fat & fierce

It occurred to me today that I walked blindly into fierceness, not knowing if I could pull it off, hoping it would all work out, aware that I had nothing to lose but “my precious chains.” I pieced together the bits of life’s lusciousness which I’d learned to hang onto: first for survival and then something far beyond that. I’ve been a fat girl for as long as I can remember. The fierceness came much later.

Back to “my precious chains.”

The allure of normativity – the chains - in all its forms – heterosexuality, monogamy, thinness – is incredibly potent and alluring. The promise is simple: you do this and you get that. But the payoff remains ever illusive. That’s because the payoff actualizes for very few and even those who are the seeming beneficiaries also suffer from the weight of its suffocating, merciless and incessant demands. To imagine that in a time when my greatest worry could be whether I want cilantro on my tacos, I look around me and see people living lives of prescriptiveness and not liberation. And I realize that it’s because, as Native scholar Andrea Smith once said, systems of oppression must seem like the only way; they must seem natural and inevitable or people would never participate in their own subjugation.

I remember a time when I was very resistant to fat positivity. I didn’t understand it. Even though I was undeniably, by-every-western-measure fat, it felt like something that didn’t apply to me, something I wasn’t interested in. It made me feel unsure and belligerent and sometimes it made me blush. Even when I was organizing as a feminist, I was still sold on the bill of goods, my heart was still set on the prize of passing. I wanted so, so badly to pass! I didn’t have words for the longing that had grown inside of me. I wanted to pretend that this body wasn’t this body, and in disavowing this fat body I inadvertently sought to erase it and the other outlaw bodies that were like it.

And then came fierceness.

Me and fierceness went way back. Back to pre-school when I knew I was hot shit, when my belly was a fascinating orb and not the seat of my greatest shame. But I lost it. It was taken from me, forced out, presumed dead. But me and fierceness kept bumping into each other, and one day the glittery seed of fabulousness settled in again, began to lay down some roots, brought me back to life.

Fierceness is fundamentally about resistance, about liberation, about protecting the strut, the light, the too-tight pencil skirt from all the people and ads and social forces that seek to force it out of you. Fierceness is queer. It is brown. It is revolutionary. My fat saved my life. This body, which at one time felt like it had betrayed and imprisoned me, was in fact the source of my greatest liberation. My fat reminds me that I was destined for things greater than passing. It took me through grad school, through feminism, relationships, love, through political and intellectual territory I could have only dreamed of. And, girl, I’m just getting started.