. Acclaimed philosopher Kate Manne shows how to combat it.
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.
Blending intimate stories with trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia matters, now more than ever. Over the last decades, bias has waned in every category except one: body size. Here she examines how anti-fatness operates – how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect and poor educational outcomes. It is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. Fatphobia is a social justice issue.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of ‘body reflexivity’ — a radical re-evaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women
'I want to press it on every schoolgirl who thinks that feminism is uncool, any woman who thinks the most important gender battles are won, pretty much every man I know, and say, have you thought about this?' Sophie McBain, New Statesman
'Kate Manne is the Simone de Beauvoir of the 21st century' - Amanda Marcotte
Male entitlement takes many forms. To sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, bodily autonomy, knowledge, power, even care. In this urgent intervention, philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny.
In clear-sighted, powerful prose, she ranges widely across the culture to show how the idea that a privileged man is tacitly deemed to be owed something is a pervasive problem. Male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women's pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are 'unelectable'. The consequences for girls and women are often devastating.
As Manne shows, toxic masculinity is not just the product of a few bad actors; we are all implicated, conditioned as we are by the currents of our time. With wit and intellectual fierceness, she sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to be cared for, believed and valued.
