This isn't related to the excerpts but i've been thinking a lot about is how capitalism and capitalist adjacent societies denigrates bodies who are or look unfit to work/produce. I'm reading caliban and the witch right now, and learning about the scale of how often women (well, people who had a uterus and AFAB during those times) were punished for simply trying to retain control of their bodies. They were denigrated to the role of a womb and if their womb was not producing the right kinds of children, with the right people and often enough, you were in danger of being deemed a witch and punished for it.

Of course, controlling whether your uterus is capable of producing healthy children and the health of those children in a time before vaccines was completely out of control of these parents.

Later on, during the slave trade era, black slave women would be seen as equal worker to any man on top of well, the much fouler and triggering stuff involving wombs and chattel slavery. In every case, the assigned-woman worker here is seen as having value only related to their bodies and what they can be used for, as if every human is just another cog in the capitalist machine, and the value of the cog is entirely decided by what the external body looks like (completely out of the human's control).

Woman shaped cog can be used for babies. Strong shaped cog can be used for labor. If you don't fit those, you are useless, valueless and we will persecute you for not fitting in our machine how we like. Even today if you have an intellectual type job, it's still difficult to get those if you are visibly physically disabled in some way or there is a social stigma attached to you.

Speaking of how being fat relates to this, being fat makes you less likely to be hired and impacts your income negatively, most especially if you are being perceived as a woman.

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/aug/30/demoted-dismissed-weight-size-ceiling-work-discrimination

Shown hypothetical CVs with photographs depicting fat and thin people, the participants clearly perceived men and women of average weight to be the most suitable for employment. Obese women were the least likely to be hired. The researchers concluded that stereotypes of obese people being “less physically capable and slothful” were likely to have played a role in this outcome.

The result of this prejudice is not only that overweight people stand less chance of getting a job; they are paid less, too. In 2016, researchers at the University of Exeter found that a woman who was a stone heavier would on average earn £1,500 less a year than a comparable woman of the same height. Overweight people also work longer hours, are considered less qualified for leadership positions and are expected to be less successful, according to numerous studies.

But this shouldn't be a surprise. Over and over, we see powerful people picking and choosing who and what is acceptable to them and basically creating a restrictive culture around it. And of course those powerful people are going to mainly be focused on how to exploit workers and extract profit. Fatphobia succeeds in that completely, AND creates an industry that profits billions off people's shame that they are or might become fat.