Issue #43 Am I not my body?

Roxane Gay is a culture critic, writer, and essayist who is also an all-around badass. I've known about Roxane for years now at least since her book Bad Feminist came out in 2014. I also follow her on Twitter. Gay's text is plain with each word carefully chosen. Her work is relatable. Accessible. Challenging.

I started Bad Feminist, a collection of essays across numerous topics, a few months ago but too late to finish it before it was due back to the library like many of my reads these days. I finally got a chance to jump back into the title and enjoy Roxane for a few hours Sunday afternoon.

What I wasn't expecting, though knowing the spaces she writes about, to get so angry while reading her work. Roxane is fat and before she had bariatric surgery, she weighed close to 500lbs. She knows about being fat. (She even argues women who are 30 pounds overweight do not understand being fat because there is Lane Bryant fat and real fatness.)

Her fatness is, to her at least in the beginning, a guard against being viewed as a sexual object amongst other things. Roxane was gang raped was she was a teen. She writes openly and with straightforward prose about what happened and how that singular action shaped her life. I was almost gang raped, the almost somehow making it slightly better because I always have to be superior to someone, as well as I was date raped numerous times.  I've talked about this topic with close friends and in my journals, online and private for years. Food is my savior. Food is both the protector and the shame. I've known there were others like me but it took reading Roxane's words that so succinctly discussing this topic that angered me. I don't know why. To be quite frank, I didn't think I could finish the book since it was forcing me, on my own volition I should add, to confront my past in a new and unsettling way. It has been decades since the date rapes but at most times it still feels too raw to deal with.

I finished the book.
 
I found myself heavily skimming, looking for safe words before I could enter back into the book's space to get relief but she tied her fatness into almost everything. I knew the writing of her experiences as both an explanation and a catharsis. I thought I had catharsis myself years ago. Apparently, I do not. Apparently, I needed to rethink and reframe my thoughts on the topic. Apparently, not only do I feel shame for what has happened but also I am beyond shamed of my own fatness. Most of the time when I eat I zone out and I don't pay attention to what I'm eating. This past week alone I have found myself stomach-ached and food drunk on meals even though I argued with myself it was the only thing I ate that day. My body was uncomfortable. I felt as though I couldn't move in a graceful way. My core is not the greatest, sometimes I sway standing still, but food drunk I felt like a turtle wanting, painfully, to turn my body in so I could not be so exposed. The shame comes in waves, reminding me over and over I did this to myself. This is my own fault. I know better. But yet my behavior continues on.

Bad Feminist covered a myriad of topics while one of her latest books, Hunger, is all about her body. I have checked it out and I know I must read it. Perhaps, finally, I will get closure to my own body while painfully reading someone else's confession.

I'm watching Dietland, a new TV show, based on the book of the same name, on AMC. The summary says it's a subversive look at the battle of the sexes but it's more than that. It's a subversive look at the thin vs fat paradigm and women who destroy themselves trying to be thin. This is a show that angers me for a variety of reasons but I am compelled to watch it every week. One friend pointed out it seems to glorify being fat. The writer of the book got her PhD with an emphasis on "normative femininity of the body; the fat female body; consciousness-raising and the ‘personal is political’ in feminist practice and as a literary aesthetic; American second-wave feminist history and fiction; ‘chick lit'; critical theory, particularly Michel Foucault." This basically says we need to stop mocking fat people and have fat acceptance. 

Fuck fat acceptance and body positivity people. They address only to surface of what it is to be fat. Not all of fatness is trauma based but I am betting a good percentage is. I cannot abide by someone else's idea of what is to be my body when I cannot even confront and accept the choices I have made. How my body moves and looks. Self-acceptance will ease the self-loathing, sure to some extent, but embracing the idea that by wearing what I want, eating what I want, and doing what I want with my body isn't the only steps that need to happen. My body is trauma. I need to understand the trauma before declaring that by making myself "bangable," as they did in the latest episode of Dietland, I will gain new insight into my body and take charge. There is a lack of responsibility that is missing from those causes. 

Sarai Walker, the writer of Dietland, says in essay after essay she is fighting against the obvious contempt of fat people in the media. That we are so easy to reject fat people as even human. She said she wrote the book to give fat women a voice but that being on the front lines of using that voice is exhausting. She says we must stop making fat women's health our business. (I do agree with this.) She is right but she is also wrong.

Roxane Gay wrote about her love of rap and the mindlessness of reality shows. We can argue until we are blue why those things are bad for women's self-esteem and image while still taking glee in those reality show dramas. She writes we are complicated humans. It's okay for me to be angered by what I read while agreeing AND disagreeing with the message. I don't think you'll ever find me in an either or situation on the topic of fatness. 

And perhaps, now that I think about it, is the whole point. That small nugget of self we must accept before we go any further. Reviews of Dietland touch upon this view in the book but I haven't read the book yet. It's on hold at the library so at some point I will read it. I'm sure I will feel conflicted and pulled apart by the writing. 

Like I said, complicated.



 

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