Reviews with content warning for Fatphobia - Queer Body Power: Finding Your Body Positivity

Reviews tagging 'Fatphobia'

Queer Body Power: Finding Your Body Positivity by Essie Dennis

4 reviews

camillatd's review against another edition

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hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

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sara_m_martins's review against another edition

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reflective medium-paced

3.5

Queer Body Power is a non-fiction on the Body Positivity movement, from an intersectional, queer perspective, and with a memoir-like feel to it. While part of the book focuses on body issues, I think it's main subject is how being queer affects how you feel and live in your body and its interaction with the outside world/society. So I would recommend this to queer people at large, to find a echo of what they may already feel, but not to someone who is, say, struggling with body dysmorphia.

"Queerness is so much more than a label that is supposedly required for dating. It is community, history, how you carry yourself in the world, fluidity, performance, identity, character, heart. Queerness is many things and all of those things at once."

The inclusion of interview excerpts is something that I have seen tried often, and seldom well-executed. Thankfully, it works really well here, adding while still keeping in the flow of the book.
I found the content itself, while not revolutionary, well-structured and I think this would be great for someone who needs a starting place or who feels they need a way to better get acquainted with the circle - it is sometimes hard to get all of these pieces of information if you're left to navigate the internet by yourself, and are not sure were to turn. I think it is also a good book to read generally as a queer person to see something you have experienced reflected and ponder about somethings you haven't considered before. I certainly found some pieces of information which lead me to reflect a bit on my experiences. Of course, non-queer people could also gain from further understanding what the experience in a queer body could be like.

Queer joy is why we are here. [...] We shouldn't have to spend our whole existence being told how hard it is to be queer; we deserve to embrace the wonderful things about it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. The opinions are my own and voluntarily given.

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beca_reads's review against another edition

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informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

This book is empowering and is going to help a lot of people. My main concern going into this book, was that it wasn't going to be intersectional but I was proven wrong. Essie discuss the link between being queer and body image. I liked that she talked about her childhood, I feel that this is commonly overlooked when discussing body positivity. They also talk sensitively about eating disorders within the LGBTQIA+ community, what I truly appreciated was Essie interviewing a range of people from the community as it shared a wider perspective. I could also tell that this was well researched throughout which made for an overall good reading experience.

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reallife_kazbrekker's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.25

I'm very thankful to have received an ARC for this book from Netgalley.

This book was so much better than I expected!
When I went into this book I was expecting that the author was not going to mention disabled people and how they are often times left out of the body positivity movement, but to my surprise (and delight) the author did mention it. The author themselves is disabled, so that's probably why they mentioned it, but still. I was so happy that disabled people were talked about when it comes to this subject!

This book has some great quotes as well, that I definitely wanna try and get a physical copy of this so I can annotate it. Here are some of my personal favorite quotes:

"You are worthy of companionship regardless of what your body looks like."

"This reluctance to give your body the right medicine in case you gain weight is a perfect example of why fat phobia is so damaging."

Both of these quotes, and lots of other ones as well, resonate with me a lot. Some of the subjects talked about in this book hit way closer to home than I expected, so it seems that I need to work through some... issues that I have. Obviously a single book is not gonna fix all of those, but I definitely helped me realize what some of my issues towards my body were caused by.

So yeah, definitely gonna buy a physical copy of this book and annotated it, because having some of the best quotes in this book in my notes app on my phone seems a bit weird...

Edit: Bought a physical copy, reread it and annotated it! Still highly recommend this book, it's great!

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