Roxane gay hunger pdf

Like this, Roxane Gay also has her own, like her recovery journey, which changes with times and places. 11) She very boldly reveals that at her highest, she weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall, which, as she proceeds, is an ‘unfathomable’ number but the ‘shameful truth’ of her body. She hated this program but used to watch it to understand a world constructed by popular culture, which is not ready to accommodate the fat people.

She wanted to be fat, to be big, to be ignored by men, and to be safe. . For society, maintaining the body is a kind of ‘social responsibility.’ From the classroom to cloth shop everywhere, she was treated as ‘other’ because of her fatness: “At the end of that first class, as the students filed out of the room, I wanted to collapse with relief because I had survived those fifty minutes of being fat in front of twenty-two eighteen- and nineteen- year-olds.” (Gay, 2017, p.

Sociology Compass, 4(12), 1020–1034. 142) Like her body, the plus size clothing is also both visible in its size and invisible. elite daily. 41) However, after being raped, as she started to hate her own body, she made the decision to go outside the ‘norm’ by becoming fat because those boys treated her ‘like nothing,’ she says starkly, ‘so I became nothing.’ Paradoxically, becoming nothing means becoming fat to make her unattractive and unwanted.

Fat Studies, with an extensive history and interdisciplinary literature, questions and criticizes traditional attitudes to fatness and draws upon the language, culture, and theory of civil rights, social justice, and social change. The close reading technique makes it possible to understand how Roxane Gay juxtaposes her experiences, relationships, attitudes, and Fat Studies to critique popular culture and fat-shaming messages.

Vogue. Critical Pedagogy in the TwentyFirst Century: A New Generation of Scholars. Gay’s idea of this message can be linked with Tasha Fierce’s idea: “Viewed as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely represented in popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as revolting as agents of abhorrence and disgust.” (Fierce, 2010) Gay’s presentation of media is also another way how she resists media messages of fatness.

By glorifying thinness and presenting fatness as a social problem, popular culture messages create one kind of fat politics which arouses fat consciousness among the individuals.

(Farrell, 2011) How people feel their own and other people’s fat bodies are both regressive and progressive. Before being fat, she accepted fat-shaming messages, but raised her voice to resist them after gaining weight: “Few areas of popular culture focus on obesity more than reality television, and that focus is glaring, harsh, often cruel.” (Gay, 2017, p.

She entered a series of toxic platonic and romantic relationships, but also experienced one of her first healthy romances.

In Part 3, Gay continues to discuss her cycle of emotionally abusive relationships, her family’s concern with her size, and society’s poor treatment of those living in fat bodies.

In Part 4, Gay chronicles her attempts at weight loss and continues to critique society’s poor treatment of those of size.

In Part 5, Gay tackles several issues, including her working toward a healthy relationship with food, her relationship with her family, her gender and sexuality, and the link between her public persona—fostered by her successful writing career—and reactions to her size.

Part 6, the final section, deals with themes such as fatphobia in medicine, racism and disability, and Gay’s musings on her rapist “Christopher.”