misia, aka Hanne Blank, is featured answering Big Fat Blog’s “Three Quick Questions” this week.
How did you come to fat acceptance and fat rights?
I’m fat, smart, opinionated, and politically active, and have been all these things since I was a teenager. I don’t take well to being silenced or told that my ideas don’t matter. And I’ve always thought that behaving badly toward people because of some aspect of their physical body — whether that means their skin color, their height, their use of crutches, their weight, their gender expression, the scars on their skin, their gray hair, their biological sex, whatever — is generally unjustifiable, that whole “can’t tell a book by its cover” thing. For me as a progressive feminist, opposing the whole range of physical-body-based prejudices and stigmas is all of a piece. Fatness and fat rights happen to be two of my personal issues, so it’s a topic I can speak to from the inside. But fat politics are not separate from my overall politics of inclusion and human value.
