'We're here. We're queer. We're fat.
'This one-of-a-kind collection of prose and poetry radically explores the intersection of fat and queer identities, showcasing new, emerging and established queer and trans writers from around the world.
'Celebrating fat and queer bodies and lives, this book challenges negative and damaging representations of queer and fat bodies and offers readers ways to reclaim their bodies, providing stories of support, inspiration and empowerment.
'In writing that is intimate, luminous and emotionally raw, this anthology is a testament to the diversity and power of fat queer voices and experiences, and they deserve to be heard.'
One of the things that first drew me to this book was the title, Fat and Queer, as I myself am both fat and queer. There are a lot of books out there that talk about weight, and a lot that talk about queer identities, but you don't often get many that talk about the two together, and how they can each play into each other.
This book collects together a number of short stories, essays, and poems that examine what it's like to be fat in a queer world, and does so from a wide variety of identities and experiences, meaning that everyone will be able to find something in this book to identify with.
As someone who is overweight, pansexual, in a polyamarous relationship, and trans, I've found that my weight has definitely played a part in my sexuality, gender, and relationships, and that it's something that you're normally told is a bad thing. I've lost count of the amount of times I've been told that being fat is bad, that it's shameful, that it'll stop me from getting a partner, that it'll make me an ugly woman when I transition, that it'll make sex bad. My fatness has always been used as a weapon against me, and is something that society has tried to train me to hate about myself.
Fat and Queer shows me that I'm far from the only person who's been through this, that people from all over the world and all walks of life have had the same messages pushed on them time and time again; and that learning to come to terms with that and love yourself can be a long and hard struggle sometimes.
It's made clear across the various contributions to this book, however, that many of the things we're told about our fatness get proven wrong time and time again. Readers get to see the contributors tell about how they came to love themselves, their bodies, and how they discovered that their fatness and their queerness are linked together. Sometimes people will take issue with your sexuality or gender identity, sometimes it will be with your weight, but a lot of the time they'll try to use both against you. This book celebrates how the two of them are linked, rather than wallowing in the hurt an pain that others try to make us feel.
That's not to say the book doesn't get a little heavy at times, there are some very personal and downbeat moments in this book as the contributors are brutally honest in their experiences and how they have sometimes effected them in a negative way; but this is never the complete focus of these stories and essays. Instead, it is about the joy and peace that these people have found once they find comfort in who they are.
Whether you yourself are fat and queer, or if the you simply picked up the book because it sounded interesting to you, there's going to be something in here for everyone. Thanks to the multiple contributors, their vastly different experiences and the way they present their thoughts, this book is able to appeal to a wide variety of people, and as such is one that's definitely worth checking out.
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