Two Whole Cakes

I’m tickled to be posting this here on behalf of a reader who is assembling an anthology of writings by fat queers, a project that I think is fabulous and extremely necessary and couldn’t be happier about (and I’m not just saying this because it was such a struggle to find good sources when I was writing my MA thesis on fatness & queer theory a hundred years ago).

Check it out:

Call for Submissions

Working Title: Spilling Over: A Fat, Queer Anthology
Editor: Jessica Giusti, Feminist Studies Ph.D. Student, University of Minnesota
Contact: spillingover@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2008

Despite the attention given by queer studies to the materiality of bodies and the cultural and social inscriptions that designate them, still a dearth of both scholarship and literature exists around intersections of gender, sexuality, and fatness. As fat studies begins to emerge as a viable academic location of inquiry, questions surface as to how fat bodies, deemed “excessive” in their trespasses of size and space, create even more complex subject positions when compounded by queer desires. This proposed anthology seeks contributions addressing junctions of “fat” and “queer” in pieces that consider the representations and resistances of non-normative corporeality and also writings considering the theoretical conceptions of these intricate subjectivities. Spilling Over will reflect the notions of excess, boundaries, and containment implied by the labels “fat” and “queer” both singularly and collectively. In the form of scholarly writing and creative non-fiction pieces, essay submissions might consider (but are not limited to):

• theorizing the concept of “excess” as it pertains to fatness and queerness
• fat and queer identities; personal narratives; reclaiming “fat” and “queer”
• notions of (in)visibility, hypervisibility, and passing and/or privilege
• intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability, age, and religion
• the economics of the obesity “epidemic” and the diet industry
• fat, queer art and performance; performativity
• pleasure, sex-positivity, eroticizing non-normative bodies
• acceptance movements, political activism, resistance
• the engagement of feminism with fatness
• global, transnational, transcultural constructions of fat, queer bodies and lives
• critical reflections of fatness and queerness in media, literature, film, music, and visual arts
• the rhetoric of fat oppression, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, responding to and/or addressing hate speech

By December 1, 2008, please send your 2,000 – 6,000 word submission, along with your complete contact information and a 50-100 word biography, to spillingover@gmail.com with the subject line of “Spilling Over – Submission.” Submissions must be received in 12 point Times New Roman font and sent in via Word documents (PDFs will not be accepted). Pieces will be reviewed and decisions made by April 2009. Please note that accepted submissions will be approved on a tentative basis, pending editorial board approval once the anthology has secured a publisher.

Questions can be directed to me at spillingover@gmail.com or visit the MySpace page at www.myspace.com/spillingoveranthology

Please distribute widely.

I love Igigi. Well, I should qualify that: I love Igigi when they’re making stuff that fits my style, which they don’t always do. I love them when they match me because the quality and fit of their garments is absolutely outstanding.

Some seasons, yeah, I’ll look and the site and howl “NO IGIGI NO! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? I WOULD NEVER WEAR THAT.” (Yes, I treat them as though their sole purpose is to satisfy my demands. Full disclosure: I do this with plus-size retailers a lot.) Some seasons I am incapable of coherent speech because their offerings are so appealing, so all that comes out is “AAAARRGGGDHSAGHD” as I strain with the effort of figuring out how I’m going to pay for this stuff.

As many of y’all probably already know, Igigi has recently added video to their site, which is, in my ever so humble opinion, a stroke of fucking genius. (NB: Old Navy Plus is following in their footsteps on the video bandwagon; let’s hope this starts a trend amongst plus-size online-only retailers.) The videos are brilliant because they really do help to give a sense of how a garment moves, as well as the weight and hand of the fabric used (something that tends to be important to me).

This morning I was looking over the Igigi site (truthfully, I was weighing Igigi’s Brigitte Mod Dress against this more affordable option from the Silhouettes catalog), when I ran across the Jackie dress.

This is the kind of dress that renders me speechless as described above. Oh, it’s lovely. It’s the kind of thing Igigi does incredibly well: a sophisticated, slightly retro-flavored, well-fitted dress, equally excellent for a day at work or for more formal occasions. It’s why I love them, when they’re not doing the more monotonous and predictable matte-jersey stuff (in my opinion only, of course).

But there’s more: click through to the Jackie dress, if you will, and then click on the option to watch the video.

Now, the first couple of videos Igigi put up featured a full-length model wearing the dress, walking toward the camera, doing that goofy model-turn, posing, the end.

This particular video has added something more.

This video is dress porn. This is not meant as a criticism, but an acknowledgment that in my world, dress porn totally exists. Note the closeups, the tender stroking of the fabric. Should I be watching this at work? This is not merely informative, or educational. It’s seductive! Igigi, you tawdry tramp, you brazen hussy, you JEZEBEL OF THE FATSHION UNIVERSE. Give me the dress. GIVE ME THE DRESS. I NEED THE DRESS. THE DRESS AND I ARE MEANT TO BE TOGETHER.

It’s good that my fatshion obsessions aren’t, like, creepy or anything.

This is not fat-related, but it is race-related, which is obviously another important subject frequently touched on ’round these parts. What you’ll see, if you watch it, is some common-sense advice on how to address those inevitable racist statements or actions you may come upon in your travels through life (and the internets) in a way that is constructive and forward-thinking.

I didn’t make this video, I’ve just seen it linked via YouTube a million times lately, and this evening it occurred to me that it might have a useful place here.

Pay attention: there is an excellent and thought-provoking post over at Shapely Prose by guest blogger Occhiblu, who takes issue with an article uncritically linked on Junkfood Science on Friday.

Sandy calling this article “profound” and explicitly linking it to weight-based discrimination in the U.S. is problematic, to say the least. Saying that this is where “we’re being led in the name of perfect health and bodies, and in the war on obesity” endorses this view that somehow the Chinese are more oppressively perfectionist than the West and uses the racism of the original column to erase the reality of Chinese culture in order to make a point about fat discrimination. She tosses Chinese culture and values under the bus in her effort to talk about why fat discrimination is bad.

Occhiblu makes some great points, and the post serves as a hard reminder that when folks observe that fat acceptance has done an imperfect job of addressing its racism, they’re not necessarily accusing people of being candidly Racist-With-A-Capital-R-And-A-Pointy-Hat. The failure we’re most often guilty of is not being overtly offensive but simply not thinking critically about race when we’re going about the daily business of FA. This, I would hazard, was a case of someone simply failing to consider the racist implications of the article; for white folks in particular, this is an easy thing to overlook.

It’s a continuing process, and one we all have to recommit to every day, even when we fuck it up. Like riding a bicycle; when I fall off, I don’t throw the bike away – I get back on and give it another go even at risk of skinned knees.

It’s in the media, therefore it must be true!

My personal feelings on weight-loss surgery are hardly a secret and have been oft-repeated, both here and elsewhere. They are, in summation, that I do not begrudge anyone their individual rights to discrete and private decisions regarding their own bodies, but that on a political and personal level I am strongly, fiercely, vehemently opposed to weight-loss surgery. In practice this means I don’t generally end the relationship if a friend chooses to have WLS, but said friend must acknowledge that it’s just not a subject we can discuss. I try to think of it as the kind of basic philosophical disagreements I can have with a given person and yet overlook, because I like that person and their friendship is more important to me than agreeing on everything, which is unreasonable anyway (as an alternative example, evidently I also have friends who disagree with me that pistachio ice cream is a grotesque concoction of Satan, and yet we manage to push past that as well).

On a personal note, WLS freaks me out. The concrete facts of it freak me out, whether it’s sealing off a teeny tiny stomach-pouch and reconnecting it on an express route some distance down one’s small intestine, or even sticking an inflatable donut around the stomach to choke part of it off. It freaks me out. My digestive system WORKS! It works! Why would I take something that works and mindfully fuck it up? I have an almost panic-response to it, which makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for me to understand why anyone in full possession of the facts (as everyone I’ve known who’s gone the WLS route has been) could do that to their body.

So it goes without saying that this article’s opening horror-story of WLS gone wrong gave me the shivers: The miracle weight loss that isn’t: Risks of gastric-bypass surgery are often underplayed, some experts say

The article is from Self magazine, on the web by way of msnbc.com, and is unusually critical of WLS considering the obesity panic that typically permeates the news media.

[D]espite the growing popularity of obesity surgery — and the general perception that it’s a shortcut to thinness and good health — it’s no easy path. The American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) in Gainesville, Florida, puts gastric-bypass surgery’s death rate at between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 200. In one AHRQ study, 4 in 10 patients developed complications within the first six months, including vomiting, diarrhea, infections, hernias and respiratory failure. Up to 40 percent of gastric-bypass patients can suffer nutritional deficiency, potentially resulting in anemia and osteoporosis; seizures and paralysis have been reported in extreme cases. Some of these malnourished patients experience bizarre neurological problems, as Wells did. [Emphasis added]

Whoa whoa whoa, hold up there a minute, article! Between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 200? Does that strike anyone else as being kind of a broad freaking range of potentialities? Is that not a pretty horrifying reminder, in fact, that the exact number of casualties from WLS is totally fucking unknown? And is it not likewise horrifying to realize that doctors nationwide are proffering WLS willy-nilly as a cure-all solution for their fat patients who suffer from basically any health condition, weight-related or not?

Does this make anyone else want to roar like a big fat intestinally-intact lion?

All this for a surgery that the experts admit is poorly understood. Few randomized, controlled studies (the gold standard of research) have been performed comparing gastric bypass with nonsurgical weight loss therapy. Although initial weight loss can be dramatic — gastric-bypass patients typically shed around 70 percent of excess weight — patients gradually regain 20 to 25 percent of what they lose. For people with extreme obesity, defined as having a body-mass index of 40 or greater, gastric bypass often merely shifts them into the obese category. […] Altogether, weight loss surgery remains an uncertain proposition, and although potential patients must meet certain criteria (as the women interviewed for this article did), experts caution that the surgery is definitely not meant for the mainstream. “Because it’s risky, it’s only appropriate for a tiny fraction of people with obesity — the sickest 1 to 2 percent,” Dr. Kaplan says. “The idea that all obese people should get surgery is insane.” Yet that’s the way weight loss surgery is being peddled to the public.

I even had it “peddled” to me, totally uninvited, apropos of nothing. For the record, fatness notwithstanding, I am an impressively healthy individual, with only one chronic condition – very mild asthma – and that is unrelated to my fat. The fact that a well-meaning medical professional suggested WLS to me, a healthy body, essentially for cosmetic reasons, illustrates in a particularly stark way how irresponsibly WLS is both portrayed and understood by the medical community. Furthermore, peddling WLS to healthy individuals on the basis that their fat MIGHT, SOMEDAY, affect their health is on a level with recommending women with the most minimal risk factors for breast cancer get their breasts removed as a precautionary measure. It takes the position: “We don’t actually fully understand how fat works or how it influences health in a direct way, and instead of trying to further that understanding, we’re going to recommend you just get the fat removed, via a gruesome procedure that will in the best of circumstances affect your ability to eat and digest food for the rest of your life and the long-term health consequences of which are largely unknown.”

I understand that, for some percentage of people who choose WLS, the choice is made out of desperation after trying to confront weight-related health issues in non-surgical ways without success. I completely understand that diets don’t work and that for some people WLS seems the last chance they’ve got. But I also feel as though trading one set of health problems for another is hardly progress.

And there’s also the fact that WLS does not result in the fabled “permanent weight loss” fairy tale so many are eager to believe.

The greatest period of weight loss is the 12 to 18 months after bariatric surgery, after which you start to see weight regain, according to Meena Shah, Ph.D., an obesity researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Her 2006 review of the controlled studies done on the issue revealed that the disease-fighting properties of both bypass and banding surgery go down as patients’ weight goes back up.

[…]

But a new theory might provide some answers about post-op weight gain, and prove that willpower has little to do with it. Researchers are now theorizing that the reason patients lose a certain amount of weight in the first place is because gastric bypass, in part by toying with hormones, somehow lowers the body’s natural set point, the weight your system is most comfortable maintaining. A patient’s hunger returns, because the body has achieved that lower set point. “The surgery changes our physiology, the way the body responds to food. It makes heavy people more like people who are naturally thin,” enthuses Dr. Kaplan, who is conducting cutting-edge research on the topic. “Understanding this as a set-point issue allows us to stop blaming the patient who doesn’t do as well, because they were just built that way. What they lose is what they lose, and they can’t expect to lose any more.”

We’ll set Dr. Kaplan’s weird circular logic aside (”WLS makes fat people like thin people, except without actually making them thin!” I’m sure that sits well with his patients). Basically, WLS is surgically-induced starvation, and as such illustrates a perfectly paradoxial problem of surviving in an advanced consumer civilization – the “problem” of too much (for more on this, see Susan Bordo’s exceptional Unbearable Weight). Conventional wisdom would erroneously blame too much food for fatness, so the solution, it would seem, is to forcibly restrict intake. Except it doesn’t work – because fat people don’t get fat exclusively from eating too much food, simply restricting food isn’t going to make fat people thin.

Unfortunately, the article glosses past the fact that more and more people are choosing to pay for WLS out of pocket, owing to insurance companies and their mysterious and unfathomable rules about who qualifies for surgery and who does not. The unspoken side effect here is that WLS often remains a viable option only for the middle and upper class fatties; those without a few grand to spend (or the ability and inclination to put the procedure on credit) are out of luck.

Overall, the entire article is pretty impressive, considering it’s coming from Self magazine, which, unless it’s recently changed, is hardly a great bastion of size acceptance. I would not have expected such a critical assessment from that source, but I’m glad to be wrong, and I wholeheartedly recommend anyone who’s even thought about WLS give it a read.

For years upon years I wore nothing but black. By this I don’t mean that I wore “a lot” of black, or that the majority of my wardrobe was black – I mean bloody everything was black. The most color you’d see on me was, maybe, if something had red stitching on it. The black was omnipresent enough that it became a sort of trademark; I was always that girl who wears black all the time. People remembered me that way. People would refer to me that way.

Black was easy. Everything matched. I could spill shit on myself (a common occurrance even today) and not worry about a stain ruining the garment forever. In a more visceral way, it was also deliciously dramatic and cosmopolitan. I will argue til I’m dead that everyone is saying something, intentional or not, with the clothes they wear – even clothes that offer camouflage or cover.

To invoke our own ever-brilliant stitchtowhere, who was quoting someone else that said:

“As a visible expression of the social order, grooming practices mark a society’s members by rank, gender, occupation, and age, and also communicate identity, affinity, or aspiration. Failure or refusal to groom communicates resistance, carelessness , or incapacity. Thus, it is never possible simply to “opt out” of the discourse of dress. No one can dress in a way that signifies nothing.” (Scott 12)

Black says that you’re Serious. Black says that you’re Not To Be Trifled With. Black simultaneously stands you out and renders you invisible.

At some point in the past few years I befriended color for the first time, really, since my childhood. To the extent that now it’s difficult for me to wear black at all, unless we’re talking about a job interview or a formal event or something requiring some other variation of a uniform. I like color – particularly bright, retina-searing color – for some of the same reasons I liked black. It’s memorable. It’s dramatic. It’s something people remember.

It’s also attention-getting. Culturally-speaking, fat bodies are earmarked as either invisible (insofar as getting no attention at all) or temporary (insofar as only getting attention as the “before” in a before-and-after, or as the warning against alleged bodily/moral iniquity lest THIS COULD BE YOU). Wearing color means making myself – and my body – visible in a forceful way. I’m almost impossible to ignore. I may be othered; but you’re going to see me no matter what, whether you like it or not. And truthfully, personally, I don’t particularly care if you do – visibility for me is only marginally connected to attractiveness, or about being seen as “pretty”. No matter my body size, no matter what my face looks like, the eye of the beholder rules the day, so in the end there will always be folk who find me unattractive or even repulsive. I can’t be arsed to worry about that, or to allow myself think it says something about me, since I can’t change it. And as is often repeated but less often heard in fat acceptance circles: you don’t have to be “pretty”. You don’t owe attractiveness to anyone.

No, for me visibility is – literally, simply – about being seen. Seen, as the great big fatass I am, contented and proud in my own skin; this is a miserably uncommon representation of fat people, and yet I know these folk exist, because here I am. And here are my fat friends who feel similarly. Where are we represented, where are our experiences reproduced? If I can’t see them in culture, I will represent them myself.

I wouldn’t argue that all fat people should demand attention. I wouldn’t prescribe behavior to anyone unless they were comfortable with it. I am mostly asking you to consider what you’re saying with the clothes you wear, with your style, or lack thereof. Is it you? Or is it what the cultural discourse says you should be?