Letters / On “Bodies of Water”

I wanted to express my appreciation for “Bodies of Water,” a conversation between the artist Sasha Wortzel and the photographer Shoog McDaniel in the recent Florida issue of Jewish Currents. It is so rare to see fat voices and fat bodies represented positively, or even neutrally. In leftist media, depictions of fatness are often used as shorthand to signal overconsumption, capitalism, and greed. Such representations fail to engage with the marginalization of fat people, which—as Sabrina Strings argues in Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia—is rooted in eugenics, colonialism, and anti-Blackness. So I can’t express how refreshing, how heartening, and how moving it was to open the Florida issue and come across this engagement with McDaniel’s work, which actively subverts common cultural stereotypes by offering precious and rare visions of fatness as abundance, pleasure, and joy. Thank you, Sasha Wortzel, Shoog McDaniel, and Jewish Currents for your radical inclusion.