Sociological Images linked to  art historian John Berger in the BBC documentary Ways of Seeing.

…perspective on the objectification of women in European art and advertising, starting with paintings of nude women.  “To be naked,” he argues, “is to be oneself.  To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude… they are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”

I didn’t note until after I played it that it was from 1972, so his oracular voice and uncomplicated perspective grated a bit. I kept wanting to make the conversation more nuanced and complex. And that oracular male voice giving us truth undercuts his point a bit. But in the context of 1972, it’s groundbreaking and brilliant, and unfortunately still true enough. These images occur over and over in contemporary advertising and art and we are mostly oblivious to their long history.

Obviously, I’ve thought a lot about images of the nude in art. Before I began Women En Large I spent a lot of time looking at historical nudes.  I wanted to be clear enough, so that I was aware of the classic cliches of specific poses and postures. One of the most anatomically striking is “the nude with the broken back.”

I did the same for the male nude when I did Familiar Men.  Although, of course (unsurprisingly) there were far, far fewer images to look at.

I was always looking for pictures that were true portraits rather then objectified pictures of unreal women. Berger says that historically there are only 20 or 30 of them.  If so, I’m surprised that I had seem most of them when I was doing my research. My favorite in the video is Titian’s portrait of his young wife hugging her breasts.

For me the best thing about it is not the commentary, but the changing vision of the female nude through time. The European art that is shown from Medieval times to Impressionism really illustrates differences in beauty standards. And the images he chose illustrate it superbly.

These are very well worth watching.  As is the third part, a discussion by a panel of women on his talk. Be patient with the introduction in the first one. The painting discussion and images happen fairly quickly

”

In her recent post on Clara Park, Laurie said, “We no longer have the 1950’s Freudian lens. Instead we have the lenses of our times that work to support the structures that run our world, and still serve to obscure the realities and complexities of human lives.” That comment got us to thinking and talking about what some of the lenses of our time might be.

What do we mean by a “lens of the times”? To pick just one example from another time, in the Victorian era, there was a law putting prostitutes with venereal disease in hospital jails, on the theory that this would prevent the spread of syphilis. This is a reflection of one major Victorian lens, that immorality was the root cause of social problems. Of course, this would only work if only prostitutes spread syphilis, while in fact infected people were passing on the infection all the time through many channels of which prostitution was only one. So there were three problems: first, syphilis didn’t stop spreading. Second, the social structure was supported: everyone else involved was effectively absolved of immorality, because the lens was pointed at the prostitutes. Third, the prostitutes who were not in jail were less able to prevent themselves from becoming infected, because they were seen as criminals: vectors, not victims.

In our time, one of the lenses that performs this function is the pathologization (sometimes medical, sometimes not) of various behaviors with social causes. There are dozens of examples: from teenagers acting out in classrooms through alcoholics and drug users to people with eating disorders may be punished, and/or assigned DSM-IV diagnoses and recommended medical and/or psychiatric treatments, including (of course) psychiatric drug prescriptions. People are urged to join 12-step groups and read self-help books. Just as the experience of Freudian psychoanalysis sometimes made a difference in the first half of the 20th century, all of these things can help now; sometimes, they transform an individual person’s life in very important ways.

Here are some of the social effects of this lens:

Pathologizing a problem doesn’t solve it, or even minimize the number of people who have it. It might increase the number of people who recover, but it doesn’t change the size of the incoming stream of people developing the problem. Nor does it change the fact that some people’s lives are irreparably damaged by the social response (such as people who are put in jail or juvie).

Placing the responsibility for the problem on individuals makes it easy not to look at social factors. We don’t for example, examine alcohol ads, billboards, and alcohol use portrayal in movies and on TV in any serious way, because we have defined alcoholism as a problem of individuals. It doesn’t seem likely that a culture who saw alcohol as a societal problem would sell t-shirts that say “I don’t have a drinking problem. I drink, I fall down. No problem.” More importantly, it allows us not to look at the fact that alcoholics get more or less of a free pass to continue living in the culture, while drug users (especially if they are people of color and/or poor) are imprisoned for a comparable addiction. (We treat prostitution similarly: being a prostitute is penalized far more than paying a prostitute, as if the two were not intertwined.)

Putting the responsibility on individuals works two ways: it can make individuals feel guilty/shameful about their problems, and seek (or not seek) individual help rather than organizing and taking social agency and it can let people place the “blame” for problems on other individuals, thus perpetuating oppression and not looking at their part in the system. In other words, an anorexic (after some treatment) might come to think her problems were entirely her fault and something she should be able to overcome with willpower, while her family or her community might also think the same thing. So, she blames herself and her culture blames her. No one then has to look at the pressures on women to lose weight, be thin, be perfect, and not have bodily needs.

Social change cannot happen unless many people can see the nature of a problem. This lens (like so many other historical lenses) keeps us from looking at what is profoundly wrong. People don’t and won’t work together to change a system if they can’t see the harm it is doing them: anything that isolates us from each other and makes our problems completely our own impedes social change. And, by definition, all systems resist social change, so they develop obstacles.

The inimitable Prof. Susurro was writing about this issue last week, while we were separately starting to talk about it.

[At an overseas (from the U.S.) mental health seminar], a famous therapist presented an in depth study on “the importance of diversity” in health practices at the seminar/conference. Despite his obvious commitment to trying to welcome diverse clients into mainstream services, it became obvious that he had started from the all-too-familiar supposition that emotional reactions to oppression were pathological. In other words, if you are angry because you live in gentrification grand central, or you are acting out in class because you are experiencing all kinds of bullying around your first attempts at gender transgression, it is because you have “maladaptive coping skills” (i.e. your anger is “inappropriate”). And if you get mad at your therapist, stop treatment, or otherwise try to seek real help by indicating the problem to someone else … oh yes, my friend, you are not only exercising maladaptive coping skills, including triangulation (when you try to get a third party to uphold your “crazy, crazy, fantasy land”) but you are CRAZY with a capital CRAZ and YYYYYY.

So she and her friends came up with a diagnosis that points out the failures of the current lens: “Mel Gibson Spectrum Disorder.”

The Disorder – Colonial Fantasy Syndrome

A disorder in which a member of the dominant culture believes that their experience is normative and any other experience is therefore deviant or abnormal despite evidence to the contrary.

Indicators

Sufferers must meet 5 or more of the following criteria

1. delusions of grandeur
2. preference for a world in which the fantasy of their dominance supersedes the realities of diversity in the real world
3. an overwhelming sense of persecution or victimization
4. frequent projection (ie accusing others of the acts in which the client is actually engaging)
5. manipulation of interpersonal relationships for one’s own gain while claiming otherwise
6. egocentrism often masked as selflessness or self-interested demonstrations of selflessness
7. characterized by sublimation in which one’s sense of superiority is masked by seemingly altruistic acts toward the targeted group(s)
8. subset of sublimation defined by hypocrisy in which the sense of superiority is masked by calling out others for same or similar behavior, especially if members of targeted group(s)
9. desire to belong to a group, see one’s self as, or otherwise engage in elitist or exclusionary practices
10. engages in emotionally or physically threatening behavior with those who challenge the client’s world view
11. tendency to blame addiction for incongruencies in one’s worldview or self-image (may or may not be accompanied by actual drug & alcohol dependence or abuse)
12. willful disregard for the truth when confronted

Okay, it’s still depends on a lens. But it’s one we’d like a lot better.

Although stereotypes of Native Americans are easy to find, mainstream culture does not have a lot of images of everyday Native American people engaged in familiar pursuits. One thing we virtually never see is any connection between Native Americans and technology, which is why I am so pleased by this video, in which daybreakwarrior, a young Navajo man, provides “a lesson in descriptive Navajo” by showing off his iPod:

(If you can’t watch or listen to the video: This video shows a young man describing his iPod in the Navajo language in very significant detail. He covers not only what it is and what it does, but also its size, weight, dimensions, materials, and how the headphone jack and the download port work. The video has both transliteration of the Navajo sounds and translation into English.)

A few specifics to note:

1) He relies on English for only a very few words: “iPod” and “classic,” numbers, and “GB.” The word for “television” appears to be “holo.” In his notes on YouTube, he says: “In regards to concepts of “downloading,” there are no official ways to describe these things in Navajo. People in different areas use different words.”
2) The way he describes the device tells us a lot about Navajo culture–it is very hard to imagine someone of European descent thinking about some of the descriptors he uses (“it has rounded corners”), while still being completely informative and intelligible to a non-Navajo speaker.
3) His clothing and surroundings also silently combat stereotypes of Native Americans.

I find that I enjoyed this video even more the second and third times. It makes me wish I spoke Navajo, or at least that I had better access to descriptive concepts of that depth and range.

(I found this at Sociological Images, in a longer post by Adrienne Keene about stereotyping Native Americans and technological concepts, which is also well worth reading.)

How a story is told can be as important (or more) than the story itself. I found this when I was looking for something else, so I came to it with no specific expectations, as I might have if someone whose web page I was reading had linked to it.

Here’s the headline:

FACTORY DEFIES SWEATSHOP LABEL, BUT CAN IT THRIVE?

And the opening:

Sitting in her tiny living room here, Santa Castillo beams about the new house that she and her husband are building directly behind the wooden shack where they now live.

The new home will be four times bigger, with two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom; the couple and their three children now share a windowless bedroom and rely on an outhouse two doors away.

You have to get four paragraphs in to find out what the article is about.

Industry experts say [the Alta Gracia t-shirt factory] is a pioneer in the developing world because it pays a “living wage” — in this case, three times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers — and allows workers to join a union without a fight.

The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company.

… the factory is a risky proposition, even though it already has orders to make T-shirts and sweatshirts for bookstores at 400 American universities.

The headline just begs to be analyzed: the phrase “sweatshop label” implies that somehow the factory isn’t defying (or even just opposing) the truth of sweatshops, but just the label. And then, “can it survive?” which is the constant running thread of the article. Even though “myriad university officials and students” are calling for just this kind of thing, and they already have orders from 400 colleges, skepticism is the order of the day.

So the headline gives us a hint of hypocrisy, followed by overt undermining of the enterprise’s chances. The opening tells us that as readers we’re supposed to have our “do-gooder” mode turned on, instead of reading to evaluate the business theory. (Note that the article is in “Global Business,” which tells us something about who’s reading it.)

If we keep reading, we find out that the owner, Joe Bozich, is a successful businessman (but the article spends more time on a health scare that apparently encouraged Bozich to reexamine his values than on the business aspects). Bozich’s company, Knights Apparel, “has made apparel deals with scores of universities, enabling Knights to surpass Nike as the No. 1 college supplier.” The company’s commitment to workers’ rights is not new.

The factory’s cost will be $4.80 a T-shirt, 80 cents or 20 percent more than if it paid minimum wage. Knights will absorb a lower-than-usual profit margin, he said, without asking retailers to pay more at wholesale.

“Obviously we’ll have a higher cost,” Mr. Bozich said. “But we’re pricing the product such that we’re not asking the retailer or the consumer to sacrifice in order to support it.”

So let’s analyze some more. Twenty percent is a huge difference in cost, but to a company selling in America, eighty cents is not a huge difference. If they passed the eighty cents on to the retailer, and the retailer passed the eighty cents on t the consumer, your t-shirt would cost you eighty cents more. I haven’t looked at t-shirts in a college bookstore for a long time, but I bet they cost about $15-20, and I bet most Americans who buy them wouldn’t really make their buying decision on the difference between $15 and $16, though $20 to $21 might be an emotional jump. However, as the second sentence of the quote above shows, you and I won’t have to make that decision. Knights is making it for us, by eating the difference.

Apparently, the “will it survive?” question is about competition: if retailers can use the same markup that they do for Nike and Adidas shirts, then the three brands will cost the same amount. So Knights faces “branding problems,” even though the entire last third of the article talks about the amount of support and excitement being generated already.

It helps to have many universities backing the project. Duke alone placed a $250,000 order and will run full-page ads in the campus newspaper, put postcards in student mailboxes and hang promotional signs on light poles. Barnes & Noble plans to have Alta Gracia’s T’s and sweats at bookstores on 180 campuses by September and at 350 this winter, while Follett, the other giant college bookstore operator, plans to sell the T’s on 85 campuses this fall.

When I was in grade school, they taught us to begin journalistic articles with who, what, why, where, and how. Here’s another framing based on that principle.

“LIVING WAGE FACTORY MAKES STRONG DEBUT IN DOMINICAN REPUBLIC”

“Joe Bozich, an American entrepreneur with a successful business background, believes that his new living wage factory in Villa Altagracia, Dominican Republic, is a good proposition for everyone involved. The factory will make college-branded t-shirts and similar gear, and will compete with Nike and Adidas for market share. Bozich’s decision to pay his workers a “living wage” instead of the minimum wage ($147/month) most Dominican Republic apparel workers get, and to absorb the price differential so that American retailers and consumers pay the same amount, is based on a mixture of his values and his entrepreneurial instincts. ‘Workers paid a fair wage, and treated like human beings, are more likely to do good work, to stay with us for a long time, and to be healthy and able to come to work every day,’ Mr. Bozich said. ‘We’d rather encourage them to unionize than spend time and money fighting an expensive battle against the people who are working for us.’ Over 250 universities have already placed orders for the t-shirts, and such varying enterprises as Barnes & Noble Bookstores and the Workers Rights Consortium are helping to publicize and promote the new gear.”

(I made up the “quotation” from Bozich, in part because I didn’t see any commercial justification for Bozich’s choices anywhere in the article.)

This article could, perhaps, then go on to discuss the improvements in Santa Castillo’s life, Joe Bozich’s fear of a brain tumor and subsequent multiple sclerosis diagnosis, and even mention some critics’ concern that Knights Apparel would face difficult competition. But it wouldn’t be a “look at the bleeding heart liberal taking a risk with no business value, not likely to succeed if it weren’t for politicized college students, many of whom may be hypocrites when it comes to the cash register.”

I’d like to see Joe Bozich succeed. I’d like to see Santa Castillo in a stable job that supports her family. And I’d like to see Steven Greenhouse (who wrote this article) discuss the choices he made in writing it.

Even more, I’d like to see workers organizing in the Dominican Republic (and elsewhere) from the ground up, forcing Nike and Adidas and other competitors to follow Knights path, or do better.

Clara Park died this week at 86.  She wrote The Siege, in 1967. The book was about her eight-year-old daughter Jessica, who had been diagnosed with autism.

For many years autism had been blamed on “refrigerator mothers,” cold uncaring women whose children became autistic in response to them. You can imagine the havoc this wrought for the mothers and the families of autistic kids. It was part of the simplistic Freudian lens from the 50’s that made mothers responsible for almost anything that went wrong in the family. (One of the Freudians’ favorite terms for describing women in many contexts was frigid.) This belief system supported the rigid 1950’s ideology of the family

I was raised to see the world through this simplistic Freudian lens.  By the time I read The Siege in 1967, I had recovered from most of it. Because at that point, I didn’t know very much about autism, the “refrigerator mother” explanation had unthinkingly stayed with me. I don’t remember much about the book except that it was profoundly revelatory.

Quotes are from the New York Times.

Mrs. Park, a college English teacher, wanted to tell her daughter’s story, and the book she wrote, The Siege published in 1967, did that and more

“My mother knew early on that something wasn’t right,” Paul Park said. “Jessy didn’t show classic signs of retardation: she was coordinated, there were certain tasks she performed efficiently. She spoke very hesitantly by the time she was 8.”

Still, in measured, often poetic assessments, Mrs. Park’s books describe how Jessy recoiled when touched, screamed in desolation if a washcloth was missing from the bathroom and performed abstruse mathematical calculations. Mrs. Park told of how difficult it was to find professional care and of the turmoil the entire family faced.

… In the first edition of The Siege, Jessy was called Elly because Mrs. Park, hoping that her daughter would someday be able to read, did not want her to be embarrassed. That concern dissolved, and Elly became Jessy in later editions, as well as in a sequel, Exiting Nirvana (2001), which recounted the agonizing but steady progress of the girl and her family.

The second edition of The Siege says, “I write now what 15 years past I would still not have thought possible to write: that if today I were given the choice to accept the experience, with everything that it entails, or to refuse the bitter largesse, I would have to stretch out my hands — because out of it has come, for all of us, an unimagined life.”

…Jessica Park, now 51, can read, is an accomplished artist and has worked in the mailroom at Williams College, in Williamstown, for 30 years. Her mother was a lecturer in English studies at Williams from 1975 until 1994.

…Bridget A. Taylor, director of the Alpine Learning Group, a school for autistic children, said…“The book really set the stage for families to search for answers; to no longer accept ‘no’ from the establishment, to have higher expectations for their children,” she said. “In many ways it decreased the isolation that families felt, and for many young professionals in the field, the book was an invaluable reading assignment to learn what the experience is like.”

Clara Park’s writing is a powerful reminder of how often the established explanations for “different” children and adults are dangerously wrong. We no longer have the 1950’s Freudian lens. Instead we have the lenses of our times that work to support the structures that run our world, and still serve to obscure the realities and complexities of human lives.

Just for fun, we thought we’d share this beautiful food art, done in advertising photography style. (Several years ago, we found fine art food sculptures, which are very different.)

Notice how the blueberries were carefully auditioned for their roles in the handbag, each one perfect and perfectly matched for size and color.

While many in this series are beautiful, these fish are the most inspired. The way the color of the fish exquisitely match the color of the clasp is a lovely touch.

Fulvio Bonavia, the photographer, is an award-winning Italian photographer who apparently does a mix of commercial and art photography. These photographs are from his book, A Matter of Taste. He built all of these food artifacts by hand; no Photoshop was harmed in the creation of these accessories.

Thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty for the pointer.

In honor of Body Impolitic’s regular blogger Lynne Murray’s new book, Bride of the Living Dead from Pearlsong Press, of course our blog was a natural stop on her virtual book tour. Since we’d already announced the book’s publication, I thought it would be nice to have an author interview.

Debbie: In her cover blurb, Laurie [Toby Edison] calls the book “Jane Austen meets the Marx Brothers.” Is that the tone you were aiming for? Did you have a catch phrase of your own for what you wanted the book to be?

Lynne:: Laurie’s comment was more than I could have hoped for. I have studied various writers’ work, particularly when I was trying to write action scenes in mysteries, which don’t come naturally to me, but when I read Austen, I just feel like I’m living in her world, eavesdropping on her pointed remarks. The Marx Brothers are also total fun for me, so to be compared to both in one sentence is tremendous. If I had a catch phrase it would have probably been less inspired, so I’m going with Laurie’s!

Debbie: Your heroine is “midsized,” i.e., she’s fat by contemporary obsessive standards but she probably wouldn’t have been considered fat in a different time and place. Did you choose that size for her consciously, or was that just “how she is” for you? If you did choose it consciously, what went into your choices?

Lynne:: When the hero or heroine of a book is any size over “slim” in our season of insanity where vaguely average characters bemoan how fat they are, a writer is dealing with very loaded words to describe a character’s size. When I first consciously chose a fat heroine, Josephine Fuller, I introduced her as “over 200 pounds” because I was reacting to a book where a fat joke was made about an elevator being broken if a woman over 200 pounds got into it. That served Josephine Fuller well.

However, with this book, I specifically did not want to use a dress size or a given weight. When you drop numbers into a fictional text, you stir up reactions like: “Oh, she’s way too fat, totally fatter than me, I can’t relate to her at all.” Or for the more radical reader: “She’s not fat enough for me to identify with.”

Instead, I made the point that Daria could seldom find clothing in her size in the stores and when she needed something beyond jeans and a T-shirt her mother took her to a seamstress to have clothing made for her that fit. I wanted to make Daria’s experience of being too big to fit the most important factor.

Debbie: I’m very interested in Oscar [Daria's boyfriend/fiance], who is human enough to be grumpy and nervous, and is still a remarkably good model for how a heterosexual man can treat a woman he’s dating (and later engaged to) respectfully, while still holding his own ground. Is that aspect of his behavior based on any models you know of in fiction (or film or other story format) or did you construct him from scratch? What’s your favorite thing about him?

Lynne:: It’s hard to pick one thing about Oscar, because he has a lot of the elements that I most admire, and I’ve been fortunate enough to know several men (and to be married to one) with such qualities. To me, Oscar is the quintessential good guy–smart but non-manipulative, funny, and happy to laugh at life’s absurdities. Often when a man says he wants a woman with a sense of humor he means he wants someone who will laugh at his jokes. Daria would probably scare off such a guy. But Oscar has the rare and wonderful gift of being confident enough in his own self-worth to enjoy it when Daria gives as good as she gets. Oscar has integrity, he takes responsibility, and he has friends who value him because he values and supports his friends.

Debbie:: And while we’re at it, what’s your favorite thing about Daria?

Lynne: Daria is surprisingly good at making the best of a bad situation, being able to laugh at adversity helps.

Debbie: You don’t mention this in your answer, but that sounds like something that Daria and Oscar have in common. Having that attitude to share it will probably serve them well after the book ends.

Do you have a sense of humor like Daria’s, or are you able to step outside yourself enough to construct a sense of humor really different from your own in a fictional character?

Lynne:: That’s a question I’ve never considered, but I suspect that I’m not so flexible. My best guess is that Daria’s sense of humor is similar to my own. From time to time I do try to sharpen up my wits by reading about how professional humor writers hone their writing. I keep having the yearning to write a straight-up farce, but when I attempt it, I start building layers into the characters, and the structure of a farce is notable for sacrificing depth for a kind of Rube Goldberg mechanical action. Much as I love to see a well-done farce, I’m not sure I could write one. But the question does make me want to ask another question back atcha—how can someone step outside themselves to create a different sense of humor? Examples, please!

Debbie:: I’ve seen books where the characters have very different senses of humor, different enough that it doesn’t seem likely to me that the writer has all of them. Terry Pratchett comes to mind here as a funny writer whose characters often have widely varying senses of humor. I don’t write fiction, but I expect that one way to step outside of your own sense of humor is by observation; seeing what kinds of things are funny to various people, and what kinds of ways different people express their senses of humor, and bringing those differences onto the page.

Did you consider putting in a supernatural/horror element to go with the title? If so, why, and if not, why not?

Lynne: The title was the very last part of the puzzle piece to fall into place long after the book was complete. For years the book was called A Guide for the Dysfunctional Bride, but Daria’s T-shirt collection and love of old monster movies became more and more important to the story as I went through many revisions of the manuscript.

I brainstormed with publisher, Peggy Elam, about horror movie titles at least one candidate became a chapter heading–”Attack of the 50-Foot Wedding Planner.” Bride of the Living Dead was my favorite, but I went back and forth about it for some time because I didn’t want to raise false expectations among fans of the undead. In fact, one zombie-loving blogger, mystery author Dani Fredsti, read the book with that expectation. She was kind enough to say that she came for the zombies and stayed for the humor. But her reaction and comments from zombie fans on her blog made me consider what the book would have been if I’d taken the story into the horror realm—zombie wedding caterers, vampire tuxedo rental companies, werewolf indie film directors. It would have been a different book for sure!

Debbie:: Maybe that’s next?

What went into the way you handle Sky’s anorexia? Have you known anorexic people? (Spoiler question: do you think Daria’s wedding is part of what enables Sky to seek treatment? And did you purposely not tell us how successful the treatment is, or is that just where the book ended?)

Lynne:: Honestly, to the best of my knowledge, I have never been close to anyone suffering from anorexia. However, I have been exposed to other conditions where a loved one is either secretly or defiantly pursuing a self-destructive course, and I think the frustration that friends and family members feel must be similar. I’m also proud of my characters in Bride of the Living Dead in that they came together as a family to optimize a situation where treatment was not a simple or affordable option. As far as Sky’s future, I wanted to create a situation that reflects real life in so many chronic, physical and mental conditions, where treatment is one day at a time and success is not so much a destination as a way of building better ways of coping and trusted resources to call on when the disorder arises again.

Debbie:: Thanks for writing the book! I really enjoyed it, and I’m sure lots of Body Impolitic readers will follow suit.

I’ve recently become aware of Danza Voluminosa, a Cuban government-sponsored fat dance company. The performance clips I’ve seen are really impressive.

Formed a decade ago by Juan Miguel Mas, this company of obese dancers has become a cultural phenomenon in Cuba, breaking stereotypes here of dance, redefining the aesthetics of beauty and, along the way, raising the self-esteem of heavyset people.

All the quotes are from a Havana Journal article by James C. McKinley Jr. in the NY Times. His reactions clearly surprised him.

But something strange happens when the troupe takes the stage. Classical and modern dance often give the impression of human beings flying, freed of the earth. The usual female dancers are like nymphs, the men like Greek statues. They soar, spin, leap and reach for the sky. Because of the size of the dancers in Mr. Mas’s troupe, however, the work of Danza Voluminosa conveys something more earthy and human. Fat people move differently, he said, and the choreography must change. “We are more mountainous,” he said with a smile.

The dancers’ movements are often slower than those of their slender colleagues. These dancers favor limbs swinging in pendulous arcs and wavelike motions that seem to ripple through their bodies. They seem to grip the floor rather than abandon it, keeping a low center of gravity, often crouching or dancing while kneeling or lying on the ground.

And when their dance becomes frenetic, the sheer weight of the dancers thudding across the stage conveys an excitement akin to a stampede, something out of control and wild, yet made of human flesh and blood. It can be a riveting sight.

This interview of Mas gives a good sense of the company and has a lot of dance in it.

Not surprisingly, being part of this has been transformative for the dancers

“I always liked to dance,” the dancer, Mailín Daza, said later. “I wanted to dance in the classical ballet, but my mother told me fat girls could not dance. I always dreamed of being a ballerina. With this group, I feel I am a ballerina.”

But it is also true that they do what they call “anti-obesity” work.

Mr. Mas said it would be a mistake to think that his work was intended to glorify or sanctify obesity, or even to deliver a moralistic message that one should not discriminate against the overweight. Rather, he said, the troupe’s art tries to face the reality of obesity while giving larger people a chance to express themselves through dance, a chance they are denied from childhood in most dance classes.

I would probably have a lot more issues if there was lots of good fat dance in the world, but there isn’t. And when you watch these beautiful bodies perform there’s no question what the true message is.

And on the topic of Fat Dance, Big Moves, a marvelous fat positive dance company, is performing in the Bay area this weekend.

This summer, Big Moves brings you two well-rounded nights of song, dance, drag and delicious surprises. Join the Phat Fly Girls – West Coast and guests, including the triumphant return of our very own Phat Fly Boy, Kirk, as emcee. We’re gonna fill the stage with big voices, big bodies and big attitude sure to leave you begging for more. Guest artists Raks Africa, Vicodonia, Kitty Von Quimm, Rubenesque Burlesque, Bollywood by Mona Sampath Khan Dance Company students and a special little something from Marilyn Wann.

Check it out.

GO BIG OR GO HOME
(Our Biggest and Best Show Yet!)
Friday and Saturday, July 9th and 10th
8pm (doors open at 7:30)
Chabot College Little Theater
25555 Hesperian Blvd., Hayward, CA
Tickets: $15 advance, $20 at the door
Purchase tickets at Brown Paper Tickets or from your friendly neighborhood Fly Girl.

Marlene Says:

When I was fifteen, if you had told me that I would be who I am now, I would have stabbed you.

I’ve said these words to friends over the years. I’ve said them with a smirk. I’ve said them to claim some kind of rough trade credibility. I’ve said them so as to emphasize the humor in the irony that I could have come here from there. Here is out and unrepentant and indignant at what the world expects of and forces on queers. There was aggressive, insular, ignorant, hateful street punk like only Philly and possibly Baltimore can breed. There is what too much of the world looks like.

I would have stabbed you.

I like to imagine that I am wrong. I like to imagine that I would have fallen immobile in a swell of collapsing shame and anxiety and denial and while my entire world came apart in that moment, I might have also felt lighter. That’s just my imagination. That’s what I now think I should have been like then. I wasn’t. I was one of the people I try not to despise and fear now because they are (and I was) dangerous in their deep convoluted hate. I was not a very good person.

I called the out gay boy in my high school a faggot while harboring a heartbreaking crush on one of the boys I thugged around with. I’m sorry, David.

Some friends have commented that I can be very patient and nonjudgmental when it comes to ignorant hateful folks. I can see that they think they are doing the right thing in their fearmongering. I allow that they simply don’t know or understand the world in the same way I do. I know that they act out of fear, whether it is fear of people like me, or fear of themselves, or fear of rejection by people like themselves. I have this patience with these people because I have been like them. I have been afraid. I am still afraid, but not of myself. I am less afraid than I have ever been and I keep working on it, but I have not been afraid of myself for a little while now. Sometimes, when I have been worn down, I do hate them. I hate them with the same belligerent anger that I carried when I was fifteen. I’m trying not to be that way anymore, even to the people who would see me and mine dead in the street.

It was just the end of June, the high holidays. Over the past few weeks, people I love and respect have been, in a variety of ways, being unafraid. They have been saying out loud who they are and they have been speaking not just of their joy, but also prying open the corners of their shame. They have said these things aloud to me and to each other, so that we can all heal and grow a little. They have been trying to move themselves and their world towards their ideals. I sometimes feel like I don’t do enough of this sort of work myself.

Right now, this is what I can do. I can say that any one of the people in the world who would stab you for telling them they would become me really could be me some day. It happens all the time.

Is it any consolation?

We were going to write our usual single-topic post today, but we kept sending each other too many interesting options. So here are a bunch of body image articles that we hope will interest you as much as they interest us:

Sins Invalid is a performance project on disability and sexuality. Sparkymonster linked to this post at Dis/positional featuring excerpts from Matt Fraser’s performance at the 2009 performance series in San Francisco.

It’s really good art and a powerful expression of the issues. We really want to see what he does next!

In the same post, Sparkymonster points out American Able, artist Holly Norris’s social commentary pastiches on a series American Apparel ads. Norris, and her model Jes Sachse, “intend to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media.” Norris has protected her work against reproduction around the Web and the blogosphere, so be sure and click through and take a look.

The whole feminist blogosphere is talking about the horrific procedures being done through the Medical College of Cornell University, in which babies who have large clitorises are subjected to surgeries and very very nasty follow-up procedures as young girls to “determine that they still experience sexual sensitivity.” (Very triggering information at the link.) Not only is this wrong in all the ways we’re sure you can imagine, it also (in the case of some of the young girls) disguises the reality of intersexuality into a vague and unfocused “abnormality” which is, without data, considered a “psychological risk.” Bird of Paradox, in one of many fine responses, focuses on the intersexuality issue.

I have to say that I’m completely mystified why the writers of any article detailing such shocking treatment and human rights abuses against intersex children should feel it necessary to leave out the salient fact that the subjects of the research are intersex. But one thing is clear: if we, as a society, are going to condone the treatment of intersex people like worthless lab rats and then deliberately airbrush them out of high-profile news stories about the injustices they’ve suffered, then how are we ever going to be able to start making amends for the human rights abuses inflicted against them in the name of medical science?

On a related note, professor and novelist Nnedi Okorafor writes about African reactions to her new novel, Who Fears Death, which approaches female genital cutting from a different perspective.

I am very proud of my Igbo-ness. However, culture is alive and it is fluid. It is not made of stone nor is it absolute. Some traditions/practices will be discarded and some will be added, but the culture still remains what it is. It is like a shape-shifting octopus that can lose a tentacle but still remain a shape-shifting octopus (yes, that image is meant to be complicated). Just because I believe that aspects of my culture are problematic does not mean I am “betraying” my people by pointing out those problems.

If you don’t think all bodies are beautiful, does that mean you have to think some of them are ugly enough to decapitate and replace with advertising? Interbest Outdoor Billboards has a new campaign to fill their billboard space that Shakesville finds especially disturbing.

What we notice here is that despite the snapshot quality of the photograph, for anyone who can shed their preconceptions, she’s attractive. One of the two other photos in the campaign (which you can see at the link) is a white man with his hands behind his back, so that his hairy chest and not-terribly big potbelly show over his white briefs. The photograph is cropped below his shoulders. He looks just fine to us. The campaign also includes a third photo, which is a close-up of an unshaved man picking his nose which, as Melissa at Shakesville points out, implies that “being fat is just a bad habit you don’t have the will or courtesy to break.”

Last week, Debbie posted about Neli, the young man who was arrested for being autistic and black. In the comments of that post, his mother pointed to this video, in which Neli tells his own story.

On the occasion of New York’s Gay Pride Day, the New York Times published a feature on Storme DeLarverie,, now in a nursing home in Brooklyn, “who fought the police in 1969 at the historic riot at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village that kicked off the gay rights movement.” The article gives us some background on Ms. Delarverie and also reminds readers that “the first gay pride parade in 1970 was not a parade at all but a protest marking the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.”

Let us close with a fat-positive U.S. government stamp. There’s a nice short biography of Kate Smith at this link.