“We
claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority. But we never
stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans.”
April 4, 2012
|
Last weekend when "Mad Men" aired its second episode of the season,
viewers blanched to see character Betty Draper, a frustrated housewife
with no personal or professional outlet, sink into a spiral of weight
gain, self-loathing and emotional overeating, begging her doctor for
diet pills. While today's viewers may find Betty's plight simplistic or
pat, the idea that body image and weight were interrelated with feminism
was revolutionary for its time.
In fact, it changed the way activists looked at their bodies and
politics. Even as this intersection between food, body image and
politics has been debated, critiqued and absorbed, how far have we come?
Psychologist Susie Orbach’s debut book
Fat Is a Feminist Issue celebrates
34 years of providing theoretical and practical musings on the
relationship between women and fat. The book is equal parts self-help
advice, psychology journal, gender studies, and fat-acceptance theory.
As feminist and fat acceptance movements evolved from second-wave
protests to contemporary digital activism,
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
connected the dots between two parallel causes for human rights while
championing the individual’s right to be healthy and happy at every
size. Orbach’s pioneer insistence that feminists needed to talk about
body image and compulsive eating, while fat activists had to acknowledge
issues of gender and difference, united two notorious social-activist
movements that made progress possible across a dual spectrum of civil
rights.
The second wave of U.S. mainstream feminism appeared well underway when
Fat Is a Feminist Issue came
to prominence. At a time when feminist rallies and actions organized
predominantly around the Equal Rights Amendment and changes in the
workplace – as well as the emergence of fat-acceptance protests without a
framework for understanding gender – Orbach wanted to explore the
private lives of female compulsive eaters. For a fat woman operating in
the public sphere, life “centered on food, what she can and cannot eat,
what she will or will not eat, what she has or has not eaten and when
she will or will not eat next… The obsession with food carries with it
an enormous amount of self-disgust, loathing and shame.”
In 1970, the Boston Women’s Health Collective published a 35-cent booklet that morphed into the classic tome,
Our Bodies, Ourselves. Eight years later,
Fat Is a Feminist Issue showcased Orbach’s clinical, activist and often personal work battling fat oppression.
Within a few years of Orbach’s debut release making the rounds in
book clubs and classrooms, the feminist backlash of the 1980s became all
too apparent. Critics claimed that feminism’s modest (read: staggering)
social and political gains were more than satisfactory. They wanted the
general public to embrace post-feminist gender equality. Mostly, the
naysayers got their way. Gone were the days of Orbach’s group
consciousness-raising sessions, where community members shared stories
of fat shaming, body dysmorphia and eating disorders — a public space
that exposed a common hatred of fat and frequently female bodies while
fumbling on the path to liberation. But where the groups left off,
popular literature became the outreach to disseminate the gains of
activists.
One of the author’s shortcomings in 1974 was the
narrowness of her topic’s scope, particularly when it came to issues of
race, genders other than cis women, sexual orientation, and disability.
In the preface, Orbach noted that the groups of women she worked with
were composed entirely of North American and European white women;
similarly, discussions on queer fat bodies, trans* fat bodies, and
disabled fat bodies (outside the purview of eating disorders) are not
referenced in the text. However, as both feminist and fat-positive
movements took their message to the Internet, conversations among
various social justice-minded communities continue to expand.
Several prominent feminist bloggers focus extensively on body
acceptance, but their work often goes beyond the singular relationship
of gender and fat. Writer and activist Tasha Fierce is a frequent
contributor to
Bitch and Jezebel and creator of the blog
Sex and the Fat Girl,
where Fierce documents her experiences as a self-described “fat, queer
woman of color.” She is particularly passionate when addressing the
intersectionality of fat bodies.
“Our approach to building fat community needs to be a comprehensive
and all-inclusive one,” says Fierce. “White cisgender feminists who are
fat need to recognize that there are different levels of oppression —
not everyone who is fat is only facing discrimination because of their
weight.” She pointed to a recent
call-to-action
by the organization NOLOSE which argues that people of color are too
often portrayed as the impoverished, tragic face of a heavily
politicized and trending obesity epidemic. Social justice organizers in
both the fat-acceptance and feminist communities are responsible for
facilitating inclusiveness within their ranks, she says. Fierce shared
her insights for creating that environment. “When there are fat activist
gatherings, the organizers need to make sure the venues and materials
are accessible to those who use differing methods of communication —
these are just basics to start with.”
Fierce is hardly the only feminist-minded writer who insists on an
intersectional approach to feminism and fat positivity. Late last fall,
Hanne Blank released an expanded edition of
Big Big Love, Revised: A Sex and Relationships Guide for People of Size (and Those Who Love Them). Blank read
Fat Is a Feminist Issue as
a college undergraduate. Her vision for mitigating privilege is
deceptively simple and profound. “Shutting up and listening with
humility and openness to what other people have to say about their
experiences and their needs would be a great start,” says Blank. “Then
work on creating coalition politics.” There’s also the work of renowned
womanists
Renee Martin,
Monica Roberts and Tami Winfrey Harris, who recently
posted on the harsh criticism hurled at the overweight, middle-aged
Downton Abbey star Brendan Coyle’s appearance in a love scene.
Even for bloggers who haven’t read Susie Orbach, her text’s influence
is undeniable. Consider Arwyn Daemyir, who blogs at Raising My
Boychick. Her 2009
post on the futility of dieting is particularly memorable. Daemyir’s mother was a subscriber to
Radiance: The Magazine for Large Women and later provided her daughter with a personal subscription. Although Daemyir has not read
Fat Is a Feminist Issue,
her mother owned a copy. “I have a tag on my blog by the same title,”
she says, noting the phrase’s influence. Yet Daemyir felt more
influenced by titles that followed Orbach’s published work, including
Marilyn Wann’s
Fat! So? and Bonnie Bernell’s
Bountiful Women, as well as the too-short-lived
Hues
magazine. Without Orbach’s contributions to the feminist and
fat-acceptance movements, perhaps none of these works would have drawn
in audiences from both sides of the proverbial aisle.
Orbach’s radical call for open dialogue on body image and eating
disorders remains an essential text for generations of activists who
struggle with understanding and accepting fat bodies. But the work is
far from complete.
Within the movements, the same impossible questions cycle and recycle. In “
Tiny Revolutions,”
advice columnist Cheryl Strayed (writing as “Dear Sugar”) responded to a
middle-aged woman experiencing bouts of insecurity at the thought of
exposing her loose-skinned, not-skinny body to a new lover. Sugar poses a
question that Orbach likely asked of her own clients in group sessions:
“What’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I
move from loathing to loving my own skin?”But was anyone shocked when
Sugar pointed to a profound failure of the feminist movement to flip the
script on body-hatred? Thirty-four years after Orbach sounded the
alarm, there is still no collective feminist vision of the other side.
“We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered
the accolades,” Sugar writes. “But we never stopped worrying about how
our asses looked in our jeans.”
Orbach can point to a number of changes in the treatment of fat women and diet culture after the publication of
Fat Is a Feminist Issue. Eating disorders are not the hidden phenomenon of decades past. As an author, she may have been able to take some credit after
Cosmopolitan ceased running a diet-tips column after the book’s release, but most of the mainstream magazines marketed to women, including
Cosmo,
would be hard-pressed to name more than a dozen instances of plus-sized
bodies making front cover. Even in times of Internet connection and the
subsequent fluidity of personal identity, fat bodies are policed and
polarized into extremes. Feminism and fat-acceptance movements need
Orbach and other feminist, fat-positive writers to establish
correlations between body image and body acceptance. The revolution may
still be possible, but it will require the collaborative vision of
multiple communities to achieve.
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