Editor’s Letter: Let’s Talk About Fat Travel
Author, activist, and Airbnb Magazine guest editor Virgie Tovar invites you to the conversation — the first in a new series on travel accessibility.
When Airbnb Magazine asked me to edit a package on fat travel — the first in a series on travel accessibility — my first reaction, if I’m being honest, was one of clammy discomfort. I soon realized that some of that stemmed from an unresolved sense of imposterhood, stoked by years of the uncontested and homogeneous image of the ideal traveler. Rarely do we see (or imagine) people of color or queer, trans, disabled, or fat people doing one of the most enriching, expansive activities available to humans: traveling.
My own travel career began at the age of eighteen with a trip to Italy. Alongside wonder and delight, I dealt with stuffed-to-the-brim planes with hip-pinching seats, judgy gelato servers, and body-shaming comments. I hoped against hope that I wouldn’t need to replace any of my clothes because all the stores in Italy seemed filled with the tiniest and most unforgiving pants I’d ever seen. No fat traveler is a stranger to this struggle.
In popular culture the image of the Person Who Travels is tall, svelte, and vaguely Swedish-looking, someone who swishes down snowy mountain trails, lounges glamorously on beaches, and wears cable-knit sweaters by the fire in outlandishly huge chalets.
None of those images even vaguely resembled me or any of the other plus-size writers I knew. But surely, there were others like me, I thought, who both loved to travel, and had a thing or two to share about navigating some of the unique challenges plus-size travelers face. It turns out, there are plenty, and a few of those writers contributed to the pages that follow.
Get answers to the most-asked fat travel questions from Annette Richmond, the moderator for Fat Girls Traveling. Mathew Rodriguez will get you thinking about how travel affects how we feel about eating, and Ashby Vose shares what she learned about her body on Peru’s Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu. I recommend you take notes from Lacey-Jade Christie’s open letter to a thin friend. It will help break the ice during your next mixed-size adventure. I’ll lead you to one of the most remote parks at the edge of California’s Bay Area, where I worked with thirty fat women to reimagine a new kind of summer camp. And you’ll learn about how I deepened a friendship on the road in search of some of the nation’s best pies.
This package is about telling important stories that often get left out of popular travel narratives. It’s also about making travel feel a little more accessible for those of us who don’t fit the mold — and it’s about giving that mold a much-needed makeover.
As I was finishing up this package I realized that these two important parts of my identity — fat and traveler — had long seemed incompatible, but they are actually copacetic. I wanted to escape from a culture that felt unwelcoming to me, a fat and more-than-a-little-mouthy woman of color. For many, travel is about that impulse: to see if the world is maybe a little bigger than you’d been told or to find a place where you are able to gain some tiny bit of perspective on things that seem overwhelming back at home. In that way, travel is a hopeful act. And my hope with this fat travel package is that it will not just push you to think about how different bodies navigate the world, but to perhaps imagine how you too can live large.
xoxo,
Virgie
About the author: Virgie Tovar is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat and started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight. She is one of the nation’s leading experts and lecturers on weight-based discrimination and body image.
