This response focuses on the body, perceptions of the fat body, and societies rejection of the fat body to exist in a present state.
Curran Nault has broken down and illustrated a very good case explaining how Beth Ditto challenges the narratives that surround her intersectional identity as both a queer and fat woman, by choosing to exist in her body completely in the present and in a very bold way. What struck me the most is the idea of embodied corpulence and how in today’s American society there is almost no such thing as fat embodiment and instead only a fat person in the process of becoming thin, “the fat body is rarely allowed to be embodied and present, as it is continually represented as either false (the body in the process of becoming thin) or past (the body that has been left behind).”[1. Curran Nault,“Punk Will Never Diet”, NeoAmericanist, Vol 4, No. 2, (Spring/Summer 2009)] The idea of not being allowed to exist in your own body in the present due to a part of your identity in American culture is very real and is something I believe can be more broadly applied to race as well. Our culture so largely rejects representation of people of color in the natural state to the point where people of color have to make themselves “more white” in order to be accepted. So in a sense they aren’t allowed to exist as themselves and instead are pushed into a period of transition to become something that is more “acceptable.”
Full Bibliographic Entry:
Nault, Curran “Punk Will Never Diet” NeoAmericanist Vol 4, No.2 (Spring/Summer 2009)
http://www.neoamericanist.org/issues/issue/vol-4-no-2-springsummer-2009/
