tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5132674095286496900.post4514994490924631359..comments2023-08-02T14:00:05.513+01:00Comments on boyish: Do I Look Fat?Olliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15812865772654663502noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5132674095286496900.post-61508772667502715282012-10-29T11:18:12.396+00:002012-10-29T11:18:12.396+00:00Ha Jess I wouldn't have known it was you if yo...Ha Jess I wouldn't have known it was you if you hadn't named Neil! <br /><br />Great points as always. You're right, it doesn't really make me feel better about it, but it is interesting nonetheless. And very relevant: I assumed, on reflection, that J was rather enjoying putting people on the spot because she thought, probably accurately, that people would be noticing that she was 'fatter' and be too polite to say so. So much as I occasionally enjoy acknowledging someone's obvious confusion over my gender markers, and bringing attention to it (yes, there are a few mean-minded advantages to being trans!), I thought J was enjoying subverting that narrative of fatness, ie. "so, you think I'm fat, right? SURPRISE! I'm pregnant!" But as enjoyable as that may be, it's not actually subversive: in fact it reifies the equivalence between fatness and pregnancy, and indeed the misguided notion that a non-fat, non-pregnant woman is "normal".<br /><br />Also, I love how you link that to the idea of choice - because of course, fatness is bad, and nobody would choose to be fat, but pregnancy is a kind of chosen fatness, and it's ok. As long as we're choosing fatness, and as long as it's the good kind of fatness, it's ok. Except, as you say, the second the pregnancy becomes a baby, at which point one must lose the fatness <i>instantly</i> because it's not the good kind of fat any more.<br /><br />And yeah, she does seem really happy. And I don't begrudge her her bit of fun! But it did make me think, and perhaps overthink - and there's nothing I love more than a bit of overthinking :-) Thanks for your comment Jess!Olliehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15812865772654663502noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5132674095286496900.post-72993499327735086402012-10-26T10:19:59.952+01:002012-10-26T10:19:59.952+01:00Ok so I've been thinking about this because (a...Ok so I've been thinking about this because (a) I think you're being too hard on yourself and (b) I couldn't work out why I thought that.<br /><br />I'm not sure I've figured it out yet but I think it comes down to a problematic idea (in society, texts) about an equivalence betwen fatness and pregnancy. I'm only thinking about this becuase of a conversation I had with my phd supervisor (yes, Neil - but I thought that soemone reading this might not know me so I should write who he was!) about Judy Blume's 'Forever', in which a so-called fat teenager hides a pregnancy, which she can do "because she's so fat". There was an idea here about the fatness and the pregnancy being somehow substitutable for each other and the more we talked about it the more we thought of instances in 'the real world' where this happened. The idea of 'losing the baby weight' after giving birth is one of them, but also people's inability (sometimes) to distinguish between 'fat' and 'pregnant'. And these two things CAN look like each other but, for me, this is the crucial difference: they may look the same but they are not the same. <br /><br />So maybe your collegaue was a little unkind putting you on the spot asking 'do I look fatter?', maybe she was just having a bit of fun in telling people a secret that, for her, had been visually present even though it wasn't revealed, and maybe you could have responded differently if you hadn't felt so blindsided. But, for me, what the exchange comes down to is the unhelpful and I think disingenuous-to-women, if not outright misogynistic, myth that there is an equivalence between fatness and pregnancy because, sometimes, they look the same. This undermines both pregnancy and fatnessas well as the non-fat non-pregnant woman: it produces women's bodies only in terms of size (as opposed to, say, individual choice, function or motherhood), which produces them only as what others see, not what they feel like to the body/person or what they are doing for, to and with them.<br /><br />I don't know that this will necessarily make you feel any better about what happened but there's a silver lining regardless for me because it's making me think about these issues, which I wouldn't have done otherwise so thank you. Plus, your friend is really happy about being pregnany so hurrah for that too!<br /><br />Jess.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com