My very first moment inside Divine Curves, a BBW (big, beautiful woman) Club in Southern California, I encountered a 350-pound woman, smiling warmly while balancing atop a spindly barstool. She'd piled her long, artificially-platinum hair high on her majestic head, and her tightly-wrapped waist channeled her curves upward in a cascade of jiggling cleavage.

"Ten dollars, please," she said to me, her bright pink lips smiling. Smoky-black, half-inch-long eyelashes framed her blue eyes.

It wasn't as though I had never before thought of how fatness and heterofeminine sexuality would intersect, but seeing it performed quite literally in the flesh was an entirely different matter. Like most Americans, I had been raised in a culture in which fatness stands primarily in stark contrast to sexiness, desire, and pleasure. For most of us, in fact, constructions of fatness serve as warnings or boundary markers that separate sexiness from asexuality, beauty from ugliness, "normal" sexuality from queerness.

I am certainly not the first researcher to examine the overlaps of fatness, femininity, and sexiness.[1] In fact, it feels difficult for me to address the topic of fat without noting how it so frequently intersects with discourses surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality. It is somewhat of a truism for fat researchers that fatness frequently serves as pop cultural shorthand for considerations of "normal" and acceptable gender and sexual performances. At the very least, many of the same notions (think morality, excess, health, duty, identities, appetite, shame, and, of course, propriety) inform the constellations of forces comprising fatness and sexuality.

Three years ago, I walked into Divine Curves for the very first time. As I watched, engaged with, and danced various performances of fat and feminine sexiness, it became clear to me that this site was rife for analysis into the possibilities, however realized or not, of counter-discursive discourses surrounding fat, gender, pleasure, and sex.

This is not to imply my foray into this subculture landed me in a "Fat Wonderland" of feminine empowerment. Instead, I encountered a much richer and more complex site for negotiations with fatness and sexiness that, at the very best, de-centered thin, hetero-feminine sexiness. But this does mean the space was uncomplicated. Indeed, I find these contradictions and ambivalences the most intriguing. What began as a question of fat resistance led me instead into considerations of the discursive contradictions inherent in performances of fat, hetero-feminine sexiness.

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.[2] 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[3] 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.

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.[4] 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?[5] Was I being invited into the subculture and asked to share in some of its secrets?

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.[6] 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).[7] 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.[8] 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.[9] 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.[10]

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.[11] 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.[12] 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.

Conclusion

To summarize this narrative is to further complicate it, since I never reached a solid conclusion but instead find myself juggling opinions, experiences, and social theories in making sense of these fat, feminine, sexualized performances.

While not all of us in the club were straight, feminine, or remotely interested in finding a sexual partner of any sort, most of my interviewees agreed that the space encouraged costumed forays into a type of sexualized femininity usually denied to fat women. We wore thin, feminine sexiness, sometimes pinning our own versions of gender and sexuality and always queering it merely by being fat women doing sexiness.

The embodiment of fat sexuality may not speak equally of empowerment to all persons and identities. As is often the case, while resisting some dominant discourses, we often end up reinscribing others. That said, not only can I not forget the empowered pleasure many of my research participants expressed when discussing the club, but it is impossible for me to think of this space as a purely heterosexist one, in spite of its ostensible meat market atmosphere. Yes, women and men ask one another to dance and oftentimes end up hooking up, but at least within my small group and among folks I interviewed, the emphasis was much more on interacting with other empowered fat women. Even our sexy outfits were more about collaborating on colors and styles, embodying and reworking sartorially-influenced identities, and garnering feminine attention and approval. In fact, I constantly felt that my performances of sexiness and beauty were not competitive in nature with other (fat) women but sources of visual community and mutual empowerment. Our clothing and hairstyles provided room for commonality and bonding, social commentary, and (potentially) friendly public scrutiny.

In short, our sexiness, while limited in its transgressive applicability and scope, was not to attract men at all but mostly to perform for and with other women in a dance of recognition and empowerment.

Endnotes

1. See: E.J. Aubrey, "The Butt: Its Politics, Its Profanity, Its Power," in Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image, Ed. O. Edut (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2004): 22-31; J.E. Braziel, "Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body," in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, Ed. J.E. Braziel and K. LeBesco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 231-54; W. Charisse Goodman, The Invisible Woman: Confronting Weight Prejudice in America (Carlsbad, CA: Gürez Books, 1995); A. Mansfield and B. McGinn, "Pumping Irony: The Muscular and the Feminine," in Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body, Ed. S. Scott and D. Morgan (London and Washington, DC: Falmer Press, 1993): 49-67; M. Millman, Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America (New York: WW Norton and Co., 1990); Steven A. Shaw, "Fat Guys Kick Ass," in Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology, Ed. D. Jarrell and I. Sukrungruang (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005):111-21; A. Stukator, "'It's Not Over Until the Fat Lady Sings:'" Comedy, the Carnivalesque, and Body Politics," in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, Ed. J.E. Braziel and K. LeBesco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 197-213; Leora Tanenbaum, Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation. New York: Perennial, 2001); M. Wann, Fat!So?: Because You Don't Have to Apologize for your Size! Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1998). [Return to text]

2. 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). [Return to text]

3. "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. [Return to text]

4. As I discuss further in this essay, resistant and empowering messages can be multifaceted and even contradictory. [Return to text]

5. 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). [Return to text]

6. 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]). [Return to text]

7. As Goffman so ironically would have phrased it: E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963). [Return to text]

8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). [Return to text]

9. 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. [Return to text]

10. M. Schippers, Rockin' Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002). [Return to text]

11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1977]). [Return to text]

12. 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. [Return to text]