Fantasising about Lauren Berlant and her fatphobia

Dear Lauren Berlant,

I awoke this morning to a beautiful fantasy all about you, but before I can go into that I'd like to fill you in on the backsnark.

A while ago I met this hot woman and told her that I was interested in fat and queer theory. She mentioned your name, so I went and read some of your work because I wanted to impress this woman enough so that she would have sex with me. Unfortunately, this is when things began to unravel.

I came across your paper Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Boy oh boy, did I ever feel like I was experiencing a slow death of my own whilst I was reading it. It's four years since this work was published, by you, and about two since I read it for the first time, and that feeling of metal atrophy I get when I think about it persists. I knew there were ideas in there, but I couldn't get to them because of the way you set them out on a page or a screen. Some people think that reading something so impenetrably academic is illuminating, but I just call it bad writing. I struggled on regardless, wondering if I was reading something of value, or the ramblings of someone who had lost their grip on things.

Your arguments about embodied sovreignity have been better expressed elsewhere, particularly in disability theory, which you don't mention. It is your thoughts on fat that really have me scratching my head. There is nothing in what you write that reflects any of my experience as a fat queer. I'm there going: "Does she really mean people like me?". I know I'll never get the time back that I've wasted in reading what you have to say but that hasn't stopped me going back and back again to try and make sense of what you've written. This work is well-cited, I reason, there must be something in it that I'm not getting. There comes a time when you just have to give up hoping.

It's not that you don't know about critical perspectives on obesity epidemiology, you cite the big men of the movement, Paul Campos and Eric Oliver, and you have a soft spot for Richard Klein's terrible book too, you just choose not to engage. If you bothered to think about the queerness of bodies, of what it is to have a body that isn't like yours, that is non-normative, you would have the opportunity to engage with a richness of material beyond your wildest dreams.

Instead, you choose to side with The Man. Slow Death reiterates the abjection of fatness. Fat is attrition, it is the pathological and literal representation of slow death. Your work reproduces fat people as Othered, anonymous, an abstraction; 'The Obese'. You fail to question the existence of fat people as anything but a crisis brought about by a mismanagement of energy balance and you see nothing of value in fatness other than as a symbol for your theorising. Given the paltriness of critical literature on fat and race, and the problem of racism within some fat activisms, it's especially dismaying to see you applying reductive obesity discourse to people of colour in this work. There is nothing radical here.

There are other queer feminist academics who have also failed to address their own fatphobia; Elspeth Probyn thinks that fat activism is a pathetic excuse and that obesity really is a terrible problem; Susie Orbach, well, the less said about her the better. I am not the first to point out the failings of those who theorise the body, including feminists, who conveniently ignore fat or reproduce the problematic terms of obesity discourse. It's painful to witness one's abjection in this work, again and again, especially by people who should know better, people like you who are paid to think and write, people who are lauded as intellectuals, tenured professors, those who enjoy tremendous intellectual freedom and privilege and cultural capital, people who are products of privilege misusing their power, circumscribing people who have less power. Surely you have the time and resources to dig a bit deeper, think a bit harder, be a bit more critical (your journal is called Critical Inquiry after all). What would happen if you spoke to some fat activists? It's not like you have to agree but at least engage for a moment.

I wonder if you think about fat people reading your work. Fat people are so abstracted in Slow Death as newspaper reports or policy objects that it's hard to imagine an actual fat person living a life, going about their business, thinking, or having any material presence or agency at all. Can you imagine a fat dyke throwing a brick through the window of a diet clinic? Fat lovers whipping and fisting? A fat genderqueer subverting death drive theory? It must be tragic to live in a context where these people, who are real and part of my life, don't exist.

It's time to return to my fantasy. So I woke up this morning and looked at my computer and saw that two of my favourite performers, David Hoyle and Bird la Bird are appearing on a panel with you at the Trashing Performance project here in London. It's on 26 October, which also happens to be my 43rd birthday. I drifted off into a reverie, imagining David and Bird turning on you in the panel and asking you pointed questions about the fatphobia in your work. I imagined you squirming. And then I thought of Scottee and Amy Lamé, who produced the sublime Burger Queen this year, who would surely be in the audience, and Vikki Chalklin, whose performance work considers femme fatness, and maybe there would be other rad fatties in the crowd too, and I imagined a bag of rotten tomatoes in there somewhere, and flesh, teeth, mess, and your disbelief of it all. And I imagined you picking up your bags and running to the airport to return to your little burrow in academia-land, shaken and aghast.

Sincerely,

Charlotte

PS The expression on the woman behind you in this picture makes me laugh a lot. It's the top result for your name in Google Images.

Selected References

Berlant, L. (2007) 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 754-780.

Probyn, E. (2008) 'Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat', Feminism & Psychology, 18:3, 401-404.

Performance Matters: Under- and Overwhelmed: Emotion and Performance

Please also see:

Kirkland, Anna (2011) 'The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36:2, 411-436.

Fat Accessibility on São Paulo's Metro

My friend Jenni has been visiting Brazil and told me about fat seats on the São Paulo Metro. I'd never heard of this until now. A quick search has revealed that the seats were installed in 2009 as a means of encouraging more fat people to use public transport. There are bigger bucket-style seats on the train platforms, and a wider armless seat in the first carriage of each train. Both are accompanied by a sign that says 'Priority seating for obese people' where 'obese' is defined as having a BMI of 40+.

Jenni has generously allowed me to use some of the commentary she gave on her LiveJournal. She says:

I was interested that the São Paulo Metro is so inclusive in ways that the London Underground mostly isn't – we've benefited from the enhanced accessibility ourselves, as the 'special needs' I meant include people with babies, people with luggage, older folks, pregnant women, and a range of others as well as wheelchair users. I'm not entirely sure whether the seats in question are intended as part of this accessibility (which might mean that the authorities are problematically treating fatness as a disability) or as part of some other initiative which might be being done in a more pro-different sizes way, but I was interested to see it precisely because of your fat activism writing, which makes me think about that sort of question. Brazil is in some ways a very body-fascist place – the breakfast in the hotel included calorie counts for all the foodstuffs, and the women are supposed to look chic and be skinny, to the extent that I once failed to buy some beach shorts because I couldn't get the supposedly large size any higher than my knees. At the same time though you see an amazing variety of body shapes on the street, on the telly, and on the beach, so I don't know how those pressures actually work out in everyday life, and I wonder about it.

Jenni goes on to say:

The seats are weird and interesting. The state law in question is specifically to combat obesity and is part of 'Lighter São Paulo' (São Paulo Mais Leve) but I don't see how the seats work out as any sort of countermeasure. They fit into the same category as seats for elderly or pregnant people or those carrying children, in that the seat is not supposed to be used by people who aren't in that situation unless there is no-one around whom has a better right to it. There are fewer specific seats for fat folks than for old folks but otherwise it's supposed to work in the same sort of way as for categories of people who no-one would deny a right to preferential treatment, so arguably preferential treatment is here being given where it is normally withheld. There is a seat on the platform and a matching seat in the carriage that stops at that bit of platform – that's a carriage that also has space for bicycles, wheelchair users, and pregnant/old/baby-carrying folk (though the latter have lots of specific seats and not just in this carriage).

On our various Metro trips in SP far, we have seen one fattish chap sat in one of the seats on the train – clearly he didn't mind sitting there whether or not he would officially 'count,' I mean he mustn't have been embarrassed by it or anything. On the seats on the platform we only saw a canoodling couple using it as a love seat (neither of them were skinny but they weren't fatties either – again they didn't seem embarrassed to be sat there so I suppose they weren't sensitive about their weight or anything) and a mother and young son, aged maybe 10 or so, just using it as an extra-wide seat.

Jenni posted some pictures on her Flickr and also pointed out this article São Paulo um cidade Chubby friendly*?. Here, too, is a news report in Portuguese 'Banco dos gordinhos' do metrô agrada também os magros.

I really love the contradiction that Jenni points out between anti-obesity initiatives, which tend to be about eradicating fat people, and these seats, which support the lives of fat people as we are. Installing seats across a large transport network is a public investment in fatness and suggests that fat people aren't going away any time soon. Where the seats are framed as some kind of response to 'obesogenic environments', ie getting fat people out and about and doing things, the rationale may be fatphobic but the outcome is about creating inclusive space.

Newspaper reports typically state that fat people are too stigmatised to use the seats, but the seats make me feel excited at the idea of confident fat people using them, which must surely happen. It would be amazing to see that.

I also like the way that the seats ally fatness, disability and accessibility. Firstly it shows that accessibility is more than disability, and secondly, although the relationship between fat and disability can be filled with tension (see my paper from 1997 Can A Fat Woman Call Herself Disabled?) I see them as very much intertwined.

These seats have blown my mind in all kinds of ways, which means I have questions that may not have answers: why have seating that delineates a body size at all? Why not go for bench-style seating in public space? Are thinner people required to relinquish a fat seat for someone fatter? What if there's more than one fat person, how is who uses the seat negotiated? What if fat seats are still too small for you? Have you used one of these seats?

Thanks Jenni!