It seems like I’ve addressed most of the issues in my new post. If anyone wants to ask me something or wants me to address something I haven’t yet addressed, feel free to ask here or at my blog. Thank you for taking time to read the entry and comment on it. I’m still quite overwhelmed that so many people liked it, and I’m in a pretty jubilant mood. Hugs all around!

By the way, if someone has commented in my blog and it doesn’t come up (and isn’t all about how much you hate fat people), try re-posting in case blogger is acting up (someone had this problem earlier today). I don’t reject any posts that aren’t clearly hateful or trollish. I mainly want to see what goes up, because I’ve had a problem with ad spam in the past.

Kate and fillyjonk, thank you for the analytical posts where you defend my point of view, and you definitely read me right there.

Miriam, thank you for the thoughtful analysis. My intention was, as you said, to compare rhetorics, not so much compare the practice of discrimination.

Elusis, I’ve read your comments and basically replied to them in my new post. I get the feeling you’re not only responding to my post, but also some things you’ve seen happening in the movement(s), and it goes a bit outside of the scope of my post. That’s why I’m not sure how to respond to your comments. Comparing oppressions is a valid concern, but I see you doing just that in your posts, so it sends a slightly contradictory message.

As Kate pointed out, it’s pretty impossible to talk about discrimination in a way that doesn’t exclude someone. I’m not sure if we can see eye to eye on whether comparing rhetorics is helpful, but we can respectfully disagree. However, if there was something particularly sloppily worded or argumented in my post, I’d appreciate a more detailed criticism.

Comparing one type of oppression (be it homophobia, fatphobia, sexism or racism) to another is like comparing apples to oranges. Yeah, they’re very different things, but they’re also BOTH FRUIT. And us fruits should stand together.

I’m sorry if that was inane. But what I mean is – why does the fact that one oppression is not exactly like another mean that we can’t talk about the ways in which they are alike (and the ways in which they are not alike)? It seems like there’s this hidden undertone where one group thinks the other is marginalizing what they’ve been through, and the other group thinks the first group doesn’t recognize that they’re being oppressed at all. Which, if people are thinking this (or thinking that others are thinking this) we should say so explicitly and get it out in the open, rather than discussing what can or cannot be compared, as if analogies aren’t a fundamental part of human language and human life, even for non english majors.

And now I’m going to bed.

fillyjonk and Rachel, also warmly appreciated that you liked my post. I also enjoy reading yours.

Here’s a new post about this:
http://fatlyyours.blogspot.com/2007/12/allow-me-to-elaborate.html

I’ve responded to most of the criticism there. I thought it might be better than writing twenty separate comments here and at my blog, but I will look into the posts more now and probably comment on some individually.

As a writing teacher and a rhetorician, I need to step in before my head explodes.

In thinking about fatphobia, it makes absolute sense to look at the similarities and overlap in *rhetoric* used against gay people and against fat people (and against any other people).

Analyzing the rhetorical arguments used to oppress groups does not mean arguing that members of those groups experience oppression in the same way, or that their history is the same, or that their future will be the same.

What it does mean is that the *language* and *logic* used to address them, describe them, and oppress them is similar enough that we might reasonably borrow counterarguments already in use by the gay rights movement into the FA movement, and we might also productively point to the existing work the gay rights movement has already done to deconstruct and rebut the language and logic (or rather, the illogic) of homophobia–and use those tools to deconstruct and rebut the language and illogic of fatphobia.

To examine patterns within the rhetoric of oppression insults no one, and is very much not about sloppy thinking.

It’s sloppy thinking–i.e,. irrational thinking–that drives racism, sexism, homophobia, fatphobia, and all manner of variations on oppression–hence the strangeness of similar arguments being used to oppress groups with vastly different histories and cultures and diversities of experience within those cultures.

As a Jew who lost much of my family to the Holocaust, I spent a long time as a child trying to understand why Jews had to die–and that question became a lot more complicated when I learned more about who else died and tried to figure out what Jews and gay people and Roma and physically disabled people and Freemasons and Jehovah’s Witnesses had in common.

Very different groups of people that we might argue have very little in common still ended up put to death under a single, irrational philosophy that deemed all of them less than human. Does anyone really believe that, if it happened today, fat people would somehow *not* end up amongst those others in line for extermination? Because sadly, the rhetoric of oppression seems infinitely flexible to support the dehumanization of just about anyone you might think of, and some you might not.

The sloppy thinking isn’t in those of us who notice the rhetoric of oppression, but in those who perpetuate it to justify their exclusion and dehumanization of any part of humanity they have decided is less deserving of respect.

And that’s no game.

That’s exactly what M. LeBlanc is talking about in the post Heqit mentioned above. For my take on why the rhetoric of choice is useful, even though I agree with you in principle, see my long-ass comment around #30. Sanity Watchers warning applies to all other comments in the thread.

WORD, Godless Heathen. I think the rhetoric of choice is actually kind of backwards here. The real justice issue, I think, is that consenting adults get to do what they want as long as it doesn’t harm someone. THAT’S IT. It shouldn’t matter if I kiss the ladies because I’ve wanted to since I’m 5, or because I decided to try it when I was 25. That’s where I see a strong parallel with the FA argument, too: it doesn’t matter if someone is fat because, say, she has PCOS, or if she’s fat because she really does eat a lot of Twinkies (gasp!). She’s still a human being and deserves to be treated as such by other human beings and by the law.

Bigots use the same old techniques on the objects of their bigotry.