"After a horrifying rape at the age of twelve, she became very fat in order to protect herself: “I made myself bigger. I made myself safer. I created a distinct boundary between myself and anyone who dared to approach me.” Gay interprets her weight gain as an attempt to “hide in plain sight” (the phrase recurs often), to conceal her secret.
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A common perception of fat as a moral failing, combined with an equally widespread ignorance of or even contempt for fat people’s accessibility needs, frequently leaves Gay feeling unable to so much as voice her discomfort.
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the so-called obesity epidemic is a phantasmic problem, conjured up mostly by cultural anxieties; fat people are not offensive to others because they are unhealthy, but because their bodies are, as Gay puts it, “unruly.” Fat people’s mental and physical well-being often becomes collateral damage to a neoliberal conception of the ideal body as both perfectly healthy and subject to endless improvement.
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Many of the chapters in Hunger first appeared online on xoJane, GOOD, and The Toast... These outlets and Gay’s books share a position: Essentially liberal in their politics, they are cosmetically connected to more radical struggles through an interest in gender and race. This can produce striking dissonances: xoJane runs supportive pieces on Hillary “superpredator” Clinton while also giving a platform to prison abolitionists ... These publications are interested in the affective dimensions of capitalist domination—i.e., race, gender, and even ability and class in a limited, identity-based sense—but not so interested in structural critiques of capitalism as such. They believe in survival as a form of political struggle, but not in political struggle as a form of survival.
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Discussing oppression without scaring white people is a difficult tightrope to walk, and Gay manages it with grace
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In Hunger, just as in Bad Feminist, Gay tends to read political collectivities as if they required ready-made subjectivities impervious to sadness or shame. That’s the wrong way round: The ubiquity of sadness and shame is what motivates collective political action."