Exploring Body Fascism and Fatness

Black fatness is made meaningful through suffering, through surveillance, and

through control. And the policing of B- Black fat flesh

anchors entire systems of governance.

Without a population to discipline, there would be no BMI, no obesity

epidemic, and no medical or scientific institutions organized

around

managing fatness.

The diet industry reflects this logic.

It operates through what I once defined as formal and informal

relationships among major food corporations, the medical

industrial complex, and individual wealthy benefactors to

sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored,

restricted,

guilted, stolen from, and punished.

Diet culture has always linked food to morality, framing restraint as

virtue and pleasure as danger through language like guilty pleasure.

Abstaining from pleasure becomes a way to train obedience, to train

self-denial, and to train discipline in service of a

broader political

order.

Body fascism is not some relic of the past.

It's an active feature of modern imperial regimes.

Every time a government decides whose body must be protected and whose bodies must

be erased for the sake of national imagery, this is body fascism.

Every time there's a call for sovereignty by state powers with the intent to

maintain borders, this is body fascism.

Every time Black flesh is wrangled, dismembered, abused,

this is body fascism.

Understanding this clarifies exactly how fascist ideologies operate through the

body, not only by glorifying a narrow ideal,

but also by

violently repressing the Black fat.

So I wanna go back to twenty twenty.

Since twenty twenty, the growing popularity of GLP-1s has been

reflected in the

public discourse surrounding Black celebrities, such as Whoopi Goldberg,

Lizzo, Serena Williams, Tracy Morgan, and Oprah,

who have either been accused of using these drugs or have publicly discussed or

advocated for their use across media platforms.

These drugs took our events... Or excuse me, took our screens by

storm,

and what started as a targeted social media advertising

was eventually folded into

the highest ritual of American mass culture, also known as the Super Bowl,

and marked the drug's full incorporation into the nation's visual and moral

values.

In the years following COVID-19, drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy,

Zepbound, and Mounjaro moved from endocrinology

clinics into mainstream conversation and were praised as breakthroughs

that could finally solve what other medicine, policy, and culture

have long understood to be an intractable problem:

fatness.

And over the course of the last several years, these drugs have also been endorsed

as a remedy for long COVID.

The fat problem these drugs promise to solve has long been framed as a threat

to public health and national vitality, a framing that has always been

Blackened, with Black subjects positioned as its most

visible and enduring

violence. By this, I mean that fatness has always been marked

precisely

because of its inability to be divorced from Blackness.