Every now and then someone will ask me what got me into fat, or, rather, why I decided to delay adulthood pursue a rigorous graduate education studying and writing about fat. I usually say I heard a radio show where some PR shill from a medical insurance company described obesity as a ‘disease,’ and I did a mental double take. That’s true, but my interest in fat and body politics has deeper roots. And they can be traced to a Doc Marten wearing, Tori Amos listening younger version of myself, in my university library with a copy of Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight.
Susan Bordo is a philosopher, feminist and defender of needy middle class young women, and if an academic book can be said to have a target audience, I was most certainly it. Unbearable Weight concerns itself with bodies, or rather the representation of bodies, or rather the representation of thin female bodies, or rather the psychopathologies that Bordo, despite herself, argues result from these harmful representations. Bordo sets herself the project of providing a ‘cultural approach to the body,’ (35) and she finds that culture in magazines, TV ads, Freud’s hysterics and Helene Cixou’s gleeful ecriture feminine re-reading of them, and the complaints of Bordo’s own undergraduate students. In her chapter ‘Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender Skepticism’ she launches into a vehement critique of nasty feminist poststructuralists, such as my dog-loving homegirl Donna Haraway and noted neologist Judith Butler. The basis of this critique is Bordo’s insistence that feminist work must be grounded in lived, material bodies, bodies that are continually effaced by the postmodern urge for specificity, multiplicity and difference.
That said, there is a tension between Bordo’s repeated insistence on the primacy of the body’s materiality, her insistence on the authority of bodily experience, and the bodies she actually engages with. Given that her main methodology is a rather straightforward close reading of the representation of women in advertisements, the body engaged with in Unbearable Weight is, for the most part, an image. Throughout this book the body is produced as a blank surface upon which various culturally produced meanings, of the value of thinness, the inadequacy of femininity, the economy of emotional need, attach. This is most apparent in the chapters that deal with the second main argument of book, that eating disorders should not be considered as pathology but, rather, as the logical endpoint of a culture that despises women, or, as Bordo puts it, as the ‘crystallization of culture.’
For Bordo, the best way to deal with the fat body is through the anorexic body, and she finds signs of anorexia-like behaviour all around her. I’ve got to be careful here, because while today my response to this aspect of Unbearable Weight is to say that, in using the eating disordered woman as a synecdoche for all embodied female experience she, implicitly, normalises feminine bodily dissatisfaction and, in the process, normalises feminine pathology, it was this argument that I identified so strongly with back in the day. When Bordo quoted one of her students as saying ‘I always feel like I’m too much, too needy, too hungry,’ I really did hear myself. Then again, foregrounding middle class girls’ concerns with their own ‘neediness’ is like shooting fish in a barrel. As my family, friends, boyfriend and cat will attest, I am a wildly needy person, but you tend to make peace with that when you get older.
Anyway, why am I discussing a rather ham-fisted book published all the way back in 1993? A few reasons. Firstly, Unbearable Weight has a surprising amount of influence, as measured by how often its cited by those writing about fat, and by the far more scientific measure of margin notations.
I’ve yet to buy my own copy, ’cause I don’t want that shit sullying all my recipe books and China Mieville, so I find myself returning to it at almost every library I go to. Which, by now, is a lot of libraries, believe me. At every library I’ve been to their circulating copy is inevitably dog-eared and crusty, the pages covered with notes and furious underlinings, some critical, some positive, and some an expression of the reader’s relief at finding themselves on the page.
But, secondly, I really feel that Unbearable Weight is emblematic of a kind of feminist body politics that has profoundly failed, a body politics that brings you:
(animated gif from the incredible Rich at FourFour, aka the man who makes the internet worth reading)
The kind of body politics presented by Susan Bordo and the like (amongst whom I would count Kim Chernin, the venerable Susie Orbach and Carole Spitzack) do and don’t provide solutions to the problem of ‘fat phobia,’ or fat discrimination, or epidemic low self-esteem, or whatever it is they engage with when they engage with women’s fat bodies. Either way, they vacillate between locating the ‘problem’ in negative, dangerous, damaging, stereotyping, ‘unrealistic’ representation or in the gendered psychodynamic hydraulics of the nuclear family. The former is easy to fix. If representation is damaging girls and women, why not change those representations? Why not draw a line in the sand between the real and the apparent and stand firmly on the side of the reality? And perhaps, just perhaps, in creating ’safe,’ life-affirming representations of women you might just help the latter problem in the process.
And then there’s Whitney, plus-sized, juicy-bootied, Fatty McFatfat winner of the last cycle of America’s Next Top Model. I’m in no position to say whether the rumour is true, that Whitney was once a model-sized model who was approached by an ANTM lackey and told that if she gained enough weight to become ‘plus sized’ she’d get in the top three, but it has plausibility. ANTM is an exercise in ridiculousness, little more than a series of girls told to pour their hearts out on screen, get daubed with paint, hung from harnesses, painted like fish and worse, but it points to the hollowness of such tactics of semiotic reversal in fat politics. On ANTM Whitney’s size (or lack thereof - she scarcely qualified as ‘plus,’ leading to uncomfortable conversations of when a woman can be ‘plus’ enough) is just another difference to be accepted by hyper-tolerant diva saint Tyra Banks. In her amazing essay ‘(Un/be)Coming out? Rethinking Fat Politics’ Samantha Murray summarizes the problem neatly, saying:
I am not suggesting that these events where the fat body is made visible in ways that traditionally have been the domain of thin women should be shut down, but it is worth recognising that this “liberatory” practice still upholds a visual regime that asserts “thinness” as the preferable modality of female bodily being. Fat politics does not see itself as implicated in heteronormative aesthetic ideals, and that it is merely reproducing them by simply reversing the ideal, not dismantling it. The question is: how effective is the simple reversal from a negative body to a celebrated one?
I’m not arguing that big female bodies should not be represented, but that at the moment it is difficult to do so without making some kind of, perhaps facile, political statement. It’s difficult to feel hot when people are continually noting how ‘real’ you are. What’s more, we’re living in a time when the politics of fat are more difficult and urgent than ever before. This is a time of epidemic obesity, of pathological fat, and as discourse of epidemic obesity grows it renders the critical tools of body image oriented fat politics useless. It’s hard to defend women’s right to at least live peacefully in their fat bodies, not when that fat is killing them. We need an effective way to think critically about fat and about culture, and Bordo has had her day.
An administrative aside: Please forgive the long interval between entries. Theory Camp is hectic, and too much Hegel is bad for the humours. I try to get a post up at least once a week, and I baked last night, and plan to bake again early next week, so I should be able to keep that up. I also plan to start a second blog, with more frequent posts, about things unrelated to food, fat and eating, once I get back to Australia in August. Also, I’d like to start a Twitter, as soon as I think of an appropriately pithy name.
A further administrative aside: Well, not really administrative. This post was largely made possible by the new Girl Talk album, which the Internet will not shut up about. And with good reason. It will make you dance like this. Do yourself a favour and go download.
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