My first impression of the club was a certain exhilaration at being in a room that included hundreds of fat women, a handful of fat men and skinny women, and a few dozen thin men. Women and men milled together, sometimes perching atop high, less-than-fat-friendly barstools at various tables, sometimes dancing vigorously to the club music blasting through two, eight-foot-tall speakers. Overall, the men had dressed casually, wearing anything from Hawaiian shirts and shorts, to button-up shirts and khakis. The women in the club mostly clustered in small, unisex groups around the pool tables and obscenely high beverage tables. Amazed by the sight of so many active, confident fat bodies in one small area, I wandered among them, complimenting outfits and striking up slightly unsubtle conversations about how being here made them feel.
As my eyes adapted to the interior gloom and the glare of soft (mostly White) skin, I noticed two televisions in opposite corners of the single-roomed club. Excited by the prospect of size-friendly images, I meandered toward one of them. The song playing in the background was one by Shakira, a throaty-voiced, limber, severely thin, and highly sexualized Latina pop star. The TV screen featured what I assumed was the corresponding music video; Shakira’s onscreen avatar rotated her hips, mouthed the words to her upbeat song, and in general performed a highly-traditional, depressingly-common, exoticized, eroticized, and made-for-male (if you believe Laura Mulvey circa 1975) visual-consumption enactment of hetero-feminine sexuality.
What was Shakira doing in a place supposedly carved out for fat performances of desire, beauty, and sexuality?
I was interested to note that I appeared to be the only person disconcerted by the gap between mainstream media representations of sexiness (brought into a space I’d hoped would deconstruct them!) and the very real presence of moving, shaking, jiggling fat bodies. I admit I would have preferred the club’s visual component to include a light show or some kind of psychedelic meandering and warping of colors on a television screen to mainstream images of feminine sexiness, but for those attendees I questioned, the videos were unproblematic. When I asked several folks how Shakira made them feel, I received nothing but positive commentary, particularly from a young, Latino man, who said it was a boon for the Latin community to see greater representation of Latinos in popular media.1 I only spoke with a handful of people about the appearance of thin icons of sexiness in the club, so I am wary of overgeneralizing; however, it seemed enormously significant to me that fat bodies danced, talked, laughed, and drank in front of representations that embody the very media-contrived beauty and sexual ideals that actively exclude fatness.
On one hand, if the club’s owners had wanted to showcase the music videos that corresponded with the songs they played, I could certainly understand the dearth of fat representations. After all, Beth Ditto of Gossip only sings so many songs. This lack of fat, let alone fat sexiness and pleasure, in popular culture was just the point: such images scarcely exist for fat women. In this way, Shakira’s presence in the club represented the very crux of my concerns: in a culture in which fat sexiness is considered oxymoronic by most, do fat women carve out creative and alternative spaces of fat beauty and sexuality, or do we co-opt and merely expand (quite literally) existing constructions of sexiness? And regardless of which, how might the presence of fat, sexualized bodies engage with, and perhaps rework, these exclusive constructions?
Below the giant television screen, fat women of all shapes and sizes strutted their ampleness in outfits ranging from punkish to abundantly unabundant. A short, round, White woman with pale blonde hair danced by my table wearing a tiny black miniskirt, a lace up top that stopped just below her breasts, and transparent netting that rather artfully failed to conceal her nipples. Another woman who stood before me at the bar wore a tight, green camouflage t-shirt with a black miniskirt and black fishnet stockings. Another, whose outfit I complimented as we stood in line for the tiny bathroom, wore a clingy, black, pleather outfit that made her look like the fat sister of one of the characters from The Matrix. Not everyone dressed with the same flare or overt sexuality, but almost every woman showed inches (sometimes a foot or so) of cleavage, legs, thighs, and shoulders. Some of the women could have out-sexed Shakira in her own video.
After the evening was over and we were all driving home, Elsa gently broached the clothing subject with me. “Um, Lesleigh,” she said, “you might think of stocking up on some short skirts and tanks for future visits. This is a place where it’s okay to show a little bit more.” The problem was, I didn’t own a single short skirt or tank top. It occurred to me that I had purchased every single article of clothing in my closet with an eye toward two goals: comfort and/or appropriateness while teaching. I didn’t own any sexy lingerie, enjoyed skirts that stretched at least to my knees, and had never let my shoulders see the light of day. Daring thoughts danced in my head: Should I start looking for sexier clothes? Was sexualizing myself transgressive or merely expanding (hetero)sexual objectification to include fat women, too? Could I buy myself into a new brand of sexiness? Did I even care about being sexy? Was this subcultural compulsion to dress sexily indicative of some fat women’s desire to take charge of their bodies or a desire to subjugate our sexual expression to the visual pleasure of the casually-dressed men in attendance? Could I be publicly considered sexy without buying the duds? Could I be sexy without attracting a partner? If I dressed sexily, would it be to garner the attention and approval of men or the approval of the other fat women?2 Was I being invited into the subculture and asked to share in some of its secrets?
- As I discuss further in this essay, resistant and empowering messages can be multifaceted and even contradictory. [↩]
- This thought occurred to me several times when attending Divine Curves. In addition to Wolf’s and others’ claims that women dress for visual public consumption, particularly for men, I wondered whether, in the context of the club, impressing our friends and other fat women isn’t also a, or even the, primary motivating force. See Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (New York: Fawcett Books, 1997). [↩]
