Humid as August

likealinoleumfloor:

myownbody:

[TW: Body Issues, Fat Shaming]

FAT

the short doc i made

now with a transcript!:

 [Intro]

(Different voices chopped up and layed over short clips of the filmmaker’s naked, white, fat body) fat/ fat/ fat/ fat/ fat/ fat/ fat/ fat/ fat (until black screen comes up with bold white lettering reading ‘FAT’)

[part 1] 

(Clips of the filmmaker’s head, face, and lips during an interview are cut together but do not match) 

My whole life growing up I had been taught to dislike my body, and specifically my fat/ I had been dissociating my from my body/ you really cement this separation between your self and your body/I started a blog, a weight loss blog, so that I would loose my fat/ I discovered so many other blogs, including fat acceptance blogs/ I was being told to love my body, specifically my fat/ (slow zoom out from the eyes begins until cut to the mouth which finally matches audio) I’ve just been working on figuring out my relationship with all these different concepts and ideas being thrown at me about my fat.

[part 2]

(Four static shots of women who are friends of the filmmaker being interviewed. They are each placed in the same frame: shot from at the chest up, sitting in a green chair with a window behind them to the right and a lamp on the left)

(1) Do I think you’re fat? … (shakes head) I don’t think you’re fat… like, no.

(2) No. I don’t think, Margaret, you’re fat.

(3) Yeah, I would say… (hesitates and sighs) I don’t like- I- I don’t- like, in a general term…..(sighs) I don’t-

(4) I think you are fat in a way that is removed from the kinds of awful connotations that come with that word in the society that we live in.

[part 3]

(Longer clips of the filmmaker’s body are cut together: the camera moves up the legs and down the back and around the stomach, the filmmaker’s hands play with her fat and her nails are painted bright red. The audio is clips from the four women’s interviews overlapping quite heavily) 

/You’re my friend I think that calling someone fat is not nice, I think it’s rude

 /I still say that like to use the term fat necessarily, I think it’s rude and I think it’s wrong; it’s used incorrectly in our culture 

/I don’t like that word, it makes me feel so uncomfortable 

/When I first met you, I remember thinking like “oh, she’s a bigger girl!” 

/ And I noticed that you were fat but I…

/ If I hadn’t gotten to know you, I sometimes wonder, and this is gonna sound bad, but I sometimes wonder if, like, if I would have seen you as- …someone 

/ If it means losing that five pounds, why don’t you wanna do that for yourself?

/ No I don’t think fat’s a bad thing to be

 / I don’t know when at what point people stop seeing people as fat

/ I don’t know at what point you can start considering yourself fat, or at what point you can stop considering yourself skinny, or you know whatever in between

/ But what are you eating?

/ It’s not just a word, it means so many things when you say that word

/ It’s a word that you reclaim, and its an identity that you reclaim

/ Why are you celebrating this? Knowing that what you’re putting into your body is unhealthy? 

/ I guess…in a lot of ways other people determine when you are or aren’t fat; you don’t really get much of a say in that

/ I feel like when people say fat they’re picturing, like I don’t even know what they’re picturing, but it’s not nice you know what I mean? It’s never like ‘you’re so fat! …and lovely.’

/ That’s gross, right??

/ I think that when I call somebody fat and if I were to describe you as fat to somebody else, I would be also describing you as someone like, horrible and disgusting and, you know… and that’s really really fucked up

/ The word is just - does not make me feel very good to say 

/ Llooking at a picture of you from before, it’s a completely different person. And I’m not saying you… I don’t think you weren’t beautiful, I don’t think you weren’t a beautiful person…

/ I’m not saying you’re not beautiful ’cause I don’t think you’re fat so you know…

/ I guess fat is lard. That you cook with. 

/ Cut the gristle off the meat 

/ But I don’t think you can point to someone and be like ‘lard’

/ Why wouldn’t I describe you as fat to a friend?

/ ‘You’re fat!’ -and mean it-  I don’t know ….you…..are…. I feel like if someone said to you (long pause) you’re an awful person, or like, you’re not worth knowing…

(Pans out from the eyes to the whole naked body of the filmmaker sitting with her legs folded on the interview chair. She keeps eye contact with the camera the whole time and gives a slight shrug before the screen goes black for the credits)

this is so well done. reminded me of certain specifics from friends growing up that i had smoothed over into vague memories. feeling angry and grossed out by what passed for friendship with thin friends. i love the confrontation of this, especially the belly shakes and rubs.

I really like this. It really emphasizes patriarchal social control of bodies. 

I feel like even though the friends interviewed by the director were thin(ner), you could hear their self-hatred in everything they said. It reminded me of when, as a rape crisis advocate, I’d work with moms whose kids were abused. When the moms talked about it, almost 100% of the time if you asked them, they’d disclose their own history of abuse, and also almost 100% of the time you could discern the way they were treated when they disclosed/ didn’t disclose from the way they responded to their kids’ disclosures. Aligning with patriarchal power will keep you safely invisible, or safely protected, they said. Or: only challenging it can keep your spirit safe. These assumptions were behind all of their words.

I also think about gendered and racialized relationships to food. Like, I as a white ciswoman with the economic and nation-of-origin privilege to move from one side of the U.S. to the other, and even out of the country and back again, have a different relationship to food than someone who is bound to the land they grew up on, the same land their family has historically lived on for as far back as anyone can remember, who knows how to grow their own food in that land. I don’t feel accountable to the land I live on, I don’t feel connected to food that grows from it, I hate my body and the traces of land/ food on me (fat) even when I try really really hard not to, I apply that body-hatred to other people sometimes even though I try really, really hard not to… and again, I forget the land, its food isn’t valuable… How easy fat-phobia is to fall into when you’re raised in a white-supremacist patriarchy. Because food is objectified, its production is alienated, it has no resonance for me, no culture, it should only be fuel, that eating what comes from the land is sinning. My body as alienated, disobedient or obedient, controlled or controlling machine. With no honest memory/ knowledge of where it came from. 

(via likeabumponabumponalogbaby)