How are your algorithms doing? Mine, for several months, have only been offering me before/after stories of women who are losing weight. Their body, at the beginning of their “transformation”, is different each time: they are often already thin, sometimes not, but in this montage of images, only the loss counts. I was so tired of seeing these bodies shrink, as if it was the goal of a feminine gendered body, to partially disappear, that I deleted TikTok, but these videos continue to pursue me, on Instagram and on Facebook.
While the news continues to be bad, even horrible, as I witness, helpless and frozen, the most serious international political crisis of my life, as the war in the Middle East spreads to Yemen, Lebanon, as the number of civilians killed continues to increase, the Internet’s propensity to tell me to lose weight fascinates me as much as it disgusts me. Not that I’m any more heroic than anyone else – the image the mirror reflects doesn’t always please me. However, it is the systemic, insidious and shameless aspect of this exhortation to thinness that I condemn: I see a link with the rise of fascism, a tactic to divert attention. Don’t look at the journalists being murdered, focus on your cellulite. The return with great fanfare of the popularity of cottage cheese among influencers seems to me the symptom: a bland star food of the 1980s-1990s relegated to oblivion, it is now omnipresent, because they want us to believe that it is of the key to a balanced, protein-rich diet. Lose weight, but have tone, muscles, girlswith shots of protein powder in your smoothie celery and pineapple and cottage cheese in your morning eggs. Don’t forget the low-calorie hot sauce to make your food feel like it has flavor.
While the second half of the 2010s saw the emergence of fat activists (think of Jessamyn Stanley or Tess Holliday in the United States, or Julie Artacho or Gabrielle Lisa Collard in Quebec) who sought to highlight fatphobia and its consequences, the global rise of the right coincides with a resurgence of bodies that we scrutinize and seek to tame. Not that the diet fad had completely disappeared, but it had faded: here it is back, and in force. In feminist studies, we call this a backlash. Anti-fatphobia is linked to Critical Race Studies and with a whole section of university research, in the human sciences, that we seek to silence. Conspiracy theorists and other right-wingers accuse these fields of study of wokism, censorship, attacks on freedom of expression and being pseudoscience. Spoilers : it is the professors of these disciplines who hammer home the seriousness of the Palestinian catastrophe the loudest. They are not promoting censorship, they are the ones being censored and seeing their freedom of expression being suppressed. Let us think of Steven Salaita, professor of American studies, who lost his position well before October 7 because of his research on Palestine, or of Maura Finkelstein, professor of anthropology who was fired because she had shared a poem by a Palestinian writer on his social media.
One of the particularly vulgar aspects of these videos is the name they are often given: “transformations”. And if the “transformations” in which we wanted to participate concerned not weight loss, which contributes to the great capitalist machines, but rather social transformations ? I call for less hope that our bodies will shrink, but rather to expand, to become big, big, in our calls for a justice that goes beyond our borders.