The readings the past week have made me think about how our society has convinced itself that the way we operate now is functionable, and we punish those who don’t or refuse to conform, that they are the ones who need fixing. The first narrative in class that first made me think about this was the Maintenance Phase podcast episode, Fat Camp. Essentially, these camps are for children to lose weight. Many of these kids report bullying in school, lack of friends, and isolation. These kids, as observed from the documentary they played, also received verbal harassment from their parents to lose weight. The agreed solution for these issues is to send them to a camp, away from family and friends to put them on strict diets and intense exercise. The solution is to “fix” the kids. These children don’t learn important lessons about their body. Their peers don’t learn important lessons about bullying or people who are different from you and their parents don’t learn important lessons about their children. None of these people unpack the actions they’ve endured, or the actions they have taken. We undertake individual solutions to social problems.

These kids’ problems are not individual. These kids don’t speak into the camera about how it’s harder for themselves to walk or play, in fact much of the footage of them at home is exactly that, them playing in the skate park, or running around with friends. These kids lament about how they’ve been ostracized for their weight, at school and at home. They don’t end up hating their bodies in a vacuum. The problem that needs fixing is not the children, or anyone who is fat, but rather the society that alienates and otherizes fat people. A society that is obsessed with diets and weight loss and justifies the harassment of fat people. Why should the marginalized have to change themselves for a problem they did not create? A problem that they have are the victims of?

A similar concept is presented in “When Coercion In Care Makes Kilmeade’s “just kill ’em” Thinkable” a blog post by Shannon Pagdon on the Disability Visibility Project website. The post discusses how our society demonizes people with mental health and forces them into institutions, robbing them of their autonomy. Further along in the article, Pagdon mentions laws that seek to “fix” the growing homeless population by forcibly placing the homeless into psychiatric wards and forcing people with mental health issues into treatment, threatening legal sanction if they don’t. Harmful solutions are only undertaken to “fix” the individual. They strip them of autonomy, remove consent, forcibly place them in institutions and inject their bodies against their will. These resources are not used for community or housing support but rather control of the person. The problems that are caused by society are not treated as the social issues they are, the individual and only the individual needs to be “fixed.”