Body Talk

by Kelly Jensen

  It started with a gold-and-black leopard-print swimsuit that reminded me of my favorite childhood hand-me-down. I wore this swimsuit on my honeymoon to the Dominican Republic. At first, I was terrified to take my dress off as I stood on the beach with my partner (who thought I was super hot and still thinks so now). But as I looked around and saw a whole bunch of imperfect people with wrinkles and rolls and even cellulite lying in the sun, I thought, Why the hell not? I remember seeing pictures of myself in that swimsuit after my honeymoon. My partner had brought an old film camera on the trip, and without much warning, he snapped a picture of me by the pool. No cover-up or “flattering” pose. Just fat old me in a banging swimsuit. I was scared of the moment he’d get the photos developed and I’d have to see that picture, but when I finally did see it, there was nothing to fear. I didn’t think I looked incredible or anything, but I was happy and sun kissed and had sand in my hair. The girl in the picture didn’t care about what she looked like or what other people thought of her thighs. She was just having a damn good time in a cute swimsuit.

  After that, my swimsuit obsession snowballed. Bikinis began to take off in the world of plus-size fashion—I lovingly refer to them as fatkinis—and I soon became the proud owner of my very first bikini. I’ve had moments that felt like big milestones—wearing a swimsuit in front of my in-laws or posting a bikini picture online—but for me, it all comes back to two very special leopard-print swimsuits.

  For so long I hated trying on clothing for real, concrete reasons (like the fact that I couldn’t find anything in my size or anything that excited me) and also for more nebulous reasons (like how women are conditioned to dread trying on clothing and being confronted with the reality of their size). And you wanna know what? Sometimes after all the internal work and all the effort I’ve gone through to find brands that work for me, it still sucks. It can still be bullshit. So sure, every day is a struggle, and sometimes the fight to just say “Fuck yeah, my body is awesome as it is!” feels like an incredibly impossible uphill battle. But as of writing this piece, I can tell you that I own well over fifty pieces of swimwear and that I strut my fat ass into as many pools as I can, as often as I can.

  That’s an excessive amount of swimwear, I know, and some days I feel wasteful and even vain. My mother-in-law (who I love and adore) always comments that she never sees me wear the same swimsuit twice, and now it’s a running joke. Of course, I have the privilege of being able to accrue that much, but I think it’s also worth considering that, like many fat people, I’ve never before had the luxury of being so frivolous. Thin people take the luxury of frivolity for granted. They take it for granted that they can walk into nearly any store and find something that fits them. Despite my collection of swimwear, I still don’t have that luxury. But one thing I have found in my mounds of swimwear is power. It’s the same power a fat person feels when they post a picture of their face that exposes their double chin. It’s the same power another fat person might feel in eating and enjoying whatever kind of food they want in public. Or what someone with cystic acne feels when they go out without makeup. Or what someone with scars feels when they proudly display them. Or what we feel when we embrace any number of things that sometimes make us want to curl up in a hole and hide from one another.

  I know it sounds simple or maybe even ridiculous, but the greatest revelations of my life have come in the moments when I’ve learned to embrace the things society has tried to tell me I shouldn’t. And a big part of that for me has been showing off my jiggly ass and dimpled thighs in an amazing swimsuit. So go put on a swimsuit, flip a middle finger to the patriarchy, and remind yourself that you’re a work of art and any fabric that drapes your body is luck to do so. You are powerful.

  My Body, My Feelings

  by Patricia S. Elzie

  I was raised in a home that focused on academics. I was my brain, and my brain was me. I played sports here and there, but I was taught that being intelligent was the most important thing a person could be.

  If I wasn’t eating or drinking, I practically didn’t know I had a body at all until I was in my twenties. Having this relationship (or lack thereof) with my body for a big chunk of my life made the concept of body positivity seem alien to me, a person who felt body-neutral. I started becoming aware of my body in my midtwenties, when I became sexually active. I still didn’t have any appreciation for my body, as I thought of my physical self only in relation to others. I couldn’t imagine loving my body or being satisfied with my body, because it still felt like something I was just stuck with. My body was neither great nor terrible to me. It was simply there.

  I have a better relationship with my body than I did in my twenties for sure, but I also have a confession: sometimes I don’t fully love it. I know I am not unique in this; however, the body positivity movement tells me that outside forces are the reason we don’t always love our bodies. The diet industry, the beauty industry, white supremacy, ableism, transphobia, fatphobia, and so on. I completely agree. We did not come into this world hating our bodies. I’ve read the books, read the articles, and followed the hashtags, and academically, I get it. I understand.

  Yet. It is one thing to comprehend something academically, but it is another to react to it emotionally. For example, we all know that no one lives forever. Not our family. Not our friends. Not our pets. Not us. This is something we all know as truth, but even armed with this information, when we lose a loved one, we still suffer the blow emotionally. We still feel. We still react. We still mourn. So while I know that any dissatisfaction I feel about my body is a result of external input, at the end of the day, that feeling is still real.

  To further complicate things, many of the voices in the body positivity movement, though well intentioned, suffer from a lack of nuance and intersectionality. Sonya Renee Taylor, founder and radical executive officer of TheBodyIsNotAnApology.com, is a major exception to this statement. The work she is doing is phenomenal in its inclusiveness and breadth. Her voice, however, seems to be an anomaly in the sea of White feminist voices talking about fat positivity disguised as body positivity. I say it is “disguised as body positivity” because it is so often fat-centric.

  I fully support people actively loving their full-figured bodies, but my body is so much more than just its fat. My body is naturally curly hair that is thought of as unprofessional, as evidenced by the too-frequent news articles about Black women getting fired because of their hairstyles and Black students getting suspended or, worse, actually having their hair cut or shaved by school officials. My body is brown skin and therefore more likely to be victimized by police brutality, which is proven by the disproportionate number of Black people killed by police. My body has mental illness and therefore relies on medication to tell my brain to stop the obsessive thoughts so that I may sleep and to make room for hope and joy in a brain that is sometimes hijacked by depression. My body is queer and therefore my body’s relationship with my wife’s body is sinful and unnatural each time another piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation pops up.

  These are all reasons why I don’t love how the modern body positivity movement puts the focus on positivity, or if not positivity, then acceptance. By shifting its focus from fighting against policing people’s bodies to, instead, encouraging us to police our feelings, the movement excludes so many people. My wife is transgender. Before she started hormone replacement therapy, she struggled to exist in a body that did not feel like home—was I to tell her she just needed to accept her body as it was? Of course not. That’s downright awful.

  The body positivity movement imploring us to love our bodies as they are can also result in odd lines being drawn about body modification. We’re often told plastic surgery is bad, but tattoos and piercings are anyone’s choice. We’re told to not color our gray hair, because it’s not shameful to age, yet it’s totally OK to dye our hair blue or pink. Why are these boundaries being drawn? Who do they benefit? Where does gender confirmation surg
ery fall? Wearing makeup? Styling our hair? Getting a prosthetic limb? These examples are all vastly different—and yet they are all ways of modifying our bodies.

  It makes me think that body positivity in its current state isn’t about bodies at all. That, instead, it’s about how we feel about our bodies, how we feel about the bodies of others, and how others feel about our bodies. Isn’t dictating how we should feel just another tool of oppression? Another way to have us shift our focus from all that we could be achieving to, instead, closely monitoring our feelings about our bodies? And then allowing those in power to maintain their power while we’re distracted, wondering if we’re loving our bodies enough and in the “right” ways?

  Sometimes we don’t love our bodies, and I’m fed up with being told by everyone from RuPaul to Brené Brown that our capacity to love others depends on our ability to love ourselves. I’m done with the messages that I must love my body to achieve some kind of completeness, freedom, or happiness.

  I want to be clear: I am not against loving our bodies. I’m very much in support of loving our bodies, not only through emotions but also through actions. I support loving our bodies in ways that are revolutionary. But I also support feeling our feelings and acknowledging that our feelings are our own and that no one can invalidate them. It isn’t sustainable to suppress our negative feelings with a weight of positivity.

  The modern body positivity movement also puts up boundaries around our emotions, forcing us to decide which are acceptable and which are a product of society and capitalism. Recently, I found myself feeling guilt about my happiness after a small weight loss. It wasn’t from a diet. It wasn’t from exercise. I’d left a demoralizing work situation and dropped some of the weight I’d gained due to stress. I was happy to have lost it but then was immediately ashamed by that feeling. I’d failed at body positivity. On the flip side, I understand that for some people, such as those who have or are recovering from eating disorders, being happy about weight loss can be a slippery slope, and the rush of losing that weight can send them into a downward spiral. These are the reasons why the body positivity movement needs to expand beyond an all-or-nothing mentality. Life is never 100 percent of anything.

  Some people may never love their bodies fully or partially or at every moment. But no one should feel additional shame from a movement purported to be about positivity. We are not weak or less-than because of our emotional experiences, just as people who reach a high level of body confidence, body acceptance, or body positivity are not more-than. So what now?

  I don’t always love my body or how my body is devalued in this society, but I am grateful for my body. Maybe that’s where the positivity lies for those of us who feel left out of the movement, and maybe that’s how we can find comfort in our relationships with our bodies. Perhaps we can practice body gratitude and make space for the positive, neutral, and negative feelings. For the highs, lows, and everything in between. No matter where we’re at, maybe focusing on being grateful, knowing that the gratitude may shift from day to day, will help us feel more consistently at home in our bodies.

  In her book The Body Is Not an Apology, Sonya Renee Taylor writes, “When we liberate ourselves from the expectation that we must have all things figured out, we enter a sanctuary of empathy.” Perhaps this is how: by knowing none of us has this completely figured out and we are all learning together. We must be patient with ourselves on our journeys and with others on theirs.

  I may never be truly, madly, deeply in love with my chubby midsection or my gray hairs, but I am grateful that this body allows me to hug, write, and laugh, which are all much more important to me.

  Is it OK to use the word fat?

  As with any label applied to a group, each individual within that group will have a different preference. But generally, fat is the acceptable, preferred term to describe someone who is outside the medically and culturally defined average weight or physical build.

  Fat is—and is not—a complicated term. Too often, it’s a word used to describe a feeling. Fat is not a feeling; it is a physical aspect of a body. Fat is also not an OK word to use to make someone feel bad, to use as an insult, or to use as a basis for discrimination. Fat is a thing a body can have, just like hair or fingernails or a nose. Some bodies have more fat than others.

  Fat activists have reclaimed the word fat, and if someone self-identifies as fat, it’s not only acceptable but also encouraged to use that same language to describe them. A person who describes themself as fat has elected not only to embrace the word but also to celebrate it.

  Fat Out Loud

  by Alex Gino

  I was twenty-three years old the first time I said the word fat out loud. I had already discovered the concept of genderqueerness and embodied it. I had already graduated from college, ditched one career, and started another. I lived on my own, had a full-time job, and was on my first-ever solo vacation: two weeks in the Pacific Northwest. But I had never said the word fat. OK, maybe I had whispered it to myself in the dark, but I had never said it at full volume, and certainly never in front of someone else.

  At least, I don’t remember saying the word fat, and I do remember avoiding it more adamantly than I avoided butter. If I never tried butter, I could virtuously say I didn’t like it, and I wouldn’t end up getting fat because I liked it too much. If I never acknowledged that I was fat, it wouldn’t matter to me and I couldn’t feel shame about it.

  As if my grandmother hadn’t given me a book called Teenage Fitness for my twelfth birthday because “I could go either way”: thin success or fat failure. As if I hadn’t grown up watching my mom lose the same twenty pounds over and over, only to find them again like the cat who came back the very next day. As if my ex hadn’t told me that part of the reason he was no longer attracted to me was that I had put on weight during a winter bout of depression.

  Avoidance isn’t how butter works, and it’s not how shame works. Not knowing what butter tasted like didn’t mean I wouldn’t be fat, and not naming my shame didn’t mean I wasn’t filled with it. Shame lives in the shadows. I was fat and needed to be able to talk about my body. I deserved to be able to talk about my body. I didn’t want to hate my body—I never had. But I had never heard of someone loving their fat body, and that meant I didn’t really know it was an option, much less how to do it.

  So there I was, visiting my good friend Beth in Seattle. She’s about my build (if a little taller) and wanted to share something with me, something she had just been introduced to herself. She handed me a brightly colored book with the title FAT!SO? emblazoned on the cover, above a delighted and delightful blond woman, a cartoon representation of author Marilyn Wann. Beth showed me that if you flipped the pages, a tiny, round Marilyn in the corner shook her stuff. It was a book filled with funny pictures and snarky commentary, and it said “FUCK YOU!” to the ideas that had been implanted so deeply in my mind that I hadn’t even known I wasn’t born with them.

  Beth and I took turns reading out loud to each other. She went first. It was a life-altering moment to sit in that sunny Seattle room and hear the word fat as an honest descriptor, not as an insult. Fat as a source of joy, maybe even something to be proud of. I felt full, seen, and solid, beneath our giggles at Marilyn’s effervescent style.

  And then it was my turn. I don’t remember stumbling or whispering. Like the title of the book said, I was fat. So? Shame about my shame multiplied into shame armor. It felt important to read the word fat as though it weren’t a big* deal, when, in fact, it was massive.*

  I was three thousand miles from home. None of it counted, like ice cream you were allowed to eat on that weird carbs-for-one-hour-a-day diet I tried for that ex who told me I was a lot less attractive when I was slightly fatter. I could claim it wasn’t really me saying the word fat, acknowledging its existence in the world, in my body. (Back then, I still thought about fat as something people have, rather than something people are.) I was si
mply reading what Wann had written, with no personal attachment to any of the ideas. I was just experimenting with being the kind of person who said things like flabulous and chub rub without a second thought.

  We must have read fifty pages aloud, and at some point, I realized we wouldn’t be able to read the entire book together. I couldn’t put this all on Beth, Seattle, and Marilyn, anyway. I would have to take on my own empowerment of my fat self. And you’d better believe I have. I bought my own copy of the book and finished it back home in Philadelphia, reading out loud when it felt like I needed to hear the words more deeply. I learned to smile at my body in the mirror. I rubbed my belly. I stroked my sturdy, dimpled thighs. It took time and focus, but once I stopped avoiding my own avoidance of my body (a full*-time job), there was nowhere for the shame to hide.

  Since my trip to Seattle, I have grown quite fond of the word fat and of fat bodies. I’ve made lots of incredible friends and acquaintances who love their bodies and mine, and love to celebrate them. Many of us are soft and squishy and give great hugs. Radically self-loving fat people are some of the most fun, caring, thoughtful, special people I know, and lots of us are amazing cooks who are happy to share our tables. That doesn’t mean we don’t have rough days when the world gets to us, but we have each other. In hard times, I have been buoyed* by my fat queer community.

  I’ve also learned that mine is only one of a wide* range of bodies and that this body I always saw as having “excessive” fat is really rather middling. I remember looking at myself in a mirror during my first NOLOSE conference (a radically feminist, fat-positive, queer space) and feeling smaller than I had ever felt. Not with pride or shame or anything but the realization that my archetype for people had been skewed to the thin for so long that I had seen myself at the high end of the spectrum. At four feet ten and having been in the range of 150 to 180 pounds my entire adult life, I am nowhere near the high end of the spectrum.