Disrupting normal: Toward the ‘ordinary and familiar’ in fat politics

A (very) brief genealogy of normal: From the grotesque to the average

The concepts of norm or normal can be dated as coming into European consciousness between 1840 and 1860, replacing notions of the godly ideal and the grotesque or common, which characterized mortal life (Davis, 2006; Garland-Thomson, 2006). The advent of statistics in the late 18th century, first a form of population-level governance and later a means by which to understand health and disease, gave credence to utilizing notions of the norm and normal as a means by which to understand the social world. The work of 19th century Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet helped to shift the conceptualization of a norm, as applied to both the variance in human features and moral characteristics, from that which signifies an ‘average’ in a normal distribution curve to that which represents the proper way of life (Davis, 2006). Sir Francis Galton, a noted eugenicist, extended this trend by dividing the normal distribution curve into quartiles allowing human traits to be conceived of as prized within a system of ranking rather than errors that fell at the extreme of one end of the curve (Davis, 2006). Because the notion of a norm or normal requires a conceptualization of its opposite, the ‘pathological,’ for full coherence (Canguilhem, 1991), what Galton’s work therefore helped to accomplish was the creation of a statistical ideal for the body and the simultaneous creation of its opposite—the deviant body (Davis, 2006). Although these are at best key moments in the genealogy of the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’ as applied to bodies and populations, what this brief review should make clear is that rather than being self-evident, normal has ‘a history, a set of investments, an entire array of supports and assumptions that bring it into being, sustain it and alter it when conditions so demand’ (Tremain, 2008: XV).

Calculating normal: The disciplinary and productive effects of definition

Within a system of biopower, in which the focus of governance is on the health and vitality of the population, normalization operates through practices of division, classification, ordering and identification (Foucault, 1990; Tremain, 2006). A biopolitical regime thus requires a system of measurements that allow for intervention at a mass level. With regard to weight, Jutel (2006: 2272) highlights the importance of population-level statistics in constructing the fat body as pathological:

With the ability to quantify corpulence comes the potential to track its distribution, prevalence and correlates. In turn, this allows a description of normality and a delineation of the bounds of normal build, which subsequently naturalizes concepts of difference and deviance.

For medical and public health officials, the division between normal and pathological bodily states of fatness or thinness can be measured and calculated through the Body Mass Index (BMI). Today, a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 defines a normal body weight and a BMI of 25 and above designates overweight and obese bodies. Dieting, exercise, weight loss medications and weight loss surgery are held in medical, public health and popular spheres as the sensible means to achieve both a healthy and visually normal body.

The belief in and strategy of normalizing those whose bodies are defined as physically and socially pathological is certainly not limited to the fat. Disability theorists and activists, for example, have extensively documented the cruelties inflicted upon those with cognitive, physical and psychiatric disabilities in the name of normalization (e.g. Braddock and Parish, 2001; Branson and Miller, 2002; Hubbard, 2006; Russell, 1998; Switzer, 2003). Scholars writing on disability from a Foucaultian perspective (e.g. Tremain 2006, 2008) have argued that increasingly bodily norms operate not in top-down/oppressor-oppressed terms but rather as disciplinary and productive forces that shape both social reception and self-subjectification. Tremain (2008: 8; emphasis in original) explains,

Despite the fact that power appears to be merely repressive, the most effective exercise of power, according to Foucault, consists in guiding the possibilities of conduct and putting into order the possible outcomes. The concealment of these practices, these limits of possible conduct, allows for the discursive formation in which they circulate to become naturalized and legitimized. That is to say, the production of these seeming acts of choice (these limits of possible conduct) on the everyday level of the subject makes possible the consolidation of more hegemonic structures.

In this sense, rather than through techniques of overt coercion, in contemporary Western societies people are primarily disciplined and regulated through their active engagement with recommended practices and techniques designed to normalize their behavior, selves and bodies. The idea of normality becomes a technique of power through which individuals are not only categorized and identified but categorize and identify themselves in ways that make them more governable (Tremain, 2008).

The seduction of normal: Re/drawing borders and boundaries

Under a biopolitical system overt forms of control do not entirely disappear, however, and individuals who ‘fail to comply’ with recommended practices are labeled as deviant and are subject to increased practice of surveillance, intervention and isolation (Petersen, 2003). Identity-based activism has historically allowed such individuals to find connection with similarly situated others; opened up the possibility for reclamation of deviant identifications, counter discourse and practices; and has provided a vehicle for political organizing that has resulted in tangible social change. These are undeniable benefits of this form of political organizing. Yet, as Kelly (2002) notes, identity-based movements for social change have also had important drawbacks. First, he states, identity is by its nature restrictive. That is, the very process of consolidating who ‘we’ are paradoxically becomes a simultaneous process of exclusion. Any attempt to define a space, group or movement as by and for a particular set of individuals immediately opens up a related set of issues around legitimacy – who has the right to be there and who has the right to speak? Second, although reclaiming marginalized identities has clear utility for community organizing, Kelly suggests that this process also risks reifying, and solidifying as natural, categories which are ultimately historical and social and that have been used in the service of injustice. Finally, the strategies of identity-based movements are often designed around making what Goffman (1986) termed a ‘spoiled identity’ more palatable to the mainstream world by attempting to redefine it under the banner of normal.

Speaking particularly about the limits of seeking mainstream acceptance and assimilation for disability movements, Kelly states,

Generally speaking, our response has been to minimize the effects of our impairments upon our lives, emphasize our similarities to the general population, and focus on removing societal barriers to the expression of our abilities. If these barriers are removed, many people believe[d], we would become normal. (2002: para. 13)

The problem with this strategy, he argues, is not only that it is unlikely to succeed but that it also leaves behind those most unable or unwilling to assimilate into mainstream culture. Warner (1999) locates this tendency toward what Goffman (1986) called ‘in group purification,’ (or the process by which individuals within a stigmatized group attempt to not only “normify” their own behavior but to bring the behavior of others within the group into line), in a politics of shame. Thus, shame, as a disciplinary technique, is expressly political in that transgressors become subject to increased intra-group and inter-group surveillance and intervention for their ‘failure’ to bring their bodies and behavior in line with such normative ideals (Petersen, 2003; Warner, 1999).

Disrupting normal: Beyond assimilationist fat politics

With specific regard to fat politics, fat activists might take heed of Kelly’s (2002) warning when we frame our responses to the often-held assertion that fatness is a cause of ill health. Amongst many fat activists there is a tendency to challenge fat-phobia by asserting that one’s own fatness is neither due to poor eating habits nor a lack of exercise and to then highlight the ways in which one engages in a ‘proper’ diet and physical activity (Daniels and Meleo-Erwin, forthcoming). Examples of this form of argument abound on the internet, however one prime example can be seen in Joy Nash’s ⁴ well-known 2007 YouTube video ‘Fat Rant,’ which as of June 2011 garnered well over 1,640,000 views. In the video, Nash portrays a number of characters that express anti-fat sentiments and then appears seemingly as her authentic self, speaking back to these characters and addressing the camera. Throughout the video, Nash confronts and disrupts commonly held stereotypes about fatness and fat people. However, at approximately one minute and twenty seconds in, she appears as what we recognize immediately to be a fat stereotype. She sits on a couch, wearing worn sweatpants and a disheveled wig, and alternately drinks soda from a two liter bottle and pushes fistfuls of a pastry into her mouth. A large bag of Doritos sits opened on a cluttered coffee table in front of her. We then hear Nash’s voiceover:

Now America’s in the midst of this ‘obesity epidemic;’ I'm sure you've heard of it. I'm not saying that’s not true. I’m not saying we should all be sitting around patting ourselves on the back, cramming ourselves full of junk food with our sweatpants stapled to the sofa. (Nash, 2007)

Following this statement, the ‘true’ Nash appears next to this character. This Nash is well coifed and wears form fitting jeans and a sweater. She says: ‘Obviously diet and exercise are vital. I am saying that if you do those things – eat right and exercise – and you still aren't thin, your life is not over’ [emphasis is Nash’s].

This argument – that one can be fit, healthy and still fat – seems, at first, to make perfect sense as strategy to combat fat phobia. However, there is an important difference between the Health At Every Size (HAES) model ⁵ of encouraging all individuals to adopt behaviors based on health and well-being rather than weight loss per se (see Bacon et al., 2005) and assertions like Nash’s. The rhetorical effect of Nash’s argument and others like it is to justify and naturalize certain forms of fatness by tying them to ‘proper’ behavior. Yet, in doing so, those whose fatness can be more directly attributed to ‘bad behaviors’ – namely a lack of physical activity and/or to particular eating habits – are inadvertently demonized. And arguably, these are perhaps the very people that fat activism should most benefit and represent. Given this, LeBesco (2004, 2010) warns against basing any argument for fat rights on the purity of our actions and the ‘innocence’ of our fat. Such appeals become dependent upon the pathologization of other fat people and effectively extend the reach of the very moralizing, healthist discourse that fat activism should challenge (LeBesco, 2010). ⁶

LeBesco (2010) encourages those engaged in fat politics to think critically about the increasing entanglement of health, morality and proper citizenship while being careful not to glibly dismiss desires for ‘good health’ and concerns over illness and disease. But how can we address concerns about the linkages between weight, health and behavior for ourselves and for others without creating a binary division between ‘good fatties’ and ‘bad fatties’? ⁷ In her work on disability, governmentality and subjectivity, Tremain (2006: 194) argues that basing social movements on identity opens them up to ‘criticisms from an ever-increasing number of constituencies that feel excluded from and refuse to identify with those demands for rights and recognition; in addition, minorities internal to the movement will predictably pose challenges to it’. She therefore suggests that such movements should focus less on making identity-based appeals and more on making appeals for what is desired.

Following Tremain (2006), I argue that rather than basing fat politics on the assertion of ‘proper’ health behavior, thereby defining fat activism as inclusive only of those who are most palatable to and reflective of the mainstream world, fat politics should take as a core mission the troubling of normative ideas and ideals of health themselves and argue for a more complex, multidimensional and nuanced framing. I suggest that a stronger, more purposeful alliance between fat and disability movements can shift the focus of fat politics more fully on to the ways in which concepts such as health, illness, normalcy, pathology and cure are ideological in nature (Garland-Thomson, 2006) and examine how they ‘function both as norms and as practices of regulation and control’ (Shildrick and Price, 1996). In doing so, fat activists could continue to suggest that fat bodies are a form of human variation; that dieting does not produce long-term weight loss, and that it may itself cause both physiological and psychological harm, while also agreeing that the complex and still contentious relationship between weight, health and impairment might mean that, as a population, fat people make greater demands on health care systems but that this fact should not serve as justification for the denial of care, services or rights to fat individuals.

Unsettling normal: Linking fat and disability politics

Disability and fat studies scholars are increasingly making linkages between fatness and disability (see Aphramor, 2009; Cooper, 1997; Garland-Thomson, 2006; Herndon, 2002). Herndon (2002), for example, suggests that there are important connections between the social construction and social reception of fat and disabled bodies. Garland-Thomson holds that feminist disability studies must consider ‘appearance impairments’ (2006: 1560), or those bodies that are not classically considered disabled. To this end, she states: ‘Perhaps the most common bodily form vehemently imagined as failed or incorrect is the fat body’ (2006: 1581). Fat studies scholars Aphramor (2010) and Cooper (1997) have specifically asked the question, ‘does fatness belong under the umbrella of disability?’

For my purposes here, I would like to focus on the argument made by disability scholars such as Hahn (1988), Herndon (2002) and McRuer (2006) that bodies of disabled people elicit great anxiety through the disruption of norms about how bodies are supposed to look and how they are supposed to function. I suggest that their arguments should be extended to fat bodies as well. I argue that both fatness and disability unsettle the belief in the fixity of the body and point to its fluidity (McRuer, 2006). Further, under a system of neoliberalism in which individuals are believed to have a personal and national responsibility for maintaining their own health, particularly acting preemptively to ward off that for which they might be at risk ⁸ (Rose, 2006), differently bodied individuals remind us that ultimately this is a losing battle. The anxiety produced by the constant resedimentation of bodily normativity requires non-normative bodies to shore up its categories (Garland-Thomson, 1997; McRuer, 2006).

Yet it is worth noting that the concept of ‘normal’ is also malleable and can change when conditions demand this (Tremain 2008). Thus it is possible that a fat politics that seeks mainstream acceptance as its goal can and will produce substantive material benefit for some people and that fat bodies may help to reduce stigma. Further, it is understandable that some strands of fat activism should want to pursue what can be seen as an assimilationist strategy of bringing fat bodies under the banner of normal. For ‘normal’ is a seductive, if not compulsory, category, particularly for those of us who find ourselves relegated to the repulsed and detestable state of pathology. As Parens (2006) has commented, the desire to be normal is the desire for recognition, community, respect and love. Given this, it is difficult if not troublesome to chastise those who seek assimilation either on the bodily level through normalizing surgeries and practices or on the collective level as the end point of fat politics.

Nevertheless, Kelly (2002) warns that political movements that make a goal of assimilation are not without cost, noting that normality demands ‘we hide our disreputable differences if we are to be granted even quasi admission into the majority culture.’ He continues by stating that, in being lured by the possibility of inclusion, we are ‘seduced into denying our own experience, thereby leaving behind [those] who least measure up, normally speaking.’ Warner (1999) argues that the effect of leaving behind those who are least able, or least willing, to seek normalization is a weakening of the movement itself; we are haunted by this ambivalence and these contradictions. Further, because the social meanings attached to fatness are necessarily entwined with systems of gender, race, class and disability (Garland-Thomson, 2006; Herndon, 2005), by distancing ourselves from those who least approximate normalcy we may reinscribe existing hierarchical relations of power. Finally, we may miss the opportunity to work with others from whom we have much to learn (Warner, 1999).

Queering normal: The strengths and limitations of a politics of the grotesque

Both Warner (1999) and Kelly (2002) suggest that the notion of ‘queer’ moves us outside the politics of shame and toward a praxis that neither denies the complicated messiness of the body nor redefines these characteristics as normal as a strategy of stigma-management. By resisting the naturalness of sexuality and gender, queer theory calls into question the legitimacy of all identity labels, exposing the identity’s historically contingent and socially constructed nature. Challenging the goal of including fatness within the category of normal, some fat activists are embracing this queer ethos in their work.

In 2006, I attended a workshop entitled Gruesome: Anti-Assimilationist Fat Aesthetics at NOLOSE, a US-based conference for fat queer and transgender individuals. The workshop was led by San Francisco Bay Area activists Amanda Piasecki and Max Airborne. Speaking about the intent behind and impact of the workshop, Piasecki (personal correspondence, 2008) stated,

In this workshop, participants talked about the value of inhabiting our fat bodies as freaks rather than as pretty-and-mild-as-possible apologists for our stigmatized flesh. We explored what it means to be aggressively-embodied fat people, and how to manage the fears and projections of society at large and their manifestations in popular culture, and what it means to represent disease and death to American culture … Participants explored our emotional responses to our failure to assimilate and relative outsider statuses, which resulted in amazing personal catharsis. Ultimately, the stark inability of fat queer bodies to fit into narrow American monocultural ideals is spawning a vibrant and vital new organism that is fed by the drive to transform our collective shame.

While the structural oppression related to occupying a non-normative body cannot be denied, a queer reading of ‘freakery’, ⁹ as suggested by Piasecki, might suggest that for differently bodied individuals such as those who are fat, performing ‘normal’—in general trying to assimilate—can also be exhausting. Thus a ‘queer’ fat activism offers us a way to crack open the concept of normal and trouble it in order to see what relations of power it acts in the service of. Using a Foucaultian lens, we might argue that performances of freakery, or ‘gruesome,’ provide alternate understandings of social reality and help to forge alternate communities and that this constitutes a micropolitics of resistance. Similarly, Pitts (1998), drawing upon Bahktin, suggests that the ‘grotesque’ body, the body that is not free of messiness or ambiguity, invites a space of liminality. This liminality, she argues, can act in the service of transgression and subversion for those who engage in norm-transgressing bodily practices. Further, such practices not only destabilize mainstream representations of the body but make whole the body and self, relieving a sense of bodily estrangement.

However, such praxis may be both limited and limiting as well (Pitts, 1998). Firstly, Pitts (1998: 81) notes, ‘in subversion, the normative categories cannot be permanently dispersed; their remains are necessary for the purposes of juxtaposition and inversion.’ Thus transgressive practices depend on a certain finitude. Second, the resistance offered by such transgression remains symbolic and does not necessarily translate to the objective, material level. Finally, she argues that even marginal and transgressive representations of the body can nevertheless be commodified and Othered. Similarly, Bordo (1992) states that performance theories make sense as long as we read subversion simply as ‘text.’ Yet when we try to ground this in actual social life, things get murkier. To this end, Richardson (1996: 8) argues that

to suggest that we can effect social change through (queer) performances, however transgressive, provocative or challenging, would seem to assume, amongst other things, that such performances will have a revolutionary effect on (straight) audiences, rather than being interpreted as imitating and reproducing heterosexuality.

In this sense, notions of political resistance based on transgression are shaped by both the actual context in which such transgressions take place and the possibility of different readers’ responses. Notably, in Piasecki and Airborne’s workshop, one participant argued that as a biracial, Afro-Caribbean, genderqueer fat person, it didn’t matter if she was heavily tattooed or wearing a Brooks Brothers’ suit – either way she would be read ‘gruesome’ given the confluence of her identity markers. As this participant makes clear, our ability to be read and experienced as transgressive is always circumscribed by circumstance and social location and the consequences for transgression may be more severe for some than for others, opening up some bodies to greater surveillance, isolation and intervention.

Writing from a feminist disability studies perspective, Garland-Thomson (2006: 261) also challenges the conceptualization of gruesome or grotesque as transgressive, noting that such work:

seldom acknowledges that these [grotesque] figures often refer to the actual bodies of people with disabilities. Erasing real disabled bodies from the history of these terms compromises the very critique they intend to launch and misses the opportunity to use disability as a feminist critical category.

Similarly, Siebers (2006) argues that apprehending bodily difference solely in terms of a performance or social constructionist framework is limited in that these approaches are unable to account for the embodied pain and difficult physical realities that many people with disabilities face. Despite these very real limitations of models of social change based on transgression and performativity, non-normative body practices can be transformative for many who engage in them (personal correspondence with Piasecki, 2008; Pitts, 1998). Used critically, they might be one strategy amongst many deployed in a critical fat politics of resistance.

‘Ordinary and familiar:’ A critical politics of resistance

In his keynote address for the 2002 Queer Disability Conference in San Francisco, ¹⁰ Eli Clare (para. 12) stated, ‘we’re good at saying the word pride, as if shame has nothing to do with it. And I’m glad we’ve become good at those things, but let us not stop talking about our bodies, about the messiness and contradictions.’ Making space for such complex narratives allows us to conceive of our bodies, our lives and of ourselves as ‘ordinary and familiar,’ and this is not only relieving, Clare argues, but pleasurable. Clare draws a sharp distinction between ‘ordinary and familiar’ and normal:

Don’t mistake me: I don’t mean we need to find normal and make it our own. Normal—that center against which every one of us is judged and compared: in truth I want us to smash it to smithereens. And in its place, celebrate our irrevocably different bodies, our queerness, our crip lives, telling stories and creating for ourselves an abiding sense of the ordinary and the familiar. (para. 23)

Here Clare seems to bring together both the subversive challenge of ‘queer’ and an acknowledgment of the complex, embodied, material reality of being differently bodied.

Following Clare, a politics of the ordinary and familiar not only opens up space for celebration and pleasure, but it makes room for pain, struggle and even shame. Making room for that which can be challenging to admit to fellow activists, let alone to outsiders, disrupts the silence and shame that undergird a politics based on normative assimilation. As well, a politics of the ordinary and familiar moves us outside of false, binary choices of reclamation and celebration or shame and normalization. And by doing so, room is made for contradictory and multiple stories which, in turn, allows for both a more complex ethos of embodiment and a more inclusive politics of resistance.

Of course, it is easier to gesture at what a politics based on the ordinary and familiar would look like than demonstrate instances of it in action. However, the New York City based political discussion group The Queer Commons (2011) seems to have embraced an ethos of the ordinary and familiar in their April 2011 event, ‘The Right to Be Ill: Queer Hedonism and Policing Health.’ ¹¹ In their organizing materials for the event that were circulated on numerous New York City queer activist listservs and posted on Facebook, ¹² The Queer Commons organizers asked:

What are the ways our body and desires are being regulated by the health imperative? Is the need to always be striving for health masking a new morality? Why is my health a cause of concern for anyone other than me? Who is the ‘public’ in public health …? What are people doing for you – or to you – when they say they are ‘concerned about your health?’ When we make a health decision, are we thinking about how our bodies feel or how we should act in others’ eyes? Can the bodies of ‘the unhealthy’ – the fat, disabled, HIV+, ill, crazy, elderly – ever be fixed? Or what are the radical possibilities of accepting a (your!) body’s brokenness? What if desire and pleasure were a part of our understanding of what allows us to feel healthy? What if we understood health as something that is only knowable to the individual and is not legible on the body?

The event, attended by approximately 35 individuals, covered a broad range of topics, including health, illness, morality, disability, fatness and sexuality, and made linkages between them. For my purposes here, I take note of the fact that some attendees discussed the difficulties of maintaining a fat positive attitude in the face of illness and impairment. Others acknowledged the challenges of avoiding the ‘good fattie/bad fattie’ trap within fat politics. In response, a thin, disability rights activist in attendance questioned the idea that a fat body with an impairment was somehow not worth living and was somehow inferior to a fat and healthy body.

In this discussion and others that evening, The Queer Commons organizers invited attendees to tell their stories of embodiment, welcoming in contradiction, shame, celebration, reclamation and ambivalence. As well, they invited attendees to collectively trouble and disrupt categories of autonomy, control, self-determination and proper citizenship that bodies such as those of ‘the fat, disabled, HIV+, ill, crazy, elderly’ pose. It is my hope that events such as ‘The Right to Be Ill: Queer Hedonism and Policing Health,’ have the potential to help shift the focus of fat politics beyond that which, paraphrasing Kelly (2002) and Warner (1999), requires us to minimize the full range of our embodied experiences, emphasize our similarities to a normative mode of embodiment and selfhood, and pressures us to bring the behavior of others within the group into line as a means by which to gain mainstream inclusion.

There is no getting outside of the entanglement of relations of power and subjectification. Given this, it is necessary for those engaged in fat politics to look critically at the practices that we take up as a challenge to fat-phobia. These very practices become, in their own way, constitutive elements not only of the self but of our movement. Following Clare (2002) and The Queer Commons, I suggest that a resistance to and disruption of the normal – ‘that center against which every one of us is judged and compared’ (Clare 2002: para. 23) – makes space for a more fully embodied means of opposition, a more critical form of identification and a more inclusive mode of organizing.