Belly of the Beast
Page 1
CONTENTS
Title Page
Praise for Belly of the Beast
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1: Beyond Self-Love
2: Pretty Ugly: The Politics of Desire
3: Health and the Black Fat
4: Black, Fat, and Policed
5: The War on Drugs and the War on Obesity
6: Meeting Gender’s End
7: Beyond Abolition
Endnotes Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
References
Index
About the Author
About North Atlantic Books
Belly of the Beast
The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Foreword by Kiese Laymon
Praise for Belly of the Beast
“This modern classic relishes in collapsing conventional and clichéd orthodoxies. As formative as Harrison’s proclamations are, it is Harrison’s pacing that gives the book the lingering feeling of the most sensual whisper.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
“Belly of the Beast is written with poise and lucidity. It pushes us to think past the pablum of telling fat folx all they gotta do is love themselves to enacting a movement that addresses the source and ramifications of societal anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Harrison forces us not to look away, reminding us that all too often ‘health’ and ‘desire’ are used to annul Blackness. In a ‘post bo-po’ world, desire and the sheer right to life can be rooted in something other than all the things named non-Black.”
—Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
“Da’Shaun Harrison is an insightful visionary, world-builder, and ingenious writer who brings us into deeper understandings and frameworks of the intersections of anti-Blackness and anti-fatness. Belly of the Beast brings us closer to ourselves because it brings us closer to the truth—that anti-Blackness is the foundation to how violence shapes our relationships to our bodies and each other. Harrison not only intervenes in the terror of white supremacist paradigms but develops the tools to imagine and build a new world. Belly of the Beast eats, and it leaves no crumbs.”
—Hunter Shackelford, author of You Might Die for This
“I am continually blown away by Da’Shaun’s ability as a writer to wrestle so deeply and expertly with questions many of us would never even think to ask—whether they be about our world, our politics, our selves, or our bodies. Every page challenges us to expand our imagination and reconstruct the ways we think, talk, and theorize about fatness, Blackness, gender, health, desire, abolition, and more. Belly of the Beast is a gift and a groundbreaker.”
—Sherronda J. Brown, editor-in-chief of Wear Your Voice magazine
Copyright © 2021 by Da’Shaun L. Harrison. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.
Published by
North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California
Cover photo by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Cover design by Sherronda J. Brown
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Printed in Canada
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is sponsored and published by North Atlantic Books, an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.
North Atlantic Books’ publications are distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publishers Services. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Harrison, Da’Shaun, 1996– author.
Title: Belly of the beast : the politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness
/ Da’Shaun Harrison.
Description: Berkeley, CA : North Atlantic Books, [2021] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An exploration of
anti-fatness and anti-Blackness at the intersections of race, police
violence, gender identity, fatness, and health”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020055026 (print) | LCCN 2020055027 (ebook) | ISBN
9781623175979 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781623175986 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: African American men—Social conditions. | Obesity in
men—Social aspects—United States. | Overweight men—United
States—Social conditions. | Body image—Social aspects—United States.
| Masculinity—United States. | African American men—Violence against.
Classification: LCC E185.86 .H376 2021 (print) | LCC E185.86 (ebook) |
DDC 305.38/896073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055026
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055027
North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.
Contents
Foreword ixAcknowledgments xiii1 Beyond Self-Love 12 Pretty Ugly: The Politics of Desire 113 Health and the Black Fat 334 Black, Fat, and Policed 475 The War on Drugs and the War on Obesity 696 Meeting Gender’s End 857 Beyond Abolition 105Notes 111References 121Index 125About the Author 129
Foreword
I am a fat Black and I would like to help Da’Shaun Harrison destroy the worlds.
That sentence defines me more profoundly than my name or any of my art. There will be plenty books and essays written about what Harrison has done with Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. Many will wonder about the rhetorical dexterity necessary to pull off such generative, and really luscious, theorizing. Folks will write about how Harrison welcomes us into the mushy procreant spaces beyond self-love, beyond health, beyond desirability, beyond human, beyond gender, and beyond abolition. Readers will talk about how Harrison names what is on the other side of, and within, all of these designations, as they invite us into the glorious stank act of radical revision (which is always a razing and generative act—even if ephemeral). Most will remember the book’s tenderness, its pleasurable rigor and its fat Black plea to demolish normal as we know it.
But. I want to talk about fantasy. And. I want to talk about fantasy.
Like a lot of you, I have tried to choke, and eventually been choked out by, disordered eating, exercise obsession, and body dysmorphia. I’m not sure anyone raised in this nation actually has a radically loving relationship with their body, their mirror, or their food, but I am “healthier” than I’ve ever been, and I am still never in my sexual fantasies or my sexual memories. I write and read to find my Black body, my Black body parts, both yesterday and tomorrow’s Black collective body. But what does it actually mean to f
ind our fat Black bodies in our fantasies? How do conventional understandings of time, place, pleasure, and consent build worlds in our fat Black bodies? How do we begin the work of world-building and world-obliteration off the page?
Belly of the Beast carried me to question why, in my fantasies, I am always far more traditionally masculine, and far less traditionally femme than I am in “real” space and time. In my memory, the ones I choose not to run from, I long not to be that same uber-masculine clone of myself. I want to be soft. I want to accept that the women in my fantasies might love and/or desire my softness? The women and genderqueer folk I meet in my fantasies and my memory have far more elasticity than the version of me I create there. But they are not nearly as elastic in body and character as the women with whom I am actually attracted? So while I am a completely distorted version of myself in my fantasies, the women in my fantasies are always women I’ve loved in the past. This means that in addition to creating a less fat, Black loving version of myself in my fantasies, I’m also only imagining love and sex with younger versions of myself and my partner. I’m erasing myself at a time in my life when I most need to be present.
Harrison has convinced me that this isn’t something to write off, or something to simply write down and to pat myself on the back for acknowledging. Our fantasies, like our utopias, don’t just say everything about who we are; they define where we are, and in defining what we are, they dictate what, and how, we will love, organize, fight, win, and lose. Heterotopias are real. And fake. They live in our fat Black bodies. And they do not live at all. This is, perhaps, the most triumphant revelation in Belly of the Beast. The fat Black folks we love are the world. The fat Black folks who love us are the world. Those fat Black folks, responsible for the most abundant and trifling parts of us, are worthy of the most exquisite destruction. And we are worthy of being tenderly destroyed by them.
As a fat Black boy artist who was always afraid of being seen, this modern classic relishes in collapsing conventional and clichéd orthodoxies. As formative as Harrison’s proclamations are, it is Harrison’s pacing that gives the book the lingering feeling of the most sensual whisper. Belly of the Beast took me behind what I’ve been told is liberation and said, “I want to destroy the world that manufactures and houses the cage by which the fat Black is bound.”
I am a fat Black and I’d like to help Da’Shaun Harrison destroy our worlds. I know you will, too.
Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
Acknowledgments
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Y. Davis starts her acknowledgments off by saying, “I should not be listed as the sole author of this book, for its ideas reflect various forms of collaboration over the last six years with activists, scholars, prisoners, and cultural workers . . .” Similar to her, I have come across and been in conversation with many people over the last seven years—and beyond—who have made this moment possible. I would have to write another book to list all the names of everyone who has journeyed with me, and perhaps one day I will, but for now I will do my best to list everyone I can within the confines of the space I have.
To Nichelle Spicer-Watkins, who I’m lucky to affectionately call Mama, thank you. If not for your labor, your love, and your labor of love, this would not have been possible. To my nana, Fran Spicer-Whitehead, and my aunts, Kimberly Spicer and Sonya Evans, thank you. If not for your ability and willingness to care for Mama when she went above and beyond to care for me, this would not have been possible. Thank you to my self-proclaimed managers, my brothers, Da’Quan and Cedric Harrison, for the laughs, the love, and the headaches. A thank you to my stepdad, Joey “Big Joe” Watkins, and my step-grandfather, Steve Whitehead, for the same. To the rest of my family, immediate and otherwise, I thank you.
Thank you to my best friend, my lover, my partner, my rose, Jaxson, for your continued support and for the ways you have held me throughout this process.
A special thank you to my queer parent, Hunter Shackelford, for holding me with so much love, grace, and care. I love better because of you. Thank you to one of my best friends, Jordan Mulkey, for all of the knowledge you’ve imparted into me; for the countless days and sleepless nights that we laughed and thought together. A huge thank you to my other best friends, Delaney Vandergrift and Terrance McQueen, for whom I am forever grateful. You have both loved me in ways unimaginable. To Justin James and Antoinette Kelley, I am forever thankful for and to you for seeing something special in me that you selflessly nurtured and helped grow. To the rest of my chosen family: Jaylen Thomas, Raekwon and Taekwon Griffin, Maurice Brooks, Fredric Wood, Jaeden Johnson, and Damani Warren, thank you for loving me so dearly—all the laughs, late night rendezvous, and endless support have pushed me to this exact moment. Thank you to the community of people who have held me down and held me close; who have crossed oceans and climbed mountains on my behalf: Simi Moonlight, Tea Troutman, RAW, Jill Cartwright, Eva Dickerson, Aurielle Marie, Desi Hall, and August Clayton. Thank you, Josh, Kings, and Q for holding me, challenging me, and loving me. And thank you Daviava, Nathanael, and Shydeik. For all of you, my love is endless.
Thank you to Avery Jackson. Your endless work introduced me to a world I otherwise would have never known and a strength I would have otherwise abandoned. To Dr. Natasha Walker, thank you for being the first to believe in me. Without your encouragement, your guidance, your friendship, and your mentorship, this book would have never been written. I love you forever. Dr. Daniel Black, thank you for teaching me to dream bigger, to read more intently, and to write more concisely. Your impact on my life and my life’s work is immeasurable. A special thank you to Lara Witt and Sherronda J. Brown for giving me the opportunity to write what I dream and for unlocking new dreams for me to write about.
On my journey to this moment, there were editors I worked with who impacted me, the way I think, and the way I write in more ways than they know—two of them being Hari Ziyad and Arielle Newton. Thank you both for believing in my work and for trusting me to write with so much care about Black people.
A very big and very special thank you to Kiese Laymon for all of the support you’ve shown me throughout this entire process. I am so honored to witness your brilliance in real time, family. Thank you to Sabrina Strings for all of your continued kindness; it means the world to me.
Thank you to Caleb Luna, Becca, and everyone else who offered feedback on this project. And to every fat person with whom I have existed in community for years—digital and otherwise. That list is very long, but I specifically want to name and thank Aubrey Gordon and Sofie Hagen who were both gracious enough to acknowledge me in their brilliant works. Thank you also to Sydneysky G. Your work and your friendship have had a continued impact on my work and how I theorize around our lives. I am so thankful for you.
Thank you to all of my Spelhouse friends and siblings. Thank you to all of my Twitter followers who have journeyed along with me, from start to finish.
A huge thank you to my editor, Shayna Keyles, for making all of this happen. You saw and embraced my vision from the beginning and helped to actualize it with so much care and effort. I am so grateful. And to all of the rest of the North Atlantic Books family, thank you.
To every friend, every stranger, every acquaintance, every community member—to everyone who has ever supported me, uplifted me, poured into me, or otherwise helped me make it to this point, thank you. I am so grateful for the ways each of you have contributed to my life.
And finally, thank you to all of the fat Black folks around the globe for whom I write with great diligence and intention. All of you helped write this book, too. All of the brilliant fat Black folks producing brilliant content online, who may never get to see their names on the cover of a book, this book is for you too.
1
Beyond Self-Love
In this book, we will talk about the body. Not just any body, but the fat Black body. And while our focus o
n the fat Black body will be general in some places, we will talk specifically about the fat Black masc body—how it has been imposed on, forgotten, and dismissed within fat studies. This book doesn’t exist anywhere else in the literary canon. There are many books on Black people, and there are many books on fat people, but there are so few that focus on fat Black people, and there are none that center on fat Black masc people’s bodies. So that is what we will do here. We will add to the few works that have begun to bridge a necessary gap between Black studies, fat studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
In a sea of necessary memoirs and “how-to” books, it is my hope to provide the literary canon with a text that will explore topics often interrogated separately, but rarely ever interrogated together. What does it look like to talk about policing, police violence, and prisons with regard to how the fat Black masc body experiences them? What does it look like to talk about health not as something the Black fat body has been removed from but rather as something created precisely for fat Black people, or the Black fat, to never have access to? What does it look like to talk about Desire/ability as a form of systemic violence that, too, was designed as a building through which the Black fat could not enter? How has gender encaged the Black fat? How do wars on our body, like the War on Drugs and the War on Obesity, overlap and intermingle? What is the utility of “body positivity” if it only seeks to provide one with a false sense of confidence rather than to liberate all from that which cages the body? In this book, these are some of the questions we’ll explore, and ultimately answer, together.
As a fat, Black, trans-nonbinary disabled person, I know the complexities that come with living in this body with these identities. I imagine that you do too, or you’re looking to learn about those complexities. You opened this book because, at the very least, you acknowledge that anti-Blackness and anti-fatness have something to do with one another—even if that acknowledgment is only that you read the words on the cover of the book. And that is why I’m writing and ultimately why I care about this book. A curious mind can be the start to someone’s understanding, and someone else feeling seen, heard, and understood. I value that.