Is this really the revolution?

In a nutshell, fat-acceptance is the idea that shaming people for the size or shape they are is Not Ok. And not going to make anyone any healthier or thinner. And also that size isn't the same as health. Fat-acceptance is closely connected to the idea of "Health At Every Size", which is the claim that health is best promoted not by pursuing a particular body size or shape, but rather by promoting healthy eating habits (not diets), regular exercise, etc, in a size-neutral manner. For more information on these ideas, check out the Shapely Prose Archive.

In this society we're brought up with massive pressures to be a certain size and shape, and for many people the psychological and medical consequences of that pressure are extremely serious. As well as shaming people for their bodies, it's not unreasonable to suggest that these pressures may contribute to eating disorders and other mental health issues and low self-esteem, as well as a number of physical health issues associated with dieting, or sudden weight gain/loss. As many people have remarked, this pressure is gendered. That's not to say that men do not experience body image issues -- of course they do. But rather that the standards to which women are held are often much more stringent, and more rigidly policed.

How to challenge these pressures is a difficult issue. But something I doubt very much will ever present an effective challenge is the practice of companies to who make a profit off of women's insecurities about their bodies. They may claim to care about self-esteem, but present no real challenge to the dominant narrative that causes those insecurities.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is important that companies have a sense of corporate responsibility. But The Body Shop's well-being campaign video explicitly holds that self esteem well-being is about "looking good" (sorry, no transcript because I can't work out how to replay bits of the video while transcribing). The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty shows a bunch of women in bras and underpants, because, um, apparently real beauty means being able to be objectified in order to sell more soap? Or something.

Feminist blogger Hugo Schwyzer has recently been promoting the Healthy is the New Skinny project, in which he is a participant. It's a project that aims to change the fashion industry to promote better self esteem and healthier body image in young women. Which sounds great, right? ...At least until you read the posts about why you should try eyelash extensions, some diet tips, and how fat is inherently bad. What part of telling women their bodies need improvement, need to be skinnier and prettier, is promoting healthy body image? What part of this is challenging the dominant pressures on women to be a particular size and shape?

There's a lot of room for feminists to disagree about what our response should be to these projects. Should we be involved in them, as Hugo Schwyzer is, trying to change them for the better? Should we condemn the projects and have nothing to do with them? Should we try to work on genuinely new projects that really do promote health at every size and fat-acceptance? Are there other options? Maybe it's not so straightforward -- I still remember Ruby, the "rubenesque" Barbie, made by The Body Shop, and how much people talked about the effect of Barbie on girls' body image when presented with Ruby's image.

But still, my own view is that as long as "body acceptance" campaigns are driven by the message that women should want to make themselves thinner, prettier, sexier, what we'll get is not self-esteem, but the same harmful messages that tell women that they are not good enough. That their bodies are not good enough. When those approaches are tied to commercial interests -- specifically, encouraging women to buy more fashion products in order to become skinnier, prettier, etc, then we run the risk of exploiting body image worries for profit. That's no revolution. A strong campaign for health at every size and fat-acceptance, though, I would like to see.

Thoughts?

--IP

Caregiving in the Big Society

I've recently taken on some caregiving responsibilities for a friend. I find it difficult to understand the reaction of people around me to this information. There are a number of puzzling points.

Several people have said things like "Can't someone else do that? It's not your responsibility." And I think, well, it's someone's responsibility, and I happen to be here. It seems to be regarded as some kind of optional extra, instead of a community responsibility for people to pitch in a little and make sure that this person has, say, clean socks.

It's hard to explain to people how this fits into my life. I'd like to be able to explain better what taking on this responsibility requires from me. The strongly negative words that many people seem to use to report their own experiences of caregiving doesn't seem appropriate for me in this situation.

A while back I wrote about being both a caregiver and a receiver of care, and re-reading it now, I note that I said very little about communities, except in terms of community attitudes.

The Tory party's "Big Society" policy is focused on scaling back national government in favour of local power, and volunteerism. For many people, volunteering time in their community is just part of being a person. My caregiving is "voluntary" in the sense that no money is involved (it's less clear that it's an "optional extra", for the reasons above). But this person needs more than just the support I can provide as a friend -- they need trained medical support too. The need more support than I alone can provide.

I wonder what would happen to someone who needed similar support if they were very isolated (as disabled people can easily become, because of mobility difficulties, communication difficulties, mental health, or other issues), or lived in a remote place, or lived in the sort of urban place where people don't talk to each other much. What good would volunteerism be if people cannot access support?

How would a volunteerist approach to caregiving provide the support for caregiving that caregivers need? Without appropriate support, caregivers can't provide the support that is needed, and then everyone loses out.

The Tory move to localism isn't intended to resource communities better -- it's a move to decrease funding, and decrease our notion of society as a nationally-constituted community. I am reminded of Thatcher's infamous claim that society doesn't exist. And this is why it matters. Our communities, whether locally or nationally conceived, have a responsibility to support those who need support.

And now that Margaret Thatcher is herself dependent, we might ponder at the irony of her entitlement to medical care that is paid for by tax, collected by the society she thought doesn't exist. The truth is this: everyone gets old and disabled unless they die first. We don't always get to plan the way things happen, so the next best thing is to preserve communities, and community support.

--IP

where is neutral?

This is a bit of a stream of thoughts that has come out of a series of ...”heated discussions”… with someone close to me, perhaps someone could offer some insight?

After a fairly prolonged period of preferring to dress more androgynously - kind of a mixture between a little bit baby-dykey and scabby-student, i started to have a bit of a longing to dig out all my old corsets, netting skirts and punk-rock buresque clothes that had been residing in the back of my cuboard for the most part of a year. For the ‘female’ bodied, or those that are usually read as female by the outside gaze – the queer negotiation of femininities can be a bit of a minefield in the juncture between public sex/gender discourse and queer identities and politics. I’ve been having a bit of a problem with this recently, I never really thought about it before – I just dressed how I wanted to dress, played with my look and thought ‘fuck it’, but recently the critiques of certain parts of my gender expression have meant I’ve had to confront the politics of my ‘femme’ side, or as I refer to it, my ‘drag-queen’ side. I go through phases, my gender identity is pretty fluid and I don’t really feel like I do – or should- have to - settle in one place in particular, but traversing the arenas between androgyny, trying to ‘pass’ as a guy and being exaggerated-ly female has brought up some pretty problematic ideas about female-body-female-identity-performance is still read, even in some places within the queer community (to homogenise a bit :o)…).

Femininity is problematic. Decades of feminist deconstruction makes that blindingly obvious. However, focusing only of the socialisation of females makes embodying femininity in a political manner rather difficult. Femininity is often conceived of as the embodiment of ‘false’ (im not talking from academia now here, but from experience of the conversations I’ve had), the embodiment of things learned, socialised, performed. In order to perform femininity we take on actions, we limit our behaviours, we control and regulate, we add – we adorn, decorate, paint and manipulate our bodies. If we state this, we fall prey to seeing masculinity as neutral, and as somehow more ‘natural’, and again, somehow ‘better’ that femininity. If we do this we lose sight of how masculinity is as much of a construction as femininity, as in need of adornments, corporeal manipulation and regulation as femininity – but importantly, in ways that appear in our culturally conditioned consciousness’ as more respectable, less fake. If we make these assumptions, we still find ourselves thinking in binary terms, and still positioning femininity as lesser in that binary.

Negotiating queer femininities is in no way an easy ride. Even when you see both binary sections as intrinsically constructed, as performed as each other – it doesn’t end there. Negotiating femininities is fraught with all the stuff that comes with it. How do you embody something about the fun of femininity - perhaps in an extravagant way – that is sex positive, and can openly display signs or an ironic subversion of traditional aspects of feminine sexuality in a positive light- without stumbling into that quagmire of being overly-sexualised and positioning yourself into that heteronormative fantasy of female-object, sexually available FOR consumption by the masculine patriarchal gaze. There is a thin line between being able to play with overt sexuality and exaggerated femininity, and the self-sexualisation (however non-intentional) that places you in the public view as right up there with burlesque style playboy models and the mannequins in the front window of Ann Summers. Mostly, the line can only be drawn in our own heads and in the heads of those who know us, our identities, our genders and our politics. Overt female sexuality still has a long way to go before we can be comfortable that our expressions won’t be re-appropriated into mainstream meta-narratives of female objectification. And for me, and I’m sure I’m not alone, it’s an uncomfortable place to stand. If you decide to brave on through it, it quickly becomes tiring to keep having to patiently explain/argue/shake someone and scream ‘no – it’s not meant like that’.

To return to taking about what it takes to negotiate “femininities”, I don’t see why make-up, corsets, hold-ups, glitter (with of course, for me, a good measure of doc martins, dread Mohawk and an abundance of body hair) should be read as anything but fun. I’ve fought for a long time to shake off my hang ups about my body, and I don’t see why showing parts of my body should be sexualised – to me my thighs and breasts are no more sexual than my arms and feet (and of course once, these too were considered highly sexual to show), but I know that they still are, and if I go around with my thighs and tits out, for whatever personal/political reason – it will still be read in that oh-so-pervasive particiarchal sexualising manner. Unfortunately I have no answers, I hope some of you will have some insights… I wish we lived in a world when queer could truly be what you want it to be, where FtF (or Queer-to-F?) personas could be taken as seriously as taking on aspects of masculinity, and where it all could be seen as a part of the same deal. What I don’t want for myself is to abandon femininity – despite it’s history and continuation of association with repression, sexualisation and a lack of agency. I don’t want to have to negotiate my femininity in a way that is more masculine in order to have myself taken seriously – that seems to defeat the object for me. To me, we are not better feminists for abandoning what has been typically resigned to the female in favour of a ‘better’ masculine model. But what is neutral if it is not the “female” embodying “more masculine” traits – and what appears as neutral (i.e. what doesn’t have some symbol of feminine identification) tends to get read as masculine anyway… where does neutral lie if not within masculinity? If it does lie within masculinity, then there is something here we have to address… How do we stop people reading things as “masculine” or “feminine” anyway? In my particular gender identity it’s all kind of like playing dress-up anyway, no matter what I put on. How do people embody queer femininities that could sideline the risk of being objectified and sexualised without your consent – or in a way that you didn’t consent to? That tricky negotiation of how you’re going to be read, because we can never escape being read – and appropriated, is one that has be accounted for, especially (but not only) when we leave the safety of our queer bubbles.

Let them eat mahimahi fillets

Further to my last post on food and intersectionality, I did some googling for cookbooks, just to double check if I had to eat my words. Alas, no, although Kate's recipes will definitely go into my recipe notebook. Here's what I found in cookbook searches.

The overwhelming majority of cookbooks aimed at people with a specific named long-term condition (eg, arthritis, fatigue, fibromyalgia, autism) are not books that explain how to make cooking a simpler task, nor are they intended to expand your cooking repertoire in an easy no-fuss kind of way, but rather are intended to promote a particular kind of diet. They have titles with the word "cure" in them.

Look, I know that some elimination diets help some people manage their conditions. That's great, and I'm happy for you. What's much less cool is promoting the diet that helps you as a "cure" for everyone, unless you have a bunch of thorough double-blind studies to back you up. Plus, if we could actually cure autism, etc, with goji berries, I'm pretty sure there would be, you know, science about that.

So to the authors of these books let me say the following: thanks for playing, and I'm glad your diet helps you, but it's actually hard enough to feed myself already what with the whole frequently-feeling-too-shit-to-cook thing, without trying to cut whole food groups out of the equation.

Ok, I hear you cry, surely you could make some of these recipes even without sticking to the diet? Well maybe I could, but why should I help people who write these books to profit from promoting these diets? And anyway, the books seem to contain a number of recipes that are completely impractical in the context of my life. Here are some of the things I will not be cooking:

• Stuffed fennel. SpoonShortageFail. Life'sTooShortFail.


• Fresh salmon steaks. CostFail.


• Wild rice. CostFail.


• Escargot. CostFail.


• Fresh mahimahi fillets. CostFail. WhereDoPeopleEvenBuyThatFail.


• Shiitake mushrooms. CostFail.


• Flavoured oils. CostFail.


• Flounder. CostFail.


• Acai berries. IDon'tEvenKnowHowToPronounceItFail.


• Assorted SpoonsShortageFails caused by recipes that take ages and need multiple pots and lots of chopping.

Kaz and I spent an amused afternoon reading samples of these books out loud to each other. Kaz suggested that the SpoonFails may be caused by the assumption that everyone has someone to cook for them. If that's the case, it's a dramatic departure from the norms of cookbook-writing (which are general assumed to be helping you cook food yourself), but would be in keeping with the idea of disabled people as helpless and unable to do anything themselves. It would also be in keeping with the assumption that everyone is middle-class, and all middle-class people have A Woman to do stuff for them -- either in the form of a wife, or in the form of waged domestic help.

In other words, here's a memo someone didn't get: not everyone has personal servants, and some people might object to the keeping of women as personal servants. Disabled people are disproportionately poor and are disproportionately unable to do complicated cooking. Cooking is disproportionately allocated to women, who are also disproportionately poor.

Is the assumption that poor people with fatigue and mobility issues are going to be trailing round their local health food shops for mahimahi fillets and truffle oil? And since my local health food shop is not wheelchair accessible, am I supposed to believe that the truffle oil will cause me to throw my mobility scooter over one shoulder while I walk around the shop? Ahahahahahaha don't make me laugh so much, it hurts my costochondritic ribs.

Seriously though, why is eating food a luxury?

[Edited to add: Kaz has more on this topic.]

--IP