When I started writing years ago, it was with the intent to ensure that our stories were documented well and that history tells those who come after me the full story. And that is why you should care about this book. Out there is a reality where fat Black folks are experiencing the harms of anti-Blackness as anti-fatness and need this book to give them the language to determine why it is harmful or give them a sense of comfort to know it is not happening to them in a vacuum and there is something they can do about it. Black liberation is the end goal, and for it to happen, fat liberation must also be part of that goal. Not “body positivity,” but freedom from the confinements of cages—as Roxane Gay refers to the body—altogether.
In a post–body positive world—by which I mean a world subsequent to the formation of body positivity—at any given time on any given day, if someone fat posts a picture to social media or wears a bathing suit to the beach, they’re met with one of two types of comments: comments intended to uplift or comments intended to cut deep. “You’re so brave,” someone might say. “I love this confidence” might be another one. Or perhaps, “I wish I had your confidence” or “Love the skin you’re in!” find their way to the comment section. On the contrary, comments intended to do harm, like “You need to lose weight,” “Stop glorifying obesity,” or “This is disgusting,” can also oftentimes be found under a fat person’s pictures—especially when that person is Black. Generally, the harm in the hateful comments are understood as such, at least to most decent people. However, not many people understand the harm in the comments intended to be affirming. What could be so bad about complimenting someone’s confidence? Or wishing you had their confidence? Or encouraging one to love all of who they are?
The issue with all of these comments is that, at their core, they suggest that self-love is enough to eradicate anti-fatness and that if you just accept yourself, or love who you are, that somehow the methodical violence of anti-fatness—housing, employment, etcetera—is no more. This is what is violent about “body positivity”; it is benevolent anti-fatness in that it is masqueraded as some sort of semblance of acceptance for fat people when it is, instead, an opportunity for Thinness to reroute, but not give up, its hold on fat people’s collective liberation. As a politic, Thinness is a system that seeks to subjugate and ultimately eradicate fatness and fat people. Body positivity takes up this mantle through abandoning a fat politic—which ultimately insists on a world wherein fat people aren’t discriminated against or marginalized for their fatness, and as such, people aren’t categorized by the size of their bodies—and replacing it with one that makes a desire to lose weight a qualifier for the type of fat person that’s worth celebrating and being nice to. And it is this type of fat person that is allowed to “love the skin they’re in.” Because the love they’re being tasked with is conditional, by which I mean it is assumed that they want to lose weight and therefore will only have to temporarily love that skin. In other words, it passively demands that fat folks change their own bodies rather than explicitly demanding that the world in which we live shifts how it understands and responds to fat bodies. Which means that there is nothing necessarily positive about body positivity. “Bad fats,” as they’re affirmingly referred to in fat acceptance spaces, aren’t allowed access to this movement because their end goal isn’t to lose weight. This leaves “good fats” as the only fat people who “deserve” to love themselves and feel confident in their bodies. By “good fat” I am referring to the type of fat people whose acceptance of their body is contingent on their ability/desire to decouple their fatness from the prescribed actions fat people are supposed to take to be regarded as “healthy”—actions that are assumed will one day make them thin. “Good fats” are perhaps fine with not losing weight but must obsess over exercise and “healthy” eating to justify their fat body. And yet, whether one is a good fat or a bad one, these comments are always violent. Self-love, even a radical one, cannot and will not disrupt or bring an end to systemic violence.
In her book The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love, Sonya Renee Taylor writes beautifully about radical self-love, describing it as an island on which self-confidence and self-esteem sometimes go to vacation, but do also vacate. At great length, she explores radical self-love in juxtaposition to self-acceptance, where she describes self-confidence and self-esteem as the “fickle cousins” and self-acceptance as the “scrappy kid sister” to radical self-love. Taylor asks the reader, essentially, to go back to their beginning. Beings we call humans were not born with hatred for their body or other people’s bodies, and as such, she argues that this is integral for one to be able to embody or truly arrive at “radical self-love.”
In sociological terms, what she is naming is that, through various social institutions, human beings are socialized—or taught—to hate their bodies and that there is a moment in our own lifetime where we did not look at ourselves through a lens of hate and disgust. These points are brilliant and fundamentally true. Where Taylor and I depart, however, is here: irrespective of how much internal work one does for themselves, the systems under which they live that actively lay claim to their bodies are not and cannot be reversed through any introspection or outward radical self-love. These socioeconomic political structures do not need the type of reform that a radical self-love would suggest, but rather they need total destruction. If we go back to the beginning, if we pull up the roots, unless the social institutions through which we were initially socialized are destroyed, we can only ever return back to the place we left. There is a particular connection between destruction and love. In this case, if we love ourselves and the people around us, we must also be committed to destroying the World in which we and they are actively harmed. This means that if love, of self or of others, is to play a role at all in any liberatory efforts, it must be a starting point and not an end. If self-love is where we start, it must be the driving force behind our continued struggle; otherwise, we become stagnant and immovable, fixated on always challenging how we see our bodies and never getting to the place where we no longer have to interrogate our bodies at all.
Radical self-love, as Taylor writes, is necessary cultural work. It challenges our relationship to our own bodies and to other people’s bodies, and that will always be a work that can make our realities after the destruction of the World better than they were before, but it does not demand more than that because it cannot demand more. The Black fat does inherently exist as a metaphysical, political entity, but this does not inherently make one a revolutionary or a radical. If one plans to see the Beyond—a place in which we live without qualifiers, conditions, or labels meant to harm and subjugate our being—more work has to be done. Right now we live in a world of systems, all of which affect the body, some that are familiar in name, and some that are less so—systems of Desire/ability, health, the overall diet and medical industrial complexes, policing, prisons, and gender. There is tangible work one must do to destroy the ontological violence which engenders, or forges the path for, what is known as structural violence. Unless and until there is a reckoning with the conceptual, an evaluation of just how un/impractical this violence is, love of self will never be the answer to oppression nor will it ever be guaranteed. Because, while it is true that the violences of this World are happening to the body, the violence is not created by the Body.
The Body—an entity of sorts, or the flesh we are born into—is not what creates the violence. What creates the violence is an ideology and the power to enforce it, interpersonally or systemically. This means that whether or not you love on, show up for, and transform how you view your body, the structure of the World does not shift. This is, again, the harm of “body positivity.” It cannot produce anything more than a quasi-self-confidence, and even that is conditional because it—for a long time now—has not been asked to. Body positivity individualizes something that is bigger than the individual.
At the beginning of this chap
ter, I wrote that this book is important because it can very well serve as the proof someone may need to know they are not experiencing the violence of anti-Blackness and/as anti-fatness in a vacuum; body positivity does not have that same commitment. For us to inch toward a tomorrow not limited by the confines of today, we have to interrogate the structures that actively marginalize our bodies and beings, and we have to destroy all that is attached to those structures. Neither body positivity nor self-love brings us to that pivotal point; the point beyond this World. By this, I mean that this World—one in which the Slave / the Other / the Black are produced—is the only World to have ever existed, at least ontologically/metaphysically. It is true that beings lived and breathed before this moment in time, but it is anti-Blackness, colonialism, and capitalism that form and shape the place we now refer to as the World. As such, the Beyond—the place we have not yet seen—is not and cannot be determined by what existed before now, but rather it will be created by acknowledging what about “the now” succeeded at making the World uninhabitable. In other words, this is the only world I will reference in this book because this is the only world in which the Slave / the Other / the Black exist, and that is the beginning of the World.
It’s important that I restate this: In this book, you will read about the body. And not just any body, but the Black fat body. And while our focus on the fat Black body will be general in some places, we will talk specifically about the fat Black masc body—how it has been imposed on, forgotten, and dismissed within fat studies. That is my focus—the effects and affects of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, and vice versa, and how that materializes through Desire/ability and Desire Capital, health by way of the medical and diet industries, policing and prisons, and gender, particularly as it relates to fat Black trans men, trans masculine folks, nonbinary people, and cisgender men.
The capitalization of varying words throughout this chapter and the entire book (Beautiful/beautiful, Ugly/ugly, Human, and Slave) is not only about what you are, but also what is assigned to you through the identities you hold. One reaps the structural and often interpersonal benefits of being Beautiful when they are white or have light skin, when they are cisgender, when they are thin, when they are non-disabled, and when they are not disfigured. One is Human—insofar as this particular category exists in opposition to Blackness—when they are white, and therefore, the Human is not the Slave / the Other / the Black. One’s body is their own, but how Bodies are collectively engaged—and where they exist in proximity to power—is dependent completely on what identities one embodies.
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Pretty Ugly: The Politics of Desire
Janet Mock—celebrity writer, producer, director, and trans activist—wrote a beautiful essay in 2017 detailing the ways in which she experiences and benefits from “pretty privilege,” even as a Black trans woman.1 In the essay, Mock writes that as she started to be perceived as a girl, she was “let in.” She saw that people started to stare and smile at her, she was offered seats on the bus, she was more heavily complimented on her appearance, and she was offered drinks at the club. This is, as she tells it, partly how she experienced “pretty privilege.” In many ways, this essay created room for a widespread conversation on how prettiness contributes to how we experience the World.
However, Prettiness, with a capital P, is about much more than one’s appearance, and it requires one to reckon with what it means to experience structural advantages over someone who is Ugly. When I capitalize the P in Pretty and the B in Beauty, or the U in Ugly, it is to name who does and does not have access to Desire Capital—that is to say who owns or embodies more or less of the identities that grant one access, power, and resources. More to the point, “pretty,” “beauty,” and “ugly”—all with lowercase letters—are subjective. They are not identities but are rather determined by the individual. Rooted still in anti-Blackness, but are not structural identities. Pretty, Beauty, and Ugly, however, are determined by the structures through which people are marginalized for their Blackness, their gender(lessness), and their bodies. Beauty standards, especially in the United States, are predicated on anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, anti-disfiguredness, cisheterosexism, and ableism.
As such, people who are Black, fat, disabled, and/or trans more generally do not have access to Beauty. However, as with all capital, one can embody identities that are valued in modern society and still also hold identities that are marginalized, which is why the term “privilege” is not quite specific enough and often does not go far enough. Desire is complex. Privilege insinuates that there is a possibility that you can opt out, and that if you don’t feel pretty, then you can’t possibly benefit from Prettiness or suffer the violences of Ugliness. Desire/ability politics and Desire Capital, however, suggest that one does not need to feel pretty to be Pretty; one does not need to feel beautiful to be Beautiful; one does not need to feel ugly to be Ugly. How one benefits or suffers from the subjugation of particular people is not determined by their feelings; it is determined by the identities they embody.
Desire/ability politics is the methodology through which the sovereignty of those deemed (conventionally) Attractive/Beautiful is determined. Put another way, the politics of Desire labels that which determines who gains and holds both social and structural power through the affairs of sensuality, often predicated on anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, (trans)misogynoir, cissexism, queer antagonism, and all other structural violence. It is intended to name the social, political, and economic capital one obtains / is given access to through their ability to be Desire. By this I mean that Desire is about much more than being desired; it is about one’s ability to always already be positioned as the very embodiment of the thing(s) that make(s) one Desire/able.
For this reason, when talking about Desire, I employ language like Desire/ability politics, libidinal economy,2 and Desire Capital. More directly, they each speak to the structure and metaphysics of Desire, Beauty, Prettiness, and Ugliness as things to be traded and saved as with any other economy. In this way, one can be insecure about how they appear, or not feel pretty, and still have access to Beauty, Desire, and Prettiness.
Insecurities are often taught as something to be afraid of, to be ashamed of, to run away from. People are taught that the way they feel about their bodies is their own moral failing and therefore their own responsibility to hold. We are all often socialized into believing that if we are insecure, then we are weak, incapable, or ugly and that all of those things are bad things to be. Many internalize that—especially those who exist furthest on the margins, like the Black fat.
But what if Insecurities are worth embracing, particularly for the Black fat? What if Insecurities are not a moral failing of the individual, but rather an inadvertent critique of a society that seeks to punish, harm, and abuse Ugly people who dare to name that their perceived “flaws” are only named as such because of anti-Blackness?
In many ways, and in other words, Insecurities are a response to the violences Ugly people are forced to endure. And so often, the people deemed Ugly are fat, Black, and trans—people who are positioned outside the scope of Desire and are thus faced with hypercriminalization and other violences against their Being.
“Insecure” is an adjective. It is a word intended to describe or name a characteristic of a person, place, or thing—otherwise known as a noun. “Insecurity” is a noun. It is intended to name a state of being, a response to a possibility of danger. While “insecure” does the job of classifying one’s (perceived negative) feelings about their body and Being, “insecurity” seeks to name the response to having no protection, the response to being harmed. It lights the path to what leads Ugly people to feeling unsafe, unconfident, and uncared for.
In On the Politics of Ugliness, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer gives a comprehensive summation of Ugliness as a politic, wherein she lays out the history of the Ugly/Beautiful dichotomy in art history, literature, and aesthetic theory. I
n that same collection, editors Ela Przybylo and Sara Rodrigues write: “Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital” and that “our aesthetic, political, economic, sexual, and social discomfort with ugliness” even affects and effects our relationship to and “dislike of ugly spaces, ugly buildings, dilapidation, and disrepair.” In Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance, Heather Laine Talley notes that “ugliness matters for us all, but it particularly matters for those with bodies deemed as ugly” and that “ugliness in itself becomes a way for barring a person’s access to status, work, and love, functioning as an absence of capital.”
“Persons” and “bodies” refer more specifically to people who are marginalized by race, class, (dis)ability(-ies), fatness, age, and gender. As such, Ugly is political. It is the determiner for who does and does not work, who does and does not receive love, who does and does not die, who does and does not eat, who is and is not housed.
The only logical step following the acceptance of Ugly as political is that Insecurity, too, must be political. If the politicization of Ugly leads to the social, political, economic, and physical death of a person, they are bound to feel unprotected, uncared for, and unconfident. To that point, Insecurities are valid. It is okay for us to be insecure in bodies that are constantly beat on and berated. Those Insecurities don’t change the reality of what anti-fatness, or overall Ugliness, is and what it does. In fact, those Insecurities better contextualize it.
Belly of the Beast Page 2
