I have some strange ideas about my relationship history.  Up to nine months ago, I claimed that I’d never had a ‘real’ relationship in my life.  I also claimed that all my relationships were bad relationships.  (See the strange yet?)  I’ve always been convinced that both of these things were because I was fat.  But NONE of these things are true.  I’ve had relationships, I’ve had good relationships, and I’ve had relationships both because of and regardless of my fat.

It is true that I’ve spent a lot of my life as a single person.  And it’s true that I’ve broken my heart a helluva lot.  But I have dated a respectable number of people (for some values of ‘respectable’, anyway).  And I’ve actually only had two truly bad relationships.  Only two.  Other relationships may not have gone the way I wanted them to, but there’s only two that have been really bad -  by which I mean emotionally or psychologically damaging.

The first of my bad relationships was in my late teens and early twenties. It lasted just over two years and is the longest relationship I’ve ever had.  We were never officially a couple, and the whole affair was kept secret, even when we lived together (twice!) – partly because we worked together, partly because he didn’t want the fact that he had a lover to interfere with picking up other girls, and mostly  because he didn’t want anyone to know that he was fucking a fat girl.  I’m not making that up, or extrapolating from anything – he told me straight out that if anyone found out he was it would be over (people found out, it wasn’t over, we just continued to deny it).  He also told me once that if I were thin, “we’d be married by now.”  I’m counting that as a lucky escape.

I accepted the lying, the secrecy, the other women because I thought I didn’t deserve any better.  Because I thought that I was so incredibly hideous that no one would ever want to be with me ‘properly’ and so this was the best that I could get.  I’m pretty sure there was also a bit of the myth that a bad boy will come good with the love of a good woman at work in there.  Romantic comedies have a lot to answer for.  I eventually met some new friends who made me feel like I wasn’t the most hideous person in the world and finally had the courage to leave.  I was heartbroken for years after.  I really and truly believed that no one could ever love me because I was fat.

The second really bad relationship was in my late twenties, and quite short (three months or so).  We started going out because she chased me.  My interest in being with her was primarily my interest in being pursued (even though she’s one of the most conventionally attractive people I’ve dated).  The sex was absolutely minimal (once) and absolutely non-reciprocal.  (Incidentally, sleeping with her made me very aware that fat bodies and thin bodies are incredibly, radically, different.  It was kind of shocking to be confronted with a body so different from mine when, both being girl bodies, they were ‘supposed’ to be so much the same.)  I raised the no-sex issue, but never pushed it because, well, who’d want to fuck a fat girl?  Even though at that stage I was well and truly into fat acceptance.  Even though I’d had experience of dating people who loved fucking fat girls, who only wanted to fuck fat girls, or who really liked fucking this particular fat girl, I was so indoctrinated with the idea that fat girls are unfuckable that I couldn’t actually stand my ground and say “This is not ok”.  There was, of course, more to the story: I was trying to do-things-differently from the past and not instigate a pre-emptive break-up; I told her that I was not going to break up with her and that if that’s what she wanted, she’d have to do it herself.  She kept reassuring me she really did like me but had “issues”.  After three months of this, I decided that doing-things-differently-be-damned, it wasn’t ok.  She had decided the same thing at the same time.

The way she told me was to say: “I was only pretending to like you”.

I wasn’t heartbroken, but I was psychologically devastated.  This was my secret paranoia in every relationship (which she knew, because I’d told her in order to reassure her that “everyone has issues”).  “Only pretending” has been my secret paranoia since year seven when Ben Richardson used to shout across the schoolyard, “Sizeoftheocean, you give me orgasms!” Since year seven means every single relationship I have ever had. EVER.  I always “knew” that anyone expressing interest in me was probably doing it to mock me.  To set me up as a punch-line. AND: She knew this.  SHE KNEW THIS.  Yes, I am still angry.  It was a cruel and deliberate thing to say (looking back, there were plenty of clues to this tendency, but I ignored them because, well, I’m fat and she’s not and surely I should just shut up and be grateful for the attention).

But back to the point: I’ve had two terrible and devastating relationships.  Hardly every relationship I’ve ever had.  I’ve actually had some quite wonderful relationships, even if they mostly haven’t gone the way I’d like them to.  But I always believed that I hadn’t had – and couldn’t have – the kind of relationship I wanted because I was fat.

I know fat acceptance as a movement works pretty hard to dispel the idea that fat women will accept anything just to get sexual and romantic attention. But at a certain time in my life, this was absolutely true for me, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that.  I think it’s also important to acknowledge that being fat does actually make it likely you’ll encounter extra challenges in dating (because there aren’t enough challenges already), even if it’s just in the constant, endless, relentless message that no one will ever want a fat girl.  A message which is rubbish, by the way, but still extremely powerful.  A message which taught me to put up with being mistreated.  A message which taught me to pre-emptively reject myself before anyone else could, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy because I foreclosed any possibility before it could become a reality. A message that brought with it the nagging idea that because being fat precluded me from having a “real” relationship (despite ample evidence to the contrary), it meant that I was precluded from being a worthwhile person, someone who really mattered.  Romantic love and coupling-off are culturally positioned as profoundly desirable, deeply necessary, and ultimately validating. “You’re no one until somebody loves you” and all that.  A message which taught me to negate my personality and desires in order to become what someone else wanted (yeah, that worked out real well).  A message which has been the hardest thing about fat acceptance that I’ve dealt with, because it’s necessarily completely wrapped up with other people’s opinions and desires.

For the last nine months I’ve been dating a boy (let’s  call him ‘The Socialist’).  I wouldn’t say our relationship is perfect by any stretch, but it’s good.  We have fun together.  I’m completely myself around him, which is a revelation.  I don’t feel the immanent threat of being dumped for someone else, someone thinner, someone more interesting (it’s amazing how trying to be what someone else wants actually makes you incredibly dull).  More importantly is that I’ve started to seriously deconstruct the ideology of romance and coupledom, and what exactly a ‘real relationship’ is anyway.

I think there are a lot of reasons for wanting the kind of relationship privileged by the dominant culture. Primarily, that is THE ONLY KIND OF RELATIONSHIP that is ever depicted as valid in the dominant culture.  I think this message is much stronger for women, but men certainly don’t escape it. There are all sorts of privileges which accrue to couples – economic, social, and cultural privileges. There’s the incredible benefit of emotional support and knowing that someone’s on your side and always having a friendly face at parties, of not having to go it on your own all the damn time*. Of knowing that you’re loved. Of having visible social approval in the form of someone who loves you and publicly acknowledges that fact.

The privileges and social validation that comes along with coupledom have become more and more blatant the longer I’ve been seeing The Socialist.  And that will be the subject of another post.

____________

*I am, of course, speaking only of functional relationships, where there are tangible emotional benefits. Obviously not all relationships are like that, and sometimes being in a relationship can actually be emotionally damaging rather than nurturing. I also realise that this is a bit idealistic even for good relationships.

One things that almost all of these responses have in common (and that Cooper’s take doesn’t) is that they’re all resting on an unexamined idea of a ‘natural body’.  AND THERE IS NO SUCH THING.  There, I said it.  I know this is an unpopular notion in Fat Acceptance.  Set point theory has been incredibly useful for many people in re-conceptualising fatness as genetically determined rather than the result of gluttony, sloth, a lack of self-will, a moral deficit.  I’m not coming out for or against the theory – I’m rather decidedly not interested in engaging with the statistics wrangling that characterises so much of these debates around fat.  The theory seems to make a lot of sense in a lot of cases, though I’m not sure it can account for everything.  But beyond the question of veracity, there are political implications to the idea of a ‘natural’, pre-determined fatness, and that is that “moral protection is founded on a loss of political control” (I’m quoting from my favourite chapter of Kathleen LeBesco’s wonderful Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity).  As LeBesco says:

While I understand the impulse to contravene declarations that fat folk are voracious, eating-obsessed pigs … I believe that allowing oneself to engage in such a debate drains pro-fat rhetoric of its power.  Saying “I don’t eat any more than anyone else” basically says, “I can’t help it – I’m not fat because of anything I did – so leave me along”.  It also says, “I will allow my right to exist as a subject (reflective, reasonable, with power to act) to be predicated upon how much I eat or don’t eat” – and this is ultimately a self-defeating move.

Again, this isn’t an argument for or against set point theory (which was never the point of this post anyway – how did I end up here?); it’s an argument against the political usefulness of the idea of the ‘natural body’.  Lesley at Fatsionista recently posted a take-down of the nature argument, and even though my argument is slightly different, I still recommend reading it (and not just because, despite my profound disagreement on the matter of Gaga, Lesley is one of my favourite fat bloggers).

One of the points Lesley makes is that the idea of ‘nature’ is actually a cultural construct.  What do we mean when we say something is ‘natural’?  I think that, in general, we mean that it hasn’t been altered or intervened with in anyway.  Which is completely impossible.  Everything we do changes our body in some way.  Not doing something changes our body in some other way.  Everything you eat becomes a part of you.  And if you don’t eat, well, that has other implications.  Breathing air, drinking water, wearing clothes, walking, driving, sitting, standing, sleeping, all of these things alter the body in some way.  The body is always in flux, and we can’t live without taking in things from our environment, things which change us.  An unaltered body is, by definition, not alive.  (This is highly influenced by a presentation I recently attended by Rachael Kendrick on metabolism, and while I’m sure I’m this is an obscene misappropriation of her argument, I found it very interesting.  Kendrick isn’t always entirely fat-positive, but she does an excellent critique of medial science and obesity epidemic discourse.)

The ideal ‘natural’ body is also frequently invoked in anti-fat rhetoric, particularly in the figure of the ‘caveman’.  In fact, some people call for a return to this way of eating (if not this way of living).  The idea is that the human body is ideally suited to a palaeolithic lifestyle and that our digestive systems work best if we eat only foods that were around 2 million years ago, and avoid all that new-fangled stuff like ‘grains’ and ‘beans’.  This idea basically harnesses the discourse of evolution in the service of what amounts to a creationist argument.  It posits that the ideal human design was arrived at somewhere in the deep and distant past, and has remained constant ever since.  It denies evolution as an ongoing process, and most importantly, ignores the fact that the caveman body was as much a product of its environment as the modern human body is.

Again, this post isn’t really about evolution vs creationism.  It’s about the idea that there’s a perfect, or ideal, or just pre-determined way that the human body should be, and that any deviation from that is a sign that there’s something wrong. In anti-fat discourse, fatness is seen as a deviation from the ‘naturally’ thin body.  In fat-acceptance, dieting or otherwise deliberately changing the body is also seen as a deviation from the ‘natural’ body.  Neither of these positions interrogates the ‘should’.  Neither of them adequately accounts for the interactions of the body with the world.  Neither of them acknowledge that the body is always being altered, is always changing, adapting, becoming.  That the raw biological material of the body does not exists apart from the culture, the environment, their interactions.  That there is no unaltered, unmodified, unchanged, ‘natural’ body.

Now, I get why people are reacting strongly to the Donna Simpson story.  It’s confronting.  She’s already a fat woman and she wants to get fatter.  It’s almost incomprehensible.  And there’s the feederism aspect, which understandably draws some concern and criticism.*  There’s the question of weather her weight gain is ‘freely chosen’ (I have issues with the idea of ‘freely chosen’ anyway, but that’s a whole other post) or directly coerced or something she’s had to resort to.  There’s the predictable fat-bashing rhetoric about health, mothering, responsibility, and being a burden on society, which doesn’t actually bother me all that much because, predictable.  What bothers me is the claim that any deliberate modification of the body is ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘unnatural’.  Is ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ because it is ‘unnatural’.

Nobody’s – NOBODY’S – body is ‘natural’.

____________________________

*I am, however, really keen for a re-thinking of the automatic and outright condemnation of feederism.  I think that yes, it is undeniably problematic, but I suspect it’s not a straightforward as the “No! Bad! Wrong!” responses claim.  I think the responses to feederism need to be understood within the context of fat-hatred, especially since it’s so easily posed in opposition to dieting, which may draw criticism but not the same level of disgust and outrage.  I also think it needs to be re-thought in terms of fetishism; I think that the idea of sexual attraction to fat bodies is still so taboo, that the desire for a fatter body is seen as reprehensible.  Similarly, taking pleasure in fat embodiment is inconceivable, so getting fatter could never be ‘freely chosen’.  ALL of this rests on a bed of fat hate, which is why it attracts much more vicious reactions than many other fetishes.  It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if I were to tie up my boyfriend and spank him for his/my/our sexual gratification, it would draw much less criticism and condemnation than if I were to deliberately gain weight for his/my/our sexual gratification.  And before anyone asks, no, I’m not going to do that, I’m just illustrating a point.

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.

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.

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?

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

Privilege is a tricky thing.  It has a tendancy to be invisible.  It’s hard to see when you have it, and it can also be really hard to see when you don’t have it – mostly because not having it is constructed as an individual fault rather than part of a structural and/or cultural system (poor people are poor because they don’t work hard; fat people are fat because they’re lazy and greedy).

For me, fat is the main area where I’m consistently aware of privilege and oppression.  The other big ones in my life are class/economics (my childhood wavered between welfare class and working poor), never having had any family or partner support to speak of (I’ve actually never seen anyone articulate this as privilege, but I absolutely believe it is), and some pain issues about having messed-up feet and joints (not related to being fat, but it interacts with it in perception).  There’s also being a woman and being queer, which I know are massive categories but I don’t experience the same level of difficulty around them – I think this has more to do with how normalised/naturalised gender categories are, rather than those particular oppressions being in any way minimal.  But for this post, I’m going to focus on fat.

I’ve always been fat.  I always AM fat.  And it’s always obvious.  It’s the physical characteristic I’m most aware of, and because of that, I have this unspoken assumption that it’s what other people are most aware of about me, too.  This may or may not be the case, but it colours every interaction I have with the world and everyone in it.

I’m usually the fattest person in the room.  I’m often the only fat person in the room.  When I meet someone for the first time, there’s a part of me that’s already – subconsciously – convinced they won’t want to know a fat person.  When I talk to some cutie at a party, there’s always a part of me that’s already – subconsciously – convinced that they won’t want to get stuck talking to the fat girl all night when there’s hot (read: thin) girls to be talking to.  When I meet some potentially eligible partner, I’ve already rejected myself on their behalf.  When someone does express an interest in me, I wonder if they’re trying to be politically correct, or they’re fetishising me, or they feel sorry for me, or they have some sort of horrified curiosity.  When I go on a date, I feel like I have two-and-a-half strikes against me before I’ve even opened my mouth.  These are not merely the products of my imagination – they’re the products of popular culture, of discourse, of personal communication, of experience.

When I go to the gym, I’m fat.  And there’s a part of me that knows people are looking at me and making judgements – about how hard or fast I’m exercising, about how much I should do, about why they think I’m doing it (no, it’s not to loose weight, but you can’t tell that by looking).  When my friends invite me to go out dancing, I hesitate because I’m aware of by fat body and how I’m not supposed to dance in public.  When they go to dance class and don’t invite me, I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m fat.

When I go to a new class, or to a conference or a seminar or a reading group, I feel like I don’t belong.  When I go to a new bar I wonder if I’m going to be ignored – or worse, looked at – because I don’t fit in.  Because I don’t fit in.  Whenever I go into a shop that doesn’t cater specifically to fat people, I know I won’t find anything to fit.

When I walk down the street in a halter-neck or spaghetti straps and get cow-called by a passing car, I know how revolting my body is seen to be.  When I go swimming and I pass a group who burst into whale song, I know exactly why.

When I go to the doctor, I know the blood pressure cuff won’t fit and they’ll suggest I exercise more and eat better.  When I go for a job interview, I know how hard I have to work to convince them I’m not lazy or sloppy or bad for the corporate image.

Wherever I go, I’m fat.  Wherever I go, it’s the most visible thing about me.  Wherever I go, I know that fat is not cool, not pretty, not desirable, not elegant, not hip, not wanted.

This isn’t a play for sympathy.  It’s not about me being a sad individual with low self-esteem (most anybody who knows me would shoot milk out their nose if you suggested that).  And it’s most certainly not all in my head.  It’s an example of how privilege works to keep oppressed people down.  It’s just a little bit of what I – an otherwise conventionally pretty, stylish, intelligent, accomplished, reasonably popular fat girl – have to deal with every time I leave the damn house.  It’s an example of the extra crap on top of all the ordinary crap that everyone has to deal with.  It’s how things get made just a little bit harder for certain groups of people, in ways which look like individual issues (shyness, self-esteem) but are really produced by the culture at large.

Why?  I’m doing this PhD on fatness and sexual subjectivity.  Part of what I’m looking at is the interventions fat people are making into representation and discourse; how we negotiate/re-negotiate our fat identities.  In a way, it’s sort of turning into a thesis on the fat/size acceptance movement.  And because of that, I want to do some ‘field work’ of sorts.  That is, hop over to the US (being the centre of the FA-universe) and hang out with some awesome fatties doing awesome fatty things.  So I’m starting to put together a sort of calender of fatty events for next year so I can try to figure out the best time to go and fit in as much as possible.

Dear people of the fat-o-sphere, I need your help.  I know it’s probably a little early to really know when things are happening in 2010, but if you do know of any awesome and fat-related events or places I should visit, please tell me all about it!  I’m particularly interested in:

- Conferences (both academic and activist)
- Performances (theatre, dance, burlesque, etc)
- Community events
- Fatshion-related stuff (eg, fat girl flea, Re/Dress, etc)
- Awesome fatties who might be interested in hanging out and talking
- Pretty much anything else you care to mention

Thanks heaps in advance!

Ok, go!

(x-posted everywhere I go)

ETA: I’ve added a calendar to track and share any events.  You can comment here, there, via email, or however you want.  Awesome. ]]> http://www.fatuosity.net/2009/10/19/places-to-go-things-to-do-request-for-fat-events-info/feed/ 2 http://www.fatuosity.net/2009/10/14/obesity-its-like-killing-mittens/ http://www.fatuosity.net/2009/10/14/obesity-its-like-killing-mittens/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:21:44 +0000 sizeoftheocean http://www.fatuosity.net/?p=46 So there’s an absolutely ridiculous article about how Obesity May Threaten Mitten Industry, based on the ridiculous headline to this apparently serious piece of ‘scientific journalism’.  Which has had me giggling to myself pretty much all day.  It’s like a wonderful piece of absurdest satire (is that even a thing?).  It’s so ridiculous that it makes the absurdity of so much obesity reporting really fricken obvious.

1. Take an observation (a small sample of fat people have, on average, slightly warmer hands and slightly cooler bellies than a small sample of thin people).

2. Draw some conclusions (fat people loose more body heat through their hands because fat has insulating properties…?).

3. Extrapolate to mean THE-END-OF-THE-WORLD-ZOMG-WELL-OK-NOT-THE-WORLD-BUT-THE-MITTEN-INDUSTRY-AND-MAYBE-THE-SOCK-INDUSTRY-TOO-BECAUSE-WE-ASSUME-FAT-PEOPLE-HAVE-HOT-FEET-TOO-EVEN-THOUGH-WE-DIDN’T-MEASURE-THAT-AND-ANYWAY-ONCE-THE-MITTEN-INDUSTRY-AND-THE-SOCK-INDUSTRY-ARE-GONE-YOU-MIGHT-AS-WELL-SAY-GOODBYE-TO-CIVILISATION-ITSELF even though you don’t actually say that mitten sales have decreased one iota.  This step is also known as: Invent An Entirely Imaginary Problem To Blame On Fat People.

Well, that settles it.  I’m donating my seven pairs of mittens to a charity for cold skinny people.  Well, ok, it’s actually six pairs of gloves and only one pair of mittens.  And those mittens are also convertable to fingerless gloves, so I don’t know if they even count at mittens…

Never mind the logical disconnect where warmer hands would actually feel colder (ever had a fever that’s made you shiver?).  Or that, if you were loosing body heat through your hands, it would be extremely efficient to put on mittens to trap the heat and stay warm (same logic as wearing a hat).  It would even be more efficient than, say, putting on a jacket, since your fat belly is already keeping all the heat in there (ha! obesity is really killing the jacket industry!  I knew it was killing something!).

I wonder if Carol Burdge, executive director of the International Glove Association, actually mean to imply that fat people’s hands were somehow akin to finely calibrated instruments that could accurately register the temperature to fractions of degrees when she said “You could use your hands like thermometers”?

Any you know what?  It’s not a bad piece of writing.  So, here it is.

Fat Year

I’m having a fat year.

A whole year of feeling fat.  Of thinking fat, of talking fat, of writing fat, of being fat.  Of owning fat.  My fat.

how to talk about the body like it’s not my body

I spent years in classes where lecturers talked about ‘the body’.  I read articles and chapters and theories about embodiment.  I wrote papers on corporeality.  All with the (un)easy knowledge that none of it, none of it, was about my body.  Not my body.  Not this body.  Not fat.  In the specificities of race, gender, class, age, ability, and desire, size has disappeared.  In the intersections, the networks, the inscriptions and readings, the talk about boundaries, fluidity, impulses, lines of flight.  In all the talk about flesh, there is a careful avoidance of fleshiness.

Not that body.

At the library I look up books on the body.  There are many.  I search the shelves for titles on the body and philosophy, the body and society, the body and what it means to have one, to live one, to be one.  What it means to be a body.  I take these books off their carefully arranged shelves and turn to the carefully arranged indexes.  I look up ‘fat’.  I look up ‘obese’.  I find almost nothing.  I look up ‘weight’ and ‘size’ and sometimes find references to thinness, eating disorders, diets and exercise.

In books dedicated to the study of the body, only certain bodies have been deemed acceptable.  In books dedicated to the study of the deviant body, only certain deviations have been deemed worthy.  Fat is not one of them.  Transgression, it seems, should be edgy, razor-sharp and full of angles.  Should be about the corporeal but not the corpulent.

Fatness is absent from the body of bodily theory, which is thin theory, anorexic theory, theory afraid of fat (but which, perhaps, perceives its reflection to occupy more space than it actually does; the space of all bodies everywhere).  Fatness is a structuring absence which is not acknowledged, not admitted to in (or into) theory, but which nonetheless is constantly implied/denied by the normal(ised) anorexic body.  Corpulence is the repressed and silenced other of corporeal theory.

I can, of course, find many books the talk about fat.  About how bad it is, how unhealthy it is, how unattractive it is.  How stupid and poor and ugly and smelly and lazy and immoral it is.  Most of all, about how to get rid of it.

There is a war on obesity.  A war on bodies like mine.  Can I call it genocide?

how to talk about bodies like mine

Susan Bordo[i] writes about ‘bringing the body to theory’.  Not just theorising the body, taking the flesh and making it words, but making the words fleshy.  Bringing the body to theory.  The body which sits cold and tired at the desk and writes.  The body which eats, sleeps, desires, hungers, grows.  The body which thinks, which cares.  Thinks this is important and cares enough to make something of it.  The body which labours to produce.

Not the body of Descartes, a great deceiver fundamentally other to the self.  Not the body of Orbach[ii], a great betrayer manifesting psychological wounds.  Rather, the body as body.

Mid-year I stand at the front of a class and talk about the body, the fat body, the body that is like mine, but I don’t say it is like mine.  I don’t say I have anything to do with it.  I talk about fat and the self, fat as antithetical to the self.  Inside every fat person, the story goes, is a thin one trying to get out.  (There is no possibility that  person trying to get out is fat.)

I talk about visibility, about what it means to see bodies like that (like mine).  How Laura Kipnis[iii] argues that fat is obscene (off-screen), that its display is pornographic in and of itself.  How bringing these bodies to the screen is a potentially subversive act.  It threatens to make them normal.

I wonder what could happen simply by being seen.

how to talk about my body like it’s my body

La Nell Guiste[iv] writes about ‘coming out’ as a fat woman.  It seems ridiculous, redundant.  Fat’s very visibility, its insistence, its immanence, make closeting seem impossible.  There is no hiding it.  Coming out as fat means not trying to pass as ‘on the way to thin’.  It’s a deviation not only of matter but of intent.  The refusal of a compulsory desire.

To be ‘out’ as fat is harder than you might imagine.  It’s socially taboo.  People protest when you mention it.  They deny, minimise, try to reduce the impact.  But the body insists.  They don’t like the word ‘fat,’ think it’s ugly, offer instead ‘big-boned’ or ‘broad-shouldered’ (I laugh) or ‘overweight’ (I protest: over whose weight?).  They don’t like the thing, the substance, the look of it, the implications.  The threat.

To insist on my fatness is a radical act.
To not try to change it, unbelievable (denial).
To find others who like it?  Incomprehensible.

(and I thought coming out as fat was hard)

The disbelief disappears quickly enough, and I am left with the uneasy question of validation: is it acceptable only because he says it’s acceptable (preferable)?  This is one of the main grounds on which the war is fought (the other being impending death), but isn’t equal-opportunity objectification is still objectification?

how to write the body like a body

How to write about fat as fat?  Not as psychological disturbance or eating disorder.  Not as wrath or greed or sloth or gluttony.  Not as comfort or sorrow or guilt or grief.  Not as the failure of thin.

Not as the failure of thin, but as substance and substantial.  As meaningful and relevant.  As desirous and desired.  As loving, lusting, aching, hurting, hungering.  As a body in the world, as person, identity, self.  As a real thing.

How to write a body like mine?

[ii] Orbach, Susie, 1978, Fat is a Feminist Issue, Hamlyn, London.

[iii] Kipnis, Laura, 1996, ‘Life in the Fat Lane,’ Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, Grove Press, New York.

[iv] Guiste, La Nell, 2004, ‘Let ME eat Cake!’ Off Our Backs, Nov/Dec <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3693/is_200411/ai_n9473135>, accessed 19 February 2006.