I haven’t been feeling great about my body lately. It’s because I’ve been spending so much time at my desk or hunched over a book (thanks, finals). But it’s also because I haven’t been able to wear my favorite pair of jeans since I got back from my time abroad (where I ate everything I wanted because cultural experience!). I’m telling myself not to let a pair of pants make me feel this way about my body, but I’m feeling it. Continue reading
Fat Acceptance
No more ignoring fat bodies [warning: rape]
It seems to me that no one ever thinks about this, or they never want to talk about it. I want to talk about it. I think it needs to be written down, passed around, and heard over and over again until we replace our present beliefs with the truth.
Note of Absence for 10/9
I’m not going to class today.
I can’t say that it’s because I have a fever, or because I had a dentist appointment, or because anybody died.
I’m not going because of the sensations I feel when we talk about fatness. The sickness and the overwhelming feeling of inadequacy (that has always been pushed in to my mentality from various points in my life) always crop up as we talk about our fat, or not so fat bodies. It’s inevitable, this distinct sucking feeling, as if my gut has become a vacuum, and I can zip myself away like a fancy reusable grocery bag.
We talk critically about the hegemonic institutions that create these body ideals. We complain together, air our grievances, we nod and shake our heads together. We are a good class, a good group of people who can empathize and understand each other’s problems, but that’s not enough to save me from wanting to shrink into my backpack and cry in a bathroom stall.
The Adipositivity Project
I’ve been aware of The Adipositivity Project for a number of years. Most people who float around Fat Acceptance circles online are aware of it, but when I’ve shown it to friends who aren’t aware of FA, it’s always surprised them. I thought, given the reading for our next class, this was at least visually on topic. I’m also always a fan of activism through art and you can’t say Substantia Jones’ photographs aren’t beautiful or radical. Many of the photographs are nudes, so beware if you decide to click through. I’ve pulled some of the more modest ones to show the intent of the images.
Adipose: Of or relating to fat.
Positivity: Characterized by or displaying acceptance or affirmation.
MISSION: The Adipositivity Project aims to promote size acceptance, not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that’s normally unseen.The hope is to widen definitions of physical beauty. Literally.
The photographs here are close details of the fat female form, without the inclusion of faces. One reason for this is to coax observers into imagining they’re looking at the fat women in their own lives, ideally then accepting them as having aesthetic appeal which, for better or worse, often translates into more complete forms of acceptance.
The women you see in these images are educators, executives, mothers, musicians, professionals, performers, artists, activists, clerks, and writers. They are perhaps even the women you’ve clucked at on the subway, rolled your eyes at in the market, or joked about with your friends.
This is what they look like with their clothes off.
Some are showing you their bodies proudly. Others timidly. And some quite reluctantly. But they all share a determination in altering commonly accepted notions of a narrow and specific beauty ideal.
I love this project, especially considering the attempts by the media to include “real” bodies through the use of marketing like the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and “plus size” (really a size 6-12) models, and how different these fat people look from those culturally approved fat bodies. These aren’t the media portrayed idea of what is “real” (and how problematic is that word in regards to any person?). These (mostly) women, 
according to the BMI (another problematic method of judgment!), are obese, or more likely morbidly obese (sometimes called Death Fat in the FA community). Most of them probably weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 or 300 or even 400 pounds – yet I don’t think they look like the stereotypical bed-ridden mordibly obese person most non-fats think of when they hear those numbers. Or maybe they do look like those ZOMG FAT people to you.
However you see them, these people are fat, but they have accepted the bodies they have and are living their lives in them.
Unruly Bodies 
