Femme Body?
How much does your body relate to you being femme? I know that I spend a lot of time thinking about how accessories, clothes, makeup, and all the other things I put onto my body relate to my queer femininity, but I don’t always take the time to think about how my body itself references me as femme, or plays in a role of the ways in which I conceptualize my body and gender. As a fat femme, I believe that I use my round and squishy body in queered ways, to subvert what is considered “appropriate†for people read as women (I won’t even again get into the cultural misunderstanding of my body and how my genderqueerness is invisible). My fatness and commitment to body positivity and fat activist principles is a tool I utilize on a daily basis to disrupt and queer dominant discourses of femininity. I fully believe that in my own life femme is a queering/perversion/subversion of appropriate straight femininity, and in our fatphobic media saturated culture thinness is valued practically above all else and tied to conceptions of beauty. I believe that I along with other fat femmes have the ability to pull fatness out of our XXL pink glittery tool belts as a weapon to combat and queer notions of traditional femininity.
For me, being a flamboyant fat femme in the world is just another way I feel seen, I wear clothes that fat folks aren’t supposed to wear, bright clothes, things that don’t “slim.†In fact as I write this, I’m wearing * gasp * horizontal stripes right over my fat, fat belly. I’ve covered my fat flesh in tattoos- another “rule†broken, as people continually stare at all my flesh. I feel like my flamboyant femininity as a fat femme queers me in ways I don’t know how I would do if I wasn’t a big fatty. I’m really curious about how we think about our bodies in regards to our identities. How about all of you- is your body part of how you think about being femme?
February 7th, 2008 at 10:28 am
hmm…this is a good question.
for me, my body is definitely connected. i am probably not the best role model for body acceptance, since i have some issues of my own to work out. but i love being able to wear dresses, corsets, heels…and i kind of like being smaller, for whatever reason. there are a lot of things i struggle with, and i guess everyone has their own body image issues, but i think that being ok with being queer and femme has definitely helped me be much much more ok with my body.
on a related note, would you consider adding Quench to your blogroll (http://quenchzine.blogspot.com)? we’ve got a few fierce femmes who write for the blog, and we’d be happy to put up a link to you.