So, fatness and bisexuality. They have some shit in common.

Some notes before we begin

- This thread is the product of discussion in a bi fb group I'm in. Thanks to the fab bi folk in there

- This will be based around a US/UK context cause that's what I know https://twitter.com/MazHedgehog/status/1301957573105659904

- My framework is heavily informed by British Imperialism and white supremacy so race factors in heavy

- most importantly, I make no claims to rigorous scholarship here! I am a rando on twitter spitballing, not a proper intellectual.

There are so many fat bi/queer folk on here producing incredible work.

If you want real knowledge production, they got you.

Anyway, caveats out the way, lets do this thing!

The obsession with the hetero/homosexual binary and lifelong thinness come (in my mind) from the same impulse:

Discipline and control

Fatness tells us that bodies cannot be fully tamed. The size/shape of our bodies is constantly (re)forming as we grow/age. It is neither static nor stable

Similarly, bisexuality tells us that our desires may not be fully coherent. They (re)form over time and that may include genders you didnt expect

Our sexual/romantic desires are neither static nor stable

There is an impulse within both fat and bi activisms to emphasise that fatness/bisexuality aren't chosen and that they are both permanent, stable, coherent categories.

I.e. I've always been fat/bi. I will always be fat/bi. I cannot change my body size/sexuality

This isn't bad! I super want to emphasise that this isn't bad.

In a culture that is constantly trying to diet/conversion therapy fat/bi people into more acceptable categories

Asserting that neither dieting nor conversion therapy does what is claimed is VERY IMPORTANT

But what if the lack of discipline/control/congruence in both fatness and bisexuality is....good?

If bodies and desires cannot be controlled, what can we do instead?

What ways of being are opened up?

*A brief aside (i promise its relevant)

*This obsession with control springs from (i believe) Reformation ideas about sins of the flesh meeting Enlightenment ideas around mind over body

*They come together to form a cultural rejection of the body. This is a rejection of pleasure/sensuality/sin in favour of what is believed to be logic/purity/virtue

*End aside*

Fatness and bisexuality open up space to revel in the instability of being in a body.

I don't know what size I'll be in 10 years, or how my sexual desires will manifest so why stress over it?

Why spend my time and energy trying to enforce a coherence that doesnt exist?

Fat politics can be understood as a movement to allow people to live in the bodies they have today

Fat politics demands that fat people be allowed to enjoy full lives without waiting for some thin future that may (will) never come.

Bi politics demands that people be allowed to change tomorrow, that they not be bound to their romantic/sexual histories.

Bisexuality is a lens for recognising that every relationship and moment of intimacy is different, and must be approached as such

It recognises that as good

When you allow yourself to live today and embrace change tomorrow, this creates space for pleasure

You allow yourself to exist in your own body, in this moment and enjoy it.

Fatness and bisexuality invite you to see food and inactivity and desire and sex as good things, as things to be appreciated and enjoyed.

Things to be informed by the past, without being tethered to it

And to shape the future without being rejected in favour of it

In a society that abhors both those things, fatness and bisexuality are to be feared/hated/rejected.

And that's why I find them both rather powerful

/end thread

An addendum: this (i think) makes both fat and bi activism fertile soil both environmental activism.

So much of what is destroying our ecosystems is grounded in colonial/capitalist power relations

Our economies are based in controlling the natural world such that we can extract maximum wealth from it

This includes people

Even the concept of 'wilderness' and 'the natural world' is placed outside humanity.

It is ringfenced in places like national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty (a British designationn

Nature becomes something that's nice to have, but a luxury that is both tied to the past and rejected in favour of an imagined future

What do I mean by this?

Within the UK there's this rural idyll, with 'nature' being tied to some imagined, unchanging past pegged anywhere between the middle ages and WW2

There's also nature/rural communities in the Global South, that are still filtered through imperial imaginations.

Mental images of rice paddies in South-East Asia and savannas in East Africa that haven't changed much since the 19th century

Either way, our idea of nature is tethered to some imagined past that doesn't exist.

'Nature' is also rejected in favour of some imagined future.

We'll protect the environment 'soon'

We'll do something about climate change 'soon'

Even the idea that climate change is 'going to happen' like forests aren't burning *right now*

What does this mean for people who live in rural areas now? Across the world?

What would it to take a fat political framework and apply it to climate activism?

The idea of living in the world as it is *now*, improving people's lives in it *today* is a powerful one.

The idea of not waiting until people are worthy of help

Of respecting their autonomy/right to self governance

Of ceasing to withold from them the means of a full life now

Of using this as a guiding principle of environmentalism

Is a powerful one

Wrt to a bi political framework

What would it mean to decouple nature from some imagined static past?

And embrace change?

And allow the world around you and the people in it to change?

And operate within that presumption of change?

What would it mean to approach every patch of soil, every tree, every stretch of coast and coral reef as a new relationship?

To be remade and reformed and renewed every time you approached it?

Imagine centring the people who have the closest relationship with that bit of the world, and working with them into the future?

And letting our relationship with them be informed by the past but not bound by it?

How powerful could that be?

And in all of this, to understand that we humans are a part of nature. Nature is everywhere and we are always in it.

So our relationship with ourselves and each other will play out on the land and in the air and the seas

Our obsession with control is killing our ecosystems and each other.

What would it mean to embrace bi and fat liberation and use these as additional tools to get us all - and the planet we live on - free?

Ok CAVEAT

I'm not an expert on environmentalism AT ALL.

As always, i am just some rando on Twitter so *please* interact with my writing as such and take a big ole pinch of salt with it.