Tag Archives: Body image

Photo of the Week: Photo in Ph21 Gallery Budapest – CorpoRealities

 

Laurie says:

My photo of Chupoo Alafonté from Women En Large is in the CorpoRealities exhibition at the PH21 Gallery in Budapest. A curated international photography exhibition from August 29 – September 21, 2019.

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From PH21:  The human body, in full or in part, is often in the focus of various photographic genres. From documentary, event and street photography to fashion photography and the nude, photographers have always found ways of constructing images in which the specific portrayal of the human body gains significance. This may be stemming from the rich layers of meanings determined and shaped by the specific socio-cultural context of the image, the visual interaction of the human body with the surrounding physical space, or the intriguing compositional possibilities offered by the body itself. When focusing on the body, some photographers explore movements, study expressive gestures and postures, or concentrate on the beauty and details of the human anatomy. Some narrate whole life stories through the depiction of the human body. Others may offer stern visual criticism of our normative conceptions of the human body and its mainstream representation in Western media.

And here is Chupoo’s brilliant text from Women En Large:

When I think of what it means to be a fat, black woman, I think of my ancestors, women at the lowest rung of society, who were forced to serve, nurture, and give birth to a nation that hates and fears people who look like me. Those women were the invisible foundation used to build other people’s wealth and self-esteem. During slavery in this country, black women and men were used to physically build America. Black women were used as chattels to continuously replenish the slavery populations, as pawns to destroy black men’s self-esteem, and as meat to satisfy white men sexually. These women did not have the luxury to worry about their growing dress size. The life they lived called for big, strong bodies that could endure. Many petite, frail little women just couldn’t (and didn’t) survive the brutishness of living in America.

These facts may seem like ancient history to some, but it’s been less than forty years since white people decided it was all right for black people to sit next to them at a lunch counter. As a matter of fact, it’s still not okay for fat black people to sit next to whites at a lunch counter. One can say or do just about anything they want to a fat person in public. What makes the abuse different for women of color as opposed to white women is that for black women it’s nothing new.

Most people of color in this country are not living in their natural habitat. Most African and Indigenous people living in America come from a place where geography and climate dictated that the evolution of their bodies’ metabolism be efficient and able to store food to survive in their native environment. As we were introduced to European culture, we immediately began to lose access to the food and remedies we knew.

The percentage of large people in communities of color is much large than in white communities, and the less we have assimilated to the dominant European culture, the more we are accepted in our own community. I rarely experience discrimination because of fat in the black community. I feel the hatred when I am in public, where white people dominate. Even other black people will ostracize me if we are in a white environment.

So when you ask me about my life as a fat black woman, I have to talk about the many struggles of my people. A black woman is often invisible even in the movements where she is on the front lines. Black males reaped the benefits of the civil rights movement. White women benefit from the women’s movement and affirmative action. Black women are on the bottom of the heap even in these struggles. The realities of our lives are overwhelming, and we still don’t have the luxury of contemplating our growing dress size.

Survival is more important than acceptance.  – Chupoo Alafonté – Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes 1994

 

Athlete Turned Farmer: A Grounded Body Image

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Laurie and Debbie say:

AC Shilton was a journalist and competitive triathlete. Now she’s a farmer. In her essay for Outside, “How Farming Saved My Body Image,” she tells a moving and honest story of how her body image has changed:

I spent years in a deep embrace with endurance sports. First I ran. Then I did triathlon. Then I raced bikes. Then back to triathlon again. Along the way, I developed a serious eating disorder. I’m nearly six feet tall and had ducked under 100 pounds when, at 20, my father staged an intervention. I got treatment. I got better.

In a sane world, endurance sports would encourage their participants to be strong, muscular, and healthy, but apparently that isn’t what happened to Shilton and her cohort. “Running, cycling, and triathlon are sports that celebrate the knife-edge between fitness and thinness—doing the most you can with the very least.”

Farming, she says, is another story:

…producing my own food is the hardest endurance sport I’ve ever done. No level of training compares to the day-after-day-after-day grind of wrestling food from the earth.

Today I don’t care so much how my body looks as long as it performs as the tool I need it to be. Brute strength is the thing I crave most. Maybe it helps that I’m not wearing spandex every day. Maybe it helps that I’m no longer playing the who-can-throw-away-most-of-their-dinner game that plagued many cycling-team camps that I attended. Maybe it helps that I fought bean beetles and powdery mildew to produce most of the calories on my plate. Or maybe I’m just too tired to care about sucking in my belly as I build a fence.

Shilton does not acknowledge all the levels of privilege that go into her story. Not only did she and her husband have the means to buy the farm she works, she also clearly has an athlete’s genes and extraordinary health. At 34, she isn’t just privileged over disabled people and old people, she’s also privileged over people with perfectly functional bodies, because most people simply don’t have the combination of genetic and personality traits, let alone the passion, it takes to push yourself to the limits she loves. Her story would be richer if she took her luck into account.

What sets her essay apart from so many is the clear way she connects her completely real and grounded physical work to her body image. While competitive running, bicycling, and triathlons are constructed activities, designed to push bodies to the limit for the purpose of pushing bodies to the limit, the kind of farming she does (and millions of people around the world do) is a necessary activity that by its nature pushes bodies to the limit for the purpose of feeding people.

The most astonishing thing about life on a farm is that I’ve stopped thinking about calories altogether. This is quite possibly because I’m too busy to think about them. I’m up at 5 A.M. to exercise the horses. Then I feed our various critters—cats, dogs, aforementioned horses, and soon chickens and goats. I clean stalls, move manure to our compost pile, and, if I’m lucky, sneak a cup of coffee in somewhere. I sit for a few hours of freelance-writing work and then head back outside. Afternoons and evenings are spent rebuilding barns or pulling dumped concrete blocks out of the stream. Some days I get in a run before it’s time to feed the animals again. And this is just my winter routine. In summer, we also pull weeds, pick bugs off plants, and harvest whatever has come into season.

Once she committed herself to the farm, the rest is not voluntary, it’s essential. Her body is deeply engaged, with her mind and her heart, in creating something. She doesn’t have to compare herself to other athletes at the end of a race: instead, she can look at the food on the table and her whole self knows “I made that happen.” When you have the opportunity,  the ability, and the desire to live that way, body image obsession fades in relation to “we grow food for people to eat?”