AustLit

'I first read Fat City in 2013. At the time it was an article by Dr Karen Hitchcock in The Monthly but since then it has been republished in stand-alone format by Black Inc. In it, Hitchcock drew on her work with morbidly obese1 patients in order to address the question of who is responsible for the spread of obesity in contemporary society. I clicked a Facebook link, read the article numbly and clicked out feeling uncomfortable. Hitchcock claimed she didn’t dislike fat people, yet reading her article made me feel ashamed. I couldn’t explain why, so I pushed my embarassment down. No one else seemed to have read it that way, and I suspected the response to giving voice to my feelings would be, “Yes, but you are fat. You’re being oversensitive.” I tried to forget it, but the article continued to haunt me, even influencing my choice for an honours research topic.' (Introduction)