Celebrating Fat Attitudes
By Lori Don Levan
Being fat in the United States carries with it a stigma that is as much a part of the American fabric as football. Women, especially, are subject to the pressure to be and stay thin in order to look young. Fat is no longer used as a mere descriptive term but rather the word is imbued with negative moral judgment. Consequently, people who cannot or will not conform to a narrow view of normal are marginalized. Fat jokes, character judgments, negative descriptions, improper medical treatment and well meaning advice can cause deeply rooted psychological pain. Fatness, once considered a sign of affluence in the 19th century, has become the pariah of the 21st century. Supported by representations of the ‘ideal’ body in popular culture, large women living in this thin-worshipping society have been uniquely targeted for ridicule where fear of fat has become a panoptic phenomenon. As a result, the fat female body has been marginalized to the point of invisibility.
"Fat Attitudes: A Celebration of Large Women" brings together fourteen contemporary artists to celebrate the beauty of the fat female body. By so doing, it makes the invisible visible in a positive light and stands as a site of resistance to negative stereotypes of female fatness. The fat female body is re-constructed and re-presented allowing for alternative possibilities of seeing and understanding the female form. As a result, the marginalized body is recontextualized into a new vehicle for understanding beauty in all of its complexity. Laurie Toby Edison’s black and white photographs depict large women in a variety of sizes in familiar settings such as their homes, the beach or the gym. Lynn Bianchi’s black and white photographs stand in high contrast to Edison’s work since they depict an idealized theatrical setting in which the "Spaghetti Eaters" exist. Sylvia Netzer’s emotionally charged ceramic sculptures were created as a way to deal with personal issues concerning her body and relationships with other people. Laura Aguilar’s haunting self portraits show a woman in harmony with nature, while my own self-portraits reference the classical in art history. Neil Osbourn, Tina Arroyo and Patricia Schwarz celebrate the beauty of the female form in their graceful color images. Frank Cordelle celebrates the female body through his collaborative images of women from ages 0-100 years old as part of the Century Project. Meredith Miller’s touching and sensitive portraits of women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome exist to celebrate the feminine. Andi Bray, Cristin Berkey, Tanya Scott and Aimee Cegelka created work especially for this exhibit. Their participation in a research project concerning the development of sites of resistance to fat phobia resulted in a variety of images that reflect their personal/lived experiences as fat women.
The artists included in "Fat Attitudes: A Celebration of Large Women" were chosen because of the way in which they deal with female fatness and the lived experiences of large women. All of the work was created out of a need to represent female fatness in its corporeal sense. The lived experiences of the artists and their subjects dictated the way in which the images were constructed – either through collaboration, self-reflection, a need for activism or a combination of all three. The resulting images emerge through a sense of agency over the work where the subject and object of the gaze are claimed by the act of creation and presentation in a public forum. This agency is what fuels resistance to the negative stereotypes of fatness that exist in our society and allows us to create physical sites of resistance as an alternative view in visual culture.
My own journey into creating sites of resistance began with the visual image and artistic practice. Over a five-year period I produced photographic self-portraits exclusively. I chose the self-portrait because I wanted my work to reflect the authenticity of my own experience. By using the nude genre, I made the body itself the locus of contention concerning attitudes towards beauty and fatness established in American culture. While my early work was very personal, issues concerning beauty, internalized oppression and marginalization as they related to my fat body became more and more connected to the experience of others as I shared my work. Eventually, I was able to reconceptualize negative stereotypes in order to show that beauty can exist in the margins. This breakthrough was the impetus for my current research concerning issues related to being fat in America. In the process, I discovered many contemporary artists who are doing similar work. There is a community of people eager to speak about their lives in order to affect change. "Fat Attitudes: A Celebration of Large Women" was created to facilitate that process.
The culminating event to this exhibit, "Fat Attitudes: An Exploration of an American Subculture and Representation of the Female Body" was part of the Art and Art Education program’s continuing series "Conversations Across Cultures". Held at Teachers College Columbia University, the event examined cultural representations of fatness and to what extent those images contribute to stereotyping of women’s bodies. Presentations examined the power structures that exist in the regulation of female bodies through attention to fatness, moral attitudes towards fatness, and the suppression of female autonomy. Social limitations that are imposed on fat women as they relate to beauty ideals in American visual culture are often built on the fantasy of a slim ideal where highly sexualized criteria are used to construct images that represent a youthful female body. Opposition to these stereotypes was considered and sites of resistance identified in order to help to empower women and girls to claim authority over their own bodies. This first of its kind conference included presentations, panel discussions and performances that featured a range of cultural commentators, artists, critical theorists, and educators.
My own research on "fat beauty" and American visual culture prompted the organization of the exhibit and conference, and I spoke about the importance of artistic practice to the process of resistance and creating sites of resistance. Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin who created the book Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, were included as keynote speakers. They spoke about the book, fat activism and the strong sense of community that grew out of the project. Marilyn Wann of Fat! So?, also a keynote speaker, encouraged conference participants to embrace the fun of resistance. Kathleen LeBesco, author of Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, examined how fatness is constructed in popular culture, and suggested ways in which we can rethink categories of otherness. A movement workshop was conducted by Rochelle Rice and Sandy Schaffer of In Fitness and In Health and NYC-NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance). Performance artist Seleka Brooks and vocalist Andi Bray treated the conference participants to their special brand of entertainment. All of these women, along with artists featured in the exhibit and others came together to challenge the negative stereotypes that are all too prevalent in today’s world. Their courage to speak out against fat phobia made the exhibit "Fat Attitudes: A Celebration of Large Women" and the conference "Fat Attitudes: an Exploration of an American Subculture and Representation of the Female Body" a site of resistance and a great success. It is my hope that the dialogue will continue in image and words.
"Fat Attitudes: A Celebration of Large Women", Curated by Lori Don Levan, Macy Gallery, Teachers College Columbia University, February 16-27, 2004.
