Belly of the Beast

by Da'Shaun L. Harrison

  You can’t beat people down forever and expect that they never feel the effects of that continued beating.

  Insecurities are not a personal indictment; they are an indictment of the World. Being that this is the case, people deemed Ugly should run toward Insecurity. Not as a trauma to inform their politics—as it is dangerous to navigate the world of politics through trauma rather than an informed praxis—but as a political tool that aids in developing their understanding of and relationship to oppressive power structures.

  The World is set up in this way: to be Ugly is to be a Monster; to be a Monster is to be the Slave; to be the Slave is to be the Other; to be the Other is to be unDesirable; to be unDesirable is to be the Beast. A metaphysical, ontological chain to pieces of flesh never intended to navigate this reality. And while Ugly people may not have control over that, what they do control is the ability to reclaim and redefine the meanings of these words. They can learn Ugliness and Insecurity more intimately as parts of who they are—particularly and especially under this imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.3

  In a speech she gave in 2011 titled “Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability,” Mia Mingus prefaced some important questions with a very important introduction:

  We all run from the ugly. And the farther we run from it, the more we stigmatize it and the more power we give beauty. Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot. What would it mean if we were ugly? What would it mean if we didn’t run from our own ugliness or each other’s? How do we take the sting out of “ugly?” What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel? What would it take for us to be able to risk being ugly, in whatever that means for us. What would happen if we stopped apologizing for our ugly, stopped being ashamed of it? What if we let go of being beautiful, stopped chasing “pretty,” stopped sucking in and shrinking and spending enormous amounts of money and time on things that don’t make us magnificent? Where is the Ugly in you? What is it trying to teach you?

  The Ugly in all who are marginalized for their bodies, Blackness, and gender is trying to teach that Insecurity is important too. And so to add to her important questions, I would also ask: What would it mean if we were more insecure? What would it mean if we did not run from our insecurities or anyone else’s? How do we take the sting out of “Insecurity”? What would it mean for us to acknowledge Insecurity for how it has informed our politic(s)? What would it mean for us to lean into Insecurity as a political tool in which we free ourselves from insisting that we perform “perfection” and total confidence in order to advocate for our collective liberation? What would happen if we stopped apologizing for our insecurities, stopped fearing them, stopped trying to shed ourselves of them?

  Ugliness as political is what Frank B. Wilderson III is pointing to in his book Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms when he uses Jared Sexton’s words from a lecture to help define “libidinal economy.” It is also what Sabrina Strings is describing in Fearing the Black Body where she writes:

  Racial scientific rhetoric about slavery linked fatness to “greedy” Africans. And religious discourse suggested that overeating was ungodly . . . Not until the early nineteenth century in the United States, in the context of slavery, religious revivals, and the massive immigration of persons deemed “part-Africanoid,” did these notions come together under a coherent ideology.

  As it relates to Desire/ability, fatness as Blackness—which is to say that fatness is formed as a coherent ideology through the creation of (anti-)Blackness and therefore does not intersect with Blackness, but exists with Blackness itself—is what leads others to determining that fatness is unDesirable. Similarly, it is those two things that keep thin folks, and sometimes fat folks, from locating desire in the Black fat. Said differently, it is this unDesire that creates the margins that the Black fat is forced to live on. If the locale of the subjugation of fat people is, too, at the genesis of the objectification of Black subjects—and it is through the unremarkability and unpleasantness of how fatness dressed Black flesh that created the structures that necessitate the marginalization of both identities4—then one can determine that Desire is at the root of the continued harm that the Black fat navigates.

  Statistics show us that fat people are less likely to be hired for a job,5 that fat people in America can legally be fired from a job in forty-nine states for being fat,6 that fat people are more likely to be homeless,7 that fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted,8 and that fat people often die from being misdiagnosed or undiagnosed.9

  Make no mistake: fuckability as Desire/ability does not mean that all bodies deemed fuckable are humanized, nor does it mean that every person who has sex with the Black fat sees them as living beings deserving of care. And it is often for this reason that fat subjects live with Insecurities. Being fuckable is determined by someone other than ourselves, and therefore it is completely about whether or not others locate desire in you. This desire does not have to come with an interrogated politic. It could very well be a fetish, predicated on the desire to only see fat people as sexual objects incapable of being more.

  What fuckability as Desire/ability means is that Desire/ability is part of the Human experience, and being seen as unDesirable, specifically for the Black fat, is at the heart of what helps to maintain the separation between the nonHuman and the Human.

  The hope, then, should not be to be Beautiful or Desirable. Instead, each of us should sit with why the idea of finding Ugly attractive is uncomfortable. Societally, there should be an interrogation of why Ugly people are asked to apologize for their Ugliness and to find ways to conform to Beauty rather than divesting completely from Beauty as a political concept. In that same vein, we should all sit with why we believe Insecurity as a concept must be a personal and moral failing rather than a result of systemic and social domination. I want us to know Insecurity as intimately as we know the marginalized pieces of ourselves: as valid, as identities, and as political.

  This is an indictment of thin people—which includes people with gym bodies, people with athletic bodies, people who are slender, slim, or otherwise non-fat, as they all benefit from anti-fatness and cannot necessarily separate themselves from a politic of Thinness. This is an indictment of people who claim a liberatory politic but exist with a politic of Thinness. Thinness, as a politic, demands that one consume less, desire less, rather than make the demand that we end a World where what one desires would leave others without. On the surface, this means something as simple as the Black fat doesn’t have to eat less. When interrogated more closely, however, this means that the Black fat doesn’t deserve to have less access to housing; it means the Black fat doesn’t deserve to have less access to employment; it means the Black fat doesn’t deserve to have less access to proper medical care and to health care; it means the Black fat doesn’t deserve to have less access to adequate clothing options. It means fat children don’t deserve to be sent to fat camps—a project predicated on the idea that literal minors are undesirable and greedy. It means that fat women don’t deserve to be believed less and assaulted more when sharing their stories of sexual violence—all of which is also predicated on the idea that fatness is unDesirable and they are thus unable to consent, because consent is reserved as an option only for those who are Desired.

  This is to say that concepts like “greed(iness)” and “overconsumption” are the cages that breed Thinness. These concepts suggest that for one to be free, they must be thin—even if only in politic. Which is to say that one’s disinterest in desiring fat Black people is harmful—not just for the fact that fat Black people deserve access to love but also because at the epicenter of our subjugation and objectification is unDesire. So to destroy anti-fatness and anti-Blackness, we must destroy Desire, Beauty, Thinness,
and whiteness.

  To state this more plainly: anyone who experiences sexual or romantic attraction, that also claims to be committed to fat people’s liberation, who is uninterested in being in relationship with fat people (romantically, sexually, platonically, or otherwise) is, in fact, anti-fat. Wanting to alter your partner’s body because it is “too fat” is anti-fat. Wanting to alter your own body because it is “too fat” or out of the desire to not ever be fat is fatphobic. Preferring to be with people who are not fat is anti-fat. And it is anti-fat because, statistically, thin people who hold these views are also the people in positions of power to deny the Black fat the materials and tools necessary for us to live.

  Kiese Laymon wrestles with this a bit in his book Heavy: An American Memoir, specifically as it relates to sexual violence experienced by fat Black boys—a story so often untold.

  In the beginning parts of Heavy, Laymon discusses how he felt that he was his sexiest self when Renata, one of his mother’s students, put her breasts in his mouth, when she touched him, and when she breathed like she enjoyed what her body was feeling. He wrote about just how unsexy he would feel when she’d come over to his house and not touch him or let him touch her.

  The story is further complicated when Laymon reveals that Renata was his babysitter and he had not yet reached the dawn of his teenage years when these acts of molestation began.

  Laymon complicates our understandings of sex, sexual violence, and Desire by ushering us from a layered conversation around the hypersexualization of fat Black boys due to anti-fatness and Desire/ability politics, to an even more complex conversation about the fat body and what it is forced to endure for the sake of perceived pleasure and Desire/ability.

  Several years ago, I penned an essay where I discussed a few of my encounters with sexual abuse, and my relation to Laymon is a result of the sexual abuse we both were forced to endure. Often, I don’t feel sexy unless I’m pleasuring someone else’s body through sex. In those moments, my body is most desired, and my body is not often appreciated outside of sexualized context.

  When Laymon writes about his “thighs and calves” not being “muscly enough,” I read an embarrassment that is not foreign to me. I empathize with how his lack of muscularity would sometimes keep Renata from touching him, and though she was sexually abusive, the feeling of being unwanted was nonetheless difficult to bear. Laymon’s experience of abuse from Renata was further explored when he watched her have “fully naked” sex with her muscular boyfriend, highlighting again the extent to which sexual violence is psychologically disturbing and emotionally wrangling.

  The feeling that your gut is figuratively and literally keeping you from experiencing what it’s like to wrap your whole self around someone and for them to do the same to you is almost suffocating. As sad as it is, the feeling of your body being a physical barrier in sexual contact is oftentimes what we have to process before we can ever even consider that what we’ve experienced is sexual abuse.

  I know what it’s like to not process your assault for the deadly act that it is because fat people, generally—but fat Black boys and bois, specifically—are taught (sometimes, inadvertently) that we cannot be sexually assaulted, that we should appreciate when our bodies are being touched in any way, even when the behavior is violent.

  Fat people are sexually assaulted, but the confines of gender limit whose stories are told. Overarchingly, fat people are not believed when they are victims and survivors, and yet, fat women courageously share their stories despite the risks. However, seldom do we hear from victims and survivors who are fat Black boys, and the lack of adequate and accessible data to support the claims of abuse does little for our supposed credibility. And it is for this reason that I write this from the personal. Because not only is the personal political, but the political has not made room for data beyond the personal.

  Fat Black people forced into boyhood—whether we actively understood ourselves as such or not—are sexually abused all the time, and our invisibility as victims and survivors further demonstrates the ways anti-fatness is detrimental to the minds and bodies of fat Black boys/bois and must be eradicated in full.

  I have known sexual assault more intimately than I have known most of my sexual partners, both when I was being forced into boyhood and now as a fat Black trans-nonbinary person. And part of what caused me to be slow in recognizing these encounters as assault/rape is the thought that I had to be grateful. For a long time, I had not processed those abuses because I was still working past the crossroad at which the hypersexualization of Black boys and the gaslighting of fat survivors meet. There is an exhaustive history of Black boys, bois, and men being fetishized and hypersexualized because of their dicks, their “hard” demeanor, and the animalistic characteristics assigned to their being and existence. This is exacerbated when the Black masc person is a fat one or is read otherwise as “large.” While there is no clear evidence that Mandingo or warrior fights were real or used as forms of entertainment,10 the very idea of such a reality is always already violent because it is formulated by the belief that Black cisgender men and other Black people to whom the illogics of “maleness” are assigned are necessarily expendable and their bodies are useful only as punching bags and modes of punishment. And as we will explore later in the book, it is this that so often leads to the murder of the Black fat.

  There is also a long history of fat Black people, especially Black women, not being believed when they accuse men of rape. Many are even assaulted by police when they report. So for the Black fat, which lives with the heightened fear of being hypersexualized while simultaneously never being desired, this story rests heavy in our hearts.

  To this point, sexual violence is not foreign to me. What is necessary for me to contend with, however, is just how much my body being read as that which belonged to a Black woman caused me to be assaulted by the type of men who engaged me.

  The first time I can recall being violated by a man, I was around eight. At the time, I was perceived as a Black boy who had more ass and more thighs than boys were supposed to have. Black boys are supposed to be athletes. They’re supposed to carry their weight proportionately or not at all. They are supposed to be thin, or at least a little muscular, and not really fat. Whatever their size, they were never supposed to look like the “little fast Black girl on the block.” The one whose breasts formed a little earlier than expected. The one whose ass was just a little too round for men to resist. The one whose body moved differently when she walked. Though I was, in fact, an athlete, that body that people so easily read as “fast” was my own. I had the weighted thighs, the pants that didn’t really fit, the ass that moved without being prompted to. And because I did, I quickly learned that my body was not my own.

  bell hooks defines patriarchy as “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”11 In Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, Hortense Spillers writes of the “loss of gender” or an altered reading of gender for Black people—particularly and especially Black women—after slavery through the “ungendering” of their body.

  This made evident to me that the violence my body has long endured was the ungendering of my Being, particularly due to the ways in which patriarchy shows up through anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, heterosexism, and misogynoir—a term coined and proliferated by Moya Bailey and Trudy. Black women, while mostly described as “strong” and thought to not be able to experience pain, are still oftentimes viewed as “vulnerable” and “weaker”—the latter most often being what informs the former. They are weak because they are strong; they are strong because they are weak. They are assaulted because they are strong; they are weak, and therefore, they are assault
ed. They are fast until they are slow; too slow until they’re fast. They are girls until they are women; they’re always women, even when they are girls. Cisgender men, and the way they rationalize these violences against so many bodies, are walking contradictions.

  It is this that forces me to grapple more deeply with my assaults. The type of men who engaged my body, who I understand as down-low (DL) and straight-assumed, still held intimate relationships with women, or led others to believe so. My body—full and weighted—waited for no one to touch it, and yet it was touched anyway. Over. And over. And over. And over again. It was engaged in such a way, in part, due to the fact that this body is and has always been removed from gender. For these men, my body provided a comfortability usually found only in “fast” girls void of any and all perceived vulnerability. Said again, my body was welcoming—even well into my adult years—because, frankly, it made these men feel that they were fucking a woman without engaging the power dynamic therein. And this is not to say that men who are DL are into boys, nor is it to excuse the violence of trespassing against someone else’s body, but it is to say that the only need for a DL identity is to protect the masculinity of those not directly assumed to be queer while harming those of us for whom queerness is inescapable.

  To provide a point of clarity: this is not intended to compare my experience to that of little Black girls robbed of their girlhood and Black women robbed of their womanhood, but rather this is to name the severity of the violences transgressed against them and the overall harm of applying gender to flesh always already being ungendered or experiencing “racialized disgendering,” as Milo W. Obourn names it in her book Disabled Futures: A Framework for Radical Inclusion: