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Mind the Black Girl.
If my technorati rating means anything. What little readership I have, has shrunk dramatically. (I like to think those who stay, those who come and go, those who are here, are quality. Thank you.) This period of relative silence (with the occasional outburst of intellectual epiphanettes) has been one of deep introspection for this black girl in real life and on the web. As I think about who I am, what I am doing in this world, what I am doing as an artist, and what the HELL I am doing in a doctoral program--I am also thinking about what it means to be a black girl and be visible. To be a black girl and have a place on which to stand, and where to stand too. What would it mean then, when faced with a microphone, an open space to speak, for me to give the world what is in my head? Its not pretty. To sit in the subconscious of this somewhat awkward black girl is not exactly the most safe place to be (especially for me). What would you find? Fears, tons of them. Fears of inadequacy, fear of not being black enough, not woman enough, certainly not beautiful enough, not Spelmanwoman enough, not middle class black woman enough, not not wealthy black woman enough, not smart enough, not healthy enough, not thin enough, not spiritual enough, not this coast enough, not american enough, not that cost enough, not enough for any nation, not wealthy, shame, shame, not worthy, not worthy, not worthy. on the other hand: Insightful epiphanies about identity, trauma, self awareness. Moments of overwhelming feelings of love for humanity and the universe. Dreams, poems, songs. What then would you find if I just let you sit with me through the course of a day? A messy apartment that I am ashamed of. Audible outbursts of self pity and self hate. Looking away from mirrors. Tears, tears, dirty laundry. on the other hand: Spending long moments in the mirror admiring myself. Long bonding moments with my cat. Dancing to good music, and very very loud singing. Sudden moments of creative clarity. The manifestations: poetry, music, painting. Do you need to know all of these things? Maybe. I think the mind of a black girl (which I will call myself as long as i can while taking myself seriously) is something that has not been explored. I think there, lies what society has left us. What is there--lies the answers for large questions we've been waiting to have answered. I think what you'd see in the course of a day is what we do with it. It is all incredibly remarkable, brilliant, and sad. But what will you do with that? Will that matter? WIll I just be speaking to other black girls with the same things and more in their heads. Would it matter even if we spoke this, loudly, to each other? I think so. And so... Labels: black girls, blogging, fatness, racism, self-hate, self-love, sexism, society uttered by a black girl at 9:25 AM. | 1 comments
Labels: beauty, fashion, fatness, youtube uttered by a black girl at 10:10 PM. | 4 comments
 All I had ever wanted... a skinny jean for the big girls... and I still don't have a decent winter coat...  oh the morality... uttered by a black girl at 5:29 PM. | 1 comments
I want a puffer coat. Its nice and warm, and I prefer the hip hop inspired gathered puffer coat that is oh so curvy girl friendly... The thing is... Babyphat is unfortunately unreliable in its so called "plus size" sizes. The plus sizes are cut oddly and the coats are mad restrictive (or ridiculously loose) regardless of thier 1x 2x 3x labels... This I learn as I try on the new coats on sale at Ashley Stewart. However not only does Nelly's Applebottoms coat fit perfectly for this plus size girl, but they are better priced too! (However, Applebottoms doesn't have any plus size models to show them off... only white decapitated mannequins... whereas babyphat actually hires *a* plus size model for the website). This... from a woman who has sworn off Nelly products since his actions surrounding the Nelly protest. (PUNK!!) Can I get some pro fat feminists to comment on this issue? Do I have to get skinny to maintain my alliance? Labels: culture, fashion, fatness, hip hop, music uttered by a black girl at 8:12 AM. | 6 comments
Wed Sep 6, 5:32 AM ET The global obesity pandemic combined with society's anti-fat bias is more damaging to women than to men, an expert has warned at an international conference. "Being obese and female is as bad as it gets," Berit Heitmann, a nutritional and medical research advisor to the Danish government, told a meeting of world obesity experts gathered in Sydney Wednesday. Not only were obese women socially stigmatised more than their male counterparts, but their health suffered to a greater degree, delegates at the 10th International Congress on Obesity heard. Heitmann said that although gender differences in the obesity epidemic were narrowing, the vicious circle of obesity and poverty still had a greater impact on women. Poverty was well known as both a contributor to and result of obesity, a condition that was five times more common among poor people in the developed world, she said. A recent Finnish study showed that obese women faced more job discrimination and earned less, not only compared to men, but also to women of normal weight and obese men with a similar education and job. "Appearance and size seem related to getting and keeping both job and salary," she said. Prejudice began early in life for obese females, with children as young as three shunning their obese peers, Heitmann said. Family, teachers and healthcare professionals were also more biased against obese girls and women than boys and men, she said. "Obese women are deprived of friendships, intimate relationships, social interactions, education, income and respect," Heitmann said. In the realm of education, with fewer grants and scholarships awarded to obese women, she said. In addition to social disadvantages, obese women suffered more from diabetes, hypertension and heart disease than men with the same body mass index, Heitmann said. "The risk of developing diabetes type two for an obese man is about half that of an obese woman," with similar figures for hypertension, she said. Paradoxically, while obesity appeared to cause more disease in women, death rates were similar among the sexes, she said. Women's tendency to carry more fat on the backside than on the stomach, where it was more dangerous, may explain this, she said. Research dedicated to alleviating the burden of obesity on women's health included a study showing women could achieve weight loss more effectively when exercise was augmented by a higher protein diet. Professor Donald Layman, whose 2005 study was published by the Journal of Nutrition, reported that higher protein diets, when combined with exercise, meant dieters tended to lose fat rather than muscle. Although Layman was invited to speak by the lobby group Meat and Livestock Australia, Manny Oakes of CSIRO -- Australia's government body for scientific research -- called Layman's results exciting. The obesity conference, which is held every four years, has drawn more than 2,000 academics and health professionals to seek practical ways of fighting the greatest single contributor to chronic disease worldwide. The World Health Organisation says more than a billion people -- nearly one in six of the world's population -- are overweight, outnumbering the 800 million who are under-nourished. uttered by a black girl at 3:37 PM. | 3 comments
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
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