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So everyone has heard about the whole Kevin Smith vs Southwest Airlines thing by now, yes?  (Just in case you haven’t, you can find out all about it here, here, here, or, well, a whole bunch of other places.)  Basically, Kevin Smith got kicked off his flight for being too fat, and there’s been a whole of a tweet/blog/cast explosion about it.

It’s been really interesting to see some of the things that Smith has said, especially given that he’s not by any means a fat-positive guy.

I’ve been listening to his SModcast about the incident, and along side his anger and indignation at being publicly humiliated and treated with something less than dignity, there’s some really interesting discussion of thin normativity and fat self-policing, like in this exchange:

K: I live my life fat, and I have to navigate through a thin person’s world all the time.  And as such, you would never put yourself into harm’s way, so to speak, um, in regards to your girth or size.

J: You wouldn’t set yourself up.

K: Never.

I can sort of sense an almost apologist streak to some of what Smith says, but what’s interesting to me is that he’s talking very clearly about self-policing, about being acutely aware all the time that the fat body doesn’t fit, and avoiding situations where that’s going to be a ‘problem’, where fatness is punished with pain or shame or public humiliation.

He also talks about being at a ‘bear convention’ and being able to relax and not ’suck his gut in’ all the time:

K: I was in a room full of people who looked like me.

J: How was that?

K: Muscle-y and gay.  No, they’re fat, they’re dudes who look like very large dudes who look like me.  It’s awesome!

Yep, I think that’s some fat solidarity right there!

Coincidentally, all this has happened just as I’ve been reading Joyce Huff’s fantastic ‘Access to the Sky: Airplane Seats and Fat Bodies as Contested Spaces’ in The Fat Studies Reader.  Huff interrogates Southwest’s policy of forcing fat passengers to buy two seats and the arguments which are used to justify it.  As Huff points out, ‘the “average” customer, for whom Southwest presumably designs its seats, represents and ideological construct rather than a statistical average’.  She goes on to argue that:

The underlying ideology that determines the size of the so-called average customer to whom Southwest supposedly caters is a capitalist one.  Although airlines and their supporters may invoke average customers who represent cultural ideals, in fact seat sizing has a lot more to do with profit margins and maximizing the number of paying customers.

This arbitrary allocation of space is normalised and the ‘corporately constructed environment’ is rendered invisible by invoking as ‘average’ the ideal passenger for whom the seats are a comfortable size, and stigmatizing (and penalising!) those bodies which fail to conform to this arbitrary ideal.  Blame for everything from lack of space to increased fares is shifted onto the offending bodies, and individuals – rather than corporations or cultures – are stigmatised and held responsible not only for these problems, but also for their solution (ie, in this case, weight loss).

As Huff argues:

Southwest’s policy assumes an audience accustomed to capitalist modes of thought, one that will endorse the premise that businesses need to continually increase profit margins, one that will believe that this need is sacrosanct to the degree that they will subordinate their own needs and desires to it.

I for one am glad that Kevin Smith is a loquacious dude with a platform, and that he’s not willing to subordinate his needs to the rhetoric of corporate profit.

Fat acceptance has given me my body.  Of course, I always had a body, but for a while there I was pretty disconnected from it.  I remember years ago someone telling me that they had seen me some place and I was shocked.  I was shocked that they had seen me, that I was visible, that I actually, physically existed.

I’ve also, in the past, had trouble consciously acknowledging physical pain.  I’ve had chronic ankle and knee problems since I was a kid, and even though I knew that, and could articulate it to some extent, I would recast the physical limitations engendered by that pain as defects of character.  Rather than consciously acknowledging that I couldn’t walk too fast or too far without causing myself pain, I would ‘forget’ about how much it hurt and interpret my reluctance to engage in physical exercise which actively hurt me as being a bad, lazy fatty.  I have, thankfully, developed much more awareness, and I find it easy to manage when I’m by myself – I’ll just catch the tram for two or three stops rather than walk, for example.  But it’s harder when I’m with other people and have to negotiate the shame (or fear of shame) of being (perceived as) a lazy fatty.  I not only walk with them, but often try to walk at their pace.  Which hurts me.  And I have to stop.

In the last year or so I’ve also had pretty bad RSI in my shoulder, from all the time I’ve been spending on the computer (note to self: blogging may be a break from thesising, but it’s not a break from the computer!).  I’m doing what I can to manage it – gym, stretching, regular breaks, yoga, massage.  One big factor – and by far the hardest for me to negotiate at the moment – is that I need to let my body take up space.  I find it particularly hard on public transport, where space is extremely limited already.  I’ve noticed how I hunch my shoulders, draw my arms across my body, try to shrink down to take up less space.  And how I stay that way even when my shoulder starts to ache and my neck muscles spasm.  Well, at the point of my neck muscles spasming I start to stretch and wriggle and find some way of sitting that doesn’t actively hurt me.

I do think it’s useful to be aware of my body in space and how it relates to other people.  I am endlessly infuriated by people (mostly men, but certainly not all or only men), who  s p r a w l  a n d  s p r e a d  o u t  and take up a four-seat all to themselves when the train is packed.  But this is not simply an awareness of my body in space, it’s also an awareness of how taking up more space is coded as selfish, anti-social, and shameful.  And how this coding affects the way I manage my fat body in public spaces.  And how subtle the monitoring and disciplining of the body can be.

I cannot even begin to describe how excited I am about this!  A fat studies conference!  In Australia!  With Charlotte Cooper!  And the absolutely brilliant Sam Murray!

PLEASE CIRCULATE TO ALL INTERESTED PARTIES

Call For Papers – Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue

To be held 10 ­ 11 September, 2010 Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

While cultural anxieties about fatness and stigmatisation of fat bodies in Western cultures have been central to dominant discourses about bodily ‘propriety’ since the early twentieth century, the rise of the ‘disease’ category of obesity and the moral panic over an alleged global ‘obesity epidemic’ has lent a medical authority and legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation of the dominant medical models of health, gives voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and offers critical insights into, and investigates the ethico-political implications of, the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies.

This two-day event will put Australasian Fat Studies into conversation with critical fat scholarship from around the globe by gathering together scholars from across a spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as activists, health care professionals, performers and artists. This conference seeks to open a dialogue between scholars, health care professionals and activists about the productive and enabling critical possibilities Fat Studies offers for rethinking dominant notions about health and pathology, gender and bodily aesthetics, political interventions, and beyond.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

* Charlotte Cooper (Department of Sociology, University of Limerick)

* Karen Throsby (Department of Sociology, University of Warwick)

Abstracts are sought that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):

* Interventions to normalise fat bodies (such as diet regimes, exercise programs, weight loss pharmaceuticals and bariatric surgeries);

* The ethico-political implications of the medicalisation of ‘obesity’;

* Constructions of the Œfat child¹ in childhood obesity media reportage;

* Representations of fat bodies in film, television, literature or art;

* Intersections of medical discourse and morality around ‘obesity’;

* The somatechnics of fatness;

* Fat performance art, fat positive performance troupes;

* Histories of fat activism and/or strategies for political intervention;

* Fat and queer histories/identities;

* Fat embodiment online, the Fat-O-Sphere;

* Feminist responses to fatness;

* Constructions of fatness in a range of cultural contexts;

* Systems of body quantification, measurement, and conceptualizations of (in)appropriate ’size’;

* Fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, disability and/or ageing.

Please send abstracts of 300 words, or panel proposals, to Dr Samantha Murray via email at Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au by Friday, 16 April 2010.

Well, this blog has been rather quiet lately.  Mostly because I’m not a very regular blogger to begin with, but also because of been off doing Epic Productivity (TM) on my actual thesis.  Theoretically, that should feed in here, but I have thousands of words of notes towards a chapter rather than a nice concise little five hundred word post.

Anyway, instead of a ‘proper’ post, I thought I’d share an extended quote from a book I’ve just started reading, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship by Lauren Berlant.  There is a chapter that talks a little bit about fat, but the book is more concerned with the race and sexuality in America. I want to make it clear that I think caution is needed in not appropriating wholesale the arguments and terminology of other struggles (I wouldn’t claim ’subaltern’ for white fat acceptance, for example), but I think this passage says some really useful and interesting things about privilege, activism, speaking, visibility, and the necessity for faith in other people.

Moments of optimism for the transformation of…political and social culture abound in the stories of subordinated peoples… A member of a stigmatized population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship.  Her witnessing turns into a scene of teaching and an act of heroic pedagogy, in which the subordinated person feels compelled to recognize the privileged ones, to believe in their capacity to learn and to change; to trust their desire to not be inhuman; and trust their innocence of the degree to which their obliviousness has supported a system of political subjugation.  These moments are acts of strange intimacy between subaltern peoples and those who have benefited by their subordination.  These acts of risky dramatic persuasion are based on a belief that the privileged persons of national culture will respond to the sublimity of reason.

I call these moments acts of Diva Citizenship.  Diva Citizenship does not change the world.  It is a moment of emergence that marks unrealised potentials for subaltern political activity.  Diva Citizenship occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege.  Flashing up and startling the public, she puts the dominant story into suspended animation; as though recording and estranging voice-over to a film we have all already see, she re-narrates the dominant history as one that the abjected people have once lived sotto voce, but no more; and challenges her audience to identify with the enormity of the suffering she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce, calling on people to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent.

Diva Citizenship has a genealogy that is only now beginning to be written; the fate of its time- and space-saturating gesture has been mostly to pass and to dissolve into nostalgia, followed by sentences like “Remember that moment, just a second ago, when X made everything so politically intense that it looked like sustained change for good would happen?”  The centrality of publicity to Diva Citizenship cannot be underestimated, for it tends to emerge in moments of such extraordinary political paralysis that acts of language can feel like explosives that shake the ground of collective existence.  Yet in remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity, it can lead to a confusion of wilful and memorable rhetorical performances with sustained social change itself.

Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, p222-223

I can think of a few examples of Fat Diva Citizenship – Beth Ditto’s whole public persona, for one.  The profile of Lezley Kinzel being herself in the Boston Globe.  Everyone who posts pictures to Fatshionista (livejournal or flickr) or Deathfatties.  The whole damn fatosphere in general, and any time “when a [fat] person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege.”

The claims of these moments of Fat Diva Citizenship tend to get co-opted by mainstream commercial interests in order to sell more magazines, but then, I wonder – is that a sign of some sort of sustained social change, even if it’s not the sort of change that upsets – or even challenges – the system in any real way?

So I’ve been reading and writing and thinking and talking a lot about fat and sex lately.

Well, ok, I haven’t been reading a lot, exactly, because there’s not a lot of academic work on fat and sex to read and some of what there is, is frankly appalling.  I have been reading what Samantha Murray, Jana Evans Braziel, and Laura Kipnis have to say on fat and sex, though, and it’s most interesting.  It’s got me thinking.

There’s so few images of fat women as sexual beings in mainstream representation.  Most of these representations are set up as parodic, absurd, carnivalesque, grotesque.  Images from fat porn occasionally find their way into the mainstream, where they are recontextualised as objects of ridicule rather than desire.  Any fat woman who dares to desire sex  is cast as oblivious to the disgust and repulsion her body must engender.  She must be delusional to think anyone could possibly want her.  As Murray says:

as a ‘fat’ woman I am expected to deny my own sexual desires and identity because my body stands as an ‘embolism’, to use Sedgewick’s term, between  my sexuality and my society (p123)

Yeah, I fucking love Sam Murray.  But that’s not really the point I’m trying to make.

The point I’m trying to make is that what this suggests to me is that being able to conceive of ourselves as a desirable object is integral to constituting ourselves as validly desiring subjects.  Extended out to the cultural level, it is necessary to be able to conceive of a body as desirable in order to conceive of its desires as valid or real.  In order for desire to be intelligible as desire.

What do you think?

References:

Samantha Murray, The Fat Female Body, 2008

Laura Kipnis, ‘Life in the Fat Lane’ in Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, 1996

Jana Evans Braziel, ‘Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body’ in Bodies Out Of Bounds, Desirable objects 2001