Episode 69 with Anastasia Kidd
When Weight Loss Becomes Idolatry – Anastasia Kidd
Show Notes & Full Transcript
Author of the book “Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation,” Anastasia Kidd (she/her) is starting a movement inviting Christians to examine their own biases against fatness and embrace a more abundant gospel rooted in anti-oppression. She shares how hundreds of years ago, the church began implementing practices of control and power to have ownership over our bodies and how that has had lasting harm. Anastasia invites us all to become unrepentant fatties in this conversation.
Anastasia Kidd is a pastor, educator, storyteller, and fat activist who studies how Christian colonialism helped establish structural anti-fatness in U.S. society and beyond. She believes that identifying with unrepentant fatness can help undermine all that is wrong with the world by reconnecting humanity with the abundance of nature, practicing sustainable communal relationships, and cultivating beautiful and pleasurable ethics.
Connect with Anastasia on her website and Instagram.
This episode’s poem is by Chen Chen and is called “God, Gods, Power, Lord, Universe.”
Sophia Apostol, the host of Fat Joy, has started the Fat Joy newsletter where you’ll get behind-the-scenes info on guests, hot takes, and top recommendations for all things fat joy.
As a thank you for subscribing to the Fat Joy newsletter, you’ll get immediate access, for free, to 55 videos that only paid supporters have been able to see until now. These minisodes were recorded after Sophia & her guest finished the main interview and Sophia asked them 10 unexpected questions for “Some Extra Fat Joy.”
Should you want to support the Fat Joy podcast financially, you can become a paid subscriber of the Fat Joy newsletter and receive subscriber-only content from Sophia.
You can connect with Fat Joy on the website, Instagram, and YouTube (full video episodes here!). Want to share some fattie love? Please rate this podcast and give it a joyful review.
Our thanks to Chris Jones and AR Media for keeping this podcast looking and sounding joyful.
A Fat Joy Podcast Book Review
Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation
Written by Anastasia Kidd
Respectfully reviewed by A. Cavouras
Book Summary
It was a strange experience picking up a copy of Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation; to be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect. I am not a religious person and I have no connection to Christianity other than some negative memories leftover from childhood. In the prologue, the author repeats “Keep Reading”, over and over, an open invitation to learn. What I found between the covers is a book that isn’t about religion, it’s about dissent. On page 5 Anastasia E.B. Kidd says, “Finally, any person with a body is invited to this party. (I hope I bought enough chips.”)
No matter my faith history, I know I’m in the right place.
Kidd has created a framework for dismantling the harmful aspects of both the Church and Christianity around fat and fat stigma. She went further and wrote a road map on how to look at a group’s past, their stories, practices and beliefs and rewrite them collaboratively to chart a new path forward. She layers in her own experiences with short memoir pieces, proving over and over that she brings her whole self to this work. As an ordained (minister) in the United Church of Christ she is a powerful person to disrupt anti-fat bias within the faith community.
Pop culture has taught me that standing up to the church is a dangerous thing to do and Kidd takes up the challenge with bravery and intelligent research. Fat Church is unlike any church I have ever heard of and I left the pages of this book inspired.
Some Special Things About This Book
In Chapter 2, Kidd spends a useful number of pages giving great vocabulary lessons: thinspiration, fat, fat panic, fat studies, fatness spectrum, fat liberation,and more, but she goes further to outline how these words intersect with ‘purity,’ ‘temperance,’ ‘moderation.’ Worthy of special mention is how Kidd interacts with the word ob*se. Her spelling robs it of a vowel and its power.
The author’s dissection of history and her searing social commentary are both impeccably researched.
Here are a few of my favourite sections:
On Trouble: Kidd shares the analysis of what trouble fat women are, summarised by the fact that fat women are doubly-problematic. From page 46: “They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.” (Reviewer side note: Wow, that’s a team I want to play for!)
Tricky Knot of Homemaking: In chapter five, Kidd explores the historical and deliberate link between homemaking, home economics, women’s magazines, Graham crackers, and diet culture – feminists, this section will make your cauldron boil.
Eve – I can’t say I have given all that much thought in my life, but in Fat Church, Kidd links original sin and women’s bodies where Eve disobeyed authority by taking a big, forbidden bite of that apple. From then on women are viewed as impure and disobedient, with men being given the task of monitoring their purity, and forcing compliance and control over their bodies. A fascinating analysis that plays in with this quote on page 67 that comes from Naomi Wolf:
“Female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women’s bodies are not our own but society’s, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger, a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”
Validating Lines for Your Heart, Your Mirror, or Your Socials
P. 18
“But the truth is: I am fat, and that is not going to change. Embracing that fact has been a blessing. Through my own learning, I started to recognize that the vast majority of what makes my fatness difficult is societal.”
P. 125
“Say it with me. All people should be allowed to exist, and even provided the opportunity to thrive, without cultural shame - fat people, sick people, disabled people, and people marginalised in any other ways. Say it again. Say it until you believe it. Say it until you believe it applies even to your own fat body, or to the body of the fattest person you’ve ever seen.”
End Note
The truth is this book wasn’t written for me.
On page 31, Kidd says “And yet, I’m also writing this book as a primer, an introduction for those who have never been disavowed of the lives of diet culture and its pervasive hold on the medical and media industries in our country. I’m writing most particularly to progressive American Christians…”.
I am neither American nor Christian and although it might not have been written for me, this book still spoke to me on a deep level.
Plus, I never miss a party that has chips.
Respectfully reviewed by A. Cavouras (a.cavouras@gmail.com)