The Tyranny of Thinness

A fearlessly feminist philosophical approach to defying diet culture, cultivating radical self-care, and rediscovering empowered embodiment Informed by personal narrative, cultural studies, and the work of luminaries from Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft to Audre Lorde and Roxane GayIn this timely and unflinching manifesto, Dr. Celine Leboeuf unpacks the philosophical and oppressive systems that sustain our cultural obsession with being thin—why it’s framed as something to “achieve,” how it’s predicated on exclusion, and that the goalposts are racist and misogynistic—and always moving.Drawing on memoir, feminist theory, and cultural analysis, The Tyranny of Thinness is a wide-ranging and erudite treatise on how the skinny ideal shapes our earliest memories and experiences—and steals joy, agency, and self-determination from our adolescences, our social identities, our ambitions, and even our sense of moral worth.Part 1 traces the origins of fatphobia in anti-Black racism, unpa