Happy Fat Liberation Month! Throughout August, Fat Forward Books will be discussing foundational texts for learning about the fat liberation movement, how it started, how it's grown, and why it matters... including at book club!

Our August book is Belly of the Beast by Da'Shaun L. Harrison!

The 2022 Lammy Award Winner in Transgender Nonfiction
Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing.

To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.
 
Da’Shaun Harrison--a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer--offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated.
 
Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.

Da'Shaun Harrison is a queer and trans afropessimist and anarcho-communist born and bred in the South. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and received several other media and literary honors. As a movement media and narrative strategist, Harrison draws from a deep history of community organizing—beginning in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to inform their cultural criticism and political thought.

Fat Forward Book Club will meet Friday, August 21 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT to discuss Sparks Will Fly in the community Discord!

Meeting on the third Friday of every month at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT via Discord, Fat Forward Book Club will read and discuss a variety of books by fat authors, about fat experiences, and/or featuring fat characters based on votes from Bindery subscribers. We'll explore books across multiple genres and target audiences/age groups to discuss depictions of fatness in fiction and nonfiction, as well as how perceptions of fatness in the book world have changed or stayed the same in recent years.

All followers are invited to participate in monthly book club discussions! They can also vote on each month's book club pick and to suggest future titles for consideration, among other additional perks. Please see the membership tab for details!

If you're not already following this Bindery Page, please click the link in the top right corner to sign up! It's free, easy, and takes just a few seconds. Every community member helps us reach our goal of creating a fat-focused publishing imprint.

Once you follow, don't forget to register for the Fat Forward Books Discord server for bookish discussion all day, every day, and for our monthly book club meetings!