You Do Have A Right To Remain Fat: A Conversation with Virgie Tovar

Why are women judged for their size? What if you decided that you had the right to remain fat? This episode explores:

• Our born desire to like ourselves as we are.
• How we get shamed out of that at such a young age, and so very quickly.
• How hard it is to re-learn how to like yourself.
• Why our cultural commitment to fat-phobia harms us all.
• A Discussion of the book You Have the Right To Remain Fat.

Our guest is: Virgie Tovar, who is an author, activist, and a lecturer on weight-based discrimination and body image. She holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. She edited the anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012), is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Feminist Press August 2018), The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (New Harbinger Publications 2020), and The Body Positive Journal (Chronicle Books 2022). She has received three San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commissions as well as Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

• Fatty Fatty Boom Boom, by Rabia Chaudry
• What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, by Aubrey Gordon
• Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness, by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
• Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, by Sabrina Strings
• The Body is Not An Apology, Second Edition, by Sonya Renee Taylor
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