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Sonalee & Jules’ workshop proposal was accepted to the 2026 Fat Liberation Symposium hosted by Dr. Caleb Luna at UCSB in May. We are taking this workshop on the road & into our local communities bc these ideas belong with the people not tucked away in the academy. Join us for in person dialogue about the fight for body autonomy (fatness, youth & adult transness, abortions, immigration, & many more) in this current fascist political climate.
We designed this virtual offering as a 3-part series to expand our somatic capacity and feel more embodied through practice together in a fat liberatory and loving space focusing on specific areas we have observed needing special attention in our work as trauma therapist (sonalee) & somatic practitioner (jules).

Disembodiment is the primary strategy through which oppression is maintained (Lama Rod Owens). Fascism knows that the more detached we are from our fat bodies, the easier our bodies will be to colonize and use towards fascism’s own ends (Cole Arthur Riley). The creep of fascism is alive in our ecosystems. Encroaching on the borders of our bodies, fascism projects a fantasy of power meant to intimidate, isolate, and produce obedience (Beatrice Adler-Bolton). Thus breeding body fascism: a somatic experience of fear, overwhelm, isolation, or helplessness. The impulse to dissociate from the body and leave our fat is in direct response to accelerating fascism (Jules Pashall). What survival strategies are we creating in a world where unsatiated billionaires wish to inject more and more of us with their weight loss fantasies? The wellness of the soil becomes inseparable from the wellness of our souls because when we love the land as body, as ancestor, as lover, we cannot poison the streams (Rowen White). We must turn our attention to our own fat bodies. What wisdom do they have to share about refusing to be poisoned?

In this workshop, we will trace the profit-driven proliferation of weight loss and why fat obedience is integral to disciplining our bodies. Trans queer fat adults only emerge into existence after winning their first battle: fat body autonomy, often as children. Reducing industries generate fatphobia as a distraction from the work needed to sustain and reproduce our fat futures (Toni Morrison). In accelerating fascism we ask, “what is your body feeling?” Not as a means to reduce activation, but instead to access more of the somatic capacity available to resist, knowing our resistance looks different depending on our role in revolution. This is a call to slow down. To continue to move at the pace of racialized capitalism, after what we’ve survived mid-pandemic, is not only unsustainable - it is capitalism death-making (@griefandgrits substack). In our refusal of reducing, disability is mapped onto our bodies as the antithesis of productive labor. This workshop will explore an anti-work ethic that challenges the over-valorization of making our bodies supremely functional for capitalist purposes (Work Will Not Save Us: An Asian American Crip Manifesto) to embody crip time, non-linear African time (@mumbipoetry instagram), in our dreaming wildly outside the cramped fascist imagination.

We must reclaim power over our bodies and lives (The Fat Underground, 1973) and we need our whole bodies for that- we need our fat for that! When was the last time you felt into the full shape, ferocity, splendor of your fatness? What wisdom do our fat bodies have for us in this time? Let’s find out together.