Evette Dionne on 'Weightless,' dismantling fatphobia and how 'capitalism ruined body positivity'

In "Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul" (Ecco, 272 pp., out now), journalist and author Evette Dionne lifts the veil on the subtle and insidious ways in which society seeks to control and oppress fat women, particularly Black women and young girls. 

But Dionne's debut memoir is also a reminder to choose joy. "Weightless" is a "celebration of what we can do as people in the face of an onslaught of hopelessness," she says. 

In her collection of essays, Dionne examines and challenges America's relationship with fatness and how fatphobia has seeped into every aspect of society including in schools, the media we consume, our health care system, and the movements such as body positivity that were meant to mobilize a more equitable future for fat people and other marginalized groups. 

Dionne, author of "Lifting As We Climb," which was longlisted for the 2020 National Book award for Young People's Literature, also writes of being diagnosed at 29 with heart failure and pulmonary hypertension after years of exhibiting symptoms and not feeling seen or heard at countless doctor's appointments. "Unfortunately, my experience isn't an anomaly," Dionne, now 33, writes. "Many other fat people have experienced varying levels of neglect as well." 

The author, who currently serves as executive editor for YES! Magazine, spoke in an interview about navigating fatphobia, being chronically ill, the meaning of resilience and why it's never OK to comment on other people's bodies.

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Question: Your book's title exudes the feeling of being free from society's expectations of what our bodies should be and look like. Can you elaborate on the meaning behind "Weightless"? 

Answer: I kept coming back to the idea of being "Weightless" because the book deals with really heavy topics – mostly around the idea of weight bias – but I did not want people coming out of the book hopeless. Hopeless about the state of our reality, about the state of our world, or about the ways we should feel about our bodies. So "Weightless" is meant to be subversive and kind of tongue in cheek but also meant to capture this idea that those in society burdening us with fatphobia, racism or sexism, that we, collectively, are stronger as a system and as long as we’re interrogating that system together – we can rise above. 

Resilience is a prevalent theme in the book. What does resilience mean to you? 

It means everything to me. I have two chronic illnesses, and whether or not my body recovers, whether or not my body is able to sustain this recovery for the remainder of my life – there's so much about my conditions I don't have control over. What I do have control over is how I wake up every day and how I feel emotionally – that I can (control).

I'm facing down a barrel every day around heart failure and pulmonary hypertension, and I just had a whole meltdown not too long ago about how I can't carry my own children. It really hit me, and in the face of all of that – my life still goes on. The thing that I can choose for myself, even if it's for an instant, is joy and to be resilient in the face of all of that. 

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How has being diagnosed with chronic illness influenced how you navigate fatphobia and the biases that come with that? 

When you're navigating fatphobia, it's constant gaslighting. You know inherently, this is my body, I'm in this body, but everyone is telling me my body is defective and that in order for me to conform to the society that we've created, my body needs to look different and be smaller. So you spend so much time on this hamster wheel of dieting and exercising and dieting and restricting and if your body is not slimming as a result of that, then you're like, "What's wrong with me?"

I was very close to dying and doctors took it really seriously because I was really young and they needed to figure out what in the world is going on with this person's body that's near its expiration date at 29. It validated for me that, it wasn't me. It was everybody else. It was not me. Chronic illness in some way affirmed for me that our medical system really is fatphobic, our schools really are fatphobic, and the media really is peddling dieting imagery in order to get us to purchase something. Everything just made sense. 

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In recent years, the body positivity movement has undergone a lot of scrutiny about who can partake and whether the positivity aspect still stands. What are your thoughts? 

Capitalism ruined body positivity. Body positivity is a movement about systems. It was never about people. It was always about ensuring that fat people, trans people, disabled people and anyone in a body that's considered deviant is safe in our society and has equal access to jobs, housing and to all the ways in which they are penalized for being different. It was about changing those systems and eventually dismantling them and rebuilding systems that are equitable.

Then it became a movement to sell products. All sorts of things are labeled body positive that have nothing to do with the goal of dismantling the system of fatphobia. So it becomes really divisive when the face of the movement that used to be really radical isn't fat, trans or disabled people, but rather the people who have been most able to successfully market the movement. The fact that it is now become about how people feel about their bodies is very misguided. 

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You write about people commenting on your body when you lost weight. But the weight loss was actually due to the medication you were taking for your health. Why is it wrong to comment on other people's bodies? 

When you're commenting on someone losing weight, in this case me, what you're really commenting on is my heart failure, my pulmonary hypertension, and the medications and restrictions that have been implemented to save my life. And you are saying that it is worth it if the byproduct of that is that I lose weight. People don't intend for that to be the conversation, but if you're commenting on, say, Adele, losing weight and Adele comes out and says, 'I got divorced and then I was having panic attacks. As a result of that, I had to start exercising to regulate my nervous system.' What you're saying to Adele is, 'I'm glad that happened so you could lose weight.'

So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way, and you just never know. It could be cancer. It could be depression. It could be an eating disorder. You just never know the reason why somebody else's body is different. Unless you're really close to that person and are witnessing whatever their journey is and sitting down with them every day to figure out what's going on with them, it's just inappropriate to comment on their body period. It's just not an appropriate thing to do, it's just not normal or natural but our society has normalized it to the point that we think it's OK to not only do it in our family but to do with celebrities we don't even know. 

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