Fatness

• If you don’t know Lizzo yet, she shot to fame in 2019 with the release of her third studio album Cuz I Love You.
• The re-release of sleeper hit Truth Hurts launched Lizzo to number one on the charts and made her a household name.
• The catchy lyrics still have people around the world singing, “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100% that bitch”.

Thick and juicy

• She also uses descriptors such as big, thick and juicy.
• Lizzo’s reclamation of the word is rooted in a queer-feminist led and disability-related activist movement: fat activism.
• The fat activist movement emerged in the United States in the 1970s, and includes early figures such as Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran.
• Fat studies has since emerged as an interdisciplinary field that documents and theorises the work of fat activists.
• For years fat activists have been drawing attention to the assimilationist nature of body positivity and its toxic and exclusionary mechanisms.

Fatness in society and culture

• We have the added complication that fatness, in many ways, is in the eye of the beholder: conceptions of fatness tend to be individually, socially and culturally shaped.
• She says,
  I am a Black woman, I am making music from my Black experience, for me to heal myself.
• I am a Black woman, I am making music from my Black experience, for me to heal myself.

So should we say ‘fat’?

• If an individual like Lizzo self-identifies as fat, an invitation emerges for us to also pick up and use the term to describe her body.
• Doing so, it feels like we, too, might participate in a process of fat liberation and size acceptance.