Monthly Archive

Racialicious posted a great piece, originally published on Guanabee, by Alex Alvarez called Body Language: How Nicknames Objectify Minority Women And Why I Don’t Care “How You Meant It.” It explores the relationship between culture, language, and women’s bodies, which is a complicated topic (like doctoral thesis complicated) that Alvarez does a nice job on, despite the small space:

“Gordo/a,” “gordito/a,” “flaco/a” and “flaquito/a” are also quite common. Quite literally, they mean “(little) fatty” or “(little) skinny.” Take the Univision TV series “El Gordo y La Flaca,” . . . starring Raul de Molina and Lily Estefan. . . . On a personal note, I cannot tell you how much I wished my parents would have called me “sweetie” or “pumpkin” instead of “my little fatty.” Kinda stings when you’re going through puberty. To have complained about this, of course, would make me seem like an “acomplejada,” or like I had a complex about my weight and appearance. Which would have been pretty much exactly on the money. Growing up, I had always noted the difference between my family’s lack of barriers and delineations when it came to discussing bodies, particularly women’s, and the unspoken barriers among Anglo families on TV. And perhaps the most frustrating aspect of all this is that my family member didn’t mean anything by it. They weren’t actively try to make me aware of my body. They loved their gordita, after all. But, growing up in an increasingly multi-cultural world, I was exposed to different ethnicities’ relationships to their and others’ bodies. And I would have really preferred that verbal distance between my body and the world around it. Acomplejada as that makes me.

Such physically-conscious nicknames reduce the object to nothing but a body and, while innocuous to some, they are wrought with (somewhat) unspoken criticism, even if only in the sense that it makes one aware of their weight and form each and every time one stops to think about their nickname. Particularly for females.

Now go read the whole thing and come back here so I can tell you something.

My coworker, who is South East Asian (I am being intentionally vague here again; I know that SE Asian is not a monolithic cultural entity), and I were talking about cultural approaches to women’s bodies yesterday. She told me that where she is from, it is perfectly acceptable for friends and family to approach women and remark about how much weight they’ve gained, the some way one might comment about a new hair style or a new pair of shoes. From my experience, although close interfamilial relationships are fraught with weight and body-related land mines, family friends and distant relatives generally have the tact to avoid inquiring about any recent weight gain.

The fact that I equate keeping a sock in it about my weight with tact is pretty telling, no?

I will be seeing a good chunk of my family, and probably a vast selection of my in laws, at some point this summer. While my small immediate family is fairly accustomed to their incredible shrinking and then growing and then shrinking and then growing again relative, I so rarely see my extended family that for all I know, they’ve only ever seen me fat. Or skinny.* While I feel fairly confident that my reserved (we’re Presbyterians, for shit’s sake) white upbringing will render weight-related comments verboten, I am nervous about incurring their unspoken judgment. In my “grass is greener” moments, I sort of wish that at the next massive extended family dinner, my relatives would just comment about my weight, and get the topic out there. I even have a response all worked out:

“Yes, I have gained weight! Quite a bit. My husband and I both have great jobs and are living comfortably, so we’re able to eat really, really well. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Then I would laugh all the way back through the buffet line.

*True story: I went back to my (rural, small) hometown area for my (step)grandmother’s funeral five or six years ago. I was thinner than usual (about an 8, I think) and was dying my hair dark brown at the time. I stood in the receiving line, and after the tenth or so bereaved individual walked past me in without so much as a word of condolence, I entreated my mother for explanation (or just the dispensation to get out of the damn line and go sit down) and she told me that this parade of great aunts and uncles, shirt-tail cousins, and lifelong community acquaintances did not recognize me as a granddaughter, and instead assumed I was my serial monogamist cousin’s most recent girlfriend. This realization that I was a stranger to my own people failed to spark any urge to “get to know my roots,” FYI. I also felt really badly for the cousin’s actual girlfriend, who was in attendance although not in the receiving line, and so was being roundly disregarded by an entire community while being allowed to remain in a seated position. They have since split up.

Hey Chicagoans - don’t pass up the chance to see official excerpts from still black: a portrait of black transmen, playing this weekend at Northwestern University, The Center on Halsted, and Columbia College. More info at blac (k) ademic and the official film website. I’m excited!

ETA some more links.

What the fucking fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

God DAMN it! I am angry, and ashamed, and so, so disappointed. And I would like to take this moment to echo Black Amazon and say: Fuck Seal Press.

Listen. I won’t give up on feminism. I can’t. Feminism, as a philosophy, as a focus, as a fundamental part of my identity, saved my life. Sometimes the passion I feel for feminism as a way of living burns so hot in me that I can’t sleep at night for the excitement. Sometimes I can’t sleep for the grief, or for the despair, but feminism as a philosophy, as a focus, as a fundamental part of my identity gives me hope to keep on trying.

But I won’t stand behind feminists like Amanda Marcotte and the folks at Seal Press. That is not the feminism that I want to be a part of.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mo Pie’s post, Understanding Weight Loss, reminded me of something that has bothered me for a long time, even when I was an earnest and sincere advocate for WW instead of a bitter, jaded, angry person. It’s this whole magical “10% of your body weight” concept. There is this idea in dieting land that losing 10% of your body weight is a magical, wonderful goal that, if achieved, will result in lowered blood pressure, lower cholesterol, reduced risk of diabetes, smaller clothes, increased happiness, 15% more making out with hotties, your dream job, untold riches, never having anybody’s crotch pushed into your face during your rush hour public transit commute, and a spontaneous understanding of the inner most secrets of the universe. Weight Watchers even gives you a chintzy little key chain once you’ve lost the equivalent of 10% of your starting weight.

Mo touched on the bothersome nature of the 10% ideal when she said, “Of course, if someone is obese and does ‘lose 10-15% of body weight,’ they are still visibly obese. Just from looking at them, nobody can tell that they are actually following society’s dictates. This underscores yet again how counterproductive the culture of shaming and mockery is—what if you’re vilifying someone who’s already lost weight, hmm?”

But I think what really gets me is the underlying message of the 10% weight loss goal: no matter what you weight right now, it’s not right. Whatever your weight happens to be, it’s not healthy. You’re not really happy. You’re not really attractive. Whatever your weight is, you are not as healthy, happy, pretty, and perfect as you are supposed to be.

Because what you are supposed to be is always, always less.

Congratulations and best wishes to What About Our Daughters. Here’s to many more years of “uncompromising, unapologetic, and unbowed defense of Black women and girls.” Thanks, Gina, for keeping me informed and aware and always refusing to back down or be silenced.

I’m sick. Sick sick sick. I have a “cold,” which I put in quotes because the word “cold” does not do justice to my suffering, which is epic. Monumental. Exhausting. Phlegmy. My ears are clogged, so that the world takes on a distant, wrapped-in-cotton kind of feeling, like hangover fuzziness, but quieter. My nose is leaky. My chest is spasmodic. I sound like a drowning duck when I talk and an angry basset hound when I cough.

Eating is a chore, and not only because my clogged ears make chewing an unpleasant and deafening proposition, but because I am pretty sure I’m getting all of my daily caloric needs from the ever-present cough drop tucked between my cheek and gum. Eating food just doesn’t occur to me until some outside stimulus reminds me that, yeah, I should probably eat something. I guess. Let me finish my cough drop first.

The last time I was this sick was probably 2001 or 2002. The general symptomology was the same: onset with a ridiculous fever (this happened on Monday, and in my high-temperature state I got the idea that I really immediately needed to start live blogging Dancing with the Stars (which I had never even watched before Monday and only watched now because I couldn’t focus on anything else (as an aside: why is everybody on that show the same color orange?)), including the commercials. Lucky for us all, I loaned my laptop to a friend whose computer shit the bed a few months ago and we were all spared the feverish fruits of my delusional labor) followed by a week or so of incessant coughing and clogged up head and generally feeling like shit. I was also on Weight Watchers. And would you believe? I figured out the points for cough drops. And counted them.

You know what else? I got on the message boards at the Weight Watchers website to look for advice on how to stay on program when sick. Such tips included the points value for various cans of chicken soup and? Cough medicine.

Not a diet, you say? But a simple “lifestyle” change? Merely eat less, exercise more, and make sure that when you’re ill, you cut back on the food so you can make up for all the points your ingesting in medicine.

I still feel about as healthy as the floor of the Red Line at about 2 AM on a Friday night, but I could seriously give a rat’s ass how many points or carbs or calories or grams of fat my array of off brand cold remedies contain, and if I thought it would help me get through the day without coughing so hard I crack a vertebrae, I would eat a sugar-coated block of lard. Or, given how desperate I am to be over this nonsense, lick the floor of a 2 AM Red Line train (which would probably work to cure the cold because it would kill me outright). But even though I don’t feel good right now, I certainly feel better than I did when I was counting cough drop points.

UPDATE! I started experiencing stabbing head pain today before lunch and thought maybe I’d go visit my friendly neighborhood doctor. Wise decision, it turns out, as I have a fairly nasty ear infection. In both ears! I’m actually relieved, because it means there is something wrong with me and, being a veteran of adult ear infections, I know I’ll feel human in a couple of days once the antibiotics start doing their thang.

Speaking of, I’d better lay in a supply of yogurt. And since I’m not on WW, I’m totally getting the good stuff.

Because what gave you the idea this was a blog about fat and feminism and stuff and junk? It is now a blog about heart-stoppingly cute baby otters.

I sent the link to this video to my friend L who replied:

L: OTTER OTTER OTTER OTTER!!!!! I can’t go for a drink tonight because I am watching TINA FEY in the return of 30 Rock. TINA FEY TINA FEY TINA FEY TINA FEY!!!!!!!

OTM: Tina Fey should make a movie in which she plays a wise-cracking otter rehabilitator.

L: That I would have to watch in the privacy of my own home.

If only I had a dollar for every email exchange with L that turned into a conversation about otters, booze, and Tina Fey…

ETA:

L: Haha - way to call me out! But I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve done that, too.

OTM: I was calling us both out, actually. If I had a dollar for every time, I’d buy us an otter, get the three of us drunk, and fly us all out to visit Tina Fey.

HI DERE WEE BABY OTTER!

You tell me:

1. Friday night I dreamed that I went to a ball game at Wrigley Field but was unable to fit into the seats. Not only were my hips wider than the arms of the chair by about six inches, but they were made of some hard material so unyielding that I couldn’t even wiggle in on the diagonal.

2. Saturday night I dreamed that I was performing in a fat girl burlesque/fashion show with Jennifer Lopez (who, I must state for the record, I do not consider fat) who was wearing a sequined thong and riding a fully decked out circus horse. We were all wearing blue and silver and I most adamantly did not want to be there.

3. Last night I dreamed I went to the gynecologist to have my IUD removed only to be told that it had grown into my uterus and was thus unremovable. Ever.

Now I’m no dream interpreter, but I clearly have some body image stress kicking around that kooky brain of mine. Yeesh.

Peter Sagal is alright with me.

I’m a fan of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! (although as I could not be sure that Peter, Carl, and the panelists would limit their interaction with Maureen Dowd to demanding that she STFU, I did skip her Not My Job segment a couple of weeks ago) even though sometimes I think they go for the cheap, and occasionally sexist, laugh. But after seeing a link on Feministe to Sagal’s All Thing’s Considered commentary Gender Inequity in ‘Whoville,’ I find that I love Peter Sagal almost as much as I hate Jim Carey.

Wait, that is impossible. My hatred of Jim Carey is unparalleled. But I do find myself feeling happier, warmer, fuzzier feelings towards Mr. Sagal than I ever have before. Read a wee bit for yourself:

In a new subplot added by the filmmakers, the mayor of Whoville has 96 daughters. He has one son. Guess who gets all his attention? Guess who saves the day? Go ahead, think about it, I’ll wait.

No I won’t. What’s so irritating about this casual slap at daughters is the sense that the makers of the film didn’t really mean it. They seemed mostly interested in riffs on pop culture and jokes about violating bodily integrity. But what writers are told, you see, in Hollywood notes meetings, is that every character has to make a journey, towards something he needs and ultimately gets, and what they decided the Mayor of Whoville needs was a better relationship with his son. Here is a father with 96 daughters — 96 amazing, beautiful, unpredictable, mysterious, distinct, glorious human beings — but gosh, what in the world is he going to care about? I know, let’s give him a moody silent uninteresting offspring, but this one’s got a Y chromosome… that’ll be boffo box office!

Huggles!

Lauren Williams at Stereohyped linked to a story on NPR that asks whether “fatism” is indeed more widespread than racism:

A new report in the current issue of the International Journal of Obesity suggests that weight discrimination is on the rise.

“Overweight women are twice as vulnerable as men, and discrimination strikes much earlier in their lives,” the report states.

The reason used by some to justify the bias: weight is modifiable, race isn’t.

So does this reasoning have any merit? If you believe that weight is modifiable, it seems like it would. But I call bullshit.

Let’s say for argument’s sake that weight is modifiable. Take me for example. When I was 17 I started my first “successful” diet and lost 60 pounds; I’ve not stayed at a stable weight since. For almost 20 years I have been either losing or gaining weight, living in a state of constant weight (and wardrobe) fluctuation. So, is weight modifiable? Mine sure is. I don’t even know if my body has a set point, much what that set point could be because I’ve never given my body a chance to find it. Now that my brain has decided that being fat is okay, I am both fascinated and terrified to see what my body ultimately makes of this information. But that’s beside the point, which is that sure, technically weight is modifiable.

But it’s not modifiable in any controllable way. I can set my sights on a particular weight and throw all my energy into getting there and maybe I will, but probably not (in all of my weight’s amazing malleability I have never achieved a “goal weight”). Even if I get close, I have proven time and time (and time and time) again that any weight below 200 pounds is unmaintainable for me without untenable sacrifice. Modifying my weight is less about a precision manipulation and more about setting forces in motion and hoping for the best. So how modifiable is something that we can change, but only with intense effort and never permanently and never in a focused and specific way? Not fucking very.

But even if weight is arguably modifiable, even in a grossly imprecise way, the modifiability justification falls short. Under US law, deafness is a disability and discriminating on the basis of deafness is illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But deafness is also modifiable in some instances with cochlear implants. Should it be legal to refuse to make a reasonable accommodation for a deaf employee who is eligible for a cochlear implant but refuses to get one? Religion is a protected class under Title VII, making it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of religion. But religion, as important is it is to many people, is not a genetic trait and so is 100% modifiable. If scientists suddenly discovered a quick and easy gene “therapy” that would change a person’s race, should racial discrimination suddenly become legally acceptable? Relying on modifiability as a justification for weight-based discrimination is convenient, but ultimately unsatisfactory.

Not to mention that the underlying legal philosophy used to justify the bias basically says “Here is an acceptable way to be. You don’t have to be this way, but if you chose not to be, you have to face the consequences.” Who is defining acceptable? And how are they defining it? And who died and made them boss, anyway? What we end up with is anti-discrimination law as a tool of social control - conform or you’re fired, fatty.

But not only is this whole “if you can change it, we can discriminate against you for it” explanation pretty bogus, as Tara at Fatshionista explains, this line of thinking (and the report Lauren linked) fails to consider the complex intersectionalities at play here too. Lauren addresses this at the end of her post when she asks: What if you’re black, a woman, and obese?

Despite the assumptions underlying Title VII and related case law (very little of which was written or interpreted by non-white non-men (I don’t know how many of these white dudes were fat, though)), apportioning discrimination neatly into buckets labeled “gender,” “race,” “color,” “nationality,” or “religion” is impossible. Generally under US law, if you are a black woman who is passed over for promotion in favor of white women and black men, you’re SOL; the employer promoted other women and the employer promoted other black men so under the law? No actionable discrimination. When a report like this suggests (or when the media interprets a report like this to suggest) that “fatism” is more widespread than racism, it is saying that it’s possible to cleave fatness away from race, to say definitively that if an employer discriminatorily fires a fat black woman, it’s because she’s black. Or fat. Or a woman. But not some combination of the three. Consider fat and disability in the same framework. Is an employer illegally refusing to make a reasonable accommodation under the ADA if it could cheaply widen an existing ramp door to allow a fat person who needs a large size wheelchair to access the building but refuses to do so?

Is there a point at which the modifiability justification and the shortcomings of anti-discrimination laws at addressing intersectionalities come together? I was hoping to find that when I started writing but it’s getting late and I’m not there yet so I open up to you, dear readers. I think this is an important conversation to have. I chose to post about this here instead of commenting on Stereohyped because I wanted to think about this using FA principals as a given rather than getting bogged down in “fat is unhealthy/losing weight is easy and awesome” debate and, ultimately, not getting anywhere new.

ETA: I was fixin’ to climb into a nice warm bed with a nice warm dude and two nice warm cats when it occurred to me that I should make a very important clarification. I AM NOT asking whether “fatism” is more prevalent than racism. That question, in the parlance of the internet, is made of fail. I am talking about modifiability as bias justification and intersectionality. I also don’t mean to limit the discussion to race, gender, or disability - that’s just what came out when I started typing. Okay go.

Ah, melodrama!

1. Monday night, as I was dishing up some delicious rice pilaf with black beans and fried plantains for dinner, I put my delicate inner arm directly on that 350 degree pan handle and got this little souvenir of culinary ineptitude:

2. Then yesterday morning while walking to the bus, a bird pooped on me. I did not take a picture of my misfortune, but I did immediately tell myself a story about how Chicago’s pigeons are planning a revolt, and are marking those who will be spared, to console myself over the indignity of starting my day by getting crapped on.

3. Yesterday afternoon, I wandered into Rainbow near my office because there were so many bright colors on display, plus dresses, and I’m already planning ahead for the stultifying heat of the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival (OMG Dinosaur, Jr.!). Now, I hate Rainbow. The clothes are hideous and cheap and made of cast-off children’s Halloween costume fabric and they smell bad but I have this idea in my head to make a sundress out of pre-smocked fabric, but with some fluffy eyelet layers under it, because I am really into fluffy multi-layered skirts, and Rainbow had some smocked sundresses already made and selling for less than the fabric would probably cost and I had an idea that I would buy two and stick them together somehow. FRANKENDRESS. So I’m poking through the stinky dresses and I recognize a brand label, Mlle Gabrielle, for which label-recognizing ability I absolutely have Live Journal community Fatshonista to thank, and the dress was cute and $14.99 and made of 100% cotton, can you believe it, and is pre-fitted with a fluffy multi-layered skirt so I bought it and I’m wearing it today and I look super cute, if I do say so myself.

4. Too bad I wasn’t wearing this dress last night when I was in the laundromat because who did I see but Steven Rosengard, of Project Runway Season 4 fame, doing his own laundry and thus disabusing any notion I may have had that being on a reality TV program means nothing but drop off service from here on out, baby! I was a fan of Steve’s designs (and thought he was consistently funny in a low-key, dry witted way), but declined to approach him because I was wearing what Colleen has termed a “Brady Bunch dress” and rather than fight the 70s-era upholstry look, I decided to take it to its logical conclusion with bright orange tights and brown flats and really, was it going to make this guy feel any better about getting kicked off PR for being saddled with a wedding dress to have somebody dressed like this accost him while he washes his own unmentionables and tell him that she likes his style?

Sweet merciful crap!