ghosts and horror

[susanstinson]

I'm reading exquisite ghost stories: The Two Sams, by Glen Hirschberg. Very scary, technically brilliant and morally gripping. I'm going to review them for Strange Horizons.com

I think it's a very bad idea for the US government to run commercials that show children sticking a fat belly buried in the sand with a stick. The fact that it's supposed to be a detached belly that someone "lost" walking on the beach does not change the damage that kind of imagery does to people's relationships with their own, various, warm, living bellies. It's a macabre, nasty image supported by skewed statistics and presented, as so often, in the name of health. Makes me feel as if I were breathing sand.

Comments

[beccawrites.livejournal.com]

i'm nearly speechless.

and then, actually, in trying to pick myself up off the floor about this, it occurs to me that maybe we could have these discussions at nolose. last year lynn mcafee was talking about the fat movement needing to create fat theory that goes beyond simply "diets don't work" because eventually doctors will come up with a treatment that works. (i don't think that she was saying that diets-don't-work isn't a crucial message -- i mean, look at what she does with her time -- she just was saying where are we going as a movement and a community?)

and the ways in which fat oppression is intertwined with class oppression and with war and with ablism and with racism and... these seem like good places to start in developing that theory.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Becca -- that's a great idea. I'm running out the door now, but developing deeper, more complicated conversations about fat would be a great thing to do at Nolose.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

What made you speechless? The ads? Or something about what we said about them?