BY RACHEL SHATTO
Curve
In her latest book, “The Unapologetic Fat Girl’s Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts,” author, fat activist, and exercise enthusiast Hanne Blank makes one thing perfectly clear. There is no wrong way to have a body, and no one and nothing should stop you from enjoying it. One of the best ways you can do that is through movement: “Exercise gives your body to you. It blows the dust off and gives it a little shine, and it hands it over with a weird little curtsey that makes you understand, maybe for the first time, that this body is yours, is actually kind of wonderful, maybe even miraculous.”
For queer and genderqueer readers, Blank says “An awful lot of issues about alienation from the body and weirdness in fitting into mainstream cultural spaces can crop up for members of the queer community, too. The experiences that fat people have with these things aren’t necessarily the same as the experiences that LGBT people have, but the underlying dynamics are often very similar, because they all tend to center around the experience of body-based prejudice and being told that there are things about you and the way you are embodied that are wrong and unworthy. As a result, some of the same coping strategies can help.”
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