Thread by @KivanBay

I've been reading my new book, Queering Fat Embodiment, and there's this part in the introduction that I know is going to piss people off but I so strongly agree with it and I'm going to share it anyway.

So in Jackie Wykes' fantastic introduction, there is a discussion about how compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory thinness are "mutually constitutive", or put another way, that they are mutual components of a larger system of imposed normalcy that give each other form. (pg 1)

This is not just a rogue theory flying about. Adrienne Rich wrote on the topic in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience" in 1980.

Rich explained how heterosexuality is "'a political institution' which not only works to structure social, political, economic and cultural life according to an asymmetrical system of binary gender, but also ... structures identity and desire through 'control of consciousness'"

Again pg 1

Wykes points to McRuer who drew on Rich's scholarship in Crip Theory (I own it, it's great) to further elaborate on compulsory heterosexuality's contingence on compulsory able-bodiedness, the co-constitutive relationship of heterosexuality and ability.

Turning to LeBesco, Wykes introduces us to the possibility and potential of queered fat, not just for fat bodies, but for queer bodies, and those bodies that are queer and fat. LeBesco writes, importantly, of the ways in which queerness and fatness have been treated similarly

As sites of moral panic, as medicalized, stigmatized, and pathologized identities, they share commonalities and overlap

But also, working from Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, Wykes elaborates on queer as both identity AND action "which seeks to expose taken-for granted assumptions, trouble neat categories, and unfix the supposedly fixed alignment of bodies, gender, desire, and identities." (pg 4)

Including this quote from Kosofky Sedgwick on how queer "can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made

(or can't be made) to signify monolithically." Wykes also points to Kosofky Sedgwick's excitement at "queer" spinning "outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all [such as] race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality"

Kosofky Sedgwick does caution not to forget the original meaning of the word since "for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term's definitional center, would be to dematerialize the possibility of queerness itself"

Here Wykes explains that the book seeks not so much to argue that fat is necessarily queer, but rather to "point to the ways that heteronormativity operates as a regulatory apparatus which underwrites and governs discourse on—and management of— the fat body." (pg 4)

But this is the part that really nailed it for me, and I hope if you're not gnashing your teeth in frustration at this point, you will consider it:

"While these 'identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses' may not be subsumed under gender and sexuality, they are, however, mutually implicated in the discursive and material construction and circulation of meaning, identity, and power

"that fall under the critical rubric of queer critique. Importantly, 'identity-constituting' discourses such as heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, whiteness, middle-classness and slimness are unmarked—

"they appear natural and universal and thus have profoundly normative and disciplinary power.

"By 'bringing forth' these discourses and making their hidden assumptions visible, queering can work to destabilize normative categories and denaturalize dominant ways of seeing, doing, being." (pg 4-5)

I hope this helps you understand how compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory thinness are related, cool cool

Think of compulsory thinness as a normativizing rhetoric that, like compulsory heterosexuality, lends power to some while marginalizing others. Try not to think of it in a binary state either, but rather consider how proximity to this construction of normalcy lends privilege.

Nobody is entirely "normal" and if they are, it is never a static, timeless state that can be maintained. For this reason, it helps to understand it not as a binary state but rather as a spectrum of experience that differs based on proximity to the "normal"

It's also important to understand this normativizing rhetoric of compulsory thinness exists within a neoliberal framework of understanding that responsibilizes the individual to "solve" the "problem" of their fatness while excusing corporate influences on the "problem"

I forgot to tag this thread as a #fatstudygroup thread whoops

Upon reflection I don't know if this next point is self evident and feel the need to add it. When we say compulsory thinness and compulsory heterosexuality are mutually constitutive, that may give the erroneous impression that queerness offers respite from the tyranny of thinness

Tyranny of thinness is a quote I just didn't have room for quotation marks calm down it's from Orbach though I first read about it in Bordo. ANYWAY

With all due respect to groups like Girth and Mirth, and body positivity in the queer community, it would be dishonest to pretend that we have some kind of immunity to the pressures of compulsory thinness

What I have actually found is that those groups further from the "normalcy" point on the spectrum have their bodies policed to a higher degree, with their bodies read as dangerous or even iconoclastic

That is, those bodies that fall outside the scope of heterosexuality or outside of cisgender identities are seen as more threatening and dangerous when they are fat.

I'd also point to @_iAmRoyal's threads on how fatness is read on the black masculine body as more threatening. There's also been research into how on the black feminine body, fatness can be read as an excessive and threatening sexuality.

In these ways, bodies outside of the "unmarked" give a sense of heightened threat because of their fatness.

I love this quote from Crip Theory, text to follow

"in the emergent industrial capitalist system, free to sell one's labor but not free to do anything else effectively meant free to have an able body but not particularly free to have anything else.

"Like compulsory heterosexuality, then, compulsory able-bodiedness functions by covering over, with the appearance of choice, a system in which there actually is no choice.

"And even if these compulsions are in part tied to the rise of industrial capitalism, their historical emergence and development have been effaced." McRuer, Crip Theory, pg 24

In fact, discussing Edelman's essay "Tearooms and Sympathy; or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet" from Homographesis on the pop representations of a "sexual crisis involving a prominent member of Lyndon B. Johnson's administration." (pg 26)

The essay provides "a snapshot of dominant attitudes in the mid-twentieth century" (ibid) as it discusses the 1964 arrest of Walter Jenkins, Johnson's chief of staff, for performing "indecent gestures" with another man in a DC men's room.

"Edelman contends that the response to the midcentury arrest of Jenkins and many others for indecency, deviance, or perversion took at least three forms. First, the individual involved could be defined and contained as a "homosexual."

"This figure was understood as a distinct type of person, whose difference was legible on the body." (pg 26-27) McRuer focuses in on this legibility of difference on the body, pointing to Edelman's second recorded form of midcentury response, reading his sexuality as disability.

This response would read Jenkins as mentally ill, and would posit his sexuality as a symptom of some kind of bodily or mental difference.

The third form of response that Edelman discusses is a crisis of the very structures of masculinity and sexuality itself, not a popular form of response obviously. McRuer points out the first two forms of response were much more popular in 64.

McRuer also discusses the "coming out of the heterosexual", or the way that once compulsory heterosexuality felt itself threatened by queer critique it necessitated a reaffirmation of heterosexuality as the "norm", with more aggressive and vocal displays of heterosexuality

"Snapshots from this period might include the picture of New York mayor Ed Koch declaring, "I'm heterosexual," and of Magic Johnson insisting on The Arsenio Hall Show, after revealing his HIV-positive status, that he was "far from being a homosexual."

"These and other heterosexual stories consolidate a newly visible "heterosexual community"." (pg 28)

These reaffirmations of one's heterosexuality, McRuer notes, fall in line with Butler's theories in Gender Trouble about heterosexuality as a performatively constituted identity, always in the process of imitating and approximating "its own phantasmatic idealization of itself"

And, according to Butler, failing, because it is bound to fail, and because of this "the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself."

"Able-bodied identity and heterosexual identity are linked in their mutual impossibility and in their mutual incomprehensibility-" McRuer writes.

"[T]hey are incomprehensible in that each is an identity that is simultaneously the ground on which all identities supposedly rest and an impressive achievement that is always deferred and thus never really guaranteed." (pg 25)

Considering what we've now learned from McRuer and Butler, let us consider the incomprehensibility and impossibility of thinness, its position as the "unmarked" and "normal" and its oppositional definition of "not fat", and its status as an impressive achievement not guaranteed.

I should probably remember to put my tip jars at the end of my education threads paypal.me/kivabay