Cool Fat Poster

Laurie says:

I love this fat monologue poster by Barry Deutsch.   He’s talking about pain and process that are all too typical for many people.  Check out the web version so you can read the text and see details.  You can buy it here.

Barry Deutsch Poster

There was originally a paragraph here where I read the nude figure in the back ground as female. Fortunately I got an almost immediate comment from purpleshineycrafter “Uh, the picture in the background looks like a man to me”. They’re right and it should have been obvious. In spite of all my years of experience with fat nudes of both sexes I read it wrong. Aside from my total embarrassment, it says something about how heavy some of the visual tapes can be. We’re barraged for our lifetimes with images of how people are supposed to look. My profound apologies, especially to Barry.

Speaking of lovely nudes of fat men, here is one of my favorite images from Familiar Men.
Richard Labonte

I love Barry Deutsch’s comic Hereville.  It’s set in a contemporary alternate universe in an orthodox  Jewish community with dragons, surreal creatures, family, and a heroic little girl named Mirka .  He’s at the APE 2008 (Alternative Press Expo) in San Francisco tomorrow.

Thanks to Lynn Kendall for pointing to the poster.

7 thoughts on “Cool Fat Poster

  1. THANKS. As you can see from the corrected blog, I really needed your comment. Once I read it, and looked again, the figure was obviously male. I’m flabbergasted that I made this error.

  2. i would guess from the comic that the person in the background is meant to be read as a man, but i also feel anxious about saying that it should have been obvious that someone is a man. saying “what appears to be a fat male nude” or something along those lines feels very different–i worry about the erasure of trans people and other implications of an expectation that we can assess gender, or even sex, from a picture like this.

  3. There’s really not much in the way of female or male cues in the poster’s visual text, and almost none in the written text either.

    So I’d say that it’s absolutely *not* obvious that it’s a male nude.

    The placement of the panels and the lack of detail obscure the cock from the painting, and in the panels, it’s easy to miss the stubble on the speaker’s face in the few panels that have it.

    As for the artist’s message, the emphasis on feminism and colonization applies to both men and women, so it’s just as reasonable to assume that the genital vagueness in the artistry strengthens Barry’s message rather than weakening it, and that rather than being led astray when you see a female body, the poster forces us to think about both gender and beauty as fluid constructed categories (as fluid as the lines of the nude) rather than rigid or simple or clearly defined.

  4. Miriam Heddy,

    I like the concept of what you’re saying. But I initially read the cartoon carefully; it’s not gender ambiguous as I see it. I can certainly see the ambiguities you discuss in the nude, but my second glance and apology still feel right to me.

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