Dancing Resistance?: Charting Some Politics of Fat, Feminine Sexualized Performances

Divine Curves: Dancing Fat Ambivalence

I gained entrée to Divine Curves through my friends and research participants. Throughout my research, I spent many nights there and interviewed several attendees. The following account of my experiences fold several excursions into one and follow it with a deeply ambivalent and contradictory summary of my understandings of this place as a site for performing resistance to dominant, anti-fat discourses about the supposed un-sexiness of fatness.

The evening began when I met up at Daphne’s house in West Hollywood with my friends and research participants Elsa, Daphne, and Daphne’s boyfriend, Antoine. Upon walking in the door, I could tell that I had made a huge sartorial error, although everyone was too polite to immediately comment. We were venturing forth on a sultry July evening, but I had worn what I thought were appropriate club clothes: jeans, sandals, and a light blue t-shirt that crossed over in the front, revealing an entire half-inch of cleavage. I’d felt somewhat risqué—until seeing what Daphne and Elsa wore. Daphne was decked out in red and black: a short, stretchy black skirt (which I later found out was a swim bottom); a red, sleeveless, cleavage-baring poplin top, complete with artfully placed ruffles; and a filmy, black chiffon jacket which could be removed if the mood struck. Elsa wore short, clingy red shorts and a tight, black tank top that featured a size-positive slogan.

“Um, I think I’m overdressed,” I admitted later. My friends gently agreed.

My physical and mental discomfort with my outfit continued throughout the night. The club, which serves as an LGBT bar five nights out of the week, featured a makeshift banner announcing the small building as “Divine Curves.” After paying my $10 cover charge and entering the overcrowded, dimly-lit interior, the depth of my error in clothing choice became abundantly apparent. The interior was overheated with several hundred bodies, a fact that became increasingly evident as I danced throughout the night.

I had wondered before entering the club what bodies would look like in a space eked out for self-defined “big, beautiful” bodies. Media largely constructs beautiful and sexy as diminutive, thin, Aryan-esque (or non-White and exoticized), plasticized, poreless, pictorially chopped up into body parts, disproportionately top-heavy, and often infantilized, stripped of agency, and posed for visual consumption. ¹ How might larger bodies, normally excluded from representations and constructions of popularly sexy forms, move and appear in this alternate site? How might counter-discursive images, messages, and performances of sexiness and beauty manifest? Would a new hierarchy exist? Would body size determine sexiness? Would superfat/supersize ² women perch atop a fat-admiring pyramid? Would sexiness and desirability be determined by body size, clothing choices, youth, or adherence to other markers of hetero-feminine attractiveness?

I had never been to a size-positive club before. In fact, I had only been in a heterosexually-oriented dance club a handful of times, and that had been during my undergraduate years in Idaho. Divine Curves is marketed as a heterosexual environment where, as Marilyn, the Divine Curves employee I reference at the beginning of this article, remarked to me during our interview, fat women and their male admirers can “be themselves.” As a fat woman used to frequenting gay bars, I was completely new to such ostensibly heterosexual scenes. However, as I discuss below, the heterosexual atmosphere did not mean the club’s dynamics were not queered as well.

1. S.L. Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York and London: Routledge, 1990); E. Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).[↑]
2. “Supersize,” also called “superfat” by those who shun the comparison to fast food options, is a labeling category used by the size-positive community to indicate the largest women. Who qualifies as supersize depends on the definition; some say it’s anyone who can’t buy clothing from mainstream clothing outlets (like Avenue or Catherine’s), while others designate it as a category that encompasses everyone who exceeds 300 pounds or a size 30. Most people I asked to define this term agreed that “supersized” is a highly subjective category and identification with it is quasi-voluntary.[↑]