therotund:

That Sexy Fat Pink Elephant In The Room; Discussing Fat, Fetishism, and Feederism

jessiedress:

I’m into most (if not all) of what Marianne is saying here. It’s interesting to me (as a queer person especially) how sex/sexuality/fetish communities/kink get kind of pathologized in FA. I guess that just isn’t where I “live,” if you get what I mean. 

I totally understand not being into something, or not being into the way that someone approaches you, and I’m all for good boundaries and communication. I guess in the end, what this whole discussion is really reminding me of is something that someone smart I know once said - “We can be friends even though we’re different.” I think that a lot with regard to fatty community/body positive community/FA community/whatever.

I mean, most of my friends are queer, and I’m REALLY into my queer community and enjoy spending my time around people who share my politics and rage and love for way too much glitter and making out with friends, etc.

When it comes to knowing fatties, I feel a little lost. If I say “oh no, I mean, we don’t have xyz in common,” I’m probably missing out on some community I could have with someone who shares my lived-experience in a way my IRL community really doesn’t.

I guess what I’m saying boils down to this - I still don’t know ANYONE who I can reliably share clothes with who lives in my community.

I know FEW people I can reliably share clothes with across the country. By necessity of style/lifestyle most of those people are queer femmes, but by god, how judgmental can we afford to be about people’s sexual practices when we want to talk to someone with 60+ inch hips? FA community can feel weird to me as a queer woman, and that’s fine. I can work through that, because if your body looks like mine, I really can’t afford not to try to be in solidarity with you. 

I think fat community can be quite different from queer-identified community; but it can also be quite similar - it seems to be all about where you’re building your community and with whom you are building it. Fat acceptance definitely leads to some strange bedfellows sometimes - because bodies across all spectrums can be fat and deserve basic human dignity - and that’s something that is occassionally difficult. But I also think of fat acceptance in terms of the greater construct of social justice - I spend a lot of time talking about fat at the Rotund, for example, but I was so so so excited about Tumblr in part because I felt like I could talk about a hundred other things, too, and bring that stuff into the fat acceptance community without sending my narrow-focus topical blog right off the rails. *laugh*

So, yeah - I don’t think fat community is necessarily a community built solely on a shared physical characteristic but I think it’s also okay when it is.

Similarly, I think it’s important that fat acceptance as a community move away from pathologizing things like kink - which is why I feel like I’ve been bringing it up ad nauseum of late. Because it’s a community that is not necessarily founded on common progressive values across a broader sampling, it’s important to have these conversations - and to have them over and over again.

Fat acceptance has, in my reading and research, a fairly long and difficult history with the fetish and feeder communities. I think a lot of the knee-jerk anti-fetish/anti-feeder reaction now is actually an outgrowth of the insistence on the part of some fetish and feeder communities that fat people, especially fat women, should be grateful for the attention. Which is just gross. And not a problem that is limited to fat people - it’s the entitled-to-your-sex attitude that is one of the trappings of “default masculinity” in, at least, America today and historically. People who question that, who push for redefinitions and breaking down of gender constructs are changing that expectation and I think that’s one reason I’d much rather fat acceptance move in the direction of queer community than mainstream community, you know?

Fat acceptance is, for a lot of people, their first forray into social justice activism. I’m not sure how that happens. I don’t know if it’s a particularly 101-friendly movement or if because it is an embodied concept if people just find it a good starting point. In those sorts of cases, I want fat acceptance to be a proverbial gateway drug to wider social justice concerns. But it’s definitely a process.