{"id":3242,"date":"2012-01-19T08:00:59","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=3242"},"modified":"2012-01-19T08:00:59","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T13:00:59","slug":"body-politics-body-work-isnt-just-for-the-straight-folks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2012\/01\/19\/body-politics-body-work-isnt-just-for-the-straight-folks\/","title":{"rendered":"BODY POLITIC: Body Work Isn\u2019t Just for the Straight Folks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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KYLA: Thank you Healthy Weight Week for helping me keep my sanity this New Year\u2019s Resolution season. \u00a0With everyone whining about holiday weight, the 15 pounds they\u2019re determined to shed this year, and the oh-so-annoying weight watchers commercials, a fat girl needs something to hold on to! \u00a0I was particularly dismayed when I first saw the Jennifer Hudson Weight Watchers commercial<\/a> with this former fat girl role model singing about the \u201cmiracle\u201d of weight loss. \u00a0Guess I\u2019ll go back to Camryn Manheim and her fab \u201cthis is for all the fat girls<\/a>\u201d Emmy acceptance speech. \u00a0Oh, and cling to the message of Healthy Weight Week<\/a>: \u201cOur bodies cannot be shaped at will. But we can all be accepting, healthy and happy at our natural weights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Truth told, I thought I\u2019d put all this body hatred behind me when I came out and embraced queer culture. \u00a0Surely this community that trumpeted acceptance, gender fucking and whole-selves rhetoric would understand the beauty of bodies? \u00a0Apparently not. \u00a0Or at least, not as universally as baby dyke me had hoped for. \u00a0At one of the first gender studies conferences (read: queer nerd breeding ground) I attended, I encountered the patronizing, shaming \u201cconcern\u201d for the health of \u201cour women\u201d (i.e. fat lesbians) that I have since run into repetitively. \u00a0According to promulgators of this message, we need to be concerned about the health of lesbian women because they tend to be fatter than straight girls. \u00a0What they see as a health risk for the community, I see as the beauty of size diversity, which apparently is oh-so-threatening.<\/p>\n

This refusal to accept and celebrate size\/body diversity is hurting our communities and our movements. When we start internalizing the phobia of society at large, we start policing each other. And rather than creating radical communities with new norms (or where the idea of \u201cnormal\u201d is abandoned all together), we recreate the oppressive forces from which many of us were trying to escape in mainstream culture. \u00a0It\u2019s sapping energy away from fun things\u2014like flirting and dancing and changing this world. \u00a0As a community, we queers are already battling messages that there is something \u201cwrong\u201d with us. \u00a0Our bodies don\u2019t have to be another source of wrongness.<\/p>\n

AVORY: It\u2019s interesting that you had that experience at a conference, Kyla, because I sort of have found the opposite–and yet, I\u2019m not surprised, given the queer community\u2019s tendency to both celebrate diversity and forget about it simultaneously. \u00a0I\u2019ve found a lot of fat-positive fat queers out there, particularly in femme queer female and genderqueer circles, something I attributed to the similarity between those two identities. \u00a0Both queer people and fat people have to deal with a lot of community-enforced shame and stigma, and both of those communities have groups of people who like to be stand-out and fabulous about their identities.<\/p>\n

However, the queer community also does tend to brush aside other identities in favor of the big queer umbrella, and the \u201cconcern\u201d for fat queer women seems to fall in with that. \u00a0I\u2019ve seen similar trends with acceptance of kink and polyamory in queer circles, while at the same time some queer folks are claiming that vanilla and monogamous sexualities are being ignored.<\/p>\n

The fact is, we\u2019re never all going to be the same. \u00a0The message of Healthy Weight Week is that bodies vary, \u201chealthy weight\u201d varies, and we should celebrate that. \u00a0The concern-trolling that sometimes crops up in the queer community may be in some way tied to the very idea of a \u201ccommunity\u201d–that a queer person should look a certain way, relate a certain way, and too much diversity will hurt us somehow. \u00a0Of course, that\u2019s bullshit. \u00a0It\u2019s not healthy for the most privileged members of a huge, diverse community to try to create community identity through policing the community\u2019s boundaries. \u00a0And ultimately, I don\u2019t think that they can succeed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thank you Healthy Weight Week for helping me keep my sanity this New Year\u2019s Resolution season. With everyone whining about holiday weight, the 15 pounds they\u2019re determined to shed this year, and the oh-so-annoying weight watchers commercials, a fat girl needs something to hold on to!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21098],"tags":[21337,21427,779],"class_list":["post-3242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-body-politic","tag-fat-positive","tag-healthy-weight-week","tag-queer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}