You Have the Right to Remain Fat
Virgie Tovar 

For essayist and activist Virgie Tovar, society’s discrimination because of the size of her body has been far more detrimental to her well-being than “the lessons [she] received about [her] racial and gender inferiority” (36). Thus, in her collection of essays titled You Have the Right to Remain Fat, Tovar responds directly to that discrimination and mistreatment. Tovar argues that society’s standards for body size are unattainable through dieting largely because the diet industry is a capitalistic venture whose main goals rest in financial success rather than in helping people attain a specific weight. When women fail to meet a body size ideal through dieting, they internalize their perceived failures, blaming themselves rather than the larger cultural framework and its unrealistic standards. Women searching for an alternative way to meet the unrealistic body ideal are caught in a cycle of socially-encouraged, self-harm dieting. The proclamations in Tovar’s text are a call for anyone caught in the prison of diet culture to denounce that prison and replace it with a life of freedom and acceptance that allows one to glorify in the beauty of one’s body regardless of its shape or size.        

Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp, a 4-week online course designed to help women who are ready to break up with diet culture.

You Have the Right to Remain Fat is a publication by The Feminist Press. Click here to purchase

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Reviewed by
Melinda Zepeda
​4/2/2019

Melinda Zepeda has writing published or forthcoming in the anthologies ¡Basta! 100+ Latinas Against Gender Violence and Péinate: Hair Battles Between Latina Mothers & Daughters. She writes monthly for the online magazine Hispanecdotes. Her children’s manuscripts tentatively titled Diego Finds Spanish and Miss Papas Visits City Council are currently in review. 

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