Defining “fat” and “thin”
I’m still reading and commenting over at that infamous Feministe post, which really means that I need to learn when to let go. Well, actually, I don’t need to learn when to let go, I need to learn to actually just shut up and let go when it’s become spinning wheels in the mud.
But alas and alack.
Anyway, I don’t have anything really cohesive to say about this but what the conversation has degenerated to is the whole question of defining fat and thin and whether or not it is appropriate for FA to create fat-only spaces (and if so, how to draw the line between who’s welcome and who is not). And I guess I’m just curious from my readers about a few things that I take for granted, and I am wondering if you take these for granted also.
1. I take for granted that people understand that, while bodies are on a spectrum and thus it is extremely difficult to define where thin ends and fat begins, that the people who are on the fattest end of the spectrum are the most marginalized by fatphobia. The most silenced. The ones furthest out on the fringes. The ones most likely to experience fatphobia affecting their social and economic livelihood.
2. I take for granted that people will be accepting of the idea that when someone experiences a type of oppression that they don’t, or even a sub-type they don’t share of an overarching oppression that they do share, that they would come at that idea with kindness and respect. That they will see any defensiveness they have to this as evidence of privilege.
3. That the people with “deathfat” or “morbidly obese” or whatever-you-want-to-call-them bodies don’t have social power over the people with “chubby” or “inbetweeny” or whatever-you-want-to-call-them bodies. That for the former to want to have some conversations about their own unique experiences, without being overpowered by the voices of the latter is no threat to the latter whatsoever.
I mean, am I really off-base with these assumptions? Because I find myself boggling when people don’t have the same ones. And maybe I’m the one who’s completely off here. I don’t think I am, but after nearly 200 comments on that thread I’m wondering, am I alone?
Kataphatic 
I’ve been sitting here at this comment window for a good 20 minutes, writing and re-writing my thoughts on this. Unfortunately, what I think isn’t very nice and it’s not something I feel like discussing in a public space. But there are a lot of reasons I no longer participate in any of the FA communities and it’s because, over the last few years, it has been made abundantly clear that FA isn’t for someone as fat as I am.
I’ve thought about this – the thread was very illuminating, because I hadn’t thought about the ways fatphobia affected someone much smaller than I was (say, the tweenies) but I also am surprised that the tweenies DO feel marginalized in an FA space.
I think your unwillingness to discuss the issue, Natalie, is part of the problem if such marginalization does exist. How do we discuss that and make this a more inclusive space if we *can’t* talk about the issues that drive us apart?
That said, personally, I do think fatphobia affects the DEATHFAT! to a greater degree as a group, simply because the world isn’t made for us. I went to a chain sit-down restaurant this weekend with my husband and son and we chose to sit on the patio. The minute I sat down, I knew I’d be spending the entire meal sore – the arms on the chair dug into my hips (note that I sit without discomfort in airplane seats, although they’re tight, so it was something about the design of these chairs that made them painful in combination with my size). We spent about 45 minutes to an hour there and every single minute of that time, I was uncomfortable and in pain, because those chairs physically exclude someone my size.
I don’t know if I would reject the sympathy of people smaller than I am who don’t experience that – but I also feel quite passionately that those people cannot understand, not fully, what it is like to have to constantly walk through the world aware of the size of a chair and whether or not it means I have to eat in one place or another place, any more than it’s possible for me to fully understand, say, what it’s like for someone to be in a wheelchair and be constantly aware of the physical space in which they must function.
I just wanted to say that I’m aware now that this dynamic exists too, and I am going to do my damnedest not to be hypocritical and push other people aside. I won’t claim to fully understand an experience that isn’t my own, but I have never believed that FA is just here for me and my experiences, and I don’t want to act that way either.
I think your unwillingness to discuss the issue, Natalie, is part of the problem if such marginalization does exist.
I desperately want to create a space—somehow, somewhere—where people like Natalie do feel safe speaking their experiences. But as annalouise talked about over at that feministe thread, speaking those experiences puts someone in an incredibly vulnerable position, and if FA has failed to create a space where Natalie feels safe to do that, then I think it’s something that we need to look at as a community.
It’s kind of a double-edged sword, though, because probably one of the best ways for the movement to be more inclusive—and centering—of the voices of the deathfat folks, there need to be folks who are deathfat actually talking. The more the better, because the more who are speaking, the more likely others will feel safe to join the conversation. And it’s also important for people who are experiencing it to speak because of your last paragraph. I think you’re right, because even though I am absolutely “obese” I wouldn’t describe my experience the same way as you do. I feel like my fatness is more on the periphery of my consciousness, and it rears up when I encounter particular situations, that are usually unexpected, in which suddenly my fatness becomes a problem. I don’t worry about whether I’ll fit in chairs of restaurants I’ve never been do, though occasionally I do have a problem fitting or being comfortable. I don’t think anyone can really completely understand what it’s like to be in the body of anyone else which is significantly different from theirs. And it’s for that reason that we need to hear from people what they’re experiencing, so that we can at least have some compassion, some empathy, some idea of a little bit of what it might be like for others.
I wish I could say you were the first person I’ve heard saying this, but you’re not, by a long shot :(
And I gotta be honest, I’m a lot more concerned about that, than about inbetweenies feeling like they’re considered “not fat enough” for FA.
Natalie L. –
I find it very interesting that my impression of your comment was that you felt you were too fat for FA and that others seem to have the impression you feel you’re not fat enough.
I don’t think it’s the size of the body that makes a person more or less valid. It’s what they do and say.
Oops, I did misread!
The original Feministe article’s comments were mostly about people feeling too thin to be part of FA – so I skimmed and misread. My apologies :)
That for the former to want to have some conversations about their own unique experiences, without being overpowered by the voices of the latter is no threat to the latter whatsoever.
I guess what I have to say is that I was under the impression that the conversation we were talking about had to do with FA as a movement and its internal issues, like racism, classism, ableism, and other internalized aspects of kyriarchy (which, yeah, also includes sizeism and fatphobia). I object the idea that “chubby” and “inbetweeny” people in general don’t belong in that kind of conversation or that we have less to offer it. Again, I think that’s akin to light-skinned POC being excluded from general POC spaces or bisexual people being excluded from general queer spaces.
That doesn’t mean I’m not aware of the privilege I do have, because I’m not fatter than I am right now. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t think the experiences of other fat people aren’t important, especially those that are different than mine. It also doesn’t mean that I object the idea of more restrictive safe spaces or conversations where specific voices dominate because it’s about their unique experiences. I’m totally on board with being excluded from stuff that isn’t about me, but FA as a whole is about me, even if it’s also about a hell of a lot of other people too, some of whom are nothing like me.
The conversation that (I thought) we were talking about – which was about the FA movement as a whole – yes, at some point that conversation absolutely has to include all fat people who want to participate. Saying only the “deathfat” people should participate is sucks for the same reason as saying only the “inbetweenies” should participate – neither group is enough.
Yeah, I started to realize that there must be some disconnect in what we were talking about when your comments were disagreeing with me… and yet I agreed with almost everything you were saying lol :)
The thing is, that whole thread got so bogged down, and some people WERE talking about FA in general, and some people were just talking about specific conversations, like annalouise and myself. I think that can lead to some of the confusion that we’ve found ourselves in. And it doesn’t help when people who say they don’t “self-identify” as fat (what a privilege that must be … would that fatness would be an identity I got to chose, rather than one that was placed upon me by society) are trying to dictate the terms about how fat people come together, I’ll admit that starts to really get me quite upset. Especially in feminist spaces.
And I’ll be the first to admit that when I get upset, I may not be as good at reading every word or being super-charitable to those whom I perceive to have the most privilege in the conversation. Because my whole point is that in these conversations, those who are the most fat should be centered… those who are pushed to the furthest of the fringes, like Natalie and Heidi, should be centered the most. I’m not even advocating that my own voice be centered because I recognize there is a lot of fatphobic bullshit in society that I’m not subjected to. So anyway, yeah, I get upset, and I don’t want to spend energy walking people through this, what feels to me like such a basic justice concept.
So, that brings me back to the fact that these conversations are better had in spaces where fatphobia is not the norm and the voices of people with fat bodies are centered. Like here! :) Speaking of which, yay, I am truly glad you came here to follow up.
Well, regarding the location for discussion, there is still a part of me (possibly the PR-oriented side) that is thinking, “If there is an issue of FA failing intersectionality, what about having these conversations in, say, a trans-oriented space, or a radical WOC space, or a disability-focused space – if we aren’t welcoming enough in our own spaces, why not go out and see if we are welcome in other spaces” (not that Feministe is one of those spaces, but the conversation seemed to have enough of an audience that I was hoping someone might have something to say on that), but that may be again a whole ‘nother kind of conversation than what you were thinking about. And maybe my understanding of intersectionality failures in FA is not accurate (which is kind of why I asked the question that sparked a million derails in the first place), so I still don’t know if that kind of outreach is relevant, or if there are people and spaces within the movement that are already strongly FA and intersectional.
I’ma follow this comment up with another one that talks about something entirely different. I want to keep them separate to keep at least a bit of organization in the threading.
yes, I actually do hear you. In fact, Heidi and I are talking about trying to make a more all-inclusive space for FA folks to talk online with one another about anything related to FA, including intersectional issues. It would be a place we’d really want to get a lot of diversity—gender, race, dis/ability, body size, etc. I’ll be posting more about this soon and would love to have your input on the idea in general and perhaps you’d even be interested in being one of the contributors?
The other comment, and this is me trying to grapple with thin privilege here, is an elucidation and confession of how I personally live my life as a fat person. I want to emphasize that it is personal, as well as partly exploratory, because some of this self-awareness is still new to me. It may also be triggering as all get out for eating disorders and self-destructive thoughts (seriously, I am triggering myself to write it out). None of it is meant to excuse any bad behaviour on my part, past, present or future. Any equivocating reflects that I am trying to articulate something for the first time, not that I am rejecting its truthfulness.
I experience my fatness more psychologically than I do physically. That lessened physical experience of it is my thin privilege. The psychological experience is one of fear for my life and it is essentially unrelated to how fat I actually am – I could be emaciated or I could weigh one hundred pounds more than I do, and I would still be living with a part of myself that wants to kill me. It is like being locked in a house with a monster, except that monster is me (and not fat me, either – the monster is the part of me that hates fat me).
FA has allowed me to confront that monster in a way that does not make me want to kill myself more. I feel like I need it to live. I came to identify as fat a few months ago because, BMI aside, I could not bring myself to do so before. I lived in a perpetual state of denial about my body because I couldn’t bear to think of myself as fat or thin. I was trying to dissociate and blockade being a person with a body as much as I could. I could not go there, because the only narrative I had to deal with it consisted of, “Well of course being fat is bad for you” and “If you just tried, you could lose weight”.
I was invested in FA before I ever let myself acknowledge that it truly meant something to me personally. I do see it as a social justice and social change movement, and, as I said above, I don’t want it to revolve around me and my particular experiences and needs. But I am wondering about the place in FA for a person like me, where the issues of physical barriers and external discrimination (I’m sure some people think of me as fat, but I won’t say that I would be reliably classed as fat by all people all the time, especially in sweater season) are much less. I am wondering if me being here is inherently colonizing. The experience I’m having, the deep and abiding self-hate, is something anyone can experience at any size. I don’t even know if fatter people are even more susceptible to it or not – as far as I know, it’s not correlated with actual size, but mental and personality characteristics. I don’t know if people fatter than me who do experience this experience it differently or not. I don’t know how people thinner than me experience it either. I honestly don’t know.
I do happen to be fat right now (and will probably get fatter as I get older, if my genetic heritage is any indication), but the worst of my fatphobic experiences are in my head and always have been, even when I couldn’t admit it, even when I was deeply in denial that I was even struggling with something (hi, inexplicable spontaneous crying in public). The fatphobia I experience directly and vicariously (learning about FA actually amped up my anxiety because now I realize that society is even worse than I knew) feeds right into it. And god I am tempted all the time to tell myself I am not fat, or at least not too fat. I am desperate to not be fat, even when I know that what I am thinking about is toxic and self-destructive. Any desire *I personally* have for thinness is self-hate and self-hate alone. Body positivity feels like the only weapon I have against a monster that wants me dead and gone. And now that I’m realizing this, I realize that I have no idea where I belong in FA, and how to balance this with my thin(ner) privilege.
I cannot emphasize enough that pushing myself to talk about this has put me in a bad state. I knew that it was a risk and I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t think I had a reasonable chance at coping and that I might benefit from finally articulating it, as well as possibly contribute something worthwhile to the dialogue. But for a modicum of my own safety I want to make it clear that I am not talking about any of this lightly. If I sound clinical and distant at any time, that is a coping method.
Oh shit, I should have made that trigger warning bigger and bolder and at the top of the post. Can it be edited, please? I’m sorry – I misjudged the formatting.
Read this as/when you can – don’t upset yourself further, please!
The thing is, when it comes to thoughts/feelings like yours, those are part of the journey for many of us who are DEATHFAT! – I remember, absolutely, being a size 14/16 and loathing my body so deeply, so profoundly, that I saw myself as huge, even when, technically, I wasn’t. I remember looking at size 26 clothes at Lane Bryant and thinking that the kind of person who wore those clothes must have completely failed at life.
So…
Now I’m a 30/32 and I really AM very large by societal standards. I cannot pass as average in any way, and, while I don’t always love my body, I’m far more comfortable in my skin than I was. I still have that deep, internalized hatred that pops up from time to time, and maybe always will, but I’m better at dealing with it. I still absolutely understand where someone smaller comes from in terms of that self-loathing, though. I truly do. I think the only time in which I would find that upsetting/frustrating/unwelcome is when those individuals absolutely refuse to acknowledge that other people really DO have a different experience of fatness (i.e., not being able to pass) and think that their own thoughts are completely normal, rather than problematic reflections of societal pressures, so to speak.
So, for me, someone like you is absolutely welcome in FA. Your voice SHOULD be heard, absolutely – and that includes your struggles (with, of course, the trigger warning that you already clearly are aware might be necessary) and I think many of us have the same feeling – desperately wanting NOT to be fat, whatever “fat” means to us.
Thank you for being courageous enough to share your feelings!
I identify with much of your comment. In fact, when I look back at photos of my younger, thinner self I think, “wow, I can’t believe how fat I thought I was compared to how not-very-fat I actually was.” I wonder sometimes if my psychological well-being had been more grounded and strong, if I had really been able to accept and embrace and love myself at that time exactly as I was, if I might have never dieted and never gotten quite as fat as I got.
Such thoughts are, of course, difficult to deal with for a number of reasons. The anger toward those who taught me to hate myself, the guilt and shame of believing them to the point that I damaged my body even further, the grief and loss for what those years could have been like absent such extreme self-hate and how much better I assume my life would be now if I had always loved my body. I know those thoughts are toxic, but that doesn’t mean I can always overcome them.
Anyway, all that is to say that you are not alone in struggling, many of us in FA struggle. I think that one of the most powerful aspects of FA for me was finding that out—that FA didn’t have to be yet ANOTHER bludgeoning tool to beat myself up for not being good enough. When that was always my pattern, it was so easy to slip back into. HAES became yet one more area where I wasn’t good enough, because I do have high blood pressure and high cholesterol and I don’t always eat perfectly. But eventually I came to realize that that’s not really what most HAES proponents were saying, when I saw post after post by FA bloggers talking about healthism being a problem and that no one has a moral imperative to be healthy. But it takes being part of the community, I think, to really begin to feel safe enough to become vulnerable enough to really see that in action.
so thank you for taking the time to make yourself vulnerable and share this with us. I am wondering, are you still feeling worse? Or after a day or so after posting this, have any other ideas or feelings taken root? Feel free to ignore if this is too personal, I just know from personal experience how often opening up a wound can hurt at first, but lead to healing, joy, freedom, etc. later on.
You’re not alone.
If it weren’t for the inability of some to let go of/acknowledge/deal with their thin privilege, we wouldn’t be having a conversation about fat-only spaces at all. It’s not thin(ner) people who are the problem, it is unexamined thin privilege.
that pretty well sums up my thoughts too.
I don’t take #2 for granted. I’ve found that it’s pretty rare. It’s hard enough for some people to feel sympathy for other people, even a little bit. Asking them to treat someone else’s experience of oppression which they don’t share is asking a lot. It is very difficult to be aware of an oppression (or social/physical difficulty) you don’t experience yourself.
I was in NAAFA briefly a couple of decades ago and was more of a largeish tweenie in size at the time. Most members were what you would call deathfatz. I can’t say I felt all that welcome, but then I was used to feeling not-all-that-welcome with smaller people. Did I commit some sort of social gaffe? I didn’t know, but if I did it might have been blindingly obvious to someone else.
You’re right that we should be able to discuss these issues. Perhaps we can find SOME common ground and work from that. For example, even if we haven’t all been painfully squeezed by patio seats, most of us have been in the vise-like grip of airline seats, where changing seats doesn’t even help, assuming it was allowed.
yeah I see what you are saying. And when I really think about it, I realize that I’m not talking about people in general, but of feminists or other justice-minded individuals who get privilege-oppression dynamics in some arena. Like, I expect that people who want to work toward liberation from their own social oppression, that they’ll at least be open to listening to folks who are talking about their own.
My experience participating in a fat-friendly swim group was similar to your experience in NAAFA, in that I was definitely on the smaller end and most of the women were much larger than me. It’s interesting how you and I experienced it differently, because for me it wasn’t so much that I felt like I wasn’t really a part of things, it was more that I felt incredible relief at not being the fattest one in the room. I know for sure that my internalized fatphobia was playing a role in that, but it also was just a sense of “ahhh… there are all kinds of bodies here, and no one is judging mine.” Although, our experiences may have been very different because I was there to swim, I wasn’t really there to make friends. So I never got to know many of the women very well, and the group was forced to disband before I had a chance to make any friends there.
I’m a DEATHFATZ, and I blog about it, sporadically. Lately, I’ve been doing more commenting on other FA blogs and co-blogging on FFF, along with managing First Do No Harm.
When I first found FA, 3 years ago, I didn’t think there were very many people as fat as me (almost 400 lbs), and I wasn’t sure I belonged, for several reasons. Most of what I read concentrated on HAES and the good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy, and the fact that FA was supposed to be a safe space with no diet/WLS talk (and I had a failed WLS behind me). So here I was – a superfat woman, disabled, a failed WLS survivor, and probably a bad fatty because I didn’t eat a lot fresh fruits/veggies and didn’t exercise. Was there even a place for me in FA? I didn’t think so, but I kept reading, and finding more blogs, and such a wide variety of sizes of fatties and opinions on how to live FA. So I started my own blog to figure out my own journey to fat/self acceptance, blog about why I had had WLS and why it was a bad idea and why I thought no one else should do it without knowing all the things I hadn’t known when I had mine (is it ever true that hindsight is 20/20!). The longer I’ve been in FA, the more blogs I’ve found, and the more people over 300 lbs there are that are blogging/commenting about life at/above that weight. I don’t think our voices are silenced so much as we are drowned out by the voices of those smaller than us simply because we are out-numbered. After all, those of us who weigh over 300 lbs are a minute fraction of the fat population when you take into consideration that anyone with a BMI over 25 is “overweight” and anyone with a BMI over 30 is “obese” (my BMI is 57, so I’m so far outside the pale, I’m obviously death-looking-for-a-place-to-happen and just not smart enough to fall over and die already…..lol).
I sometimes struggle with the HAES thing also – I *don’t* move as much as I know would be better for my body (and I say that from the perspective of having PCOS, which slows my metabolism AND some joint ills unrelated to weight that *do* respond well to motion). The issues with motion for me are both psychological and time-related…I’m just so *busy* that the psychological effort of having to get myself out to exercise seems overwhelming on top of everything else I have to do.
I think the good fat/bad fat dynamic can be very oppressive but I feel that pressure has gotten better in recent months, with more people vocalizing their resistance to the notion that anyone has the right to tell me that I HAVE to be healthy. I suppose that I’m very lucky that many of my cravings are for “healthy” foods – my issue around food has never been binging on junk food, not really, but more about not recognizing full signals and eating WAY past full even on the the most nutritious foods.
So.
I’m glad you’re finding this a space that works better for you and is more welcoming – know that I, for one, enjoy hearing your perspective!
I can see how within the FA circles that deathfat can seem to be the “power” position (and at times may be)…as a deathfat myself I know that I am more likely to want to read about the experience of other deathfats. I get more excited about seeing seeing fatshionista posts on deathfats. I think there is the idea that people could feel “more fat is better fat” within the FA circle as far as giving validity to your voice.
Though – the second you step out of the FA circle the supposed “power” is gone. So. yeah.
I just wanted to say how much I liked your presence in that post. I feel still really iffy about framing these kinds of conversations in the context of a post like that, even in a more fat postive space, since I think my gut negative response to 1)”in-betweenies” feeling not fat enough to be welcomes and b)people who struggle with their body image feeling guilty about those struggles relates 100% to how those two issues are twisted by fatphobia in order to reinforce some stereotype of blobular harpies wanting everyone to be as blobular as they are.
It relates, personally to how my internalized homophobia and internalized fatphobia are linked to my own horror at being the ultimate misogynistic joke: the 300 lb man-hating lesbo-dyke brow-beating more attractive women. And then, my own jerk-tastic response is embody the fuck out of that stereotype. RAWR! GIVE ME CAKE etc etc.
I find it a little baffling that people on the Feministe thread thought the “no diet talk” (or rather, no promotion of diets) rule was so oppressive and excluding them. I feel like “dieters are allowed, diet talk is not” has been talked about and explained to fucking death. The Kate Harding “Elephant in the Room” post linked to was one that I’d seen before, and I felt like, “THAT’S what you’re bothered by?” (Unfortunately the “piling on” thing linked to seemed to link me to the main blog and not the post being discussed, and I’m not gonna wade through someone’s blog to try to find it, but since I’m more familiar with Meowser than the other people there, I’m gonna go with her version of events.)
Frankly, I think just the fact that people with eating disorders or disordered eating find [positive] diet talk triggering is more than enough reason to ban it. But obviously there are activist reasons to ban it, too. FA is simply not the space for it.
I think that even if you’re a person who thinks that weight loss/maintenance measures are sometimes justified, the rule makes sense. Because really, if you’re talking about it on the internet in an FA space, you’re not doing that in a vacuum, you’re doing it in the context of a fatphobic culture. It’s pretty hard to announce to the internet that you’re dieting and think dieting’s a good idea without the implication that the rest of us should, too. That’s not nearly the same as a requirement of absolute agreement or “thought police” or whatever.
I also wonder, since this is the context in which it originally came up: are things like the “no diet talk” rule responsible for POC, poor people, etc. disproportionately shying away from FA? I saw a lot of “this is why I personally am put off by FA”, but I didn’t see any evidence of whether it was something that was disproportionally putting off other marginalized people, or if the issues mentioned were just putting off more middle-class young-ish white women. Certainly, I think FA being more accessible to models isn’t going to lead to a smaller proportion of young middle class white women.