Kate Manne: Demoralizing Fatness

215 South Depeyster Street,Kent OH 44240

25 April, 2023

Description

Fatness is often moralized. Through a variety of channels—the news, entertainment, social media, and ordinary conversation—fat bodies are depicted as a moral problem, and fat people as a moral failure. The atmosphere may be one of moral panic or, by turns, patronizing concern and ostensibly well-meaning hand-wringing. But the best argument to the conclusion that one is morally obligated not to be fat—namely, that fatness represents a burden on the health care system—turns out to be surprisingly weak. Not being fat is simply not a moral obligation. Manne concludes with a debunking explanation as to why fatness has wrongly been moralized, in view of the disgust often garnered by fat bodies. This event will take place in the Kent State University Conference Center Ballroom. We kindly ask that all attendees mask. Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT. Manne’s research is in moral philosophy, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. She has written two books—Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown, 2020)—and is currently working on a third, called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown, 2024). As well as academic articles, she regularly writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews on moral and political topics for a wider audience, which have been published in venues including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Cut, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Politico.