Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive, and complex telling of our understanding, perception, and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body, unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces. This book is not a "how-to" guide for fat confidence. It's not a compendium of fat suffering. It's simply a collection of narratives about what it's like to survive in a weight-hating world. It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people's ideas about our existence. The stories in this book are celebratory and are painful. They look at intersections of race and queerness; they destabilize womanhood by presenting a range of possible female embodiments. They explore issues of disability and madness. The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like. This book is a snapshot of its place and time, but these stories remind us that we're here to stay. The body stories will change but we will keep owning our own narratives. While story, especially written by women, is often seen as outside the academic canon, these stories, these creative offerings, are theory, are research, and are activism. They are nothing less than the blueprint for liberation. Writing about fat and about bodies outside of medicalized narratives, without ignoring the impact of race, sexuality, class, ability, gender, fashion, appearance, and beyond, is radical and rigorous. It is impossible to think about the future without wishing for liberation. Liberation can come in many forms. It can mean an awareness, the ability to confront. The stories in this book display the ways that liberation isn't a finish line or a thing we can complete—rather it is a million small actions and understandings in aid of a renewed and hopeful world.

本書は、固定的な「ボディ・イメージ」という概念を覆し、流動的で複雑な生身の経験を「物語」として奪還する野心作です。社会的な「正しさ」によって記号化されてきた身体たちが、自らの言葉で語り直すプロセスは、単なる告白を超えた痛烈な批評性を放っています。人種や障害が交差する地平で、痛みを抱えつつも生を肯定する筆致は、読者の魂を激しく揺さぶります。 これらの言葉は、既存の枠組みを壊す「解放の設計図」そのものです。社会が押し付ける「標準」への抵抗は、身体という最も個人的で政治的な場所から世界を変えようとする、切実なアクティビズムの結晶と言えます。自らの物語を自らの手に取り戻したいと願うすべての人へ、革命的な希望を与える一冊です。