Her discussion of this relationship highlights the places where feminist studies and feminism and dis/ability studies can inform each other. Gay describes how her body is seen, judged, appreciated, and humiliated in the world is not only reflective of what she thinks, but what the world thinks of bodies “of size” (p. While both are inextricably linked, the ways in which Dr. Through writing about her varied encounters with food, space (like on airplanes and in chairs), and in relationships, she gives us insight into her emotional and mindful existence in the world around her she also gives us insight into her body’s relationship with the world, and how that is dynamically connected to her mind, but we also get a sense of separation between mind and body. Gay thoroughly describes and examines her body’s relationship with the world. This connection has both an intimately personal as well as global reach, and makes placing further social constructions of a woman’s body as a problematic and shameful secondary violation, a further injustice.ĭr. Her personal description of the violent theft inherent in rape and sexual assault, and the consequences of that violation, is a quiet and authentic rendering of the injury, and a snap-back to the reality that the body, mind, and heart are inextricably connected.
However, rather than exploiting her own experiences by describing her trauma in detail for the reader, she withholds and instead uses it to explain how her own relationship with her body was disrupted and dictated by young men who took from her notions of physical autonomy and worth. She examines, to an extent, the ways in which food has been a coping mechanism for her through her own trauma.
Through her personal experience with the language and semantics we, as a society, use to describe people who do not fit a specific construction of health and healthy weight, she challenges the inherent shame embedded within the value-laden labels by which we use “unhealthy” to define “healthy” by contrast. Gay presenting herself and her body through descriptive text, all the while examining those descriptions.