Disgender is neither an assimilation to dominant gender identities, nor a complete rejection of or removal from dominant narratives of gender, but rather a way of thinking about the complex and disabling (in both the sense of limiting access and in the sense of providing a social identity and epistemically valuable way of being in the world) ways that gender intersects with our other social identities.12
If these assaults fell so confidently on my body, one that was thought to have belonged to a boy, one can only imagine the aggregated harm many Black girls and women have been forced to endure. Patriarchy acts as a system that assigns power to cisgender men, or men assumed to be cisgender, and employs hegemonic masculinity at the expense of people directly harmed by gender(ed) violence. By this, I mean that men, especially those who are cisgender and heterosexual, while also negatively affected by this system, are empowered to hold dominance over women and all other people impacted by gender(ed) violence. This is, to my understanding, where the harm forged onto and around my body, bodies like Laymon’s, and other bodies like ours interact most with misogynoir and ungendering.
Sydney Lewis writes in “I Came to Femme through Fat and Black” that she “came to Femme as defiance through a big booty that declined to be tucked under, bountiful breasts that refused to hide . . . Through shedding shame instead of shedding pounds,” and this forced me to consider how the fat Black fem(me) body is perceived, especially in the Black South. Fem(me) bodies like Lewis’s—ones with breasts and booties that would be described with adjectives like “voluptuous” and “busty”—have often defied standards of beauty, of womanhood, of femme-ness and femininity, so much so that, for as far back as the enslavement of African people, fat Black women in the South have long had a history of being assigned the role of caregiver/nurturer. They act as the Mammy.
The Mammy caricature, dating back to 1810, originated as an image to advertise the mythological unification of the South. Enslaved fat Black women were assigned the duty to care for white children. Their bodies, oftentimes used and abused, were thought of as a symbol of loyalty, unity, and care. Writer and historian Jesse Parkhurst writes that “[the Mammy] was considered self-respecting, independent, loyal, forward, gentle, captious, affectionate, true, strong, just, warm-hearted, compassionate-hearted, fearless, popular, brave, good, pious, quick-witted, capable, thrifty, proud, regal, courageous, superior, skillful, tender, queenly, dignified, neat, quick, tender, competent, possessed with a temper, trustworthy, faithful, patient, tyrannical, sensible, discreet, efficient, careful, harsh, devoted, truthful, neither apish nor servile.”13 And though all these descriptors were used as a way to market the Black women caring for white children—thus, creating a “unified South”—what is never made public is the sexual abuse her body endured; the fact that she, too, was still nothing more than property; that she was just an image who was still denied the realities of resources, freedom, and a true role in society.
This is a truth, an imagery, that is still central to the Black South. The feminization of the Black fat body is salient in our culture. We deify the imagery of our grandmothers cooking, cleaning, and caring for us with their low-hanging arm fat. We reminisce on the moments we shared out on grandmama’s/mama’s/auntie’s porch, looking out into the field, where she imparted all of her knowledge and wisdom into us. And still, as Lewis writes, these women are deviant in that their bodies refuse to take up a different form. Ingrained in the DNA of the (Black) South is the belief that fatness, especially when it rests on a Black woman, belongs to non-fat people; that the only acceptable time to love/touch/assign femininity to a fat, dark-skinned Black person’s body is when it is performing for someone else, and especially when that body belongs to a woman. This sense of entitlement is what leads to the sexual violence against “little fast Black girls” who had shapely and fat bodies. To that same point, this is what feminizes the body of little fat Black boys and bois who own a body most often associated with Black women or completely removed from gender entirely.
My assaults, though made possible by heterosexism and anti-fatness, too, have all happened in conversation with misogynoir and the way in which men engage bodies that “belong” to Black women—even when those bodies actually belong to Black girls, Black boys, and Black adults who are not women.
As bell hooks says in Understanding Patriarchy, boys are propagandized into the order and stipulations of patriarchy by teaching them to feel pain but to never express it. This, I believe, is something that men know, even if they cannot name it. This is the cause for this sort of intracommunal (both Black and non-heterosexual) violence: these particular men intend to explore their sexuality with bodies that don’t make them too uncomfortable, with the expectation that they’ll never speak of it again; that they’ll internalize it and move on with their lives; that they, fat boys, own bodies that are meant for women, thus designed to violate, but will/must adhere to the patriarchal teachings that they should never be courageous enough to speak of the trauma afflicted by those who have trespassed against them. That is why my assailants felt comfortable with engaging with me normally whenever they would see me outside of those moments of assault, and I imagine that this is also part of the reason why Renata used Laymon’s body as an outlet. The idea is that if boys are to be boys that will one day be men, they’d have to accept their part in patriarchy.
As previously stated, the Black fat is misdiagnosed by medical professionals, are skipped over for jobs and housing, sit at the crux of harm committed by dieting and diet culture, experience heightened interactions with police, leading to state-sanctioned brutality, and are showcased as the evil that waits in children’s stories and beastly gluttons in religious texts. In various ways, the world has normalized the teachings that fat Black people are not Desirable and, thus, fat and Black bodies are deserving of the abuse they endure.
Anti-fatness is coercive in that it teaches people to believe that the bodies of fat Black folks are only supposed to endure pain, never pleasure; that their very existence is always defined by Death, never Life; that their value, if any is assigned at all, is wrapped up in their ability to perform. They have to be the Mammy archetype or, for the fat, darkskin Black masc person, they must exist between what I refer to as the Fat Albert and Mark Henry tropes—purposed with the sole role of caring for everyone other than themselves or positioned as animalistic and consistently tough. Now that I understand myself as a person not restrained by the confines of gender, I have found myself detangling the web of patriarchy in my life and being more committed than ever to being sure that those “little fast Black girls” never have to experience the worst parts of patriarchy again. That is what we must all be committed to. We must commit to the complete eradication of the Mammy caricature. We must commit to the total deconstruction of the patriarchy.
What I am really naming here is the complicatedness of feeling both affirmed and harmed by your assault because your body is never really your own when you’re fat and Black, and the trauma you arrive at upon realizing that there is no affirmation in touch intended to harm—or at least unintended to be sure of your consent.
The solution doesn’t have to be a complicated one, however. For those who are raising fat Black boys or children otherwise read as masc(uline), be sure to share with them how beautiful they are, always. Teach them that weight loss is not a requirement for them to be beautiful, even if they will never know Beauty. That their body is not an extension of their beauty but is, instead, central to their beauty. That they can be as sexual as they want, but their bodies don’t have to endure being hypersexualized by anyone. That abuse of their bodies—through medicine, sex, religion, and other social institutions—is not something you tolerate.
It is necessary that fat Black kids are taught that Insecurity exists in direct response to Beauty and Desire. This sets the foundation for how they will engage their bodies and the bodies of others around them. They should know that Ugliness is s
tructural violence just as intimately as they know that anti-Blackness is. To use Insecurity as a political tool means to war against a desire to conform to Beauty, and in doing so, it means waging a war against the idea of health, Thinness, and the foundation on which anti-Blackness and anti-fatness thrive.
There must be a commitment to destroying a World wherein one is abused and subjected to structural violence for having bodies too large and too dark for care.
3
Health and the Black Fat
According to the World Health Organization, health is the state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not just the absence of disease or infirmity.1 As I interpret it, this means that for one to be healthy, they must not only be non-disabled but must also be in an environment that allows for them to feel mentally secure, psychically safe, and socially well. As such, this means that Black people—especially those of us who exist with multiple marginalized identities—are always already unhealthy because we are always already unsafe. The creation of race through slavery was precisely intended to make Africans, with their blackened or “stained” skin, subjects. They became objects to be subjugated, poked and prodded, and turned—at least through language and especially through the ways in which they were engaged—into Beasts. Said differently, built into the very fabric of modern society, of the World—created by Europeans and sustained by anti-Blackness—is the idea that the Black, which is to name the Slave, is but an object and a subject, and therefore has no need for, or right to, safety or wellness. The Slave was and has always been removed from wellness and safety, both through the total subjugation/domination and objectification of their Being.
In fact, for “race” to be constructed, the Slave had to exist—and had to exist as the antithesis of health—so that European physicians, anthropologists, and other eugenicists could determine what set the Slave apart from, as J. F. Blumenbach called them, the Caucasian; that being the “degeneration,” or the corruption, of the Slave’s body from the Caucasian.2 For all intents and purposes, Blumenbach created race, and did so as to differentiate the Human from the Slave. These scientists based the idea of health on what Africans could and could not withstand and created health “issues” based on what Africans would not withstand. Take, for example, Samuel A. Cartwright. In 1851, Cartwright named two “illnesses” that were exclusively found in Africans. The first of the two was what he called “drapetomania,” which was a mental illness that caused the Slave to run away. The second one was called “dysaesthesia aethiopica,” which was a sort of weakness or lack of work ethic that Africans would develop if they were not enslaved or otherwise in the possession of white enslavers. His suggested treatment for both illnesses was to wash their open wounds, drape their bodies in oil, beat them with a leather strap, and force them to work in the field—specifically when the sun was beaming.
These “illnesses” were specifically about characterizing the Black who dared to believe they were deserving of health, whereby they were deserving of safety and wellness. Cartwright deemed them “psychologically abnormal and inept,”3 and this would essentially birth what we now understand to be “scientific racism.” Medical apartheid, as named by Harriet Washington, is foundational to the creation of race—which is the creation of the Black, which is the creation of the Slave. For as long as there is a Black, there is a subject to be experimented on; for as long as there is a subject to be experimented on, health will always already be inaccessible to the Slave. And as this is the case, health is a framework in which no Black person can ever fit. This is especially true for fat Black people.
The Belly—or fatness—is yet another reason for why the Beast—or the Black—can and will never have access to health. In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings masterfully details how fatness on the Black subject’s body set the precedent for how fatness would be engaged in the United States and the world as a whole. Fatness was once seen as something to aspire to, something that was attractive. The reason for this, however, was because, at the time, fatness signified sociopolitical and economic power. What Strings makes clear in Fearing the Black Body is that it was fatness’s alignment with whiteness that really made it attractive to Europeans. When Europeans saw Africans for the first time and saw that their bodies looked like them but their skin did not, it was then that anti-fatness was established as a coherent ideology. Because fatness had become blackened (and Blackened), it could only ever be impure and beastly. As the Slave represented capital and forced labor, fatness could no longer be about status and power, so it became about greed and ungodliness.
Strings argues that the fear of fatness and the preference for thinness are, principally and historically, not about health but rather they are ways to legitimize race, sex, and class hierarchies. I agree that anti-fatness is not about health insofar as the systemic bias against fat people is not predicated on a desire to see Black people mentally secure, psychically safe, and socially well. However, because that is true, I would also argue that anti-fatness is about health to some extent. For anti-Blackness and anti-fatness to be legitimate subjugating and objectifying structures, their existence had to be predicated on a Thing unobtainable by Black fat subjects. That Thing is health. In other words, to legitimize race, sex, and class statuses, health had a job to do. That job was to ensure that the Black—which is, too, the fat—was always fixed to be something that Black fat subjects could not be. This leads to the birth of the medical industrial complex—an institution built and sustained by race scientists and eugenicists dedicated to the continued Death of Black fat subjects. Said again: to be Black and fat is to always live as Dead, and “health” ensures that. As opposed to one’s literal and physical state of being dead, Death signifies that one—particularly, the Black fat—walks as Dead, talks as Dead, lives and breathes through Death, and that one is ontologically always already socially Dead. In this way, so-called race scientists and eugenicists used, and do still use, the Black fat as capital, that is, products on which they build anti-Black and anti-fat structures like “health” and the medical industrial complex with the intent to maintain a hierarchy—a social World order.
Strings states that race works to repress “savage blackness” while also disciplining whiteness. I believe that fatness and health do something similar. Fatness and health, like race, are also double agents. They are all used to tell Black fat people who and what they are, but they are also used to tell white people who they should not want to become. When they fail to model that, it can be deadly for them too. Not in the same way as it is for the Black, but deadly as a result of even unintentionally aligning oneself with what exists as the obverse of whiteness.
Health, in name and in action, has always existed to abuse, to dominate, and to subjugate. The medical industry, the health care industry, and the diet industry all exist to maintain a culture intended to “discipline” those whose bodies refuse to—and, for many, simply cannot—conform to the standards of health. Modern society enforces exercise as a punishment for this very reason. We are not taught to exercise for the sake of enjoyment, nor are we taught to enjoy our bodies in motion. We are taught, per contra, that we exercise so that we can be healthy, and that health must look opposite of fat. This means that health is punishment. So much so that there are entire camps dedicated to forcing children to exercise for the sake of weight loss. We call them fat/boot camps. The entertainment industry has created an entire market built on shaming adults into weight loss through reality television. We call it My 600-lb Life, The Biggest Loser, and 1,000-lb Sisters. These industries lead to real psychological harm, physical pain, and death.
In 1999, a fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Gina Score died because of forced exercise and a lack of care around fat children’s bodies. Gina, who had been part of a camp run and operated by military veterans, had been tasked with a 2.7-mile run. In the middle of that run, Gina fell on the ground and began gasping for air.
Soon after, she began foaming at the mouth and hallucinating. After four hours of her instructors laughing at her—while drinking soda, no less—and accusing Gina of faking, a doctor came outside and called for an ambulance immediately. Gina’s organs had failed. She had died.4
In an extreme case like this, many would call what happened to Gina abuse. In fact, many did. Gina’s case went on to introduce a national conversation around the mistreatment of youth in boot camps, and erected new laws and policies in juvenile correctional facilities. But not only was Gina abused, she was murdered. She was murdered because her instructors found no value in her fat life. The abuse did not start and end with Gina’s collapse or with the instructors’ negligence, though; the abuse began with the idea that Gina ever needed to be punished for her weight in the first place. It could be argued that Gina was not originally at the camp for her fatness but was instead there to “correct” her “bad” behavior, but so much of the behavior being read as “bad” is structured by her fatness. At the nucleus of her punishment was a push for weight loss as discipline, and health and wellness as ways to correct or “fix” bad or broken behavior. It is also what led to her death. She was neglected, at least in part, because she was fat. The nearly three-mile run she was forced to do, the idea that she was faking what would be her own death to avoid exercise, the fact that her instructors left her to lie in the sun while they drank sodas—a beverage people have long shamed fat people for drinking—were all a targeted response to her fatness. And it killed her. She was murdered by a culture designed to punish fat people at the behest of “health” itself.
Children are sent to these boot camp–like weight loss programs to be shamed for their weight, manipulated into believing that the abuse they’re forced to endure is about being accepted instead of being punished for owning a body that looks different from what the rest of the world sees as normal. Fat kids are being penalized for their bodies, “whipped into shape,” disciplined for something the rest of the world views as an offense and a breach of an imagined moral code.
Belly of the Beast Page 4
