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 Fat is not only still a feminist issue – it’s a queer one too. Jackie McMillan discusses the politics surrounding GLBTIQ folk with big bodies.
When I was asked to write an article on fat dykes, I agreed for the wrong reasons. You see, on the surface I say that things like fat pride are important – but that’s mostly because I believe in the equality of opportunity rather than equality per say. In our contemporary society, fatness has become associated with a whole bunch of negatives (poor health, sexual unattractiveness, greed, lack of self discipline). It’s got so these associations seem totally natural and often scientifically proven (like fatness is unhealthy).
But it hasn’t always been so. At other times throughout history fatness has represented beauty, opulence, a life without struggle, time for indulgence, leisure and pleasure. Fatness isn’t really any of these things either. It just came to be associated with them in much the same (arbitrary) way that our society associates it with negativity.
In America, groups such as NOLOSE are trying to correct the negative associations currently attached to fatness by taking what board member Zoe Meleo-Erwin calls “a very fat-positive stance”. They’re not saying that “everyone should become fat” though – instead they’re “committed to helping foster space for radical, fat queer activism, art, and community”. Their argument is quite persuasive because they’ve identified a whole bunch of very real ways that fat queer women are encouraged to feel disproportionately bad about their bodies, nearly all of the time. NOLOSE critique things like “dieting at the structural level and talk at a community level about how dieting and even the purposeful weight loss efforts of other fat activists affect us. However, in the end, [they] support individuals' choices around bodily autonomy.”
Their ethical stance begs me to question whether being ‘for’ bodily autonomy leaves groups like NOLOSE open to necessarily supporting anorexics, and ‘pro-ana’ groups where women actively encourage each other to starve. “While we see anorexia as a symptom and manifestation of patriarchy and fat phobia as well as other systems of injustice such as racism and classism, we at NOLOSE do not support judging the bodies of others, including those who are anorexic, as ‘wrong’ or ‘abnormal’,” Zoe explains.
You can see the ethical crux of their argument: if it’s wrong to force people to have a certain type of body, to give back bodily autonomy we really shouldn’t set limits on what sort of bodies women should have – fat or thin.
NOLOSE are trying to “help shift ideas about bodies, health and normalcy toward a place of diversity.” As Zoe puts it, they hope to “complexify notions of health such that they become more multidimensional and are divorced from automatic moral judgments”. For example, they’d say it’s not necessarily unhealthy to be fat, or healthy to be thin. I’d add, if we want to make a judgement about someone’s level of health, we need more personalised information than just their weight.
But before we get too gung ho, if I’m to be honest I still want to weep for the withering bodies of women starving themselves past what even our current society thinks is thin and beautiful. I also still want to say you can be ‘too fat’. Credit to the ethical folk at NOLOSE where due, but even with my own fat body, I want permission to make aesthetic judgements, politically correct or not.
But right now we’re so warped about fatness that we can’t believe what we think just yet. First we need to at least be able to think fat differently. That’s why fat pride movements are important – not because being pro-fat is necessarily right – but because fat pride represents one alternative view to the dominant paradigm. Through fat pride we need to make spaces where fat dykes gain sexual and bodily confidence, suspending our judgment for a while, not because judging is necessarily wrong, but because the playing field is not level. After all, we wouldn’t want to be wrong, now would we?
Jessica Guisti, editor of an upcoming anthology about fatness called Spilling Over, is a brave woman. Despite having “been fat all of her life” and “attuned to the rampant fat phobia” surrounding her, she still finds it important to express her own experiences as a fat, queer femme ie “someone who is hyper visible because of her size and invisible amongst queers and non-queers alike because of a feminine presentation”. What’s more she’s providing the platform for others to do it too via the anthology. Jessica sees it as “an opportunity to humanise these experiences and a chance to put names on some gut-wrenching, yet brave narratives alongside some remarkably proud ones”. She hopes Spilling Over will be a “resource for all people to begin considering how fat people and queer people live in the world”.
Jessica speaks directly to us all as queer women: “I think the queer community has a lot to say about fatness, but I also think they need to listen up too,” she asserts. “Queer spaces have for me, and for a lot of other fat queers, been places of blatant ignorance and discrimination, as much as they've also been locations of acceptance and support.” It’s an interesting place this intersection of queer and fat and Jess essentially reminds us that “we are never just fat.”
Young, queer performance artist Anastasia Zaravinos sits at the crux of these issues too. She recently got onto the Hellfire stage as her alter ego Adonis from the band Ghetto Pussy. She has an obviously fat, queer and female body. On stage she’s every inch a rock star. She peels off her clothes, flaunts her generous body, rubs meat into her bountiful bosom, and squashes a banana in her arse crack. She’s undeniably sexy. Yet she’s matter of fact about fat pride. “The way I look at it is, it’s about embracing yourself no matter what your size,” she says. “It’s funny that there needs to be a ‘fat pride movement’ to state that bigger women don’t have to hate the way they look.”
This rather progressive viewpoint really comes across in her sexually charged performances. Anastasia uses fatness to her advantage. “It’s something different,” she explains. “I’m quite confident on stage and I know that people are ‘wowed’ by someone getting up there with the energy and desire to perform that I do.”
But she also admits, “I’m more confident on stage than what I am in day-to-day life. When viewing footage or photos of a performance, I cringe. Sometimes I might think ‘Wow that’s hot’, but mostly I cringe.” So even for a fabulous fat rock star, there’s room for improvement. Knowing that, I admire Anastasia even more for putting her body out there before even she really views fatness differently.
I still don’t think that everyone can be beautiful or sexy, but I do think it’s unfair that certain bodies are automatically put into a category that denies them the possibility. Fat dykes can be beautiful, plain, ugly, sexy and hot (like Anastasia); so can skinny chicks.
Submissions are invited for Spilling Over. Deadline is 1 December. More info at www.myspace.com/spillingoveranthology or email Jessica Giusti at
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NOLOSE is at www.nolose.org
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