But this is my interpretation of these experiences; it is equally important to me to engage with the accounts of my research participants. Indeed, I interviewed several female (and one male) club attendees and, among other questions, asked what they found appealing and empowering about Divine Curves. Everyone indicated it was a pleasurable (if not uncomplicated) place, a space for empowerment and community. Certainly this was what I sensed from Daphne, Elsa, and the others with whom I attended; part of the fun was dressing up, part was dancing, and part was quite simply having a public place for fat folks to congregate and celebrate our beauty and sexualities.
Pleasure is a tricky topic. Some authors wield it as a weapon that consistently trumps modes of oppression, their eternal ace in the hole. This use of pleasure strikes me as besotted with a very Western ideal of personal gratification. Just because participants might feel sexy and empowered (and many told me they did), does their empowerment challenge divisive, unequal, and heterosexist systems of gender dualities? Does taking pleasure in these performances make them resistant? Pleasure is important, potentially revolutionary, but it is not an end unto itself; even playgrounds have foundations upon which they are built. However, not to recognize the liberating potential of pleasure is to do it a grave disservice. Because pleasure, like any other thing, is encouraged in some and reviled in others, and hierarchically allotted and judged, its indulgence (or denial) carries deep social significance. In this way, fat women finding pleasure in their sexualized performances is clearly resistant—but to what?
First of all, the idea of women finding pleasure in our bodies, whether fat or not, is in my mind revolutionary. To revive a familiar discussion of Foucault and docile bodies, many Americans learn to dissociate from our bodies, to police our own embodied actions.1 Our bodies are often objectified even to those of us who inhabit them. Feeling embodied, celebrating the feel of fabric and the movement of flesh across bones (my own research notes emphasize my overwhelming sense of embodied empowerment while dancing) empowers us to reject our disconnection from our bodies and embrace our ability to feel, experience, and define.
Secondly, although these performances of sexuality seem to stem from and embody heterosexual dichotomies, I experienced them as a queered space where women enacted desire and sexual attractiveness for one another.
This is not to say Divine Curves provides a utopia of fat resistance that wrestles with all systems of oppression. Seeing these young, predominantly White, mostly midsized (i.e., not superfat) women dressed in risqué outfits made me wonder if this performance of fat sexiness would be as empowering for older, butch, non-White, disabled, and/or supersized fat women. Consequently, is this brand of fat, femininity, and sexual empowerment, then, not ageist, ableist, and sizeist? And darn it, why are mainstream, feminine beauty and sexuality always, as 36-year-old, White Franki mentioned in her interview, “high femme”?
Sita, a 26-year-old, White, self-identified “butch fat woman, or sometimes a masculine trans-identified fat-female-bodied person,” explained the conundrum in the following way:
Everything gets all tangled up: femininity and thinness are both considered to be conditions of female beauty. So when attempting to represent fat women as beautiful (or desirable, okay, fully human, etc.), they must be femme (I mean feminine here, including all women not just lesbians). Part of the definition of femininity is thinness, so fat women have to overcompensate for not being thin by being more femme. Or you have to take on two overlapping beauty standards at the same time, and good luck with that!
In fact, I do think that Divine Curves’ cultural space is a (pardon the term) narrow one that allows for certain types of empowerment.2 Like all forms of resistance, it does not encompass every single source of inequality, but it does rework and enact resistance to sizeist discourses as they apply to certain populations. It is important to note that this club featured a mostly White clientele; therefore, issues of sex and sexuality remained largely unburdened by considerations of the history of oversexualization foisted onto non-White bodies. Negotiations with sex and sexuality in this White context occurred in privileged spaces in which race (read: Whiteness) was ignored as a norm and could serve as a backdrop rather than one of the defining characteristics.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1977]). [↩]
- My analysis of fat performances of sexuality are quite specific to Divine Curves. My observations and analysis would look quite different in spaces of fat, queer performances of sexuality such as those found at, for example, NOLOSE (National Organization of Lesbians of Size) Conventions. [↩]
