margitte leah | activist, blogger, filmmaker

a letter to potential ‘admirers’: what does my fat body mean to you?

By: margitte

13-05-2011

(Originally posted on tumblr, here.)

I’ve been wanting to write some sort of response to that Village Voice article about fat admirers from last week (beyond my first impressions post), but every time I sit down to write about its many problems, or about representations of fat sexuality in general (and where this article in particular fits in), I draw a blank. So instead of addressing that article in particular, I’d like to share some thoughts with you about my fat body and what it means to be the object of someone’s desire, in the form of a letter.

Dear Potential Sex Partner,

super quick: thoughts on fat & disability

By: margitte

23-03-2011

Uncategorized

Over on my other blog, somebody asked me what I thought about fat as a disability. The following was my response:
Fat people and people with disabilities have a LOT in common. We live in a world that is not meant to accommodate our bodies—a world that, in fact, actively *excludes* our bodies. Our bodies are demonized, because we are not “normal”—and if there is a way to make us “normal” (i.e. surgery, etc.), we are expected (shamed, forced) to take that route. People stare at us, we have stareable bodies. They feel like they are allowed to talk to us about our bodies, ask us how we “got this way”.

People think they know something about us—our histories, our habits, our health—just by looking.

We incite fear in “normal”-bodied people; we are what they could be if they ever lost control. Indeed, most people will become fat, and almost everyone—if they live long enough—will become disabled.

I know this is probably not what you meant when you asked about my thoughts on fat AS a disability, but here is the thing: fat people—just like all people with devalued, non-normative bodies—are disabled. NOT because our bodies can’t do things, but because we live in a world that STOPS our bodies from doing things.

A fat studies scholar whom I really respect and admire wrote to the fat studies list-serve sometime last year, to discuss why there aren’t more intersections and collaborative projects between work done in fat studies and work done in disability studies. She speculated that part of the problem, at least, is a phenomenon called ‘mutual recoil.’ (Basically, this happens when each side of a group hasn’t worked through their own negative beliefs about the other group, and thus do not want to be associated with them.)

Then she asked what I believe to be a really radical question:

“What would happen if, as politicized fat people, we embraced the word ‘disabled’ and used it in the same way disability studies scholars and activists use it? Not as a label denoting a body that needs to be fixed, adjusted, cured, or sanitized, but a body that challenges narrow and normative constructs of the body and an environment that literally oppresses many of us in terms of mobility and existing in space.”

In the incredibly (emotionally, physically, mentally) exhausting world of social justice movements, the more we can work together, the better. The more we can share our experiences with each other, the better. We need more listening, more pooling our resources, more collaborative work. We need less ‘mutual recoil’. We need to recognize how society disables all of us, and we need to work together towards a world that isn’t set up to exclude any bodies—fat, disabled, or otherwise.

musings on fat bodies and exclusion

By: margitte

20-03-2011

"obesity epidemic", body image, identity formation

The following is a short response paper I wrote last quarter… it’s nothing revolutionary, just some food for thought:

“The human landscape can be read as a landscape of exclusion” (Sibley, 1995, p. ix).

Just as lines are drawn on paper to map out the boundaries of physical space (and thus assert what belongs to “us” as opposed to what belongs to “them”), humans practice boundary-making at a much more local level: the body. While this act seems fairly cut-and-dry (I am my body, and anything that is not my body is not-me), the fact that we can never securely close off the boundaries of our bodies leaves us open and thus susceptible to contamination by that which is not-us. This vulnerability renders us incredibly anxious, and we become obsessed with maintaining these bodily boundaries and repulsed by the secretions (bodily or otherwise) that seep through them. Ultimately, this desire to keep oneself free of contagion is about keeping oneself pure, free of disease and death. On a more practical level, the process by which we establish what is us and not-us creates social boundaries between us and other people—in an effort to assert what is ME, I exclude what is Other to me, and this Other (Mead’s “generalized other”) becomes imbued with feelings of fear and desire, marked as good or bad, and eventually, is stereotyped in various ways so that I may “make the world seem secure and stable” (p. 15).

This process of ‘stabilizing’ or ‘fixing’ the identities of others (in an effort to define the self) is not only conducted at the level of the individual, but on a much larger scale, as well. Iris Young writes,

When the dominant group defines some groups as different, as the Other, the members of these groups are imprisoned in their bodies. Dominant discourse defines them in terms of bodily characteristics and constructs those bodies as ugly, dirty, defiled, impure, contaminated or sick (p. 18).

The effect of these categorizations is ultimately to define what is opposite of them: those characteristics that are considered normal (i.e. attractive, clean, pure, healthy, etc.). In other words, it is through the classification of deviance that we construct normality. This is especially salient with the construction of the “diseased other,” who, according to Sibley, “has an important role in defining normality and stability” (p. 24).

It is interesting to me how well this narrative maps onto the way current discourses about the “obesity epidemic” frame fatness and fat embodiment. Although fatness has yet to be proven as the cause of any disease, and while it is in fact documented as being protective against some diseases, many in the medical community keep pushing to frame or label “obesity” as a disease itself! From a rational point of view, this line of reasoning is nonsensical. However, if we understand the desire to construct disease as ultimately a desire about defining what is normal, and we view fatness as being “abnormal” or “not-us,” we can begin to see why people might want to claim the fat body as a diseased body.

It is also possible that, in our obsession with controlling and maintaining tight boundaries around the body, fatness—with its excess supposedly bursting at the seams—is seen as a threat to the tightly contained body. Fat bodies become “the abject” because they threaten boundaries of “normal” body size, because they threaten to take up space (more than is “normal”), and this space may encroach upon non-fat others (this fear manifests as anger directed towards fat people in close quarters, such as the airplane or bus). While it seems silly to ask, I wonder if there is somewhere (in the unconscious?) a fear that the fat body will “spill out” and “merge” with the non-fat person… or that fatness is somehow “contagious”. This seems outrageous, but a July 2007 article (“Study Says Obesity Can Be Contagious”) in The New York Times confirms it: many “obesity” researchers, in fact, concern themselves with this very question. Perhaps as a result of this fear of contagion by fat bodies, fat people are often excluded from many spaces (usually through lack of accommodations, but also through overt discrimination against them) and through their lifetime feel exclusion in a variety of situations. While I’ve focused primarily on fat bodies in my analysis of exclusion and construction of the self, I think Sibley’s thoughts on how/why exclusion happens are particularly helpful because they can be applied in a variety of different situations and to a variety of differently oppressed groups.

(Note: page numbers are in reference to David Sibley’s Geographries of Exclusion.)

The Fat Body (In)visible: A documentary

By: margitte

14-12-2010

body image, fat 101, fat visibility, feminism, identity politics

At long last, the documentary is up. I sincerely hope you all enjoy it. Click me!

‘Fat Studies’ Goes to College

By: margitte

04-11-2010

"obesity epidemic", fat 101, fat visibility

Fat undergraduates often experience subtle forms of prejudice that most people tend not to notice, from tiny wooden desks that won’t fit their bodies to sidelong stares whenever they visit the student fitness center. Some—like Margitte Kristjansson, a Fat Studies graduate student and alumna of the University of Washington—will voice their concerns to administrators, but many fat students would rather suffer in silence than spotlight themselves by speaking up. “It’s definitely harder to be a fat student on campus, when you don’t yet know that you deserve respect in the same way that any other student would,” Ms. Kristjansson says.

Oh hey, that’s me, quoted in an article by Yale University senior Eve Binder for The Daily Beast. Check it out here.

The author’s basic argument here is interesting to me: she essentially asks “who is the audience for Fat Studies?” and if it is fat students, “how do you reach them if they aren’t making it to college?”

I think it’s awesome that someone is recognizing that there’s a problem when fat students aren’t found on college campuses at the same rates as their non-fat peers. It’s been a documented problem for a long time now (at least as far back as Marcia Millman’s Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America was published in 1980). At the same time, in her focus on the fat undergraduate student as the only audience for Fat Studies (or undergraduates as the only audience for any discipline), she misses the point entirely. Fat Studies is NOT a discipline about making fat people feel good about themselves. It IS about—at least in my opinion—doing rigorous academic work in, on, and around bodies from a lens that is critical of mainstream conceptions of fatness and the ‘obesity epidemic’.

The main “audience” for Fat Studies (as if there were only one) is not necessarily fat undergraduates. In many cases the audience is other academics, colleagues who do similar and unrelated work in critical/cultural studies, health sciences, gender studies, american studies, science studies, etc. In general, I think the hope is that this work will eventually be put out there for a more mainstream audience, which certainly includes fat undergrads but is not limited to them. Those bigoted readers who all think fat people are gross, ugly, and unhealthy over at the The Daily Beast, (see comments on article above) could benefit from Fat Studies… those well-intentioned people working on health policy (like Michelle Obama) could benefit from Fat Studies… those asshats who took time out of their dinner to call my friend and I “poor fat girls” the other night could benefit from Fat Studies… my brother, who thinks gaining 35 lbs. means someone is somehow worth less could benefit from Fat Studies… Maura Kelly could REALLY benefit from Fat Studies… and so on.

I do work in Fat Studies because I believe that knowledge production, in combination with my own personal activism, is how I can best do my part to change the cultural feeling around fatness, so that all those fat kids in high school who are too busy being bullied, obsessed with weight, put on the fast-track to vocational schools, and ignored by teachers and other possible mentors, can buck this stupid trend and go to college, if they want to.

Unlike the author of this post, I don’t think that not having enough fat students on college campuses will prevent Fat Studies from taking root in academia: I think that Fat Studies MUST take root in academia in order to make the changes necessary for fat students to enter university at a rate equal to their non-fat peers.

“I was a fat kid…”

By: margitte

12-10-2010

body image, coming out as fat, fat 101

(Originally posted at riotsnotdiets)

Scanned from Le’a Kent’s “Fighting Abjection: Representing Fat Women” published in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco in 2001.

Brought to you by my procrastination while reading about Julia Kristeva on “the abject”.

Enjoy!

“Plus-size and fashion week: Open door or unhealthy invitation?”

By: margitte

15-09-2010

"obesity epidemic", fat 101

(Originally posted at riotsnotdiets)

Outrageous blog post of the week alert, y’all.

In this relatively uninteresting post, someone asks if the world of plus-size modeling promotes “obesity”. My dear friend Kristy pointed it out to me, and while the post itself is just more of the same ol’ “BUT FAT IS UNHEALTHY” nonsense, it’s a worth reading so you can understand Kristy’s response, which I think is freaking fantastic. So freaking fantastic, in fact, that I’m just going to copy and paste it here:

I have a differing opinion, in two parts.

The first is this:
I think we have tied too closely the ideas of size and the idea of health. We use size as the main indicator of health when, in reality, it is such an untrustworthy indicator. There are way way way too many variables to use size as a causation for health.

Therefore, I think that we talk too much about health when we talk about fashion – *because* we continue to talk about size. Fashion isn’t about health. Yes, there are the social repercussions of viewing popular culture and internalizing what that means in terms of body image, but what we really need to be talking about is not whether fashion is a model of good health, but about how fashion *can never* be a model of good health because fashion is about image, and image is a poor indicator for one’s actual health. Once we “de-link” these concepts we can start talking about fashion and we can start talking about health, and we can even do so together, but in the end the conversation itself will be a much healthier one (pardon the pun).

Second, I completely agree with you that runway shows should be integrated. No doubt about it, all sorts of bodies should be shown together at once. However, this integration is so stigmatized that we have to see it as a social movement – something that doesn’t happen all at once and that has historical “movements” or “waves” – just like feminism or gay rights.

And one of those waves is having an insular group, represented singularly and confidently. Showing the world that the marginalized group is not ashamed and is actually entitled to the same human rights as everyone else. This is what is happening with the fat world right now. Sure, media and social structures are stepping in to try to keep it segregated and insular – using this stage of the movement to continue to separate and isolate – but it is still a movement and it is still needed on the road to integration.

And again, the only way we will begin to see this integration is to disconnect our ideas of health (aka mortality, which is something that humans have an instinctual interest in decreasing among their populations) from our ideas of size and shape, because frankly, they have little to do with each other.

Once we can make this disconnect and stop pointing fingers at fat people for being unhealthly, actually believing the two concepts are different (we used to think homosexuality was unhealthy and deadly), we will see the changes we’re looking for.

Awesome, right? I love having friends (regardless of whether or not they identify as “fat”) who really get FA and understand why it’s so imperative. YAY for body-acceptance warriors. I <3 you, Kristy!

Judy Freespirit

By: margitte

10-09-2010

fat 101

(Originally posted at riotsnotdiets)

Judy Freespirit, one of the founders of FA, has passed away today.

In honor of her memory, please read the following:

FAT LIBERATION MANIFESTO

1. WE believe that fat people are fully entitled to human respect and recognition.

2. WE are angry at mistreatment by commercial and sexist interests. These have exploited our bodies as objects of ridicule, thereby creating an immensely profitable market selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, that ridicule.

3. WE see our struggle as allied with the struggles of other oppressed groups against classism, racism, sexism, ageism, financial exploitation, imperialism and the like.

4. WE demand equal rights for fat people in all aspects of life, as promised in the Constitution of the United States. We demand equal access to goods and services in the public domain, and an end to discrimination against us in the areas of employment, education, public facilities and health services.

5. WE single out as our special enemies the so-called “reducing” industries. These include diet clubs, reducing salons, fat farms, diet doctors, diet books, diet foods and food supplements, surgical procedures, appetite suppressants, drugs and gadgetry such as wraps and “reducing machines”.

WE demand that they take responsibility for their false claims, acknowledge that their products are harmful to the public health, and publish long-term studies proving any statistical efficacy of their products. We make this demand knowing that over 99% of all weight loss programs, when evaluated over a five-year period, fail utterly, and also knowing the extreme proven harmfulness of frequent large changes in weight.

6. WE repudiate the mystified “science” which falsely claims that we are unfit. It has both caused and upheld discrimination against us, in collusion with the financial interests of insurance companies, the fashion and garment industries, reducing industries, the food and drug industries, and the medical and psychiatric establishment.

7. WE refuse to be subjugated to the interests of our enemies. We fully intend to reclaim power over our bodies and our lives. We commit ourselves to pursue these goals together.

FAT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE ….

By Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran
November, 1973

Originally Published by the Fat Underground,
Los Angeles, California USA
copied from Largesse Archives

(via fattypatties)

On the fringe: Fat countercultures and a BBW club

By: margitte

07-09-2010

body image, fat visibility, feminism, identity politics

(Originally posted at riotsnotdiets)

This is a follow-up post to my other post about BBW culture, and Jessica’s latest about our experience at a San Diego BBW night club. For those with no time to re-read, here’s the long story short: Jessica and I wrote about our negative experience at what ended up being a recruitment event for BBW porn. The women involved in “The Community” (as it is called by them) ended up reading both of our blog posts, and there were some hurt feelings. Nevertheless, we were invited out to one of their club nights in San Diego (I know, I know, cue the pig’s blood, right?)—with some reservations, I went with Jessica, and… we ended up having a fantastic time.

Previously, I wrote that:

[…] most of the women [at the porn site recruitment event] seemed to be of the BBW persuasion—there was even a BBW night club doing some promotional raffling, along with the aforementioned photographer and her BBW porn site. Although I’m all about fat people having “safe” spaces, as a fat activist I am not inclined to find these spaces helpful if they 1) don’t allow/accept the word “fat”, 2) reinforce an “us vs. them” mentality between fat people and non-fat people, and/or 3) cater to a group of people (typically heterosexual men) who fetishize fat and thus objectify (however unconsciously) the very people they purport to love.

After being invited to the BBW club and experiencing a super fun night of dancing with a bunch of beautiful fat chicks, my stance remains relatively unchanged. After talking to a few of the women there on Sunday night, I deduced the following:

While the word “fat” is not totally unacceptable, it is certainly not embraced. It still holds a lot of negative power over people here, which is why they prefer being called “big” (as in Big Beautiful Women) to fat. Marianne Kirby recently wrote an amazeballs post about the importance of using fat over other euphemisms, which sums up my opinion on the matter perfectly.
If there is an “us vs. them” mentality here, it’s most likely unintentional. I didn’t hear anyone dissing on skinny chicks, nor did I hear any weird platitudes about “real women”… but this doesn’t change the fact that this kind of language is used on their flyers (“where skinny jeans aren’t allowed”). I’m not inclined to say that JUST because a safe space exists for fat people and fat people alone (give or take a few thin “fat admirers”) it MUST be divisive. Again, “safe” spaces are super important, especially when someone lives in a culture that constantly devalues their existence. Many other oppressed groups turn to similar kinds of “safe” or private spaces for support and community building. I get that. I just don’t think the process of turning to these spaces for support should reinforce an “us against the world” mentality—THAT does not help anything, does not foster understanding between groups, does not lead to a world where we can coexist happily and peacefully.
While the BBW porn site certainly caters to those who fetishize and objectify fatness, the club itself DEFINITELY caters to fat women who just want to have a good, sexy time. That’s awesome. YES there are some self-described “fat admirers” there, but that doesn’t take away from the amazingness that is walking into a room full of fat bodies having a great time and loving life. THAT was overwhelming (in a good way), and I’d give my left tit to have something like that available to me that isn’t associated with the BBW “lifestyle”.
Some people are really, really mad at us for expressing our opinions and criticisms about the website and BBW culture at large. Many people’s feelings were hurt. It was kinda like being back in high school—you know all those scenes in the movies where the girl that everyone hates (for whatever reason) shows up at the big dance anyway and people look at her like “WHAT IS SHE DOING HERE, OMG”? It was like that.

Despite all of this, I had fun. Jess and I danced, drank super cheap drinks, and *someone* (not naming names) may have walked away with a phone number or two. Some of the women there (including the owner of the club) were super nice, and even seemed to agree with some of our criticisms. But they were all super protective of the porn site, perhaps because many of them modeled for it.

People accused us of “looking down” on them, for trying to force body acceptance on them. Dude, it’s totally true that a woman of any size can do porn and still hate herself, for whatever reason. It happens often. I don’t “look down” on women who are made to feel bad about themselves, I feel sad. Not pity, just sadness. Because I’ve been that girl before. I haven’t done porn, but I’ve done stupid shit to get people to like me (to get guys to like me). I’ve projected a self-confident facade when inside all I wanted was to be someone else. What bothers me about a lot of BBW porn is that it actively plays on the insecurities of fat women, often portraying (and playing into) the worst stereotypes about what it means to be fat. As Jessica pointed out, this particular site and its sister sites have videos you can pay to watch like “BBW attempting to walk upstairs”—this video (at least what is insinuated by the title) is intended to titillate the type of person who gets off on a fat person’s inability to perform what is considered a “normal” task. If that is not dehumanizing, I don’t know what it.

I am not mad at the woman in the video. I am mad at a culture that fosters this kind of attitude toward fat bodies. I am mad at whatever societal forces pushed these women toward this kind of fat performance. A response from one of the models to these objections? “But that’s what the viewers want to see.” Not “but I LIKE doing this” or “doing this gets me off”—the excuse was “but that’s what people want me to do”. And that makes me SO SAD. AND MAD.

Recently I read an article by communication scholar Catherine Squires titled “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres”. In it, Squires uses examples from the African-American public sphere(s) to explore the various forms oppressed groups’ spaces take and the various conditions under which these specific types of groups form. The three types of groups she names—the enclave, the counter-public, and the satellite—perfectly map onto what is happening today in fat-positive counterculture.

For brevity’s sake, I’ll include the helpful diagrams from the text and say this: FA (what I do: fat activism, body acceptance for all, fat rights work, etc.) is sometimes an enclave, and sometimes a counter-public. BBW culture (much like the Amish, or Black Separatists in Liberia) is much closer to a satellite group. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this in theory, it’s just not for me. And, just like religious extremists can give well-meaning religious folks a bad name, BBW culture can (but certainly does not always) negatively affect FA’s fight to be taken seriously, to be considered equals, to be treated fairly.

Enclave Publics (Squires, 2002, p. 458):

Counterpublics (Squires, 2002, p. 460):

Satellite Publics (Squires, 2002, p. 464):

‘Can Rachel Zoe get pregnant?’ Is that really any of our business?

By: margitte

01-09-2010

body image, feminism, popular culture

(Originally posted at riotsnotdiets)

I don’t watch The Rachel Zoe Project, but I know her thin size (and apparently questionable eating habits?) have been the topic of much debate in the past couple years. While I’m certainly interested in—and critical of—how exposure to extremely thin bodies in the media can skew young girls’ perception of their own bodies and how they should look, I’m not really interested in body-shaming people of any size, regardless of whether or not they are “healthy”. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think eating disorders or disordered eating in general shouldn’t be discussed… they really should, and I think it’s important for young people to understand the extreme lengths their celebrity role models go to to ensure that they stay a certain size.

But it’s not helpful for us to sit and hypothesize about the relative health of someone we don’t know. When the media does it to fat people, berating celebs I love like Gabby Sidibe “for the sake of their health”, I get fucking pissed. Because the fact of the matter is, YOU DON’T KNOW that person’s life experience, or lifestyle choices, or medical history. So many people look at me, as a fat person, and make assumptions about all of these things and more based on negative stereotypes they learn (at least in part) from the media. It’s not right, and it’s not fair.

So what is Jezebel (one of my fave feminism-meets-pop-cultural-analysis type blogs) doing with their latest post, “Can Rachel Zoe Get Pregnant”? Because to me, it looks a lot like body-shaming, even if they swear up and down that that’s not what they’re doing:

This season of Rachel’s show has focused on whether she can make time in her schedule for her ticking biological clock. Yet nobody has addressed the elephant in the room: whether or not she weighs enough to get pregnant.

and

This is not an attack on Rachel’s appearance, nor is it a criticism of her own engagement in body snarking, and it’s not a comment on her highly-publicized association with size-zero actresses. Yes, those elements are all in the Zoe Ether. But what we’re concerned with discussing is the practical question of fertility, and in what condition a woman’s body needs to be in order to conceive.

Really? Is that all your concerned with/discussing? Then write an article about THAT, and if you must use a celebrity as an example to entice your readers, why don’t you write about a celebrity who has actually talked about it openly instead of calling out someone who hasn’t and concern-trolling them.

Thankfully, a lot of Jezebel’s commenters have already pointed out the obvious: that this is really none of our damn business.

a letter to potential ‘admirers’: what does my fat body mean to you?

super quick: thoughts on fat & disability

musings on fat bodies and exclusion

The Fat Body (In)visible: A documentary

‘Fat Studies’ Goes to College

“I was a fat kid…”

“Plus-size and fashion week: Open door or unhealthy invitation?”

Judy Freespirit

On the fringe: Fat countercultures and a BBW club

‘Can Rachel Zoe get pregnant?’ Is that really any of our business?

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