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redefiningbodyimage: katieanne: (via obeast book update |) Okay. This woman is seriously blowing my fucking mind right now. Check her artist’s statement and get into what she’s doing because it is brilliant. - Haley From her statement: My most visible role in the project is performing as the North American Obeast, a fictitious genus of endangered mammals.  I embody three species of male and female obeasts, which superficially resemble each other in the way that zebras, mice, crows, and other fauna do. This animalistic indistinction to the careless eye reflects and satirizes the socially perceived ‘all-the-sameness’ of fat people. This kind of dehumanizing, reductive thinking is brought to light in the MOCS project through exaggeration of the largely unexamined cultural perceptions and anxieties about fat. The obeast performs fat as our culture represents it: simple-minded, undisciplined, endangered yet threatening. By enacting the stigma and dehumanization of obesity literally, the everyday stigmatization of (and anxiety about) obese people becomes darkly humorous, rather than merely pitiable. . The narrative’s absurdity mirrors the real-life absurdity of ideological thinking, and creates an opportunity to consider a more nuanced perspective of ascribed and asserted identity formation. By borrowing the trappings of legitimizing scholarly fields (e.g. archaeology, history, biology, museology) to teach viewers about the fictional North American Obeast, the project asks viewers to think critically about how facts and cultural identities are made, and by whom. In this way, the work plays upon not only the stigma and cultivated anxiety surrounding the so-called “obesity epidemic,” but also the conventions of information dispersion in American culture.

redefiningbodyimage:

katieanne:

(via obeast book update |)

Okay. This woman is seriously blowing my fucking mind right now. Check her artist’s statement and get into what she’s doing because it is brilliant. - Haley

From her statement:

My most visible role in the project is performing as the North American Obeast, a fictitious genus of endangered mammals.  I embody three species of male and female obeasts, which superficially resemble each other in the way that zebras, mice, crows, and other fauna do. This animalistic indistinction to the careless eye reflects and satirizes the socially perceived ‘all-the-sameness’ of fat people. This kind of dehumanizing, reductive thinking is brought to light in the MOCS project through exaggeration of the largely unexamined cultural perceptions and anxieties about fat. The obeast performs fat as our culture represents it: simple-minded, undisciplined, endangered yet threatening. By enacting the stigma and dehumanization of obesity literally, the everyday stigmatization of (and anxiety about) obese people becomes darkly humorous, rather than merely pitiable.
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The narrative’s absurdity mirrors the real-life absurdity of ideological thinking, and creates an opportunity to consider a more nuanced perspective of ascribed and asserted identity formation. By borrowing the trappings of legitimizing scholarly fields (e.g. archaeology, history, biology, museology) to teach viewers about the fictional North American Obeast, the project asks viewers to think critically about how facts and cultural identities are made, and by whom. In this way, the work plays upon not only the stigma and cultivated anxiety surrounding the so-called “obesity epidemic,” but also the conventions of information dispersion in American culture.

I will never be Adam Lanza and also this titular meme is silly

pedertastic:

People are talking about how the rate of violent crimes in this country means we need to pay more attention to mental health. Studies show that in almost all cases of random shootings, the shooter was mentally ill.

These are not statements implying that most mentally ill people are violent, homicidal monsters. These are statements implying that most violent, homicidal “monsters” are mentally ill. There is a huge, inherent difference between those statements, a difference consisting of millions of people. It is the same as the difference between saying “most horses have four legs” and “most things with four legs are horses”.  The articles on this subject, such as “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”, have not noted that difference because it is OBVIOUS. 

I am a person who has experienced non-violent mental illness in the form of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I am also a person who has experienced homicidal urges and fantasies, and I am allowed to categorize those thoughts as symptoms of mental illness. In fact, categorizing them as mental illness was essential to preventing and then recovering from them.

I do not appreciate that a community of people who claim to represent the rights of the mentally ill are “offended” that mental illness is being brought up in connection with violence, or think that publicly discussing my mental illness “dehumanizes” the rest of the community. I’m glad you think of me as less than human. Thank you. 

Instead of whining about how my visible status as a mentally ill person increases the “stigma” surrounding mental illness, why don’t you confront that stigma itself and its inherent fallacy, as it relates to all of us? 

As a chronic depressive, this is 100% how I feel.

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Obesity is not a cost that can be calculated

Obesity is a body size, there are healthy and unhealthy fat people just like there are healthy and unhealthy thin people. The current state of oppression, stigma and shame around obesity means that any calculation of the cost of obesity is impossible to separate from the cost of that oppression, stigma and shame.

Obesity is correlated to a number of diseases so it is considered a “risk factor” although the term is used loosely since there is no proof of causality of risk, it’s as if they found out that short people get a certain disease more often but they have no idea why so they say that shortness is a “risk factor”. At any rate, a family history of heart disease is also considered a risk factor. The calculations that are commonly used to show the “cost of obesity” are often based on the assumption that obese people will get every disease for which they have a risk factor, or that every disease they get is caused by their fat. This is exactly the same as if we calculated the cost of people with a family history of heart disease based on the assumption that they are all going to get heart disease, or that any heart disease they get is caused by their family history. It’s just poor research.

Besides which, an attempt to calculate the cost of a group of people based on how they look in order to make a decision to eradicate that population because they’ve been deemed to expensive is clearly dangerous and wrong.

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Things Obesity is Not by Ragen Chastain (via redefiningbodyimage)

(via redefiningbodyimage)