#46 - on body size
#46 - on body size
And reckoning with fatphobia and the coopting of the body positivity movement
I went to a yoga class this week after nearly 18 months. Aside from wearing masks in the change room and while setting up our mats, now placed 6ft apart from each other, the class was the same as the hundreds I have previously attended. The only difference was that we had lived through a pandemic, and in the process, my body had changed. Over the 60 minute flow of chaturanga’s, cobras and downward dogs in front of a giant mirror staring back at me, I wrestled between the voice that said, ‘your rolls are disgusting,’ and ‘stop saying that, look how strong you still are.’ Finally, I closed my eyes to clear the gaze, to clear the chatter.
The whole exchange left me disappointed. For years, I have been trying to dismantle my inner ‘fatphobia’ and the sickness of treating my body like a commodity; one that must be shaped and chiseled to fit the product standards of patriarchy and be saleable to the male gaze. Through the pandemic, I actively thanked my body for getting us through a distressing period in human history and tried to honour my bodies intuition and needs for survival. Sure, sometimes I would justify my loathing by saying ‘I feel unhealthy,’ or ‘it’s because I haven’t worked out,’ but I’m not delusional that size has not mattered. The neurosis over the width, circumference, smoothness and tautness of my body lingers like the stench of garbage.
‘If you’re a person who says 'I am fat positive for other people, just not for myself,’ this is a gentle call-in to do some reflecting beyond your own body image. With love: that’s still anti-fatness & chances are it’s showing up in your treatment of fatter people,’ shared writer and author, Aubrey Gordon.
The reality is, I am currently still a petite woman. Even with curves, I am close enough to the current evolved image of the ‘ideal woman.’ My newly acquired weight is inconsequential. I will face no discrimination, stigma, shaming or structural barriers for my size. I don’t need empathy or compassion for my experience. I need a deeper reckoning on how dangerous the world can be for fat people, and what it means to be in solidarity.
In a Vogue cover story last year, musician, Lizzo, discussed how the body positive movement had become co-opted and commercialized.
'‘Now, you look at the hashtag ‘body positive,’ and you see smaller-framed girls, curvier girls. Lotta white girls. And I feel no ways about that, because inclusivity is what my message is always about. I’m glad that this conversation is being included in the mainstream narrative. What I don’t like is how the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it.’
Starting in the 1960s, the ‘fat acceptance movement’ set to battle anti-fat discrimination and celebrate plus-size bodies. A fat-in was organized in New York City to protest discrimination against fat people, as reported by Evette Dionne of BitchMedia, where banners that read ‘Buddha Was Fat,’ and ‘Take a Fat Girl to Dinner,’ washed the streets. This formed the bedrock for the body positivity movement, which hit its stride in 2010, led by Black and Brown fat femmes, and was the beginning of campaigns like Dove’s ‘ Real Beauty.’ But by 2017, the movement’s radical vision to create more inclusive rights to protect fat people within institutions and workplaces had become sidelined, and replaced by fashion and empowerment messaging, according to Dionne. Empowerment was important, because it created the container to understand one’s relationship to their body and how it was treated socially, culturally, politically and economically - but it did not change realities like fat people being paid less, promoted less, protected less and hired less in the workplace.
While Lizzo clearly supports and lauds the impact of the body positivity movement on people feeling better about their bodies - she mourns how the impact has not trickled down to those who need it the most, ‘you know, girls who are in the 18-plus club.’ Just last week, fat activist, Megan Ixim, had a picture of herself covering her breasts with her left arm removed by Instagram and marked as a ‘hate violation.’ The post garnered viral support, including a comment from a thin, white person, noting, ‘I’m a skinny white bitch and have literal photos with my whole tits out [that] they haven’t taken down. This is pure fatphobic anti-Black bullshit!”
In the Input article, ‘It is terrible being a Black fat femme on Instagram,’ by Cheyenne M. Davis, they chronicle the censorship, threats, bullying, attacks and shadow-banning that Black fat femme creators have been experiencing from and on Instagram, inciting a battle for respect and visibility. It is these types of experiences that have led Lizzo to divest from the body positivity movement, instead focusing on being body-normative. “It’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point. It’s easy,’ she shares in Vogue, ‘I would like to be body-normative. I want to normalize my body.”
Others have migrated towards the ‘body neutrality movement,’ which Nicola Dall’sen calls, ‘the older wiser aunt’ of the body positivity movement. "The body positive movement urges people to love their bodies no matter what they look like, whereas body neutrality focuses on what your body can do for you rather than what it actually looks like," says Chelsea Kronengold, the associate director of communications at the National Eating Disorders Association in the US. The idea of body neutrality is that one can still appreciate their body even if they do not always love the way it looks, and that it is no one’s place to tell you how you should or do experience your body. It responds to how the body positivity movement put pressure on people to always feel good about their bodies. ‘There is nothing wrong with having a bad body image day, just like there is nothing wrong with having a bad hair day,’ Kronengold expands.
The dysmorphic relationship most women have with their bodies is likely why the body positivity movement was co-opted; we are constantly in a push-pull relationship with self-awareness, the desire for visibility after generational erasure and the forces that commodify us. Without a political analysis or sense of collective liberation, it can be difficult to conceptualize how centring and amplifying the needs and rights of the most vulnerable communities in a movement can and will benefit you too.
Last year, model, Emily Ratajkowski, wrote an essay in The Cut about her experiences of losing the right to her own image in a harrowing, unpaid and assaulting experience of shooting nude with photographer, Jonathan Leder, which after striking a cord with the public, was turned into a book this year, called ‘My Body.’ In the essay, she writes that her body felt like a superpower, ‘I was confident naked, unafraid and proud,’ while also questioning, ‘what does true empowerment even feel like? Is it feeling wanted? Is it commanding someone’s attention?’ She describes the second she dropped her clothes in the shoot as:
‘….a part of me disassociated. I began to float outside of myself, watching as I climbed back onto the bed. I arched my back and pursed my lips, fixating on the idea of how I might look through his camera lens. Its flash was so bright and I’d had so much wine that giant black spots were expanding and floating in front of my eyes.’
Her book grapples with what it means to be conventionally attractive and thin, use her sexuality as her power, and also realize she didn’t have the control she thought she did, as Scaatchi Kaul writes in Buzzfeed. ‘In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place,” Ratajkowski writes. “Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned after.” The pervasive critique of the book is that Ratajkowski doesn’t offer a way forward; she is self-aware about the personal cost of offering her body for consumption, how it stems from being loved by her parents for being beautiful, but does not contend with anti-fatness or what it means to financially benefit from it. ‘I don’t blame Ratajkowski for not having any clear answers about what her body means,’ Kaul writes, noting that any attempt from detangling ourselves from the cruelty of body shaming is progress.
In so many movements, it seems this is the meridian we are arriving at: the most marginalized advocating for radical change, the cooptation by the privileged from their own sense of survival, the absorption into the mainstream, and the settling for awareness and empowerment without structural change. We need people to give up power and practice solidarity - but under capitalism, and structurally having to care for your own survival, and often your families, we’ve made this feel like an almost impossible choice. It is hard to yield to incremental change, to expect organizers to constantly reimagine movements, and to allow senseless harm to continue in the public eye. And yet I see how that process is mirrored in my own internal reckoning - with my body and systemic oppression more broadly. Two steps forward, one step back.
It would be impossible for me to say that we have not made any progress in how bodies are represented in the media - and still, our cultural obsession with weight, with putting it on and losing it like the ‘COVID-15,’ with using BMI as a harmful indicator of health and persistent fad diets, connecting fatness with unhealed trauma and algorithms of oppression that continue to harm fat racialized creators, there is also new versions of old oppressions, which is not surprising when you do not tackle the root. In some ways, it seems like we might move on to a futures of genetically engineering, upgrading and sculpting the body as frequently as we upgrade our closets before we dismantle the cultural obsession and pathology of body size.
I can hold the tension between being present with my body and the feelings it rustles up, whether it is appreciation, pride or rejection, seeing myself well beyond my body, while having it protected as a holy, temporary and evolving site of humanness. Between the physical and spiritual, the political and liberatory, the individual and collective, and our personal awareness and systemic evolutions - there is a way forward.
Have a nice week,
Hima
A week in tweets
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