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Black Fat
Revisiting Aunt Jemima's Big Black Ass Revisiting Aunt Jemima's Big Black Ass #2 Eating, Sitting, Loving, Living, While Fat There, I speak more of the intersection of race, fatness, and sexual objectification which is only a part of my feelings towards race and fatness. While I have not read or shared on the experiences of women of color who are not black... I do feel the expereince of fatness for Black women is quite particular. There is an amazing article on the subject by Doris Witt in Kimberly Wallace Sanders' Skin Deep Spirit Strong called "What (N)ever Happened to Aunt Jemima" (it is also in an issue of Discourse I dont know which. It talks about perceived notions of Black peoples' acceptance of fatness, and the racialized notion of appetite for Black women. There is this broad beleif that somehow for Black women it is more acceptable to eat (and therefore become fat) because "we" (black folks) are more accepting of fat on women. Simultaneously you have this fat Black woman trope called the mammy. The mammy is always fat and associated with food (Aunt Jemima for example), and therefore the archetype of a particularized Black womanhood: the fat Black woman. The racialized notion of Black women's appetites is so pervasive in culture and science that medical doctors concluded that Black women simply eat too much although their research proved otherwise.* Some Black women under-eat and remain at with slow metabolisms. The perception has also blocked the reality of Black girls' and women's eating disorders which are not only over eating but involve anorexia, and multiple forms of bullemia, and dangerous yoyo dieting. My expanding thoughts on that essay would be to interrogate those attributes attached to mammy further for example: her a-sexuality, her willingness to nurture all but her own, her attitude, her duties in the mater's house, her relationship to other slaves on the plantation, her location in the house etc.  The mammy archetype of course is something Black women choose to run away from... just as we have historically run away from the other tropes: Jezebel, Sapphire etc. So, in actuality, in the lives of Black women, appetite is not acceptable. Within the Black community fat is only acceptable in certain amounts and in certain places on the body. Other fat women are jokes, ("She looks more like Freddy Jackson!" - Friday) sidekicks (think of every Black film or TV show with a female protagonist... Kim to Moesha in Moesha, Love Jones, Jason's Lyric, Two Can Play At That Game, The Preacher's Wifeand the PATHETIC role of Gloria in Waiting to Exhale) or aggressive Bitches (Queen Latifah's role in Set it Off and Bringing Down the House, even Sophia in The Color Purple). While history has shown that it was in fact mammy, who was continually raped and brutalized the need to see her as a-sexual of course stems from her corpulance. Ideaologically, her corpulance distances her from femininity, and is therefore pushed to the masculine. This trips up the other stigmas of the mammy: In regards to her place in the house would also push us to think about how white women attach themselves to fat black women. It would be interesting to do a run down of white women's attachment to Oprah (examine what happened with her audience when she lost weight for example) or white feminists' attachment to Audre Lorde (why not June Jordan if one must dig a Black feminist lesbian?) Early white feminists' attachment to Sojourner Truth... I would argue that fat black women epitomize the inverse of what it is to be woman (again expanding the discourse on the notion of black women--with no disctinction on size--as the anti woman). A woman has restraint (doesn't overeat and therefore become fat, isn't sexually uncontrollable and therefore is not Black) she is also frail and managable ( fat women aren't physically managable and too solid to be frail, Black women are too angry, masculine etc. to be managable or frail... think Sojourner Truth) women demand coddling and attention (mammies are made to cater to those needs... even and especially when it involves taxing demands on her own body -- wet nurses for master's children without breastfeeding her own. Mammies never have needs of thier own. I am reminded there of a moment in Gone With the Wind where Rett Butler gives Mammy a red silk petticoat. She is given it as a joke... Why the hell does mammy need a silk petticoat? She has worn the same dress every day for the past 30 years... The luxury of the gift mocked her status as slave. Also it was red silk--a very erotic fabric and color... again to mock her a-sexuality. In the scene Mammy is extremely bashful about it... like a 13 year old girl who has gotten her first compliment. Oprah with all her money has always had to tuck away her sexuality. Even the richest woman in the US is not free of those things because of her race. The discourse around her and Steadman is extremely sexless. Therefore the new discourse that speculates her homosexuality makes complete sense. A-sexuality brings about the spectre of homosexuality for women. Where there are no men who are present as sexual releases for women they are speculated to be with women. Black women have always been placed in this strange space where not only where they a-sexualized into lesbianism, but also oversexualized into it as well: Sarah Baartman for example was pathologized into lesbianism because of her physiology.... Even Audre Lorde with all of her talk about her sexuality and her own desires is suppressed in the literature of those who laud her. Her words in the "Erotic as Power" are taken as cautionary earth mother goddess advice rather than open discussions on her sexual relationship to her body (we are much more interested in how she dealt with her dying body). Masani Alexis DeVeux speaks a little on white women's attachment to Lorde in her Biography Warrior Poet. I could go on but these are just a few ramblings to pin down some of the racilized aspects of Blackened fat. Watch for the developing queered black fatness version... (That was more of a threat than an announcement.) *As a food for thought: Black women die in the largest numbers of stress related diseases such as hypertension and heart disease. Science has blamed this on fat and unhealthy diet, not on daily traumas of racism that cause the heart to beat rapidly for short intervals. It would be fucking relvolutionary for science to admit that Black women are slowly dying of racism! Technorati Profile Labels: black women, fatness, history uttered by a black girl at 12:04 AM. | 4 comments
It is a strange middle space to be in. But I am up for it. Remind me that i said this tomorrow... uttered by a black girl at 11:42 PM. | 2 comments
Unfortunately, in the transition I've lost all of my images that were uploaded to blogger and placed in this blog. I've been considering replacing them but that would be assuming folks actually look through the archives. Something which my humility will not allow me to do. I am also highly upset with my host and will be seeking a new one as soon as the quarter is up. If you know of a great cost effective hosting service please do tell me about it. Now... on to our regularly scheduled program... uttered by a black girl at 11:53 PM. | 0 comments
uttered by a black girl at 9:26 PM. | 0 comments
So I have to rethink her. Strong Black Woman is not an ideal. She is the generic brand of emotion black women have to buy because that's all we can afford. We have not the privledge of breaking down and handling our shit. Whether it be time, perceptions of weakness, money, or kids Strong Black Woman's woredrobe comes along to save the little bit we have left. I do not want her tired ass threads for real. I don't. But being in them and my good threads all out for laundry with no coins to pull them out--it makes it seems as though I have no other options. So I have to suck up the blues. "Distract myself" (strong black woman motherwit) with shit to do. Make these distractions worthwhile (to justify not taking care of the deepest part of me), and move on. I can't even theorize on her. She got me locked up tight. uttered by a black girl at 10:39 AM. | 2 comments
Yes, there is still a new layout to come. No I have not forgotten. But this Black Girl has been chewing on some things recently. (No pun intended, and you shall see why.) What I am thinking about is fatness. And while a number of scholars and thinkers have been able to scholarize the subject, and as much as I will take there cues here in this blog, there is something so personal, so raw and open about the subject for me, that I cannot fully articulate all of what I see, all of what I have felt here. But I will try. The most trepedatious thing about fatness is actually coming out as a fat person. That seems strange because it is visible, but because it is something to be ashamed of there is a coming out process that most of us I would argue have not quite undertook. I had a closeted fat moment this evening. And I am sure, many times before that. You know—the moments where you are too afraid to pointout a moment of fat-based lookism because it would draw attention to your own relatonship to fatness? Yes, that’s what I call a closeted fat moment. And you don’t want to think of your thinner friends as "the man" or insensitive to their fat friend. But after a while it becomes painfully clear that you're fatness is something that your thin friends have tried to avoid in conversation because they think of it as ill as the rest of society, and even you do. (Totally replace "you" and "your" as me, I am aware that these are my observations alone.) But coming out as a fat person would have to involve claiming the space as a fat person. It is so odd, the way in which fat people try our best to take up as little space as possible in order to make comfortable the lives and eyes of the thinner. When I think of the many airplane rides where I have made myself wholly uncomfortable by balling myself up into nothing I cringe. Or think of the moments at the mall where I willfully decide not to even enter the "skinny heffa" (read all mainstream stores and boutiques) store so as not to take up room I am not meant to occupy because of my fatness. (Even my use of the phrase "skinny heffa" surely inspired by comedienne Mo'nique is also a part of the mistrust and hurt from the privileges thinner women enjoy by living the physical ideal, and being acknowledged as real and human by the rest of society.) It's a complete way of shifting the mind--what if... instead, we thought of mainstream stores and boutiques as a place where we are mindfully excluded, instead of ourselves as unacceptable and unworthy of being in them? These establishments are fully aware that larger women exist (I exclude men here because men's clothing has been far more inclusive of the fat.) yet they choose not to desire our outward patronage because of our fatness (the gap carries larger sizes online but not in the stores so our fat asses wont take up space there). We would not accept this treatment on the basis of race because we are aware that racism exists, we critique racism and the pain that it has caused people who have been abused by it. But lookism on the basis of fatness... no such luck. And it is the closetedness which is the most painful aspect. The feeling of intrusion that interjecting the subject of fatness would take. Instead, we often obfuscate it by talking about general ideas of "beauty" (whiteness for example) without looking to the particulars of sizeism as an issue. And we accept and aplomb the abuses we endure. The numerous news reports which film fat bodies anonymously as exotic, and pitiful specimens of human indulgence and repulsion. How often have I looked closely to see whether or not it is my abdomen or rear end filmed without my consent? Yes we watch... looking for the most recent health study that does not even contend that our fatness actually kills us. We endure the commercials that insult our beautiful divine bodies for the "sake" of our waistlines. We ignore the most intimate part of ourselves in order to heal what is torn apart daily. Our bodies can no longer be sensual. And I mean that in every sense of the word. Our fat blocks nerve endings in the public eye--and therefore we should no longer feel the pain of insults towards our bodies. We shouldn't feel the pleasure of making love--we shouldn't because our bodies are not worthy of love. Most of all we shall never enjoy food. Not in public. And eyes (whether real or not) will watch over our fat asses chewing. Marking the calories, fat grams, sodium (water retention) in each bite with panoptic scrutiny. Or maybe it is just me. And this is the most real aspect of fatness--Isolation. Fat people talk the worst about other fat people. Judge our own bodies against those of fatter people. "At least I am not that big." A constant if not unconscious, extremely present refrain. We as individuals are not fat. Others are fat, I am just [insert fat euphemism here]. But sometimes in the quiet, when it becomes too much one will find comfort in a fellow fat person. I will share with them how little I ate today, how far I ran, just enough stuff to prove my humanity another. My worthiness of thinner company in the human race. I will always secretly find pride in my anorectic and bulimic days. The days I ate nothing more than a cucumber, I will sigh and reminisce about my former size during those days (which was even then not thin enough)... I will relive them for moments in my more weak days where I actually nourish myself. The politics of it are so very personal. And they live in the quiet of our everyday lives so that lookism on the basis of size and sizeism itself goes unchecked. This changes nothing. This only reifies our invisibility, our desire to be invisible, unwatched-- free to eat, sit, live and love while fat without a question of our humanity. It's gotta change. The first step is to come out--all fucked up and bruised--we are bound to be. Come out with me. Step a round toe out of the closet door and find a world that fits just right. Another blog on fatness: Revisiting Aunt Jemima's Big Black Ass. uttered by a black girl at 11:56 PM. | 2 comments
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