This is a galvanizing, paradigm-shifting book. In 8 chapters that also function as stand-alone essays, Gordon clearly and doggedly documents the oppression, stigma, judgment, and violence faced by fat people, especially very fat people, for this aspect of their identities alone, much less in combination with other elements of identity.
Gordon covers the ineffective, unregulated scam that is the diet/weight loss industry. She busts the myth that being fat inevitably means one is unhealthy. She documents the harassment faced by fat people both by aggression from strangers on the street (fatcalling), as well as from organized entities like employers, rental companies, and doctors/insurers—none of whom have any legal obligation to provide equal services to a fat person that they would to a thinner person. She critiques how fat people are portrayed in media. She strengthens and reinforces her deeply researched essays with anecdotes—often harrowing—from her own life, and concludes the book with an illuminating and bracing articulation of the Body justice movement (as opposed to the Body Positivity movement) as Gordon envisions it, and the world that could be possible if the aims of a Body Justice movement were truly met.
Gordon works hard to interpret and filter everything she writes about the fat experience through an intersectional lens. This is as it should be. But as a White, queer, cis-gender very fat person, Gordon cannot as vividly portray the experiences of fat Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latine, Multiracial, trans and GNC, and disabled people (or the myriad possible combinations of these identities) as could people within these identities. The inclusion of passages, extensive quotes, or stories by fat non-white, non-cis, and disabled people would strengthen this book by fully including these identities and honoring them as equally central to the story of fatness. Similarly, a list of recommended reading/viewing as an appendix would have been a welcome addition and another way to bring attention to writers, thinkers, activists, artists, etc., more marginalized than Gordon herself.
Moving and transformative, I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come and the final, visionary chapter in particular will guide my actions and thinking as I do what I can to make the world a more Body-Just world.