That evening, I didn’t manage to resolve the questions asked above. Now, three years later, they remain unresolved. It is this ambivalence about sexuality, desire, objectification, and heteronormativity that I wish to highlight in my discussions of the intersections of fatness, gender, sex, and desire. On the one hand, being in a space where fatness and sexiness coexist felt empowering. On the other hand, I was unsure if we were experiencing a potentially revolutionary, or even effective, version of sexual agency. Were we shaking up oppressive structures of beauty and sexiness, or were we merely allowed temporary access?
In short, does Divine Curves offer opportunities for fat, feminine, sexual agency and empowerment?
On a very traditional, social psychological level, I can of course understand the appeal of a space carved out exclusively, or at least primarily, for a marginalized group. As Durkheim would be the first to point out, it is important for groups to establish their own rituals in order to solidify group identification and membership.1 An important first move for many countercultural groups is to attempt to reverse hierarchies that have oppressed them. This new privileging of what was previously and popularly a source of shame helps reinforce solid group boundaries that exclude Them (those who oppress) and include Us (those who are oppressed). Reclaiming words, images, and performances that previously excluded and marginalized Us is an important step in maintaining a positive sense of self in a discriminatory world.
In this way, it is comforting, even empowering, to exist in a literal, physical space—as well as an emotional one—not as an Other but, even briefly, as just another “Normal” (as Goffman so ironically would have phrased it).2 Ideals of beauty, sexuality, and desire, which usually exist in Western media and public discourse directly opposite fatness, in this space get reconfigured and mapped onto corpulent bodies. In Divine Curves, fatness can be sexy and desirable; fat bodies can literally embody certain flavors of feminine performances. The focus shifts so that feminine fatness, typically used as an outlying symbol of the borders of gendered normalcy, in this space becomes the center. Here the us/them (sense of identification with Otherized body types and performances) briefly and tantalizingly becomes an us/us (identification with a group privileged as the norm).
Another concept important to this conversation is Judith Butler’s performativity. In Gender Trouble, she notes that when individuals perform in gender drag, i.e., when their expected gender performances do not line up with gendered expectations based on their seeming sex identification, they are upsetting notions of concrete and sex-specific gender constructions. By showing that gender performances can be repeated by anyone of any sex or sexuality, she speculates that persons in drag challenge claims of the naturalness and inherency of sex-specific gender enactments.3 Likewise, couldn’t fat performers of sexiness and beauty upset the exclusive definitions of these structures? Feminine sexiness is popularly linked only to young, thin, passive, heterosexual women. Sexual desire and beautiful femininity as represented in popular culture excludes many groups, among them fat women. By claiming, performing, and owning our sexuality, sexiness, and beauty, don’t our very actions redefine the categories? Or, to use Butlerian terms, performing in sexy drag encourages “spectators” to challenge the stable and exclusive constructions of sexiness that normally reject fatness. As a result, fat women embodying a sexiness usually linked to thin, passive bodies do not reinforce but deconstruct feminine sexiness.
Butler’s discussion of drag resonates with my club experiences. There is something about seeing a 300-pound woman in a corset and fishnet stockings enacting a kind of feminine sexual drag that seems to mock traditional enactments of high femme, accessible sexuality. Part of this is because of the popular cultural constructions of fat women as asexual, as hairy lesbians who date other women only because we can’t land ourselves a man.4 When these cultural conceptions collide with the contrary and unexpected image of fat women in highly sexualized outfits, there is deep dissonance. The appearance of a woman wearing high heels and displaying several inches of cleavage is nothing to remark on in a culture that uses sexualized images of women to sell everything from beer to luxury automobiles; in this way, such expected feminine presentations draw us closer with their comforting familiarity. However, having the bulky feminine form of a fat woman filling this outfit is startling; it snaps us out of complacency and, ideally, into contemplation of our assumptions of inherent links uniting thinness, femininity, and objectified sexuality (or what Schippers would call gender maneuvers.5
- As Durkheim would be the first to point out, it is important for groups to establish their own rituals in order to solidify group identification and membership: E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Translated by J. Swain (New York: The Free Press, 1995 [1912]). [↩]
- As Goffman so ironically would have phrased it: E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963). [↩]
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). [↩]
- Note how, in part, fat women’s physical strength and solidity help paint us as less feminine; this supposed lack of docile, diminutive femininity challenges the heterosexual dichotomy of male/masculine and female/feminine. In this way, fat women are simultaneously, and contradictorily, seen as asexual and queer. I discuss elsewhere how fat women and men are seen as masquerading in gender drag and also how we are simultaneously regarded as hypersexual and asexual. [↩]
- M. Schippers, Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002). [↩]
