The Vulgarity of Flesh

The fastest way to fat liberation is physical. We will never have our freedom if we live only ‘from the neck up’, yet that is the way many fat people live, even, or especially, the activists and academics among us. Embodiment just works…The oppression of anti-fat hatred is sited on the body, and it is in the body that those wounds can be healed.

—Heather McAllister, “Embodying Fat Liberation” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. by Sandra Solovay

I am fat, over 300 pounds, and the older I get, the more ridiculous the maxim of fat dressing becomes. Minimizing outfits are not only fatphobic (implying that there's something shameful about a fat body that one must at least attempt to hide), but also unrealistic. Wearing black or vertical stripes, or Spanx isn't going to somehow distract people from noticing I'm a very fat woman. I see no reason to engage in that kind of sartorial subterfuge. Nothing I wear will make me look like I'm only 120 pounds, no matter what it is, and as a fat activist and someone engaged in fat studies for my PhD, I see my clothing choices as very political. I have no desire to acquiesce to being an invisible fat body, the only kind of fat body that is acceptable in Western society. Simply being a fat body in the world is a political act when we are constantly bombarded with the notion that bodies like mine are disgusting, and don't deserve to appear in public, unless shrouded.

Yet the fat body is often seen as aggressively vulgar, in your face. When I wear tighter-fitting garments, people react as if I have slapped them in the face, and they feel provoked and permitted to say whatever they want to me, usually about how inappropriate my attire is, and how unhealthy I must be (as if health is a virtue, as if the only good people are the healthy ones), and how ugly I am.

Here is an example of an outfit I wore last year that incited such responses:

Dress: Lane Bryant
Cardigan: Old Navy
Shoes: Ralph Lauren

(NB: These photos were taken before I learned how to take outfit photos properly, so please forgive their inexpert quality.)

Because the dress fits tighter over my stomach than the typical media images of fat women swathed in loose fabric, I was told multiple times over the course of the day that my dress was vulgar and inappropriate. The photos above don't really do justice to the amount of curves showing, so I'm including this cell phone photo from the dressing room when I bought the dress:

If I wanted to avoid this effect, I would have to wear my clothes so big that I would, essentially, be wearing a potato sack, and I like the way my body looks, so I don't mind when my belly shows, but, as one woman snipped: "This is not what it means to celebrate your curves!" The dress is tasteful and professional, but because I wasn't attempting to hide my body, it was read as vulgar because fat bodies in and of themselves are vulgar. By refusing to buy into that myth, I was aggressively displaying my vulgarity at work, and challenging the fatphobia of my colleagues. I refuse to ignore my body and live only in my mind, and I refuse to wear only those things fat women are told are acceptable for them to wear, things that don't accentuate fat, things that attempt to minimize the appearance of fat, not for the sake of the fatty, but for the sake of the viewer. Fat bodies are only ever considered from the point of view of the person gazing at them, never from the position of the fat-bodied themselves. And when I refuse those garments, and wear ones of my own choosing, I am stepping outside the boundaries of what some consider acceptable. I am transgressing, and I need to be punished.

Lesley Kinzel put it brilliantly, in her blog post at Two Whole Cakes, entitled "So Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham walk into an elementary school cafeteria*"

Those who subvert social norms are, ostensibly, people who have forgotten that they can be seen, publicly, at any time. Therefore, when they transgress social norms—by expressing physical affection for a person not visibly coded as the opposite sex, for example, or by being fat and rejecting social and bodily invisibility—they need to be reminded of this omniscient social gaze, and in the absence of institutional discipline, must be punished so they do not transgress again. This is the mechanism by which a dude who sees me in a vividly-colored dress, walking alone as though I either don’t know or don’t care that I am defying bodily norms, feels compelled to scream “UGLY FAT BITCH” at me. He is applying social discipline and teaching me a lesson: Everyone can see you, and your body and/or behavior are unacceptable.

It is not always easy to be as visible as I am, but I want to take up space. I want to constantly challenge the notion that my body—fat, queer, and disabled though it may be—is unacceptable, and ought to be hidden away. Especially in academia, where embodiment is read as frivolity, taking attention away from the superior mind, being visible is political. I'm open about my sexuality—an aspect of my identity that is often invisible because of my Femme presentation—so why wouldn't I be open about my fatness, an aspect that one cannot ignore? Why must my identity remain outside of the classroom, or my cubicle? Especially when I study fat studies and queer studies and disability studies for a living, how could I ignore those very aspects of my own embodied experience? There are certainly outfits I wouldn't wear to school, but this body conscious houndstooth dress does not look inappropriate to me. It's not low-cut or too short. It's not covered in sequins or feathers. It's a pretty conservative outfit, actually. Yet I was, according to one slim colleague, "too fat to be wearing that." The idea of "appropriate" is a concept I want to continue investigating on this blog.

How do you negotiate the balance between appropriate attire for academia and your own political motivations and personal comfort?