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Envisioning bodily difference: refiguring fat and lesbian subjects in contemporary art and visual culture, 1968-2009

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Envisioning bodily difference: refiguring fat and lesbian subjects in contemporary art and visual culture, 1968-2009

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Content ENVISIONING BODILY DIFFERENCE: REFIGURING FAT AND LESBIAN SUBJECTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART AND VISUAL CULTURE, 1968-2009 by Stefanie Snider A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ART HISTORY) August 2010 Copyright 2010 Stefanie Snider ii Acknowledgments I want to begin by expressing my appreciation to my dissertation committee, for respecting my topic and engaging with my dissertation in thoughtful and helpful ways. Each of my committee members, Richard Meyer, Eunice Howe, and Jack Halberstam, have been supportive of my work in visual culture, marginalized communities, and multiple aspects of the representation of the materiality of the corporeal body for several years and I appreciate their guidance and recommendations throughout my time at USC. I also need to express my gratitude to Professor David Román, whose encouragement in exploring a new-to-me archive in his class on Archives and Subcultures helped to launch my dissertation project several years ago. I owe my great thanks to Laura Aguilar and Kristin Kurzawa, who responded to my questions about their work with interest and enthusiasm. I also need to thank all of the volunteer and professional archivists at the following archives, at which I conducted research over the past three plus years. Their time, dedication, and genuine interest in helping researchers at their institutions helped me immensely. If it weren‘t for these people and places, this dissertation would not have been possible: Brenda Marston and the staff at the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY; Jeri Deitric, Ann Gigani, Marilee France, and Angela Brinskele at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, CA; Dr. Joseph Hawkins, Michael Oliveira, Narinda Heng, and Ashlie Midfelt at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, CA; the Stanford University Special Collections and University Archives staff in Palo Alto, CA; the Lesbian Herstory Archives, in New York, NY; Linda Long, Bruce Tabb, and the iii student staff at the University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives in Eugene, OR; and the Archives and Special Collections staff at the University of Connecticut Thomas J. Dodd Research Center in Storrs, CT. I received funding to complete the research for this dissertation from the USC Department of Art History, the Henri Luce Foundation, the USC Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program, the USC Center for Feminist Research, the USC Gender Studies Program, and the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Foundation for work at the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University. I want to thank all of my friends and colleagues, who have supported me in one way or another over the course of the past 7 years, many of whom I was lucky enough to meet because of graduate school connections and project choices. This list is in no particular order, but includes people who have helped me to conceptualize, clarify, and research this dissertation; who have contributed to my greater understanding of the fields of feminist and queer art histories, fat studies, and visual culture; who have given me opportunities to present my work in a variety of contexts; and who have given me places to sleep, food to eat, and solidarity and comfort when I needed it the most. I can‘t express how much you have helped me to survive and thrive: Sarah Doherty, Jamie Ratliff, Michaela Null, Max Airborne, Amanda Piasecki, Jason Whitesel, Devra Polack, Shayna Kessel, Maria Webster, Lillian Webster, Virginia Solomon, Yetta Howard, Holly Hessinger, Charlotte Cooper, Annie Loechle, Lesleigh Owen, Sondra Solovay, Esther Rothblum, Jessica Schurtman, Laura Fugikawa, Susan Stinson, Jessica Giusti, Katie LeBesco, Julia McCrossin, Bertha Pearl, Michele Hunt, Jason Goldman, Erica Rand, iv Jesús Hernández, Emily Hobson, Nisha Kunte, Alexis Lothian, Stephanie Black, Sheana Director, Veronica Lopez Ericksen, Natalie Gravelle, and Paul Fukui. I want to thank my extended family, who has been ever-patient with my status as a perpetual student over these past many years, and who has given their support from far away, no matter where I have lived, as I have completed my graduate work. I especially want to thank Brian Snider and Laura Snider, my brother and sister-in-law, who took care of the really hard parts of life so that I could keep up with my schoolwork and work on my research during the most emotionally difficult times. And of course, much love to Rocky, who has never been at a loss for excitement over visits home. I owe my partner, Sarah Doherty, so much more than a thank you can ever possibly say here. She has kept me as sane as possible through the lowest lows and highest highs that the past four years have brought in terms of graduate work, family struggles, and moving from coast to coast and back again. She is the most patient person I have ever known; her compassion and tendency to see the good in everyone is a model for my own growth as a person. Sarah is the epitome of a social justice warrior and her daily fight against oppression in so many forms is astounding in its passion, clarity, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness. Over the past two years Sarah has managed to do all of this and more as well as complete her own graduate studies in social work and social justice. She has believed in me when I didn‘t believe in myself and when I wanted to drop it all. Thank you, my wicked awesome fat dyke lesbian lover, for agreeing to dance with me, for sticking with me at my grumpiest, for practice and praxis, for sharing your dvds, for singing songs together every day, for loving and hugging and calling me your Squishy. I love you. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures vii Abstract xv Introduction 1 Why Fat and Lesbian Subjects? 17 The Flourishing of Feminist, Lesbian and Gay, and Fat Empowerment Movements in the Late 1960s 20 Literature Review 27 Chapter Descriptions 40 Introduction Images 47 Chapter One: Establishing Visibility in Unrepresentable Communities: Moving Toward Reclaiming the Invisible, the Unintelligible, the Monstrous, and the Other, 1968-1981 52 The New York Radical Women‘s 1968 Miss America Protest 52 The Ladder 62 The Fat Underground 70 Tee Corinne: The Cunt Coloring Book and Solarized Photography 81 Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 92 Fat Chance and Fat Lip Readers Theater 98 Fat Is a Feminist Issue 111 Chapter 1 Images 117 Chapter Two: Embracing the Self and Embodying the Other: Intersections of Sexual and Political Identities in Subcultural Representations, 1981-1992 138 Fat is a Feminist Issue II 139 Tee Corinne: Yantras of Womanlove 143 Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives 151 Laura Aguilar: Latina Lesbians and Clothed/ Unclothed 157 Heresies: Food Is a Feminist Issue 166 The Lesbian Avengers 173 Chapter 2 Images 186 Chapter Three: From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary: Grassroots and Self-Taught Artists and Activists Creating Fat Visual Culture, 1994-2004 203 Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes 204 Lesbian Connection 213 Fat Girl: A Zine For Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them 221 Laura Aguilar: Self-Portraits 229 vi Big Burlesque: The Original Fat Bottom Revue 251 The Padded Lilies 260 Chapter 3 Images 273 Conclusion: Revisiting/ Revisioning Excessive Bodies, 2003-2007 295 Tee Corinne: Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives 295 Conclusion 305 Conclusion Images 312 Bibliography 320 vii List of Figures Figure I.1. Kristin Kurzawa, Cookie Woolner, Bevin Branlandingham, and Zoe Femmetastica, 2009. 46 Figure I.2. Kristin Kurzawa, Ceci My Playmate, 2009. 46 Figure I.3. Kristin Kurzawa, Masculine Femme, 2009. 47 Figure I.4. Kristin Kurzawa, Pidgeon Von Tramp, 2009. 47 Figure I.5. Margaret Finch, Queen of the Gypsies at Norwood, n.d. 48 Figure I.6. Female Monster with Two Heads, From Boaistuau‘s Histories Prodigeuses, Paris, 1573. 48 Figure I.7. The lion-headed Barbara Urselin, born in 1641 in Augsburg, from Aldrovandus‘ Opera Omnia Monstrum Historia, 1668. 49 Figure I.8. Charles Moulton, Wonder Woman, May 1957. 49 Figure I.9. Example of the ―Headless Fatties‖ Phenomenon. 50 Figure I.10. Example of the ―Headless Fatties‖ Phenomenon. 50 Figure 1.1. Welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction, 1968. 115 Figure 1.2. The Winner, A Rival in Black and Some Ribroast Ribbing, 1968. 116 Figure 1.3. Miss America 1968 Protesters, Atlantic City, NJ Boardwalk. 117 Figure 1.4. Real Women Chained to Amerika-Dolly In Guerilla Theatre Skit in Atlantic City, 1968. 117 Figure 1.5. Giant Miss America Puppet with Leah Fritz, Florika, and Flo Kennedy. 118 Figure 1.6. Charlotte Curtis, ―Miss America Pageant is Picketed by 100 Women,‖ and ―Illinois Girl Named Miss America,‖ The New York Times, September 8, 1968. 119 Figure 1.7. Cover Drawing, The Ladder, October 1957. 120 Figure 1.8. Cover Image, The Ladder, September 1957. 120 viii Figure 1.9. Cover Image, The Ladder, February 1962. 121 Figure 1.10. Cover Image, The Ladder, February 1964. 121 Figure 1.11. Cover Images, The Ladder, November 1964 and April 1965. 122 Figure 1.12. Cover Image, The Ladder, May 1966. 122 Figure 1.13. Cover Image, The Ladder, October/ November 1969. 123 Figure 1.14. Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, 1983. 123 Figure 1.15. Judy Chicago, Red Flag, 1971. 124 Figure 1.16. Carolee Schneeman, Interior Scroll, 1975. 124 Figure 1.17. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, 1975/ 1988. 125 Figure 1.18. Tee Corinne, Labiaflowers: A Coloring Book, 1982. 125 Figure 1.19. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, 1975/ 1988. 126 Figure 1.20. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, 1975/ 1988. 126 Figure 1.21. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, 1975/ 1988. 127 Figure 1.22. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, 1975/ 1988. 127 Figure 1.23. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, 1975/ 1988. 128 Figure 1.24. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, 1975/ 1988. 128 Figure 1.25. Tee Corinne, Solarized Photograph, Sinister Wisdom 70: 30 th Anniversary Celebration, 1996. 129 Figure 1.26. Tee Corinne, Solarized Photograph originally appearing on Front Cover of Sinister Wisdom 3, 1977. 129 Figure 1.27. Cover, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. 130 Figure 1.28. E.K. Waller, Bia Lowe Reality Portrait, 1997. 130 Figure 1.29. E.K. Waller, Lily Tomlin Reality Portrait, 1977. 131 ix Figure 1.30. E.K. Waller, Earlene Mills Reality Portrait, 1977. 131 Figure 1.31. E.K. Waller, Terry Platt Reality Portrait, 1977. 131 Figure 1.32. E.K. Waller, Diane Devine Fantasy Portrait, 1977. 132 Figure 1.33. E.K. Waller, Kathleen Burg Fantasy Portrait, 1977. 132 Figure 1.34. E.K. Waller, Diane Salah Fantasy Portrait, 1977. 133 Figure 1.35. Women, 1915. 133 Figure 1.36. Cathy Cade, Judy Freespirit in Fat Chance Rehearsal, 1987. 134 Figure 1.37. Cathy Cade, Fat Chance Rehearsal, 1987. 134 Figure 1.38. Cathy Cade, Fat Lip Readers Theatre, 1987. 135 Figure 1.39. Cathy Cade, Fat Lip Readers Theatre, 1987. 135 Figure 2.1. Tee Corinne, Yantras of Womanlove: Diagrams of Energy, 1982. 183 Figure 2.2. Tee Corinne, Yantra #30, 1982. 183 Figure 2.3. Tee Corinne, Yantra #41, 1982. 184 Figure 2.4. Tee Corinne, Yantra #42, 1982. 184 Figure 2.5. Tee Corinne, The Three Graces, 1980. 185 Figure 2.6. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Three Graces, 1535. 185 Figure 2.7. Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces, 1636-1638. 186 Figure 2.8. Cover, Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives #12, 1984. 186 Figure 2.9. Leslie Baker, Judith and Meridith, Fat Frolics Series, 1984. 187 Figure 2.10. Leslie Baker, Judith and Meridith, Fat Frolics Series, 1984. 187 Figure 2.11. Laura Aguilar, Latina Lesbian Series, 1986. 188 Figure 2.12. Laura Aguilar, Latina Lesbian Series, 1986. 188 Figure 2.13. Laura Aguilar, Untitled, Clothed/ Unclothed Series, 1990-1994. 189 x Figure 2.14. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 189 Figure 2.15. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 190 Figure 2.16. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 190 Figure 2.17. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 191 Figure 2.18. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 191 Figure 2.19. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 192 Figure 2.20. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 192 Figure 2.21. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, 1987. 193 Figure 2.23. ACT-UP, ―Homosexuals Arrested at AIDS Drug Protest,‖ The New York Times, March 25, 1987. 193 Figure 2.24. ACT-UP, SILENCE = DEATH, 1987. 194 Figure 2.25. Carrie Moyer, The Lesbian Avengers: We Recruit, 1992. 194 Figure 2.26. Lesbian Avengers, Final Action Checklist from the Lesbian Avengers Organizing Handbook, n.d. 195 Figure 2.27. Carrie Moyer, I Was a Lesbian Child, 1992. 195 Figure 2.28. Carrie Moyer, Thirty-Five Chapters and Counting: Highlights from Two Years of Troublemaking, 1994. 196 Figure 2.29. Carrie Moyer, The Lesbian Avengers: We Recruit, 1992. 196 Figure 2.30. Foxy Brown, 1974. 197 Figure 2.31. Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein, 1926/ 1991. 197 Figure 2.32. Man Ray, Jo Davidson and Gertrude Stein with Portrait Sculpture, 1926. 198 Figure 2.33. Carrie Moyer, A Rose is a Bomb is a Rose, 1993. 198 Figure 2.34. Carolina Kroon, Sarah Schulman Speaking at Alice B. Toklas Action, 1993. 199 xi Figure 2.35. Carolina Kroon, Thespian Avengers Reading Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly” at Alice B. Toklas Action, 1993. 199 Figure 3.1. Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin, Women En Large, 1994. 269 Figure 3.2. Laurie Toby Edison, April Miller, 1994. 269 Figure 3.3. Laurie Toby Edison, Debbie Notkin, 1994. 270 Figure 3.4. Phoenix Featherwomon, Portrait of Harvest Brown, Cover of Lesbian Connection 20:1, July/ August 1997. 270 Figure 3.5. Phoenix Featherwomon, Portrait of Harvest Brown, 1997. 271 Figure 3.6. Diana Lee, Solstice III, Cover of Lesbian Connection 26:4, January/ February 2004. 271 Figure 3.7. Diana Lee, Solstice III, 2004. 272 Figure 3.8. Cover Image, Fat Girl: A Zine For Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, Issue #1, 1994. 272 Figure 3.9. Fat Girl: A Zine For Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, Issue #7, 1997. 273 Figure 3.10. Fat Girl: A Zine For Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, Issue #7, 1997. 273 Figure 3.11. Laura Johnston, Potty Training, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #4, 1995. 274 Figure 3.12. Laura Johnston, Potty Training, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #4, 1995. 274 Figure 3.13. Kitchen Slut Picnic, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #6, 1996. 275 Figure 3.14. Kitchen Slut Picnic, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #6, 1996. 275 Figure 3.15. Kitchen Slut Picnic, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #6, 1996. 276 Figures 3.16 ―Fat Girl Roundtable,‖ Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #1, 1994. 276 xii Figure 3.17. ―Fat Girl Roundtable,‖ Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #1, 1994. 276 Figure 3.18. ―Fat Girl Roundtable,‖ Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #1, 1994. 277 Figure 3.19. Laura Aguilar, In Sandy’s Room, 1989/ 1993. 278 Figure 3.20. Laura Aguilar, Three Eagles Flying, 1990. 278 Figure 3.21. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #1, 1996. 279 Figure 3.22. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #4, 1996. 279 Figure 3.23. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #5, 1996. 280 Figure 3.24. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #6, 1996. 280 Figure 3.25. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #9, 1996. 281 Figure 3.26. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #12, 1996. 281 Figure 3.27. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #13, 1996. 282 Figure 3.28. Laura Aguilar, Stillness #15, 1999. 282 Figure 3.29. Laura Aguilar, Stillness #18, 1999. 283 Figure 3.30. Laura Aguilar, Motion #55, 1999. 283 Figure 3.31. Laura Aguilar, Motion #56, 1999. 284 Figure 3.32. Laura Aguilar, Motion #53, 1999. 284 Figure 3.33. Laura Aguilar, Motion #58, 1999. 285 Figure 3.34. Kina Williams, Big Burlesque Dancers, n.d. 285 Figure 3.35. Kina Williams, Big Burlesque, n.d. 286 Figure 3.36. Kina Williams, Heather McAllister as Reva Lucian of Big Burlesque, c.2005-2007. 286 Figure 3.37. Kina Williams, Heather McAllister as Reva Lucian of Big Burlesque, c.2005-2007. 287 xiii Figure 3.38. Peter Stern, The Padded Lilies, 2001. 287 Figure 3.39. Peter Stern, The Padded Lilies, 2001. 288 Figure 3.40. Easy to Love, 1953. 288 Figure 3.41. Million Dollar Mermaid, 1952. 288 Figure 3.42. Les Toil, The Padded Lilies, 2003. 289 Figure 3.43. The Padded Lilies, n.d. 289 Figure 3.44. Peter Stern, The Padded Lilies, 2001. 290 Figure 4.1. Tee Corinne and Beverly Brown, Collaborative Self-Portraits, 1989. 308 Figure 4.2. Tee Corinne and Beverly Brown, Collaborative Self-Portraits, 1990. 308 Figure 4.3 Tee Corinne and Beverly Brown, Collaborative Self-Portraits, 2004. 308 Figure 4.4. Tee Corinne and Beverly Brown, Collaborative Self-Portraits, 2004. 308 Figure 4.5. Tee Corinne, H4_0864e, 2003-2005. 309 Figure 4.6. Tee Corinne, H5_1419d, 2003-2005. 309 Figure 4.7. Tee Corinne, J0_1461c, 2003-2005. 310 Figure 4.8. Tee Corinne, J12_1059c, 2003-2005. 310 Figure 4.9. Tee Corinne, G2_1381d, 2003-2005. 311 Figure 4.10. Tee Corinne, G8_0531h, 2003-2005. 311 Figure 4.11. Tee Corinne, J11_0008d, 2003-2005. 312 Figure 4.12. Tee Corinne, D1_0516n, 2003-2005. 312 Figure 4.13. Tee Corinne, F2_0511dd, 2003-2005. 313 Figure 4.14. Tee Corinne, F3_0514e, 2003-2005. 313 xiv Figure 4.15. Tee Corinne, F6_0515a, 2003-2005. 314 Figure 4.16. Tee Corinne, G10_0527d, 2003-2005. 314 Figure 4.17. Tee Corinne, L4_1047f, 2003-2005. 315 xv Abstract Envisioning Bodily Difference: Refiguring Fat and Lesbian Subjects in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, 1968-2009 focuses on both lesbian and fat subjects in multiple forms of visual representation over the past forty years in the United States. Nearly all of the individuals imaged in the representations discussed here are self- identified as lesbians and/or queer women. Many of them are fat as well. Many of the representations discussed here were produced within lesbian and fat subcultures, made by those who identify with these communities and who planned to circulate the images within the subculture, whether through journals or newsletters, books, or art galleries. Each set of creators and objects or experiences chosen to be discussed in the sub-sections of the three chapters and conclusion of the dissertation in some way help to negotiate the ways in which fat women and lesbians or queer women have been visualized in the past several decades. More broadly, each has contributed to the ways in which mainstream and/ or subcultural communities have reconceptualized norms about bodily comportment, gender, and sexual expression through visual representation. Along the historical timeline of this dissertation, beginning in 1968 and lasting through 2009, most of the subjects looked at here have been considered deviant or ―non-normative‖ (i.e., female, non-white, disabled, fat, and lesbian subjects) in large part because of body-based identities. Moreover, many have been seen as monstrous, excessive, and dangerous – to themselves and others – because their physical and discursive identities have violated the boundaries of the cultural taste of their time. Embracing these alleged slurs has been one way of xvi disempowering dominant cultural ideology about fatness as a sign of moral weakness, physical laziness and illness, and aesthetic debasement. The key visual works and texts analyzed here are taken from and contextualized within feminist, lesbian, queer, and fat art making and viewing practices, cultural theories, and activism performed since the late 1960s. Stemming from the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, incipient feminist, lesbian and gay, and fat liberation movements marked a historical shift in which groups previously seen as holding a minority status in United States culture began to define their own objectives for equal rights and desire for recognition as important contributors to American culture. Issues of visual representation and empowerment, as they intersect with multiple marginalized identities are addressed in this dissertation: How do lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual female sexualities come to be represented in visual media, including fine art and documentary photography, journals, and performance, and how has this changed since the late 1960s? What is the role of feminist art and politics in the visualization of sexuality and sexual subjects? How are ―non-normative‖ bodies used in such representations? What does the inclusion of lesbian and other female subjects in contemporary art and visual culture tell us about the politics of visibility in multiple forms of media? How and to whom do these varied visual media communicate resistance or conformity with heteronormative and/ or thin body ideals? What is the importance of the differences in meaning produced by the different media and circulation of such imagery and how does each communicate in medium-specific ways? 1 Introduction When people with stareable bodies […] enter into the public eye, when they no longer hide themselves or allow themselves to be hidden, the visual landscape enlarges. Their public presence can expand the range of bodies we expect to see and broaden the terrain where we expect to see such bodies. […] These encounters work to broaden collective expectations of who can and should be seen in the public sphere and help create a richer and more diverse human community. 1 In early May 2009, University of Michigan MFA student and photographer Kristin Kurzawa was preparing to open a gallery exhibition of her newest series of work, Femmes: Front and Center, at Ferndale, Michigan‘s Affirmations Pittmann-Puckett Art Gallery. The art gallery was an established space within the local lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community center, in which LGBT and queer-identified artists had shown their visual artwork since its opening in 1992. 2 Slated to open on May 15, 2009, the exhibit would feature Kurzawa‘s MFA project, a photographic series depicting femme-identified lesbians who had performed at a Drag King Conference in 2008. 3 While in the process of hanging the show six days before it was due to open, Kurzawa received an email from Maureen Jones, the social enrichment coordinator for the gallery, stating that the gallery planned to cancel Kurzawa‘s exhibition and opening party because, ―While we fully appreciate the beauty of queer femme performance portrayed in the collection, the images do not meet the agreed upon PG-13 or family friendly nature of 1 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 9 2 ―About Us: History,‖ Affirmations: People Building Community. Retrieved 25 March 2010, <http://www.goaffirmations.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_affirmations> 3 Jessica Carreras, ―Photos Deemed Too ‗Sexual‘ for Affirmations,‖ Between the Lines 1720, May 14, 2009. Retrieved 25 March 2010, <http://www.pridesource.com/print.html?article=35038> 2 our community gallery.‖ 4 Kurzawa was shocked at the cancellation, and had been given no inkling as to the possibility of such an act of censorship in the months prior to the opening of the show; she had had a written contract with the Affirmations gallery and an ongoing discussion with Jones about what images would be included in the show for several months prior to the hanging and planned opening. At no point had she been told her show might be in danger of cancellation. Journalist Jessica Carreras covered the ongoing story in Between the Lines, the local Ann Arbor, Michigan LGBT newspaper: ‗We had a show that's been booked for months. Everything was great and then I get this strange e-mail from Maureen Jones,‘ she said, adding that she found no written evidence in her contract or the Affirmations Web site detailing a ‗family- friendly‘ policy. ‗It's just absolutely fascinating to me that a gay and lesbian center can't support the work of a lesbian artist showing queer femmes dancing.‘ 5 Kurzawa‘s last point seems to be the crux of the issue here. What was it about Kurzawa‘s photographs of femme lesbians in various stages of performance that incited the gallery to consider the work to not be ―family friendly‖ in an LGBT community center space? According to Affirmation‘s director of communications and development, Michael Coleman, the photographs were too sexual, and ―the exhibit was a bit more focused on sexuality than what was desired.‖ 6 The gallery apparently wanted to post an exhibit that was aimed at a wider range of ages and types of viewers than Coleman believed was the case for Kurzawa‘s femme images. If this was the case, however, why did the gallery sign a contract with Kurzawa and lead her to expect to be able to hold her show up until six days before its opening? 4 Maureen Jones quoted in Carreras, ―Photos Deemed Too ‗Sexual‘ for Affirmations‖ 5 Kristin Kurzawa quoted in Carreras, ―Photos Deemed Too ‗Sexual‘ for Affirmations‖ 6 Michael Coleman quoted in Carreras, ―Photos Deemed Too ‗Sexual‘ for Affirmations‖ 3 Kurzawa‘s series, Femmes: Front and Center is composed of several photographs of femme-identified queer women who performed at the 2008 International Drag King Extravaganza (IDKE), in Columbus, Ohio (Figures I.1, I.2, I.3, and I.4). 7 Almost all of the images show women performing on a stage, wearing various costumes, including corsets, skirts, t-shirts, underwear, and bras. None of the performers is entirely nude, and only one is wearing pasties over her nipples, rather than a full bikini or bra top. In general, no one is wearing less clothing than one might expect to find at a beach or poolside on a warm, sunny day. Many of the women in the photographs are in the process of performing skits or burlesque dancing on the stage at IDKE. The burlesque performers are in various states of dress, and are shown actively parading around the stage, interacting with the audience, singing, talking, and dancing. The performers embody a range of body sizes and shapes, and there are several photographs that feature fat performers, unashamedly moving around, displaying their bulges and cellulite, shaking their bodies, and posing glamorously before Kurzawa‘s camera. In addition to the accusations of overt sexuality in Kurzawa‘s photographs, which the artist disputes in some articles about the gallery show cancellation, 8 the potentially contentious issue of the performers‘ body sizes has became a focus of the show‘s contestation as well. In the first article written about the exhibition‘s cancellation, 7 Kristin Kurzawa, Femmes: Front and Center, MFA Thesis. (School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, April 2009) 9 8 In Carreras‘ first article on the cancellation, ―Photos Deemed Too ‗Sexual‘ for Affirmations,‖ Kurzawa argues, ―These women have nothing to do with sex...they were having fun dancing. […] There was nothing sexual or sexy about it. It was sensual, but there was no sex. The problem is that they have flesh.‖ In a second article written by Carreras and also published in Between the Lines, the author writes, ―She sees her photos as sexual and beautiful, not dirty.‖ In these articles and the discussions by the community that followed the cancellation of Kurzawa‘s exhibit, the terms sexy, sexual, sensual, and sexuality are used as descriptors of Kurzawa‘s photographs quite a bit, but their meanings are often slippery and they are not used in the same way by each person describing the issue. 4 Kurzawa states, ―These women have nothing to do with sex...they were having fun dancing. […] There was nothing sexual or sexy about it. It was sensual, but there was no sex. The problem is that they have flesh.‖ 9 Indeed, in the written portion of Kurzawa‘s MFA project submitted to the University of Michigan‘s School of Art and Design, Kurzawa contends that in order for her project to be a success, to be true to the community she was photographing, she had to include fat women in the photographs: ―Body size was critical, as queer fat femmes are reviving the neo-burlesque movement.‖ 10 The women in Kurzawa‘s Femmes series embody a wide-range of body sizes and not one of them acts ashamed of or tries to hide her body in the photographs. Indeed, they flaunt their bodies as they take up space in their performances that also include a variety of gender expressions, clothing styles, hair-styles, and dance styles. Cookie Woolner, Bevin Branlandingham, and Zoe Femmetastica show off their glamorous fat and femme style, with a focus on their cleavage (Figure I.1); Ceci My Playmate turns around and show‘s off her ass, back, and thighs to the audience (Figure I.2); and Pidgeon Von Tramp holds up a measuring tape in the tips of her fingers that matches her bright green bra and panties, as if to dismiss the importance of the message the numbers printed on it convey (Figure I.4). After Carreras‘ first article on the exhibition cancellation, and her own editorial on the unfair treatment of Kurzawa and her artwork by the Affirmations gallery, letters to the editor of Between the Lines poured into the newspaper to challenge the gallery‘s 9 Kurzawa quoted in Carreras, ―Photos Deemed Too ‗Sexual‘ for Affirmations‖ 10 Kurzawa, Femmes: Front and Center 14 5 decision and encourage them to re-think the show‘s cancellation. A letter written by Larry Ault, a local reader, was published a week after the story first broke. It read, There was nothing ‗sexual‘ about the pictures displayed on the artist's Web site. I think there are two points that Jessica's [Carreras] article failed to consider (or perhaps she chose not to). Both are based upon the physical appearance of the subjects - not their clothing or the poses. Unfortunately, in the LGBT community, way too many people place far too much emphasis on physical ‗perfection.‘ Most of the subjects were very rubenesque. I wonder - had the subjects been svelte beauty queens, wearing the same outfits in the same poses - would the exhibit have been cancelled? Somehow, I don't think so. The so-called ‗leaders‘ of the LGBT Community tend to use pretty boys and beauty queens in any images promoting our community and our causes. News flash for them: there are a LOT of us that are plump, plain, or both. And we are a part of the community too. In fact, we make up a large portion of it. Maybe it's time they started recognizing our existence. 11 In bringing up the issue of fat, or as Ault calls them, ―rubenesque,‖ bodies, this letter points to the issue of ―having flesh‖ that Kurzawa cited earlier. That an LGBT community center gallery would censor images of women because of their body size and the exposure of their fatness in skimpy clothing points to an example of one historically oppressed community, LGBT people, participating in the oppression of another historically oppressed group, fat people. For body size and shape to affect an art exhibit‘s chances of being shown smacks of censorship due to culturally-ingrained thin body ideal norms. Whether or not this was the actual (or subconscious) reason behind the Affirmations gallery‘s initial cancellation of Kurzawa‘s exhibition matters less than the fact that multiple people cited this as a possibility. This shows that there was at least some level of sensitivity to the body sizes of the photographs‘ subjects by its viewers. While Kurzawa‘s exhibit was eventually staged by the gallery at the end of May 2009, 11 Larry Ault, ―Letters to the Editor,‖ Between the Lines (1721), May 21, 2009. Retrieved 25 March 2010, <http://www.pridesource.com/print.html?article=35156>; emphasis original. 6 largely due to the community support Kurzawa and the show received based on the Between the Lines articles and letters, the notion of body size as a reason for the cancellation still remained attached to the exhibition, in addition to the issue of sexualized gender expressions of the lesbian femmes pictured in the images. 12 This recent turn of events in Michigan gives insight into, and underlines the need for, an exploration of the ways in which visual representations of fat and lesbian subjects have been represented in contemporary art and visual culture. This dissertation focuses on both lesbian and fat subjects in multiple forms of visual representation over the past forty years in the United States. Nearly all of the individuals imaged in the representations discussed here are self-identified as lesbians and/or queer women. 13 Many of them are fat as well. There are instances when the individuals discussed here are one or the other, and a few are neither. Many of the representations discussed here were produced within lesbian and fat subcultures, made by 12 In Jessica Carreras‘ last article on the cancellation and re-staging of Kurzawa‘s show at Affirmations, the author describes the photographs featured as ―including some that showed rubenesque women in as little as their undergarments, or even a thong.‖ Before Kurzawa‘s and Ault‘s suggestions of censorship due to the photographic subjects‘ fatness, Carreras had not mentioned the physical appearance of the subjects beyond their status as performers in skimpy clothing. 13 ―Queer‖ here refers to a self-chosen identification that might or might not include lesbian identity within it. Women who consider themselves lesbian typically have some kind of emotional and/or sexual relationships with other women, whereas queer women might have emotional and/or sexual relationships with women, with cis-gender men, and/or with transgender men. In addition, women who identify as queer often have a different political motive for the term based in an understanding of the intersectional nature of identity formation. In his 1991essay, ―Fear of a Queer Planet,‖ Michael Warner wrote, ―Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is intricate with gender, with the family, with notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body. […] Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded by now in an indescribably wide range of social institutions, and is embedded in the most standard accounts of the world, queer struggles aim not just at toleration or equal status but at challenging those institutions and accounts.‖ Michael Warner, ―Fear of a Queer Planet,‖ Social Text 29 (1991) 6. An individual‘s choice of terms is also necessarily historically and culturally contingent. The term cis-gender refers to individuals whose gender identity remains true to their assigned gender. 7 those who identify with these communities and who planned to circulate the images within the subculture, whether through journals or newsletters, books, or art galleries. 14 Each set of creators and objects or experiences chosen to be discussed in the sub-sections of the three chapters and conclusion of the dissertation in some way help to negotiate the ways in which fat women and lesbians or queer women have been visualized in the past several decades. More broadly, each has contributed to the ways in which mainstream and/ or subcultural communities have reconceptualized norms about bodily comportment, gender, and sexual expression through visual representation. One of the dominant themes of this dissertation is the consideration of the rhetoric of in/visibility within mainstream and subcultural communities. Visibility and invisibility are never totalizing concepts; they rely upon and work off of each other within both mainstream and subcultural politics and visual representation. What is particularly important is connecting the issues surrounding visibility with those of accessing and holding actual social, cultural, political, and economic power by marginalized communities. The relationship between visibility and power is a complex one. While social movements throughout the twentieth century have associated visibility with greater freedom and mobility, since the mid-1970s visibility has been extensively critiqued as a primary mode of institutionalized power and discipline. Yet individuals and groups engaged in subcultural productions of the self have rarely preferred invisibility. Visibility and invisibility are produced or destroyed in the physical and conceptual interactions between the sight of one subject and the corporeality of another; in other words, it is 14 This is not the case for every set of objects analyzed here, but subcultural production and circulation of lesbian and fat images do dominate this dissertation. The specific ways in which the visual representations discussed here have been circulated, and thus who their expected audiences were, are discussed relative to each set of objects and/or experiences. 8 through this relationship that bodily and social identity is realized, marked, and/or dismissed. How does the gaze define identity on the body? How are some identities made more readily visible than others? What does this say about how we see and how we construct the materiality of the body both as subject and as object? What we consider as visible is often made to be an index of invisible values, characteristics, or assumptions. How do representations of human bodies heighten or de-emphasize the visibility of individuals, communities, and their identities? These questions provide the framework for interrogating how invisibility and visibility has been conceptualized and critiqued, and how it may be explored in visual representations of the body. Empowerment through visible presence has been a primary mode of socio- political organizing in the United States since early in the twentieth century. The extensive use of marches of large numbers of individuals is just one way of visualizing a need for equal and civil rights. Slogans such as ―Black is Beautiful,‖ and ―We‘re Here, We‘re Queer, Get Used to It,‖ bring public attention to the visibility, and attached politics, of underrepresented subcultures. While often this approach has had measurable positive consequences, it might seem as if it has better provided a method of in-group unification (or, the recognition that one is not alone in her socio-political struggles), than fostered legitimacy within dominant culture for the racialized, gendered, and sexualized subcultures that have used it. As has been suggested by Michel Foucault, visibility, in fact, might be a trap. 15 It could seem that to be visible is to expose ourselves to surveillance, violence, and other oppressive technologies that allow those in power to police subcultures. Here I want to think about how both visibility and invisibility can be 15 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans., Alan Sheridan. (New York: Vintage Books, 1977/ 1995) 200 9 ―traps,‖ as well as productive endeavors. 16 Though hegemonic power seems complete and unending, using the subject herself to enact and enforce its dominance, there are locations spread across the power grid that can challenge this force. While these sites are fractured, never permanent, and always already anticipated by the power source, they do provide moments of opposition that can disarticulate visualization as a mode of policing bodies, opening visibility up to subculturally-productive expressions of identity. Rather than thinking of the visibility of bodies as always and only a trap, we can see it as possibly useful for self- and group- pronouncements of identities; in conjunction, we might be able to see how invisibility, at times, is also a productive mode of subcultural investment. Contemporary visualization of so-called non-normative bodily identities can work as sites through which the engagement of visibility and invisibility are played out, reworked, and made to appear and disappear, providing examples of the dialectical relationship of power and resistance that Foucault explains. Along the historical timeline of this dissertation, beginning in 1968 and lasting through 2009, most of the subjects looked at here have been considered deviant or ―non- 16 In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault points to the mode of vision as the source from which most power comes and is distributed. In describing the panoptic prison as a location in which inmates are always aware of their visibility even as the guards literally cannot be seen to enforce it, Foucault sets up a map onto which we can construct a formative understanding of the power relations between hegemonic norms and subcultural embodiments. Foucault writes, ―He [sic] who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.‖ In being visible, we respond to the dominant force in the structure of power and self-regulate according to our perception of that force; no acknowledgement by the dominant party needs to occur for self-regulation to proceed. Power is not consolidated in a singular body, but spread out amongst all bodies that self-police based on their own self- judged perceptibility. These are the processes that Foucault warns against (though he would say they are unavoidable) when writing that ―visibility is a trap.‖ Foucault, History of Sexuality 202-203 10 normative‖ in large part because of body-based identities. 17 The concept of beauty is ever-shifting, as well as historically and culturally-contingent; over the past four decades there have been various personal and corporate campaigns to widen the notion of conventional beauty as applicable to a larger number of individuals not traditionally included within the concept of beautiful. Often conceptualized as ―true‖ beauty, ―inner‖ beauty, and ―real‖ beauty, such approaches assume that fat people, lesbians, people with disabilities, people of color, and other marginalized individuals inherently desire to be a part of mainstream beliefs about the power that those deemed beautiful are given by the dominant socio-cultural structure. This is sometimes the case, no doubt, but it is not the only method of physical and visual representation used by marginalized communities and individuals since the 1950s and 60s in the U.S. Instead, some people and groups have advocated for a rejection of the conventional notion of beauty, which is also often associated with impossible body standards that don‘t appeal or apply to all individuals. Moreover, many ―non-normative‖ people have been seen as monstrous, excessive, and dangerous – to themselves and others – because their physical and discursive identities have violated the boundaries of the cultural taste of their time. Embracing these alleged slurs has been one way of disempowering dominant cultural ideology about fatness as a sign of moral weakness, physical laziness and illness, and aesthetic debasement. The same is true of other marginalized identities; indeed, the term queer, as well as others such as dyke and fag for lesbian and queer individuals, and gimp and crip, for people 17 By ―non-normative,‖ I mean those identities that do not correspond to hegemonic Western and U.S. norms about the body and identity. These norms tend to center upon white, heterosexual, thin, able-bodied, and middle-class subjects and the U.S. culture has come to generally accept the rejection of people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals, people with disabilities, poor and working class people, and fat people from the dominant social order. Subjects who embody one or more of these identities are often seen as outsiders, living on the margins of U.S. culture. 11 with disabilities, have been reclaimed and re-framed by many of the individuals they seek to interpolate as a way in which to empty them of their hurtful meanings and challenge normative language descriptors. In 1977 Bertha Harris published an essay, ―What We Mean to Say: Notes toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,‖ in the Lesbian Art and Artists issue of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. In it she argued that lesbians were at their most artistically and politically effective when they were ―monstrous.‖ 18 According to Harris, the lesbian was the epitome of the ―non-normative‖ other. In patriarchal culture, Harris contended, monsters were ―emblems of feeling‖ that battle against the order imposed upon the world by ―phallic materialism.‖ 19 Because women go through several reproductive stages in their lives, with accompanying physical changes, women were already often seen as a changeable ―other‖ divorced from the ―consistency‖ of men. Moreover, Harris suggested that rather than essentializing women as inherently unstable and ―natural‖ in a negative way, such perpetual bodily mutation signaled a kind of magical power that was ―the genesis of all fear; the stuff of all mythic and fictive exaggeration.‖ 20 One way in which masculine culture had attempted to deal with such danger was by writing monstrous lesbian figures into their texts. Harris characterized the monster literature of the past several centuries as working to embody the ―extreme fear that those who have been tricked of power are conspiring to regain it – and will – and that 18 Bertha Harris, ―What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3 (Fall 1977) 6 19 Harris 6 20 Harris 7 12 artificial restraints on the wild (such as marriage) are collapsing.‖ 21 This was due to the fact that monsters and lesbians, as with criminals and heroes, have several traits in common: an ability to make a life outside the social norm that seems both enviable and frightening to those inside; […] marks of difference that are physically manifested and both horrify and thrill; a desire to avenge its own (and sometimes others) outcast misery: through destruction or through forcing a change in the world that will admit it and its kind; [and] an ability to seduce and tempt others into its ‗evil‘ ways. 22 In dominant culture, such traits were considered problematic at best, and criminal and/ or pathological at worse. Thus, when Harris urged lesbians to embrace the monstrous body and its accompanying attributes, she fostered a subversion of patriarchal codes of acceptable behaviors and attitudes and posited dangerous, monstrous lesbians as the forerunners of a reconceptualized social structure that would redefine physical, emotional, and intellectual social standards and policies. What is most striking here is the desire for a self-conscious placement of this monstrous identity onto oneself. In her article, Harris suggested that lesbians take on the identity of the monster in order to fully become ―awesome, dangerous, outrageous, [and] different,‖ to ―distinguish‖ themselves from heteronormative and sexist artistic cultures. 23 The images that accompanied Harris‘ essay work to illustrate the variety of forms, specifically female/ feminized, monsters had taken in visual and textual arts from the sixteenth through the twentieth century, and included the Queen of the Gypsies, a two- 21 Harris 7 22 Harris 7 23 Harris 8 13 headed monster, the lion-headed Barbara Urselin, and Wonder Woman (Figures I.5, I.6, I.7, and I.8). 24 This cast of characters populated Harris‘ article to lend humor and power to Harris‘ argument that lesbians should take advantage of their ―heritage‖ as monstrous beings that subvert the dominant paradigm during much of Western history. Several contemporary scholars and activists have taken up the potential productivity of excess as ―a radical alternative to overdetermined structures of social, cultural, and political meaning,‖ as literary historian Jana Evans Braziel and media scholar Kathleen LeBesco write in their introduction to the special edition of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory devoted to the theme of excess. 25 Simultaneously acknowledging theoretical analyses of excess and calling for more specific explorations of the ways in which embodied and performed acts of excess have unfolded in music, the media, literature, and visual arts since the early twentieth-century, Braziel and LeBesco focus this issue of Women & Performance on the fluctuating meanings of excessive bodies and their representations in relation to the cultural inscriptions of bodily normativity. They describe bodies as ―sites of cultural negotiation‖ that are ―manifold, contradictory, and metastable.‖ 26 It is with an interest in how these pluralistic and fractured meanings of excess, monstrosity, and danger are represented and interpreted in contemporary visual media featuring fat and lesbian subjects that I undertake the dissertation project. 24 Harris 5-8 25 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, ―Introduction: Performing Excess,‖ Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (Issue 30, 15:2, 2005) 9-10 26 Braziel and LeBesco 11 14 Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin surveyed ―offbeat and naked‖ bodies in visual representations in a short essay of the same title in 1999; she insisted that bodies of all types, but especially those that are ―offbeat, the ugly, the other, the excessive,‖ be looked at carefully for scholarly pleasure and analysis in relation to contemporary art production: Today we are seeing a major revival of the nude, or rather the naked. But many of the best pictures of the naked body today depend on that ideal prototype lingering in the back of the mind of the public. […] There is no question that the offbeat nude of today can be shocking. […] The nude remains a highly charged subject. 27 As Nochlin describes, the ―non-normative‖ body (nude or clothed) can tell us much about how it is constructed, both visually and socially, in comparison with the ideal body featured in various guises in art for centuries. A dissertation in the discipline of art history provides a fitting setting, then, for the examination of visual representations of bodies that might not conform to the ideal. These marginalized bodies and representations allow for a close analysis of how the art making and viewing circumstances and audiences of ―non-normative‖ imagery can contribute significantly to the meanings of such visual representations. 28 This dissertation will investigate some of the ways in which fat and lesbian subjects have used their marginalized positions productively, to challenge, renegotiate, and remake visual imagery and discourse about their bodies and identities within specific subcultures as well as within the broader mainstream realm. These representations take 27 Linda Nochlin, ―Offbeat and Naked.‖ ArtNet.com, November 5, 1999, Retrieved 12 February 2007, <http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/nochlin/nochlin11-5-99.asp> 28 On visual representations, queer theorist J. Jack Halberstam writes, ―If straightness (masculinity in particular) is associated with minimalism, then excess (of form, color, or content) becomes the signification of the feminine, the queer, and the monstrous.‖ Judith Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. (New York: New York University Press, 2005) 121 15 the form of fine art photography, political performances, images reproduced and circulated in journals and zines, digital imagery, drawings, coloring books, theatre, and burlesque performances produced in the United States. Richard Meyer, in an essay on the potential expansiveness of the area of American art history, asserts that this particular field of study allows for greater attention to be placed on non-canonical art and visual culture, because Americanists are ―more willing to attend closely to popular images and material culture than their colleagues in other art historical fields.‖ 29 He goes on to argue that intersectional work in the field lends itself particularly well to looking beyond the borders of the canon of art history for its objects of study; more specifically, an exploration of feminist and queer theory and art-making practices demand[s] that art historians move beyond an analysis of paintings, sculptures, and photographs in museum or gallery settings to look at private, underground, or otherwise restricted images, at illicit and pornographic imagery, at popular stereotypes and satires, and at subcultural productions and performances. Writing sexuality into the history of art thus means redrawing the boundaries of what counts both as art and as history. 30 Some of the work examined in this dissertation can comfortably fit within the conventional realm of visual art, such as Tee Corinne‘s or Laura Aguilar‘s photographs, while other examples are situated in the wider field of visual culture, including experiential events such as the New York Radical Women‘s 1968 Miss America pageant protest and the 1993 Lesbian Avenger‘s Valentine‘s Day celebration of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and mass-produced journals such as Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and Lesbian Connection. Distinctions are made between 29 Richard Meyer, ―Mind the Gap: Americanists, Modernists, and the Boundaries of Twentieth-Century Art,‖ American Art 18:3 (Autumn 2004) 4 30 Meyer, ―Mind the Gap: Americanists, Modernists, and the Boundaries of Twentieth-Century Art‖ 4-5 16 the objects and events discussed here not in terms of their standing in an aesthetic hierarchy or in quality, but in terms of historical meaning, audience, accessibility, and the goals of its producers. Intersectional subcultural work also calls for the situating of the author within her project. My interest in exploring the ways in which fat and lesbian subjects represent themselves in contemporary art and visual culture comes directly from my own experience as a fat and lesbian student of art history and visual culture living in the current moment. Rather than constraining my abilities to ―objectively‖ 31 evaluate the material covered in this dissertation, however, my participation in both lesbian and fat communities provokes me to treat these visual representations with care as to allow them to speak for themselves as much as possible. Each and every individual has an investment in certain identities and communities more than others, even if we are unwilling or unable to articulate it as such. By being open about my own personal and temporal investment in this project, I hope to convey the importance of historical and cultural specificity in examining marginalized communities that have amassed during my own lifetime. Queer theorist J. Jack Halberstam contends that in studying queer subcultures, ―we need to rethink the relation between theorist and subcultural participant, recognizing that for many queers, the boundary between theorist and subcultural producers might be slight or at least permeable.‖ 32 Similarly, feminist projects in resituating the very notion of 31 Feminists have historically contested the notion of objectivity as a patriarchal and universalizing notion that distances the subject from the object of study and disembodies the observing gaze of the researcher (i.e. Cartesian dualism). Over the past several decades, however, few feminists have agreed upon a particular way in which to theorize a feminist notion of objectivity; the theories that have been put forth change with the popular methods of research at any given historical moment. 32 Judith Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. (New York: New York University Press, 2005) 161-162 17 objectivity tell us that ―only partial perspective promises objective vision. […] Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.‖ 33 Why Fat and Lesbian Subjects? In ―Offbeat and Naked,‖ Nochlin argued that the some of the most compelling artwork being created at the turn of the twenty-first century was that of transgressive naked figural works by artists that visualized bodies once deemed grotesque and monstrous. 34 Significantly, Nochlin wrote, Fat is in and it is sensational. Maybe it's because of the emphasis on thinness in our social practice and the predominance of the superwaif model in Vogue, but transgression often means FLESH in contemporary sculpture, painting and photography. 35 Nochlin singles out Laura Aguilar as one photographer who has been able to revision the fleshy fat female body in a way such that aesthetics connects with politics to give voice to 33 Donna Haraway, ―Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,‖ Feminist Studies 14:3 (Autumn 1988) 583. I find Haraway‘s theory of feminist objectivity especially compelling for this project, because in describing it she simultaneously prioritizes vision and embodiment. While Haraway specifically speaks of scientific analysis here, her theory can easily be extended to the fields represented in the humanities as well: ―I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been use d to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word ‗objectivity‘ to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominated societies, that is here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s [and 2000s]. I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges.‖ Haraway 581; emphasis original 34 Linda Nochlin, ―Offbeat and Naked,‖ Artnet.com (November 1999). Retrieved 14 September 2009, <http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/FEATURES/nochlin/nochlin11-5-99.asp> 35 Nochlin, ―Offbeat and Naked‖; emphasis original. 18 a conventionally silenced population. This dissertation will extend the exploration of the fat female body in visual representations back to at least 1968, and forward well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, which sees an even greater proliferation of positive and negative imagery of fat bodies. Fat bodies lie upon the line of in/visibility, metaphorically as well as materially, in ways both similar and different from other dangerous bodies. One important recurring trope in contemporary visual media is the phenomenon of the ―headless fatty,‖ 36 an image of a fat individual usually shown as a static or walking torso, highlighting the belly, thighs, and buttocks, all parts of the body ―notorious‖ for fat rolls and bulges (see Figures I.9 and I.10). The heads, and thus brains and mouths, of the individuals who become ―headless fatties‖ in the media are nowhere to be found. As we have learned from analyses of the fractured female body in media representations of women, these kinds of images deny full subjectivity to the fat individuals pictured therein; 37 instead, these representations suggest that fat people can be broken down into their constituent (fat) parts, and don‘t require or deserve to be seen as fully-functioning subjects who signify beyond their role in an alleged ―obesity epidemic.‖ Headless fatties‘ anonymous figures stand in for fat bodies everywhere, and explicitly present the ways in which discourses about fatness have shaped how we as a society tend to see, interpret, and interpolate fat 36 This term has been coined and popularized by Charlotte Cooper. Charlotte Cooper, ―Headless Fatties,‖ CharlotteCooper.net, January 2007. Retrieved 27 January 2008, <http://charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm> 37 See Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York: Doubleday Books, 1991); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994/2004); Jean Kilbourne, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (New York: Touchstone, 1999). 19 individuals in United States and Euro-centric culture. As fat activist and writer Charlotte Cooper argues, we are presented as objects, as symbols, as a collective problem, as something to be talked about. Unless we play the game and parrot oppressive, self-hating, medicalized views about fat, fat people's own voices, feelings, thoughts and opinions about what it is to be fat are entirely absent from the discourse. Because of this, we are currently unable to capitalize on the allure a fat body holds to viewers and readers, and this will probably continue as long as we are disenfranchised beings. 38 Cooper‘s assessment of the oppression of fat individuals focuses on a theme that will be explored here: that of the allure of the fat body. This notion is a complex sentiment that parallels the exponential proliferation of headless fatties and other similar visual idioms of fatness as a signifier of danger and immorality. Desire for and fear of the fat body work hand-in-hand here. Allure for what is ―unknown,‖ or in the case of fat/ fatness more likely ―uncomfortable,‖ plays on our contradictory desire to experience and see that which is novel and to reject it as ―other.‖ As a culture we have been taught for more than one hundred years to vilify the fat body and that which fat represents. 39 This cultural assertion, however, does not erase all desire of and interest in fat/ fatness. Rather, it works to create a negative identity around such subjects, as it has with other ―repulsive‖ identities (i.e. LGBT people, people of color, people with disabilities). Western culture has normalized the self/ other dichotomy precisely to stabilize a sense of the self as 38 Charlotte Cooper, ―Headless Fatties‖ 39 Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat. (New York: Anchor Books, 1986) 88-90; Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. (New York: New York University Press, 1997/ 2002) 3-21. Also see Laura Kipnis, ―Life in the Fat Lane,‖ Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. (New York: Grove Press, 1996) 94: ―Given the vast quantities of energy and resources devoted to annihilating it, and, in turn, making life miserable for those who are unfortunate enough to bear the humiliation of its exposure, fat might be considered not just an obsessive focus, but perhaps the crux of contemporary American culture. The mission of all this cultural energy? To assure fat‘s invisibility and exterminate it from public view.‖ 20 coherent and ordinary in contrast to that and those which are unruly and extraordinary, whether in terms of body size, bodily abilities, and/or sexual identities. 40 Such cultural teachings are insidious, and affect all aspects of our lives, whether or not we are aware of their infiltration. But they do not prevent subcultural manifestations of fat pride, size- acceptance, self-love, and any other forms of anti-oppression social justice work created by activists, artists, and writers. Indeed, even as the negative imagery of fat individuals has expanded over the past forty years in mainstream distribution channels, fat-positive imagery has come to the fore within many feminist and lesbian venues during this same time frame. The Flourishing of Feminist, Lesbian and Gay, and Fat Empowerment Movements in the Late 1960s The key visual works and texts analyzed here will be taken from and contextualized within feminist, lesbian, queer, and fat art making and viewing practices, cultural theories, and activism performed since the late 1960s. This starting point was chosen because of its historical momentousness for feminist, gay and lesbian, and fat 40 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Garland Thomson writes, ―[T]he meanings attributed to extraordinary bodies reside not in inherent physical flaws, but in social relationships in which one group is legitimated by possessing valued physical characteristics and maintains its ascendancy and its self-identity by systematically imposing the role of cultural or corporeal inferiority on others. Representation thus simultaneously buttresses an embodied version of normative identity and shapes a narrative of corporeal difference that excludes those whose bodies or behaviors do not conform. […] the disabled figure operates as the vividly embodied, stigmatized other whose social role is to symbolically free the privileged, idealized figure of the American self from the vagaries and vulnerabilities of embodiment.‖ 7. In discussing the mutual constitution of heterosexuality and homosexuality, Richard Meyer writes, ―[H]eterosexuality carries homosexuality within it – as a fantasy of transgression, as an image of alterity, as a possibility at once desired and disavowed. […] [Homosexuality is] a site of both anxiety and fascination for the dominant culture. […] Homosexuality is thus conceived not simply as an identity that is ‗owned‘ by gay people but as a site of sexual and symbolic power that is under continual dispute, both by those who identify themselves as gay or lesbian and by those who do not.‖ Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 17-19 21 empowerment movements in the United States. Stemming from the Civil Rights movement to end discrimination against people of color during the 1950s and 1960s, incipient feminist, lesbian and gay, and fat liberation movements came to the fore during a historical moment in which groups previously seen as holding a minority status in United States culture began to define their own objectives for equal rights and exhibit a desire for recognition as important contributors to American culture. Each of the three groups examined here had their origins in activism performed prior to 1968, but the years of 1968 and 1969 marked important dates in which each community ―came out‖ on a national scale. While the National Organization of Women (NOW) was created in 1966 in the United States in order to ―to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men,‖ by Betty Friedan and several other (primarily white) women, it did not put much of a visual ―stamp‖ on the Second Wave feminist movement. 41 Even though NOW sought to change the ways in which women were regarded and how they could take part in society, particularly in an American context, they were formed in large part around a liberal feminist philosophy. This mode of feminism sought equality with men, particularly in employment environments, such 41 ―The National Organization for Women‘s 1966 Statement of Purpose,‖ NOW.org. Retrieved 31 March 2010, <http://www.now.org/history/purpos66.html>. While a few of the founding members of NOW were women of color, and the 1966 Statement of Purpose mentioned the ―double discrimination of race and sex‖ experienced by women of color, NOW and several other Second Wave feminist organizations became known for universalizing the goals of feminism based on the needs or desires of middle to upper-class white women. In describing the origins of the Black Feminist movement in 1977, the Combahee River Collective wrote, ―Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation.‖ Combahee River Collective, ―A Black Feminist Statement‖ (1977). Retrieved 31 March 2010, <http://www.feministezine.com/feminist/modern/Black-Feminist- Statement.html> 22 that women would be eligible for the same jobs men were and would be paid the same wages as men. 42 Theirs was a strategy of integrating women into the cultural system already in place, so that they would eventually be able to achieve their goals on the same level of men. In contrast, radical feminism sought to break down existing social structures that supported patriarchal culture and then reformulate them in order to ensure that sexism and gender disparity was no longer systemically built into social institutions. Radical feminists brought to light the argument that ―the personal is political,‖ and that the personal and political both needed to be addressed in order to attempt changes in discriminatory actions and policies. 43 Despite the fact that many lesbians were part of the founding of the women‘s movement and its feminist organizations, such as the National Organization of Women (NOW), many straight feminists feared the implications of covert and open lesbianism in their ranks, thus forcing silence on those who wanted to remain in these organizations and prompting others to leave and form new factions. Indeed, Betty Friedan herself described lesbians involved in feminist politics as a ―lavender menace‖ that would prevent feminism from achieving its goals. Friedan‘s open 42 NOW was initially founded in direct response to the lack of work toward the end of gender discrimination in the workforce promised by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was formed in 1965 to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 43 Alice Echols writes, ―Radical feminists argued that women constituted a sex-class, that relations between women and men needed to be recast in political terms, and that gender rather than class was the primary contradiction. They criticized liberal feminists for pursuing ‗formal equality within a racist, class-stratified system,‘ and for refusing to acknowledge that women‘s inequality in the public domain was related to their subordination in the family. Radical feminists articulated the earliest and most provocative critiques of the family, marriage, love, normative heterosexuality, and rape. They fought for safe, effective, accessible contraception; the repeal of all abortion laws; the creation of high-quality, community-controlled child-care centers; and an end to the media‘s objectification of women.‖ Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 2-3 23 expression of homophobia prompted several members of NOW to leave and form the Lavender Menace in 1970, a group that would soon become the Radicalesbians. 44 In September 1968 the group New York Radical Women staged a political protest against the Miss America competition in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This event would become central in the history of Second Wave Feminism, or Women‘s Liberation, as the first time in which the United States as a nation came face-to-face with feminism on a grand scale. Conducted as a day-long theatrical event including performance skits, posters, giant ―dolls,‖ and ―freedom trash cans‖ as depositories for the repressive accoutrements of femininity, the 1968 Miss America protest was the core event that launched the notion of feminists as ―bra burners,‖ as unattractive, un-feminine, ―man haters‖ in U.S. culture and media, a characterization that remains in the public imagination to this day. This protest, and its repercussions, in terms of visual representations and media circulation of the meaning(s) of ―feminism,‖ will be discussed at length in the first chapter of this dissertation. The 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City are by now legendary in the history of LGBT and queer activism. While homophile activism had been taking place for at least two to three decades before 1969, the Stonewall Riots became the inciting event in a restructuring of the way in which the emerging gay and lesbian empowerment movement was seen by both its participants and the mainstream culture. 45 On June 27, 44 Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman, Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America. (Penguin Studio: New York, 1998) 180-184 45 See John D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983/ 1998) and Marcia Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006). Literally meaning ―love of the same,‖ the term homophile is discussed in its historical context in chapter one. 24 1969, police conducted a raid on the Greenwich Village bar, the Stonewall Inn, where a number of young people of color, drag queens, gays, and lesbians were enjoying a night out. The bar was a typical target for the New York City police because ―operating without a liquor license, reputed to have ties with organized crime, and offering scantily clad go-go boys as entertainment, it brought an ‗unruly‘ element to Sheridan Square.‖ 46 That night the patrons responded to the raid with anger, shouting, struggling, throwing things at the police, and setting the bar on fire with some members of the police force still inside. 47 The next two nights saw increased rioting as larger groups of drag queens, gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals came together to demonstrate their anger and exhaustion with being treated as second-class citizens by the New York City police department and other homophobic government and business organizations. On the second night of rioting at least 2,000 people protested, and the media began to take heed of ―the first gay riot in history.‖ 48 Soon after these events, groups such as the Gay Liberation Front began to form as a proactive response to the violence and unfair treatment sexual minorities had been receiving. These groups helped to coagulate a radical movement seeking to end discrimination and foster recognition and equality of gays and lesbians (and eventually other sexual minorities) in the United States. 49 1969 also saw the creation of a new group that began to combat fatphobia in United States culture. The National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA) was created by William Fabrey as a political organization through which to campaign for civil 46 D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 231 47 D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 231-232 48 D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 232-233 49 Whether or not this came to fruition is an argument I won‘t engage in here. 25 rights protections for people of all sizes. 50 NAAFA‘s name has changed since 1969 to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, but the organization remains the largest in the United States concerned with advocating to end size discrimination on local, state, and national levels, with both a national board and hundreds of local chapters around the country. 51 NAAFA‘s mission is ―to eliminate discrimination based on body size and provide fat people with the tools for self-empowerment though public education, advocacy, and support.‖ 52 NAAFA continues today to function as a liberal humanist organization seeking to challenge weight discrimination within the socio-political structure of U.S. culture. Inspired by the formation of NAAFA the year before, in 1970 Llewellyn Louderback wrote Fat Power: Whatever You Weigh is Right, a book that described in detail the humiliation faced by fat people in American society on a daily basis in order to expose fat individuals as an oppressed and disenfranchised minority in the United States. 53 Louderback‘s book was one of the first of its kind on fat acceptance. In it, Louderback urged ―a touch of militancy‖ on the part of fat people in fostering one‘s self- esteem and encouraging individual and group rebellion in order to challenge the social norms that rendered fat individuals as unworthy of civil rights, as aesthetically 50 Charlotte Cooper, Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size. (London: The Women‘s Press, 1998) 130-131 51 For more details on NAAFA‘s goals and practices, see ―About NAAFA: Our Mission,‖ NAAFA.org. Retrieved 25 March 2010, <http://www.naafaonline.com/dev2/about/index.html> 52 National Association to Advance Size Acceptance, ―About NAAFA: Our Mission‖ (Retrieved 30 June 2009 <http://www.naafaonline.com/dev2/about/index.html>) 53 Llewellyn Louderback, Fat Power: Whatever You Weigh is Right. (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1970) 26 problematic, and as morally dangerous. 54 In addition to Louderback‘s reimagined response to fatphobia, several more radical organizations were formed out of NAAFA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the predominantly lesbian feminist group The Fat Underground. Coming from the already-established Radical Feminist Therapy Collective, the Fat Underground sprang from a Los Angeles chapter of NAAFA that had been formed in 1969-1970, having been inspired by Louderback‘s Fat Power. 55 Aldebaran and Judy Freespirit, two lesbian feminist activists created the Los Angeles chapter as a way to advance radical fat politics from a radical feminist perspective so as to enact collective empowerment and social change. 56 In 1973 the national board of NAAFA asked the members of the chapter to ―tone down‖ their work and ―be more circumspect‖ about the centrality of feminism in their philosophy of fat pride and size acceptance. 57 Unwilling to do so, Freespirit, Aldebaran and approximately five other lesbian feminists broke off from NAAFA and established the Fat Underground, a deeply radical organization that would come to have enormous influence on fat empowerment 54 Louderback viii; Louderback contended that the rampant fatphobia perpetrated across the U.S. is built into the myth of the American Dream, in which anyone can achieve social and economic success in the United States based on their own willingness to work hard and exercise their willpower to achieve their success. He wrote that fat Americans are seen negatively ―because the fat man (or woman) is an insult to the American philosophy of unlimited achievement. He (or she) is living, visible proof that homo americanus is not lord of the earth, that what he wants he cannot always get by energy and intelligence. And because he has given the lie to the American Dream, the overweight individual must be punished for it.‖ Louderback 25 55 Cooper, Fat and Proud 133 56 Cooper, Fat and Proud 133 and Sara Golda Bracha Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground,‖ originally published in Radiance: The Magazine for Large Women. (Winter 1998), also available at ―The Fat Underground Archives,‖ Largesse: The Network for Size Esteem. (Retrieved 1 July 2009, <http://www.eskimo.com/~largesse/Archives/FU/Life%20In%20The%20Fat%20Underground%20by%20 Sara%20Fishman.html>) 57 Fishman 27 communities over the next three decades. The Fat Underground and its projects will be discussed in depth in the first chapter of this dissertation. Literature Review In texts devoted to an exploration of the issues at stake for LGBT artists and art, there has been a historical absence of scholarly work on lesbians who make art and art featuring lesbian subjects. 58 Lesbian art and artists received only a single or partial chapter in the two major surveys on ―homosexuality and art‖ written in the last two decades: Emmanuel Cooper‘s The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, and James M. Saslow‘s Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. 59 While these authors briefly mentioned lesbian artists at other moments in each of their books, lesbian artists and their work were marginalized within a male homocentric account of ―gay‖ art and art history, dating from the nineteenth century and Ancient Greece, respectively. Indeed, the very fact that lesbian art and artists were given sections all their own in these texts emphasized their absence elsewhere in the texts. This absence did not originate with these scholars, however; the dearth of information about lesbian art and artists in these art historical texts came from a 58 I do not mean to imply that ―lesbian art‖ and ―lesbian artists‖ are in any way stable or monolithic categories here. Indeed, the two terms are not necessary mutually constitutive of one another. As Jan Zita Grover argues, ―gay‖ and ―lesbian‖ visual representations are constituted as such and have fluid meanings depending on the producers, the subjects, and the audiences who view and use these images for their varied projects, whether personal and/or political in nature. Jan Zita Grover, ―Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation,‖ Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. Eds., Liz Heron and Val Williams. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 354-355. I use these terms as shorthand here to describe visual representations created by self-identified lesbians and artwork centered on self-identified and artist-identified lesbian subjects. 59 Emmanel Cooper, ―Lesbians Who Make Art,‖ The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1986/1994); James M. Saslow, see subchapters ―Paris 1900: Lesbian Heaven‖ and ―Lesbian Feminism,‖ Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. (New York: Viking Press, 1999) 28 broader history of omissions and blind spots on lesbian subjectivity. As art historian Richard Meyer argues, ―The relative invisibility of lesbian art constitutes a ‗structuring absence‘ within twentieth-century American culture, an absence imposed not by chance but by historically specific exclusions and inequalities.‖ 60 Feminist art historian Griselda Pollock elaborates on the concept of the ―structuring absence‖ in terms of feminist art history and its relationship to the canon. 61 Pollock contends that art historians have a tendency to reiterate the structure of the normative canon by creating ―inside/ outside opposition[s]‖ in comparing what is included in the conventional canon and what is excluded. This is precisely what has occurred for lesbian representation in the two surveys described above. Instead of pursuing this tack to study visual representations that have been marginalized then, it seems more useful to use the notion of a structuring absence because it points to the gaps within, rather than outside, the canon, whether they are in the realms of Western art, twentieth-century American culture, or ―homosexuality and art.‖ Pollock cites Teresa de Lauretis‘ description of the feminist project as ―a view from elsewhere‖: [T]hat ‗elsewhere‘ is not some mythic distant past or some utopian future history; it is the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representations. I think of it as the spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge-apparati. 62 60 Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 22 61 While I use the singular form of the term here, Pollock notes that there is no one canon of art history, but rather several ―competing canons,‖ each with a particular focus and/or hierarchy. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 3 62 Teresea de Lauretis in Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 7-8. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, v.1. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978/ 1990) for more on the potential for resistance of the dominant regime within the gaps of the hegemonic power structure and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and 29 Because there is no exterior position from which to stake a claim on representation or discourse, feminist and queer projects must necessarily work from within the gaps and fissures layered into the discourses which have already been created or presented. Pollock writes, ―This other scene [the gaps/ absences], already there, which is as yet unrepresented, has, however, been rendered almost unrepresentable by the existing modes of hegemonic discourses.‖ 63 This dissertation project, and much of the literature in the review to follow, seeks to make an inroad into the absented visual representations of fat and lesbian subjects in order to better understand the ways in which these subjects have been represented – and how they have represented themselves – in relationship to a traditional canon of Western art. Almost forty years after it was written, Linda Nochlin‘s 1971 essay, ―Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‖ remains in place as the essay that launched a new field of study in feminist art history. Nochlin‘s essay, initially published in ARTNews and later reprinted in her collection, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, was the first of its kind to examine the social history of art-making practices as the basis for the exclusion of women in the arts over the last several centuries in the West. In addition to looking at the ways in which social customs had affected the historical absence of women in the art historical canon, and how that absence was affecting women artists in the contemporary moment, Nochlin advocated that the very act of questioning the ways in which art history was constructed as a narrative and as a field of study that separated the Subversion of Identity. (London and New York: Routledge, 1990/1999) for a similar discussion on the creation of gender as an unstable, performative identity. 63 Pollock 8; emphasis original. 30 itself from women‘s history would bring about a deeper analysis of how certain individuals and groups had been left out of social and academic histories across fields of study, as an intersectional analysis. Nochlin wrote, [T]he so-called woman question, far from being a minor, peripheral, and laughably provincial sub-issue grafted on to a serious, established discipline, can become a catalyst, an intellectual instrument, probing basic and ‗natural‘ assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and in turn providing links with radical approaches in other fields. Even a simple question like, ‗Why have there been no great women artists?‘ can, if answered adequately, create a sort of chain reaction, expanding not merely to encompass the accepted assumptions of the single field, but outward to embrace history and the social sciences, or even psychology and literature, and thereby, from the outset, can challenge the assumption that the traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry are still adequate to deal with the meaningful questions of our time, rather than the merely convenient or self-generated ones. 64 Nochlin‘s approach to her title‘s question was, like her assertion in this passage, to query the very premise of the idea of ―great women artists‖ and the reasons for their alleged absence in history. By answering her question in this way, Nochlin set forth a method of interrogation, rather than a simple set of answers, that would be useful to feminists, whether art historians or not, for years to come. Written soon after ―Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‖ Nochlin‘s ―Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art‖ extends her methodology of questioning the seemingly ―natural‖ to explore the trends in nineteenth century female sexuality in visual art that until 1972 appeared to go unnoticed by art historians. In this short but direct essay, Nochlin points out the fact that when discussing sexual imagery in the visual arts in the nineteenth century, one automatically must speak of women because ―[t]here really is no erotic art in the nineteenth century which does not involve the image 64 Linda Nochlin, ―Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‖ (1971), Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988) 146-147 31 of women, and precious little before or after.‖ 65 This included any forms of furtive or overt lesbian imagery made for the enjoyment of the male artist and buyer of the work. There was simply no possibility for women to have taken part in the creation, commission, or purchase of sexualized artifacts, of women or men, during this time period. 66 Nochlin wrote, Man is not only the subject of all erotic predicates, but the customer for all erotic products as well, and the customer is always right. Controlling both sex and art, he and his fantasies conditioned the world of erotic imagination as well. Thus there seems to be no conceivable outlet for the expression of women‘s viewpoint in nineteenth-century art, even in the realm of pure fantasy. 67 After exploring some of the iconography available for the eroticization of women‘s bodies in visual representation in the nineteenth century, Nochlin ended her essay by briefly looking at work feminist artists were beginning to produce in the 1960s and early 1970s that included erotic variations on the male nude. She predicted that ―The growing power of woman in the politics of both sex and art is bound to revolutionize the realm of 65 Linda Nochlin, ―Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art‖ (1972), Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988) 137; emphasis original. Nochlin does note that in making this statement she is referring to erotic imagery desired by heterosexual men, and acknowledges a history of male homosexual erotica that she does not discuss at length here. 66 Jan Zita Grover points out that lesbianism as a cultural identity in the West was specifically a nineteenth and twentieth century construction based in the realms of both capitalism and industrialization. While same-sex relationships have been formed throughout history, the formulation of the concept of ―lesbianism‖ as a personal identity required several prerequisites: ―Large cities and workplaces have created the conditions of social mobility, population density, and (relative) economic security necessary for lesbians to find each other and to create institutions for ourselves, and likewise, they have made it possible for our enemies to identify us through the growing visibility of our practices and institutions).‖ Jan Zita Grover, ―Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation,‖ Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. Eds., Liz Heron and Val Williams. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 351. On the formation of gay and lesbian identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, v.1. (New York: Vintage Press, 1978/ 1990); John D‘Emilio, ―Capitalism and Gay Identity,‖ Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. Ed., Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); and Jeffrey Weeks, ―Capitalism and the Organization of Sex,‖ Homosexuality: Power and Politics. (London: Allison and Busby, 1980). 67 Nochlin, ―Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art‖ 138-139 32 erotic representation.‖ 68 This has indeed been the case over the past forty years, during which women in the arts have produced a wide range of sexualized visual representations that have played on both heterosexual and homoerotic themes. In her 1973 essay ―Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art Movement,‖ Maryse Holder both rejoiced in the numbers of feminist sexual images being circulated at the time and disparaged the idea of a singular ―women‘s experience‖ which such visual images seemed to represent. 69 Holder‘s appraisal of art exhibitions that only feature work by female artists was especially negative: I think group shows […] are particularly dangerous to women. Instead of gearing one to the differences amongst artists, they force one to reduce a great deal of diverse work to a single statement about ‗the women‘s point of view.‘ Further, a group show relegates all women to a category equivalent to a single male artist: women = Oldenberg. Lastly, it has an insidious sexist effect. An amorphous notion of ‗women‘s art‘ substitutes for a vigorous, precise experience of an artist who starts from being a woman and ends in a rich, unique vision in which gender, if present, is experienced in infinitely various ways. 70 As an alternative to such group exhibitions, Holder recommended art shows that focused on a single (female) artist instead of group shows based on a particular identity trait, such as gender, as a better method for giving viewers a true sense of the artist‘s range of works that likely deal with a great many issues besides and/or in addition to the artist‘s gender or sex. Holder highlighted the production of ―sexualist‖ visual representations, by which Holder meant those works that dealt with sexual/ erotic imagery, that was often explicit, and that was created by female, ostensibly feminist, visual artists. She wrote that such 68 Nochlin, ―Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art‖ 143 69 Maryse Holder, ―Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art Movement,‖ originally published in off our backs in 1973, republished in Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, Eds., Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, Joanna Frueh. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991) 1-5 70 Holder 6-7 33 artworks seemed to her to be those which ―for the first time were not copi[ed] from men.‖ 71 Created from a particularly female point of view, ―it offered a completely different view of reality. And it was imaginative, often brilliant work about an area of human experience that had not been dealt with before, or even now, by men.‖ 72 In her review of sexually explicit feminist art, Holder embodied an attitude of cultural or liberal feminism popular during the 1970s that celebrated anatomical essentialism in analyzing sexual artwork by women that included vaginal imagery or symbolic imagery based on the idea of a metaphorical ―core‖ of female anatomy (i.e. vagina, clitoris, and/or womb). Such a feminist vantage point was taken up by some feminist artists and art historians while being denounced by others. 73 In ―Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art-Making,‖ written a decade after Nochlin‘s first feminist art history essay, in 1981 by Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, the authors renewed the called for a radical reconceptualization of art that would change the structures of oppression evidenced in the production, subject matter, and writing of art and art history that had been part and parcel of the discipline since its inception. 74 Barry and Flitterman- Lewis argued that radical feminist art needed both to be performed or manufactured and to be theorized at the same time; theory was deemed necessary because it moved beyond the particular art object so as to deconstruct conventional notions of art and contributed to 71 Holder 20 72 Holder 20 73 For example, the anthology in which Holder‘s above essay was published in 1991, Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, included this article, others that professed a radical feminist perspective, in addition to essays that questioned the perceived dichotomy between the two schools of ideology that so dominated the feminist landscape of the 1970s and 80s in the United States. 74 Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, ―Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making,‖ Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, Eds., Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, Joanna Frueh. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991) 87 34 the restructuring of the art world that the term ―radical‖ connotes. 75 Barry and Flitterman- Lewis wrote, A radical feminist art would include an understanding of how women are constituted through social practices in culture; once it is understood how women are consumed in this society it would be possible to create an aesthetics designed to subvert the consumption of women, thus avoiding the pitfalls of a politically progressive art work which depicts women in the same forms as the dominant culture. Consequently, we see a need for theory that goes beyond the personal into the questions of ideology, culture, and the production of meaning. 76 In 1991 one of the editors of the Feminist Art Criticism anthology, Arlene Raven, contested the assumed dichotomy of cultural versus radical feminism in her essay in the book entitled ―The Last Essay on Feminist Criticism.‖ 77 Raven suggested that the issues important to these two strains of feminism, in particular biological essentialism for cultural feminism and social constructionism for radical feminism during the 1970s- 1980s, were falsely set up to contradict one another, when in fact the two feminist points of view might have been able to be, if not reconciled, combined to create a more comprehensive understanding of the production of feminist and women-centered artworks. 78 Raven critiqued the lack of interest paid to and the discrimination against body art and performance by women evidenced during the 70s and 80s, suggesting that it had been stigmatized by social constructionist feminists as automatically essentialist because of its focus on the female body, thus automatically characterizing it as 75 Barry and Flitterman-Lewis 88 76 Barry and Flitterman-Lewis 88 77 Arlene Raven, ―The Last Essay on Feminist Criticism,‖ Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, Eds., Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, Joanna Frueh. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991) 78 Raven 227-228 35 unfashionable and unworthy or analysis. 79 Moreover, Raven argued that visual representation involving the corporeal female body was self-consciously engaged in responding to systems of power, while intellectual productions were informed by bodily experiences. 80 In asserting that feminist art of and about female bodies could provide especially fruitful locations of theory and creativity from social, political, and corporeal vantage points emphasizing the performative abilities and displays of bodily representations, Raven pointed to the ways in which misogynistic attitudes, particularly during the decade of the 1980s and through the rhetoric of an alleged ―post-feminist‖ era, were ultimately responsible for the discouragement of women in all aspects of society and feminist inquiry. 81 Indeed, bodily perspectives helped to illuminate the ―reality‖ of living matter and corporeal existence within an active and dynamic social world. Written specifically about the field of photography, Abigail Solomon-Godeau‘s essay, ―Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a Project of Historical Salvage,‖ expands on the ways in which representations of the body intersect and interact with the social construction of the body itself. Solomon-Godeau proposes that there are at least two important reasons for investigating erotic imagery on a historical level. One is that erotic visual representations tell us about the ways in which the subjects and objects of images are constructed within the interaction between the gaze and the body. She suggests that ―the sexual economy of looking – particularly the look directed at the woman‘s body – overarches the contingent and relative distinctions between culturally 79 Raven 227 80 Raven 227-228 81 Raven 231 36 sanctioned and illicit forms of representation.‖ 82 Thus whether a visual representation is deemed erotic or not, it can teach us about the circuitry of ―the look,‖ or the gaze; in particular it can tell us how this circuitry works when the representation features women. Solomon-Godeau reiterates the notion that the social construction of gender difference dictates the terms through which the gaze operates: [T]he active gaze is both formed and informed by the determinations of sexual difference which a priori construct the subject positions designated as the masculine and the feminine. Consequently, the feminine - differentially conceived as Other to the masculine norm – takes its place in visual representation as object- of-the-gaze, while the position of active subject-of-the-gaze is generally the masculine prerogative. 83 This formulation of the gaze, in conjunction with men‘s historically higher economic abilities, is what Nochlin implicitly describes when she notes the lack of women in control of sexualized images during the nineteenth century, as well as the basic lack of opportunities for women to become artists during the history of Western art-making at least since the Renaissance. Solomon-Godeau expands Nochlin‘s studies further by explicitly discussing the medium of photography and also by pushing the inquiry into the twentieth century. Indeed, Solomon-Godeau‘s second reason for seeking insight into erotic photography within a historical analysis brings attention to the position that photography has taken in creating and communicating the representation of women: An inquiry of this sort provides some of the tools for an analysis of the particular role that photography has played in […] the spectacularization of the female 82 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ―Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a Project of Historical Salvage,‖ Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 220 83 Solomon-Godeau 220 37 body, a phenomenon that is as intimately linked to the rise of commodity culture as are the development and expansion of photography itself. 84 Solomon-Godeau‘s insight into the creation of spectacle via photography intersects with the ways in which Susan Stewart describes the spectacle of the body and its representations. Both scholars theorize the spectacle as that which is viewed for its novelty and/or its ―otherness‖; Stewart extends Solomon-Godeau‘s analysis of the place of women in the history of art as spectacular to include rehearsed and spontaneous, everyday performance of those bodies that don‘t fit into the cultural norm, whether identified as according to gender, size, sexual orientation, race, and/or class. Stewart situates her analysis within the Bahktinian carnivalesque or grotesque in her investigation of the narratives of collecting bodies and their visual representations. She writes, the viewer of the spectacle is absolutely aware of the distance between the self and the spectacle. […] There is no question that there is a gap between the object and its viewer. […] At the same time, the spectacle assumes a singular direction. In contrast to the reciprocal gaze of carnival and festival, the spectacle assumes that the object is blinded; only the audience sees. 85 The spectacle is a particular formation of looking at bodies and their representations, then, which relies upon the singular direction of the gaze. In the relationship founded through the spectacle, the subject to be looked at becomes simultaneously objectified and silent. The subject cannot speak back, cannot set her own terms for viewing, because she is a silenced object; Charlotte Cooper‘s designation of the ―headless fatty,‖ discussed above, is one such an example of this spectacularized body. 84 Solomon-Godeau 222 85 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) 108 38 Disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson re-formulates the spectacle in her examination of the actions involved in staring, in her text of the same name. For Garland-Thomson, in contrast to Stewart, the object of the spectacle is not completely silenced, and can and will speak if the audience is willing to engage with them and listen. 86 Staring, or intense looking, can be usefully provocative; it can produce new narratives about human lives, about representations, and about how ―the other,‖ or in Garland-Thomson‘s words, the ―staree,‖ figures in the dominant discourse and in subcultural discourse. Garland-Thomson writes, Triggered by the sight of someone who seems unlike us, staring can begin an exploratory expedition into ourselves and outward into new worlds. Because we come to expect one another to have certain kinds of bodies and behaviors, stares flare up when we glimpse people who look or act in ways that contradict our expectations. Seeing startlingly stare-able people challenges our assumptions by interrupting complacent visual business-as-usual. Staring offers an occasion to rethink the status quo. Who we are can shift into focus by staring at who we think we are not. 87 Garland-Thomson argues that staring, or deep looking, is prompted for humans by noticing something or someone novel in our conventional contexts. And while staring can traditionally have negative connotations, as with the objectification of the ―other‖ or the non-normative in the spectacle, Garland-Thomson stresses the ways in which staring/ looking/ viewing can open up our worlds and bring new people or communities together. 86 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 3. Garland Thomson writes, ―Staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what‘s going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange. Staring begins as an impulse that curiosity can carry forward into engagement. We don‘t usually stare at people we know, but instead when unfamiliar people take us by surprise. […] An encounter between a starer and a staree sets in motion an interpersonal relationship, however momentary, that has consequences. This intense visual engagement creates a circuit of communication and meaning-making.‖ 87 Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look 6 39 In particular, she places emphasis on the ways in which looking at others helps us to gain knowledge about them, but also about ourselves: Staring is a conduit to knowledge. Stares are urgent efforts to make the unknown known, to render legible something that seems at first glance incomprehensible. In this way, staring becomes a starer‘s quest to know and a staree‘s opportunity to be known. Whatever or whomever embodies the unpredictable, strange, or disordered prompts stares and demands putting order to apparent disarray, taming the world with our eyes. Because we are all starers, knowledge gathering is the most productive aspect of staring in that it can offer an opportunity to recognize one another in new ways. 88 In focusing on imagery made by, and primarily for, lesbians and other women, this dissertation will look at some of the ways in which these subjects have renegotiated the terms of the gaze as well as the ―spectacularization‖ of the female (lesbian, fat, disabled) body, in both photographic projects and other forms of visual representations. The visual representations that members of fat and lesbian subcultures have created of their starable bodies can often reconfigure the meanings assigned to them by dominant cultural discourse while giving voice to people otherwise made socially unintelligible within the history of art and visual culture. Futhermore, whether confrontational or celebratory, such representations cross the lines between an art historical project and a fight for social justice on the part of its makers. These works establish new ways of seeing the frontier of uncontainable bodies. 89 88 Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look 15 89 Many thanks to Charlotte Cooper for this beautifully succinct turn of phrase. 40 Chapter Descriptions Envisioning Bodily Difference is narrated chronologically in order to trace a history of fat and lesbian visual representations that has heretofore not been attempted in the field of art history. The visual representations discussed here drive the story that is told as each chapter unfolds. The selection of visual representations chosen to be examined here comes, in large part, from the materials found through my archival research at several locations around the United States. The materials presented here, however, in no way provides an absolutely complete look at the visual and textual materials created and circulated by and about fat and lesbian individuals over the last forty years; such an endeavor would be impossible to achieve in a dissertation, or even book-length project. There are many more images and texts that I was unable to include in these pages that are just as worthy of close attention as the ones selected for this dissertation. This includes visual representations in a wide variety of underground and small zines, journals, and magazines (e.g., Broomstick, Gossip, Sinister Wisdom, and Lesbian Insider Insighter Inciter) ; by photographers and cartoonists who were active for a while and then seemed to become untraceable in the intervening years (e.g., Zoe Mosko, Mary Wings); and work by contemporary artists who seemed to move beyond the notion of the subcultural into the aesthetic mainstream in a way that their work seemed more difficult to blend into the parameters of this dissertation (e.g., Catherine Opie, Jenny Saville, Leonard Nimoy). Looking at the ways that these and many other visual representations featuring fat and lesbian/ queer subjects function within contemporary society are important projects in themselves and I am in no way dismissive of them. Indeed, that so many representations, collaborative groups, and artists remain to be 41 explored demonstrates the open-ended nature of the topics discussed and analyzed here and show us that visual representations infiltrate so many layers of contemporary life that they are nearly impossible to contain within a single approach or discipline. To this end, I had to make choices about what to include in this dissertation, and the following chapter descriptions provide an overview of what is incorporated here. Chapter One, ―Establishing Visibility in Unrepresentable Communities: Moving Toward Reclaiming the Invisible, the Unintelligible, the Monstrous, and the Other, 1968- 1981,‖ opens up with an analysis of the 1968 Miss America protest, which was the first major Second Wave feminist event in the United States to lend a face to the burgeoning Women‘s Liberation movement. The women involved in the protest created posters and performances that contested the confining beauty standards that had been celebrated by the Miss America franchise for more that forty years; at the same time, the actions of the women involved in the protest were used as a sign of what feminism looked like and stood for by the media that recorded both the pageant and the protest. From this point onward, feminists would become associated with that which is unattractive and critical of ―real‖ women, being pitted against ideals of femininity, beauty, and a celebration of American womanhood informed by capitalist notions of individuality. The rest of the chapter builds upon this foundation of contestation by looking at some of the cultural products that fat and lesbian individuals and communities produced in establishing themselves as agents for social change in hegemonic U.S. culture. The Ladder, the first lesbian journal published in the United States, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics are discussed as print publications that used drawings and photographs within their pages to visualize emerging communities concerned with redefining what 42 lesbianism meant in the U.S. social landscape. The Fat Underground, composed predominantly of lesbian women, came out of the intersections between the fat empowerment and radical feminist movements with a goal of demystifying the motivation and methods of fat oppression. During the early 1970s, Tee Corinne become known as a lesbian artist focused on the circulation of sexualized lesbian imagery through the creation of her drawings that formed The Cunt Coloring Book, as well as her photographic projects that included portraits of lesbians having sex with one another. Corinne‘s goal was to visualize lesbian relationships and women‘s bodies in all their complexity and glory so as to create images that reflected the diversity of lesbian communities around the U.S. Fat Chance and The Fat Lip Readers Theatre were two performance groups, one short-lived and one long-lasting, that created safe spaces for creative body movement for fat women as well as theatrical work by fat women that celebrated fat self-representations and critiqued impossible beauty and body standards. A look at the influential book, Fat is a Feminist Issue by British psychoanalyst Susie Orbach closes the chapter in order to contextualize the subcultural productions of fat and lesbian visual imagery discussed in the dissertation within both a feminist and dominant cultural narrative of the meanings of fat for women during the 1970s and beyond. Chapter two, ―Embracing the Self and Embodying the Other: Intersections of Sexual and Political Identities in Subcultural Representations, 1981-1992,‖ follows the first chapter in looking at photography, journals, and political performance/ activism as multiple media in which fat and lesbian subjects imaged bodily subjects in order to assert new ways of representing oppressed communities. The representations discussed in this chapter trend toward the sexual and the sexually explicit, often as a reaction to the ways 43 in which feminism and sexuality was being characterized during the 1980s as potentially harmful aspects of U.S. culture. The 1980s saw an explicit lashing out against the messages of 1960s and 1970s anti-oppressive social justice movements, in particular Second Wave feminisms and lesbian and gay empowerment through anti-pornography conversations and policies, social and political repudiation of people diagnosed and living with HIV/ AIDS, and the move toward a neo-conservative government structure that attached the disenfranchised and underrepresented populations of the United States while reifying capitalism and big business. The mainstream art world reflected many of these values by focusing on ―bigger is better‖ art forms, individualism in the form of neo- expressionist painting and sculpture, and the cooptation of ―the other‖ as a money- making scheme. But in fat, feminist, and lesbian subcultures, fine art and visual culture continued to be created that attempted to challenge such dominant norms by asserting connections between individuals and imaging the self as part of a larger collective of like- minded community members. Heresies continued to publish through the 1980s and two issues in particular, the Sex Issue from 1981 and the Food is a Feminist Issue from 1987, speak to the dialogues being created amongst its collaborators. Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives was a relatively new journal that specifically sought reader contributions from underrepresented communities, including fat women, with mixed results. Its 1984 Lesbian Photo Album issue recreated the text-heavy journal into a primarily visual work that sought to recognize and remake the structuring absence of lesbian visual imagery in U.S. culture. Photographers Tee Corinne and Laura Aguilar created work in the 1980s that problematized ways in which we look at the bodies of subcultural community members; Corinne‘s Yantras of Womanlove book deepened her exploration of solarized 44 photographs as a new way of seeing lesbian bodies and Aguilar‘s Latina Lesbians and Clothed/ Unclothed photographic series turned the matter-of-fact existences of multiply- marginalized communities into symbolic statements about the intersectional and diverse qualities of human identities. Chapter two ends with a discussion of the early political performance work of The Lesbian Avengers, an activist group that sought not simple assimilation into dominant culture, but recognition and celebration of lesbian lives of the past and present on their own terms, through their own militant and creative means of representation. Chapter three, ―From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary: Grassroots and Self- Taught Artists and Activists Creating Fat Visual Culture, 1994-2004,‖ looks at six examples of fine art and visual culture that were produced by individuals and groups personally affected by fatphobic cultural attitudes toward women and their bodies. Created during a time of increasing interest in both identity-focused visibility on other part of lesbians and fat subjects, and increasing use of ―queer‖ methods of discourse and creative production that emphasized fractured and multiplicitous subject formation, these objects of study embody a multi-directional approach to visualizing fat bodies. Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes is a book of photographs and texts created collaboratively by Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin. The photographs featured in the book showcase the variety of fat female bodies and personalities of their subjects, primarily within their own home spaces. While the images are staged rather than candid, the fact that almost all of them take place in the subjects‘ domestic settings, surrounded by their own furniture and decorations gives them a sense of intimacy that is not about explicit sexuality, but about a sharing of a conventionally marginalized self with a greater public. 45 The images discussed from the covers of two issues of the journal Lesbian Connection brings into consideration the ways in which community opinions differ from one another when it comes to portraying fat female bodies in subcultural publications. The responses to the two images showcasing fat subjects in the more than thirty year history of Lesbian Connection tells us that the corporeal and political implications of living as a fat lesbian can generate extreme reactions from lesbians themselves. The same is true of the imagery circulated in the mid-1990s zine Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, although the responses to these images were almost entirely positive from fat dykes seemingly starved for self-representations. The photographs chosen to be discussed from Fat Girl‘s three-year run tend toward the sexually explicit and the food-centered; these two areas of fat dyke life seemed particularly important to the creators of the zines because they are such contested issues for women in general, especially those women that identify as fat and queer. By imaging explicit, excessive scenes of dykes having sex, eating, and playing with food, the collaborators of Fat Girl create an over-the-top challenge to the invisibility they had previously experienced within both mainstream and lesbian communities. Laura Aguilar‘s self-portrait series, Nature Self-Portrait and Motion, are perhaps the only sets of images looked at in this chapter than can readily be considered fine art. Their form and symbolism, then, brings messages about fat identity and the particularities of living in a multiply-deviant body to an art form and gallery space all too often devoid of socio-cultural context and conflict. Big Burlesque and the Padded Lilies, on the other hand, are at their heart performance groups created by regular people, un-trained fat activists who wanted to bring pleasure, humor, and sensuality to 46 their own lives and the lives of others as they revolutionized visual culture by making fat an attribute of joy rather than pain. Finally, the conclusion of the dissertation, ―Revisiting/ Revisioning Excessive Bodies, 2003-2007,‖ looks at a recent visually-rich project that revisits some of the artistic work we had seen earlier in the dissertation. Tee Corinne‘s last photographic series before her death in 2006, Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives captures her relationship with her lover, Beverly Brown, over the course of two years of Brown‘s treatment for colon cancer. Unlike most of Corinne‘s pervious work, these images are both digital and brightly colored. The formal and symbolic attributes of the photographic series are discussed in relation to Corinne‘s investment in lesbian communities and in her lover‘s life, as well as the relationships between lesbian visual representations and the dying body. While this dissertation is first and foremost situated within the field of contemporary American art history, it exemplifies a commitment to interdisciplinary learning as it draws upon the fields of art history, visual culture, feminist studies, LGBT and queer studies, cultural studies, fat studies, and disability studies to thematize and contextualized the multiple visual representations presented in its pages. In using theories from each of these areas of study, the socio-political ramifications of vision and visibility in relation to marginalized, ―dangerous‖ embodied communities are prioritized. At its core this project sits at the intersection of social justice and visual culture, showing us that visual presentations matter and shape the ways we look at one another as human beings on a continuing and intimate basis. 47 Introduction Images Figure I.1. Kristin Kurzawa, Cookie Woolner, Bevin Branlandingham, and Zoe Femmetastica, from Femmes: Front and Center, Photograph, 2009. Image courtesy of Kristin Kurzawa. Figure I.2. Kristin Kurzawa, Ceci My Playmate, from Femmes: Front and Center, Photograph, 2009. Image courtesy of Kristin Kurzawa. 48 Figure I.3. Kristin Kurzawa, Masculine Femme, from Femmes: Front and Center, Photograph, 2009. Image courtesy of Kristin Kurzawa. Figure I.4. Kristin Kurzawa, Pidgeon Von Tramp, from Femmes: Front and Center, Photograph, 2009. Image courtesy of Kristin Kurzawa. 49 Figure I.5. Margaret Finch, Queen of the Gypsies at Norwood, n.d. Image from Bertha Harris, ―What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. Figure I.6. Female Monster with Two Heads, From Boaistuau‘s Histories Prodigeuses, Paris, 1573. Image from Bertha Harris, ―What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. 50 Figure I.7. The lion-headed Barbara Urselin, born in 1641 in Augsburg, from Aldrovandus‘ Opera Omnia Monstrum Historia, 1668. Image from Bertha Harris, ―What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. Figure I.8. Charles Moulton, Wonder Woman May 1957, D.C. National Comics. Image from Bertha Harris, ―What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977 51 Figure I.9. Example of the ―Headless Fatties‖ Phenomenon. Image collected by fat activist and writer, Charlotte Cooper on CharlotteCooper.net. Retrieved 25 November 2009. <http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm> Figure I.10. Example of the ―Headless Fatties‖ Phenomenon. Image collected by fat activist and writer, Charlotte Cooper on CharlotteCooper.net. Retrieved 25 November 2009. <http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm> 52 Chapter One Establishing Visibility in Unrepresentable Communities: Moving Toward Reclaiming the Invisible, the Unintelligible, the Monstrous, and the Other, 1968-1981 This chapter opens the dissertation by looking at the intersections between Second Wave Feminism as represented through the 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City, New Jersey and other forays into empowerment movements, such as those championed and performed by lesbians and fat individuals through the production and circulation of visual imagery in posters, journals, drawings, photograph, and performances. As with much of the visual work that will be discussed throughout this dissertation, the ways in which gender, sexuality, and corporeal embodiment are performed and represented are at the forefront of this chapter; indeed, by starting the chapter with a detailed look at the 1968 Miss America protest, I hope to illustrate the ways in which particular interpretations and definitions of feminism has influenced the ways in which bodily identities have been assigned and claimed by fat individuals, lesbians, and heterosexual feminists beginning in the 1970s and eventually continuing, with changes over time, through the current moment. The sections that follow look at several other sets of visual representations that have contributed to and/ or helped to define the ways in which fat and lesbian subjects have created self-representations during the years between the late 1960s and the early 1980s in the United States. The New York Radical Women‘s 1968 Miss America Protest A national icon of conventional beauty and positive feminine embodiment, Miss America might appear an odd place from which to begin a dissertation on subjects who 53 have been deemed excessive and dangerous. The 1968 Miss America protest organized by the New York Radical Women (NYRW), however, has become iconic in and of itself for representing ―feminism‖ 90 and its goals in the United States. As such, it merits an exploration focused on the ways in which feminism was constructed and consumed by the masses, both verbally and visually at the start of what has been called both the Women‘s Liberation Movement and Second Wave Feminism. NYRW produced the 1968 protest and invited any and all women to participate because they were exasperated by the pageant‘s promotion of women as ―inoffensive, bland, [and] apolitical,‖ ―degrading mindless-boob-girlie symbol[s].‖ 91 Highlighting ten points of protest aimed at the racism, militarism, and sexism advocated by the pageant rituals and aftermath, the press release explaining the protest, ―No More Miss America!,‖ described it as a political performance open to any woman willing to fight against the ―image of Miss America, an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us.‖ 92 The protest garnered some one hundred to six hundred participants 93 and media attention from the major newspapers and magazines in the United States; this protest became the first 90 I place the term feminism in scare quotes here because while the protest was organized by a radical feminist organization, the nuances in the various strains of feminism practiced during the 1960s and 70s in the United States have been obliterated in media references to the 1968 event. 91 ―No More Miss America!‖ (August 1968), Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement , Ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random House, 1970) 521 92 ―No More Miss America!‖ 521 93 The number of protesters recorded as having participated depends on the account given. Judith Duffett, a NYRW participant cites the number 600, while Charlotte Curtis, an unsympathetic New York Times reporter cites the number as 100. The PBS ―American Experience‖ program on the protest describes the number as closer to 400. 54 widely-covered Second Wave feminist action in the U.S., and with this attention ―the women‘s movement gained momentum and the media increasingly took it seriously.‖ 94 The importance of this event can be located in two kinds of images it fostered; one, a set of images that were circulated by the protesters themselves in the placards and posters brought to the event and another in the set of media images of the protest, its protagonists, and its critics. The self-made and mass media images of women‘s liberation sometimes conflict with one another and sometimes corroborate, producing a complicated history of the visual signs of the feminist movement. Following this demonstration, feminists came to be labeled as man-hating, ugly, and bitter by those who considered women unequal to men, and courageous, passionate, and inspiring by those who agreed with feminist goals of equality and recognition of women‘s roles in U.S. culture. September 7, 1968 marked the day in which the United States began its contentious public relationship with the concept and representation of feminism as a movement toward equality for women; this relationship is central to the construction of the themes of this dissertation. Begun in 1921 as a beauty contest, the Miss America pageant took place in Atlantic City, New Jersey every year between 1921 and 2005 and in Las Vegas, Nevada since 2006. Now a decade short of its 100 year anniversary, the Miss America pageant 94 ―Miss America: People and Events: The 1968 Protest,‖ PBS WGBH American Experience. Retrieved 3 June 2007, <http://pbs.org/wbgh/amex/missamerica/peopleevents/e_feminists.html> . Perhaps the most widely-circulated myth related to the 1968 Miss America protest is the idea of ―bra burning‖ that stemmed from the initial proposal by protesters to dump a variety of accessories, devices, and beauty-industry paraphernalia into a trash can and light it all on fire. While the ―Freedom Trash Can‖ was in fact used as a dumping grounds of such objects, it was not set aflame, apparently due to the request of the mayor of Atlantic City, NJ, Richard Jackson, who feared that the fire would become uncontrollable and engulf the boardwalk itself. Judith Duffett, ―WLM vs. Miss America,‖ Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement. (October 1968). Retrieved 4 January 2010, <http://www.cwluherstory.org/CWLUArchive/voices/voices4- 5.html> 55 has been tailored over the years to highlight various characteristics of its now 53 contestants, 95 depending on the historical moment. 96 In the first fifty years of its history the pageant focused on the physical beauty of the contestants, while during the latter half of the twentieth century it came to foster a reformulated ideal of individuality, self- confidence, and ―can-do‖ spirit. 97 The last four decades of media coverage of the 1968 protest event has elevated its status as an ―infamous‖ introduction of some of the basic tenets of radical feminism to the U.S. public. As described by Bonnie J. Dow, the 1968 protest was trivialized in the media (including television, magazine, and newspaper reportage) starting on September 7, 1968, the day of the event itself. 98 Covered in a plethora of national daily newspapers and popular magazines, including The New York Times, The New York Post, and Life, the 1968 Miss America protest began as a political action meant to expose the pageant as an institution of patriarchy formulated to keep women down as beautiful objects of desire; to perpetuate conformity in terms of gender and race; and to boost beauty industry profits that rely upon women‘s self-doubt and 95 One woman represents each of the United States, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands at the pageant. 96 Miss America Organization, ―Miss America History: 1921,‖ MissAmerica.org. Retrieved 4 January 2010, <http://www.missamerica.org/our-miss-americas/1920/1921.aspx> 97 Communications scholar Bonnie L. Dow and others argue that this reconceptualization of the pageant as a stepping-stone for contestants in their career and life-paths, and as a source primarily of scholarship money rather than fame, has simultaneously required and rejected feminist beliefs about the place of women in society. Defined as an opposing force to the pageant ideals, feminism has been the primary context in which the pageant has been analyzed by the mass media since the 1968 protest; but there is an insistence by the media as well as the pageant contestants and franchise that the contestants are feminist in a humanistic, individual way: their own personal stories and struggles allegedly illustrate that feminism has indeed infiltrated the American social structure such that these women can ―do anything.‖ This perspective on feminism negates the radical need for a reformulated social system that combats sexism (as well as racism) on a hegemonic level. Bonnie J. Dow, ―Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,‖ Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6:1 (2003) 135; Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999) 98 Dow 129-131 56 ―enslave[ment] by ludicrous ‗beauty‘ standards.‖ 99 The placards carried by the protesters speak to these issues via visual representations of women as cattle or meat, as well as overtly sexualized puppets and cartoons. In a paired set of placards displayed at the protest (Figures 1.1 and 1.2), women hold a sign that reads ―Welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction‖ in conjunction with a poster-sized photograph of a seemingly nude woman seen from the back. 100 Kneeling on her knees and shins, the woman looks over her shoulder at the viewer, a cowboy hat shielding her eyes; drawn across her back are lines that divide her body into cuts of meat, as if she were a side of beef. Titled ―Break the Dull Steak Habit,‖ the poster seems to have originally been created by the meat processing industry as a promotional advertisement. The women holding the poster in these images, however, have taken them out of context as proof of the sexism and misogyny rampant in Western culture, be they evident in meat processing or the Miss America contest. The comparison between women‘s bodies and livestock equated female humans with animals meant to be raised for consumption by the American public. Indeed, a similar comparison had been made a month prior to the protest itself, in the NYRW‘s press release for the event: ―The parade down the runway blares the metaphor of the 4-H Club country fair, where the nervous animals are judged for teeth, fleece, etc., and where the best ‗specimen‘ gets the blue ribbon.‖ 101 The visual representations take this metaphor even further, as the image of the woman as a side of beef is a violent one. The female model is portrayed as if prepared to 99 ―No More Miss America!‖ 522-524 100 The woman pictured here looks nude at first glance, but in actuality seems to be wearing a flesh-tone body stocking imprinted with the beef cuts text. 101 ―No More Miss America!‖ 522 57 be cut up into her constituent parts to be sold and eaten. Marking Miss America contestants as not simply prized animals raised for fame and fortune, but as ―creatures‖ reared to be cut apart and consumed, the New York Radical Women and other protest participants objected to the pageant as an institution of hegemonic patriarchy that dehumanized women on a conceptual and bodily level. Additional posters reiterated these and similar messages about the negative repercussions of the Miss America contest, including the focus on consumer culture within the pageant and by the commercial sponsors of the pageant (in 1968 this included Pepsi-Cola, Toni Home Beauty Products, and Oldsmobile automobiles), and the obsession with standardized beauty practices that emphasized white skin, a conventionally feminine demeanor, and particular bodily size and proportions (Figure 1.3). 102 A larger-than-life Miss America puppet, or ―Amerika-Dolly,‖ as one contemporary source described it, was displayed and paraded on the Atlantic City Boardwalk during the protest as well (seen in Figures 1.4 and 1.5). 103 The figure appears to be between eight and nine feet tall, and was constructed as a very large paper doll with 102 The first African-American Miss America was chosen in 1984, sixty-three years after the start of the pageant. The swimsuit portion of the competition has been an ongoing, and in demand, part of the televised program for several decades. Dow describes the ―swimsuit referendum‖ of 1995 wherein the viewing public was asked to phone in to vote to either keep or discard the swimsuit section of the pageant. Of one million callers, seventy-nine percent approved of this area of the pageant. Dow 140 103 According to Judith Duffett, in a review of the protest in the October 1968 edition of the Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement newspaper, this giant paper doll was used as part of the guerilla theatre performed at the event. Duffett writes, ― ‗Women are enslaved by beauty standards‘ was the theme of another dramatic action — in which some of us chained ourselves to a life-size Miss America puppet. This was paraded and auctioned off by a woman dressed up as a male Wall Street financier. "Step right up, gentlemen, get your late model woman right here – a lovely paper dolly to call your very own property …. She can push your product, push your ego, or push your lawnmower ….‖ Duffett 5 58 moveable appendages. Seemingly light-skinned 104 and dressed in a very small one-piece swimsuit, the figure‘s breasts were outsized as well, seeming to take up the entire space between her upper chest and her shoulders. The swimsuit featured stars (on the breasts, centered on the figure‘s nipples) and stripes, and while the images remaining of it are black and white it seems safe to guess that her outfit was originally red, white, and blue, the symbolic colors of the United States of America. 105 A three-dimensional chain sits around the figure‘s waist as a loose belt, representing the prison that Miss America contestants, and all women, find themselves in when oppressed by patriarchal beauty standards. The large figure‘s head seems like it is too heavy for her narrow neck to hold; she sports a medium tone (perhaps blond or light brown) ―flip‖ haircut with a high- teased/ bouffant center, a large brilliant smile, rosy round cheeks, and large eyes fringed with eye lashes. In terms of body shape and scale, her head, hands, and the aforementioned breasts are disproportionately large for the size of the figure‘s waist. This parodic representation of Miss America, and the beauty/ body standards for women in the United States was the visual focus of the 1968 protest. A Freedom Trash Can was used as a receptacle for the ―instruments of torture to women – high-heeled shoes, Merry Widow corsets, girdles, padded bras, false eyelashes, curlers, copies of Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, etc.‖ 106 The giant puppet/ doll underlined the messages of the other placards and posters displayed at the protest: women were to be 104 The images that document this Miss America Doll/ Puppet are black and white, but the skin of the figure shows up as a relatively light grey tone in these photographs. 105 The bathing suit is also described as red, white, and blue by New York Times reporter Charlotte Curtis in her article, ―Miss America Pageant is Picketed by 100 Women,‖ The New York Times (September 8, 1968) 81 106 Duffett 5 59 seen and admired as long as they conformed to the specific standards of feminine comportment valued by the pageant. The radical feminists involved in the event objected not simply to the bodily facts presented by and contained within the Miss America contest, but to what they stood for in terms of limiting women‘s abilities as a social group via a nationally symbolic identity. The pageant fostered competition between women, rather than unity as an oppressed group; it perpetuated conformity and immediate obsolescence for those women not chosen to represent the title; and it created a sentiment that Miss America should be the dream job for all girls growing up in the United States, whereas boys were to dream of becoming doctors, police officers, and the President. 107 In representing the choices open for women in the U.S., the Miss America pageant epitomized the boundaries of the traditionally feminine role as national icon in corporeal and metaphoric terms. The tack taken by many of the protesters was criticized by contemporary journalists and feminists alike in the days and months after the protest. Indeed, it was through the numerous press stories circulated in the aftermath of the 1968 protest that some of the messages of feminism were trivialized and reformulated for public consumption. 108 Charlotte Curtis‘s New York Times article, ―Miss America Pageant is Picketed by 100 Women,‖ published the day after the pageant protest was much longer than her account of the pageant itself, run on the same page as the protest article (Figure 1.6). 109 While presented as an objective report of the protest events, Curtis‘s article tends 107 ―No More Miss America!‖ 522-524 108 Dow 129-137 109 Charlotte Curtis, ―Miss America Pageant is Picketed by 100 Women,‖ The New York Times (September 8, 1968) 81 and Charlotte Curtis, ―Illinois Girl Named Miss America,‖ The New York Times (September 8, 60 to favor the pageant itself and those passers-by who encountered the protest quizzically or argumentatively. Putting scare quotes around the terms ―free‖ woman and ―racism‖ used by the protesters, Curtis highlighted an incident wherein a protester‘s grandmother was ―caught‖ by her feminist granddaughter talking to a man amongst the observers and was ―chide[d]‖ for it. 110 Curtis also asked the newly crowned Miss America what she had thought of the smaller in-theater protest by a group of women who had purchased tickets to the pageant so as to bring the protest inside the audience hall. In the brief insert article about the Miss America winners, Curtis writes, ―Miss Ford [the new Miss America] was asked tonight after she won the title for her reaction to a brief shouting incident by a small group of young women protesters. She replied, ‗It was just too bad, I‘m sorry it happened.‘‖ 111 In asking for her opinion of the protest from the new pageant winner, Curtis subtly couches the contestants as the enemy of feminists, or vice versa. By pitting the individuals against one another, Curtis simplifies the issue of structural oppression protested by the NYRW as one group of women (protesters) fighting against another group of women (contestants). 112 Carol Hanisch, a participant in the protest, critiqued the creation of just such a battle by the protesters themselves in the ways in which some of their placards challenged the contestants. In her essay, ―What Can Be Learned: A Critique of the Miss America 1968) 81. Not only was the article describing the NYRW protest much longer than the brief account of the pageant winners, it visually surrounded the small insert about the new Miss America and the runners-up selected at the pageant (Figure 6). This insert included a headshot of the winner of the pageant, the former Miss Illinois. As such we can see that the protest ended up eliciting a much closer reading that engulfed the pageant itself. Perhaps we can see the protest as a success if only for the sheer number of words and articles written about it in comparison with that pageant and its results. 110 Curtis, ―Miss America Pageant is Picketed by 100 Women‖ 81 111 Curtis, ―Illinois Girl Named Miss America‖ 81 112 Dow 134-137 61 Protest,‖ published in November of 1968, Hanisch wrote, ―Posters which read ‗Up Against the Wall, Miss America,‘ ‗Miss America Sells It,‘ and ‗Miss America is a Big Falsie‘ hardly raised any women‘s consciousness and really harmed the cause of the sisterhood. Miss America and all beautiful women came off as our enemy instead of as our sisters who suffer with us.‖ 113 Hanisch‘s critique was meant to be used as a teaching tool such that future protests would be better focused and clearer for participants and viewers alike. This was particularly essential, for Hanisch, in creating a sense of exactly what was being protested at the pageant: not individual women‘s choices, but the very bounding of those choices by the systemic sexism, racism, and misogyny embedded in Western, particularly American, hegemonic values. It seems that this message was indeed halted from being fully circulated or understood in the 1968 event; in many of the subsequent accounts not only of this one protest, but of several decades‘ worth of Miss America pageants, the contestants and ―feminists‖ have been set apart from each other as fervent enemies. Moreover, this confrontation between ―types‖ of women has been described as a clash between the beautiful and feminine pageant participants and the unattractive and unfeminine ―feminists.‖ Dow writes that in 1970 the incoming president of the National Council of Women was asked her opinion about feminism and remarked that not only did she not believe that women faced discrimination, but that ‗so many of them [the feminists] are just so unattractive … I wonder if they‘re completely well.‘ The implication, of course, was that protesting had become a way of getting the attention that ugly women were otherwise denied; as Susan Douglas astutely notes, ‗feminists were cast as unfeminine, unappealing women who were denouncing the importance of the male gaze, yet who secretly coveted that gaze for themselves by protesting in 113 Carol Hanisch, ―What Can Be Learned: A Critique of the Miss America Protest‖ (November 1968), republished in Voices From Women’s Liberation (New York: Mentor Books, 1970) 133 62 public. These poor girls, it was suggested, sought to get through political flamboyance what they were unable to get through physical attractiveness.‘ 114 It is through such characterizations of feminists that a reputation was formed, and has remained in the intervening years, that ―feminists,‖ as an amorphous and largely- undefined group, are monstrous, dangerous, ugly, and man-hating. Similar epithets have been bandied about in reference to lesbians over the last four decades as well. The concept of feminism and the term feminist has been rejected by many over the past decades precisely because of such misunderstandings of the attributes and goals of various feminisms. The 1968 Miss America protest remains as an important origin point for the development of these public readings of feminism(s) in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. The original objectives of the New York Radical Women‘s protest of Miss America have become largely obscured in the face of the media messages circulated since 1968 about exactly who and what feminists are in the U.S. The equation of feminism with man-hating, ugly lesbians remains a theme embedded in dominant cultural rhetoric and representations and continues to have consequences for feminist, lesbians, and otherwise unconventional- looking women. The Ladder The history of lesbian and feminist publications in the United States dates at least as far back as the early 1950s. Preceding Second Wave feminism and the Stonewall Riots by almost two decades, journals of the American homophile movement established an 114 Dow 134 63 alternative press focused on the production and circulation of knowledge about being homosexual in America that advocated an integrationist methodology. The homophile movement, started in the 1940s and continuing through the middle of the 1960s, focused on presenting homosexuals as a simple variant of the heterosexual norm, one whom deserved to be accepted into heterosexual society because of their shared values. The term homophile was selected as the optimal descriptor because its meaning, ―love of the same,‖ denoted ―a more favorable and constructive reaction from the general public‖ than did the term homosexual. 115 The preferred terms used by homosexual women who identified with the homophile movement included ―female homophile,‖ ―variant,‖ ―gay woman,‖ and ―Lesbian,‖ which historian Marcia Gallo notes was almost invariably capitalized. 116 Begun in 1956, the lesbian journal The Ladder was created by the Daughters of Bilitis, a West Coast lesbian activist group stemming from the gay male Mattachine Society, whose journal, ONE Magazine, began publication out of Los Angeles in 1953. 117 The first issue of The Ladder was distributed in October of 1956 from San Francisco. 118 The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded in 1955 as a society that was ―interested in promoting an educational program on the subject of sex variation, and for sex 115 Basil Vaerlen quoted in Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2006) 25 116 Gallo 25 117 Barbara Grier, ―Introduction,‖ The Lavender Herring: Lesbian Essays from The Ladder. Eds., Barbara Grier and Coletta Reid. Baltimore: Diana Press, 1976) 15; Kristen Gay Esterberg, ―From Illness to Action: Conceptions of Homosexuality in The Ladder, 1956-1965,‖ The Journal of Sex Research 27:1 (February 1990) 66; Gallo 25 118 Grier, ―Introduction‖ 15; Esterberg 66; Gallo 25 64 variants.‖ 119 DOB produced the journal, originally meant as a newsletter that would eventually ―bring Lesbians into the public eye and to provide them with a sense of pride.‖ 120 Initially an assimilationist journal, The Ladder published scientific and cultural essays about the ability for lesbians to live productively within heterosexual American society. In its early days the editors and contributors to The Ladder were not interested in reforming society to fit the needs of the lesbian, but were focused on how to open up a space for themselves in American culture to be understood as acceptable citizens. The journal listed four goals as its mission statement at the beginning of each issue: ―education of the variant,‖ ―education of the public,‖ ―participation in research projects,‖ and ―investigation of the penal code as it pertains to the homosexual.‖ 121 The text of the first purpose, the ―education of the variant,‖ showcases the explicit goals of the society and journal: Education of the variant, with particular emphasis on the psychological and sociological aspects, to enable her to understand herself and make her adjustment to society in all its social, civic, and economic implications by establishing and maintaining a library of both fiction and non-fiction on the sex deviant theme; by sponsoring public discussions on pertinent subjects to be conducted by leading members of the legal, psychiatric, religious and other professions; by advocating a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society. 122 Here we see that the DOB and The Ladder initially worked to help lesbians fit into heterosexual society, to replicate ―normal‖ cultural activities and attitudes in all realms 119 Stella Rush quoted in Gallo 7 120 Gene Damon, ―The Ladder, Rung by Rung,‖ Introduction to the 1975 reprint of The Ladder, Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature. (New York: Arno Press, 1975) n.p. 121 ―Daughters of Bilitis – Purpose,‖ The Ladder 1:1 (October 1956) 4. No specific author is listed for this mission statement; it was produced in all subsequent issues of the journal. 122 ―Daughters of Bilitis – Purpose,‖ The Ladder 1:1 (October 1956) 4 65 but the romantic or sexual. In addition, The Ladder sought to examine the medical and sociological implications of female homosexuality within the dominant heterosexual culture. While not implying shame or fear on the part of the lesbian, the desire was to readily integrate her into conventional American culture so that the lesbian ―lifestyle‖ became as acceptable as the heterosexual one. There was to be no difference between the behavior of the lesbian and straight woman; according to her behavior and appearance, a lesbian should be indistinguishable from her heterosexual ―sisters.‖ At the same time, however, the then-president of the Daughters of Bilitis, Del Martin, wrote a ―President‘s Message‖ for the first issue of The Ladder that recognized the negative impact of conventional societal treatment of lesbians and called for a greater stand on visibility and activist work among its readers. Martin wrote, ―The Lesbian is a very elusive creature. She burrows underground in her fear of identification. […] Current modes in hairstyle and casual attire have enabled her to camouflage her existence.‖ 123 Martin then lauded the accomplishments of women in American history, including suffragettes and businesswomen, who have set a precedent for independence as a valued priority among contemporary women. She concluded with a plea toward the future of lesbian freedom and visibility: And what will be the lot of the future Lesbian? Fear? Scorn? This need not be – IF lethargy is supplanted by an energized constructive program, if cowardice gives way to the solidarity of a cooperative front, if the ‗let Georgia do it‘ attitude is replaced by the realization of individual responsibility in thwarting the evils of ignorance, superstition, prejudice, and bigotry. Nothing was ever accomplished by hiding in a dark corner. Why not discard the hermitage for the heritage that awaits any red- blooded American woman who dares to claim it? 124 123 Del Martin, ―President‘s Message,‖ The Ladder 1:1 (October 1956) 6 124 Martin 6-7 66 Here Martin set up a companionate set of stakes to The Ladder‘s goals of education and integration for, by, and about lesbians. She challenged the journal‘s readers to become part of the social movement of acceptance of female homosexuality in the public sphere that later in The Ladder‘s history became outright lesbian pride and social radicalism. According to historian Evelyn Gettone, at first The Ladder ―reported political news, but was never meant to be a political journal, and so the publishers shunned advocacy, devoting space instead to poetry, fiction, history and biography.‖ 125 There was an abrupt political change in 1963 when The Ladder became heir to a new editor, Barbara Gittings, who focused on more radical assertions of lesbian visibility and social progressivism: ―The period 1956 to 1965 showed enormous changes in The Ladder and the women who wrote for it. From its earliest years, when proclamations that lesbians were mentally ill or unnatural went virtually unchallenged, The Ladder grew into a forum for lesbians who wished to replace those conceptions with more positive images.‖ 126 Such positive imagery can be found in both the textual and visual representations in The Ladder until its demise in 1972. While few images that were included in the journal take into account women of varied body sizes and shapes, the images included were less idealized than denaturalized, especially the numerous drawings featured in The Ladder, which by far the largest group of illustrations published in the journal over the course of its life. Several of the images include anonymous figural silhouettes that barely refer to gender or sexuality, if at all. 125 Evelyn Gettone quoted in Jan Whitt, ―The Ladder,‖ Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues. Eds., Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck. (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996) 159 126 Esterberg 78 67 Many of the drawings, and even several of the photographs, seem to represent lesbians and/or women in the broadest way possible, perhaps in order to appeal to a large audience that might have just begun negotiating the world around their sexual identities. For example, the October 1957 issue of The Ladder included a cover image that perhaps typified the sentiment of the homophile movement at the time (Figure 1.7). The drawing shows a somewhat feminine (narrow jaw and brow line, heart-shaped face), but generally androgynous figure from the shoulders up. The figure‘s face is in three-quarter profile, and the figure holds a mask in her right hand. The mask is a bit more feminine than the cover figure‘s face, with a very high, narrow eyebrow line, eyes surrounded by full lashes, dark tendrils of hair on the side of the face, and darkened full lips. 127 A single tear drops from the mask‘s eye. It appears as if the figure in the image has just removed the mask from her face, revealing her ―true‖ self to the world; a self that we can assume is lesbian, since the drawing was featured on The Ladder. The theme of unmasking the true self, or removing a mask so as to live more authentically in the world, was a prominent one in the rhetoric of the homophile movement and the later gay and lesbian empowerment movement. That the figure that lived behind the mask appeared to be androgynous is consistent with several other of The Ladder‘s cover images over the years it was in print. In many of the drawn covers, and even some of the photographic covers of the journal, 127 Jan Zita Grover writes, ―Two things about The Ladder‘s graphics are particularly striking for viewers in these post-Stonewall, (hopefully not post-) feminist days: their emphasis on the dyke-beneath-the-lady – the tomboy hiding behind, or hopelessly striving to emulate, the ‗feminine‘ woman – and a gender differentiation as implacable as that supposed to obtain in heterosexual social relations: short-haired, flat- shoed, pants-wearing women eyeing or hand-in-hand with longer-haired, high-heeled, skirted femmes.‖ Jan Zita Grover, ―Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation,‖ Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. Eds., Liz Heron and Val Williams. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 363. The first description seems to apply here, while the second can be applied to several of the silhouette drawings and other images on The Ladder‘s cover described here. 68 the women that were portrayed had short hair, outright androgynous or semi-covered facial features, unisex clothing, or no detailed features at all in the case of the silhouettes and line drawings featured on some covers (Figures 1.8-1.13). That the ―real‖ or ―authentic‖ lesbian under the mask was depicted as androgynous in October 1957 and that so many covers featured androgynous lesbian figures seems at odds with much of what the Daughters of Bilitis and The Ladder recommended for lesbians, at least in its early years. 128 In fact, one of the most conventionally feminine images of a lesbian shown on The Ladder‘s cover was from the October/ November 1969 issue of the magazine that featured four photographs documenting some of the marches that occurred that year across the United States in an appeal for equal justice and equal rights for homosexuals (Figure 1.13). The photographs that featured women wearing dresses and skirts on this cover showed a public image of the ―proper‖ lesbian that was constructed specifically to better fit into society‘s conception of what a suitably feminine woman should wear and look like. 129 While some leaders of the DOB, such as Del Martin, and some demonstrators in these images took up the call to embody a conventional femininity so as to assuage society‘s fears about the homosexual as ―other,‖ pathological, sinful, and/or criminal, several readers of The Ladder objected to such notions. Among these dissenters was African-American lesbian writer Lorraine Hansberry who advocated, in a letter to the journal, for the end to The Ladder‘s explicit recommendations ―about how to appear 128 John D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983/ 1998) 113-115 129 As D‘Emilio writes of both the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, ―Again and again, they [the leaders of these two groups] minimized the differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals, attempted to isolate the ‗deviant‘ members of the gay community from its ‗respectable‘ middle-class elements, stressed the responsibility of lesbians and gay men for their second-class status, and urged self- reformation.‖ D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 113 69 acceptable to the dominant social group. … One is oppressed or discriminated against because one is different, not ‗wrong‘ or ‗bad.‘‖ 130 The use of several androgynous models and drawings for the cover images of The Ladder during the 1950s and 60s might seem to belie The Ladder‘s leadership while simultaneously supporting at least some of the members of its constituency of readers and contributors. In terms of body size and shape, images featured on the cover of The Ladder focused primarily on thin bodies. In the several simplified drawings and/or silhouettes published on the covers, bodies were thin, often elongated, and usually marked as ―feminine‖ only through brief suggestions of feminine dress, hair, and/or breasts (see Figures 1.8-1.10). Indeed, it appears that for the most part, the drawings were marked as lesbian (rather than as male or androgynous) precisely through thinness and/or feminine hairstyles and facial features, such as those described above on the mask from the October 1957 issue of The Ladder. The photographs that were used as some cover images generally leaned more toward the representation of lesbians with lean bodies that were rarely marked by such feminine signifiers as breasts and/or ―hourglass‖ body shapes. The predominance of thinner lesbian bodies in the cover images of The Ladder might well coincide with the aspirations toward normativity or assimilation so prominent in much of the early life of the journal. In later editions of The Ladder we might attribute the perpetuations of the idea that lesbians are only thin to the influence of the absence of other kinds of visual representations in dominant and lesbian and gay culture more widely. Absence and/or silence perpetuates more of the same, and until a fat-acceptance movement began to coalesce in the late 1960s, fat individuals, especially women, were 130 Hansberry‘s letter to The Ladder dated May 1957, quoted by D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 114 70 largely ignored by mass media and alternative publishing forums. The same could be said of women of color, who were also largely left out of the visual representations that were circulated within The Ladder. The Fat Underground Soon after the National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA) 131 was created in 1969, special interest groups associated with the organization sprang up to focus on the issues intersecting with fatness that were considered important to members of the national organization, including the Big Men‘s Forum, the Feminist Caucus, the Lavender special interest group, the Lesbian Fat Activist Network, a Teen/ Youth special interest group, and a Mental Health Professionals special interest group. 132 In addition to the special interest groups, local chapters of NAAFA were created, including one formed in the early 1970s in Los Angeles. Several members of the already-established Radical Feminist Therapy Collective 133 formed the Los Angeles NAAFA chapter, having been 131 The organization was later renamed the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, and retains the NAAFA acronym (pronounced Nah-Fuh). 132 Charlotte Cooper, Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size. (London: The Women‘s Press Ltd., 1998) 131- 132 133 The Radical Feminist Therapy Collective was borne out of the Radical Therapy movement of the early 1970s, which advocated a non-medical model for fostering metal health. As Sara Golda Bracha Fishman wrote, ―Conventional psychotherapy places the burden of change on the ‗maladjusted‘ individual; radical therapists condemned this as a ‗blame-the-victim‘ approach. ‗Change society, not ourselves,‘ they urged. […] Radical liberation movements rarely try to change discriminatory laws. Rather, they demand change at the level of fundamental social values, which are seen as the root cause of all human laws. These values not only shape legislation, they also affect the way people view one another and treat one another in day-to-day interactions. These values influence the individual's self-image, fostering self-hating attitudes and self- defeating behaviors in members of groups that society considers ‗inferior.‘‖ Sara Golda Bracha Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground,‖ originally published in Radiance: The Magazine for Large Women (Winter 1998), also available at ―The Fat Underground Archives,‖ Largesse: The Network for Size Esteem (accessed 1 July 2009, <http://www.eskimo.com/~largesse/Archives/FU/Life%20In%20The%20Fat%20Underground%20by%20 Sara%20Fishman.html>) 71 inspired by Louderback‘s Fat Power. 134 Two feminist activists, Aldebaran (later known as Vivian Mayer and then Sara Golda Bracha Fishman) and Judy Freespirit, had created the Los Angeles chapter in hopes to advance a radical fat politics similar to those encouraged in the Radical Feminist Therapy Collective, which sought to connect personal and political issues from a radical feminist perspective in order to enact collective empowerment and social change. 135 The radical approach to demystifying fat oppression fostered by the five to six women who originally made up the Los Angeles chapter of NAAFA eventually did not sit well with the national organization, which asked the members of the chapter in 1973 ―to tone down our delivery, and also to be more circumspect about our feminist ideology, which most NAAFA members were not yet ready for.‖ 136 In response, the chapter divorced itself from NAAFA and renamed itself the Fat Underground (FU); four feminist lesbians including Aldebaran and Judy Freespirit became the core of the Fat Underground, although the group cycled through membership, getting both larger and smaller, over the decade between 1973 and 1983, during which it was most active. 137 Over the course of their life, the Fat Underground made a name for itself as a radical fat-positive activist group that exposed many of the medical and social myths circulated about fatness through several self-published texts that described the ways in which fat oppression worked in US society and how individuals and groups could fight it on a structural level. 134 Cooper, Fat and Proud 133 135 Cooper, Fat and Proud 133 and Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground‖ 136 Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground‖ 137 Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground‖ 72 Foundational to the Fat Underground‘s mission was to demystify oppression as felt by fat people, and women in particular. As described by Aldebaran above, members of the Fat Underground who were involved in radical therapy brought to the group the notion that ―oppression goes unchallenged if it is ‗mystified.‘ That is, its true nature is concealed. The oppressors do not say to the victims, ‗We will torture you until you submit to our will.‘ Rather, they say (and often believe), ‗This treatment may seem painful or unfair, but it is for your own good.‘‖ 138 The Fat Underground strove to expose the disconnect between oppressive behaviors/ attitudes toward fat people, especially those held by the medical community that had circulated through society at large, and actual scientific studies and personal approaches in order to change the ways in which dominant culture conceptualized fat and fatness. That the Fat Underground would fight for structural change rather than reform, which is what NAAFA remains known for in terms of pursuing civil rights legislation against size discrimination, was a primary basis for the group‘s formation. 139 To this end, in 1973 the Fat Underground published the ―Fat Liberation Manifesto,‖ which emphasized seven points of struggle and empowerment for fat subjects: 1. WE believe that fat people are fully entitled to human respect and recognition. 2. WE are angry at mistreatment by commercial and sexist interests. These have exploited our bodies as objects of ridicule, thereby creating an immensely profitable market selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, that ridicule. 3. WE see our struggle as allied with the struggles of other oppressed groups against classism, racism, sexism, ageism, financial exploitation, imperialism and 138 Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground‖ 139 Fishman writes, ―Then, as now, NAAFA's goal was full social equality and acceptance for fat people, within existing society.‖ ―Life in the Fat Underground‖ 73 the like. 4. WE demand equal rights for fat people in all aspects of life, as promised in the Constitution of the United States. We demand equal access to goods and services in the public domain, and an end to discrimination against us in the areas of employment, education, public facilities and health services. 5. WE single out as our special enemies the so-called "reducing" industries. These include diet clubs, reducing salons, fat farms, diet doctors, diet books, diet foods and food supplements, surgical procedures, appetite suppressants, drugs and gadgetry such as wraps and "reducing machines". WE demand that they take responsibility for their false claims, acknowledge that their products are harmful to the public health, and publish long-term studies proving any statistical efficacy of their products. We make this demand knowing that over 99% of all weight loss programs, when evaluated over a five-year period, fail utterly, and also knowing the extreme proven harmfulness of frequent large changes in weight. 6. WE repudiate the mystified "science" which falsely claims that we are unfit. It has both caused and upheld discrimination against us, in collusion with the financial interests of insurance companies, the fashion and garment industries, reducing industries, the food and drug industries, and the medical and psychiatric establishment. 7. WE refuse to be subjugated to the interests of our enemies. We fully intend to reclaim power over our bodies and our lives. We commit ourselves to pursue these goals together. 140 This manifesto was powerful and explicit in its account of the ways in which fat people had been oppressed as well as the ways in which they, and other disenfranchised groups, could react to their oppression productively and effectively on personal and political levels. Each statement by the FU in the ―Fat Liberation Manifesto‖ not only exposed the active and passive methods of oppression that had arisen in the United States since just before the turn of the twentieth century in order to control and vilify fatness and fat people, but illustrated the knowledge, both personal and political, the Fat 140 Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran for the Fat Underground, ―Fat Liberation Manifesto‖ (Los Angeles: The Fat Underground, 1973) 74 Underground had compiled to combat such attempts. One after another, assumptions based on negative attitudes involving the aesthetics and morality of fatness were critiqued with factual information. At the same time, the Fat Underground enforced productivity in their declarations, as they lay out a seven-point plan to tackle the oppressive tactics they reviewed as a small, but powerful group that worked to spread their influence and insights across the county. The ―Fat Liberation Manifesto‖ set the tone for successive publications put out by the Fat Underground, including several position papers on how fatness and oppression affected employment discrimination, sexism, eating, humor, psychiatry, and physical health. Lynn Mabel-Lois, a member of the Fat Underground, published ―Fat Dykes Don‘t Make It‖ in a 1974 issue of the lesbian feminist journal Lesbian Tide. A scathing critique of the lesbian community‘s fatphobia, ―Fat Dykes Don‘t Make It‖ detailed the ways in which fatness had been used as a barrier between legitimate lesbian relationships, both personal and political, by fat and non-fat women alike. Mabel-Lois‘ essay pointed to the instability of fat as a cultural signifier as well as to its ambiguous nature. Who was deemed fat and who was simply ―strong-looking‖? 141 Who was qualified to be a ―good friend,‖ and who might have been chosen as a lover? Where did the anti-patriarchal rhetoric begin in lesbian communities and where did it end? Mabel- Lois spoke to the overt and covert fat oppression experienced by many lesbians from their own communities. With this essay the image of a singular, all-accepting lesbian community of all-pervasive ―woman love‖ was shattered. 141 Lynn Mabel-Lois, ―Fat Dykes Don‘t Make It,‖ Lesbian Tide 4:3 (1976) 11 75 In addition to circulating written critiques of social issues, the Fat Underground took part in performative protest actions against the medicalization of fatness and the diet industry, as well as in support of women‘s and LGBT liberation issues. 142 In a retrospective article about the Fat Underground, Sara Fishman (aka Aldebaran) recounted a particularly important moment in the life of the Fat Underground in which feminists who were not members of the group coalesced around the issue of fat oppression: In August 1974, the Los Angeles feminist community held a celebration of Women's Equality Day, filling a local park with placards and booths. Thousands of women milled about, enjoying the sun, the crowds, and the atmosphere of sisterhood. The Fat Underground had a booth there, among the scores of others. Several weeks earlier, the rock singer Cass Elliot, of the Mamas and Papas, had died. She was only thirty-three years old. Cass had become a star - an icon, even - to our generation, despite being very fat. Predictably, the press vilified her memory: a widely circulated report was that she had choked to death on a ham sandwich. In fact, Cass had been dieting at the time of her death, and we felt sure that her death was due to complications of the dieting. The Women's Equality Day celebration included an open microphone and stage. When our turn came, members of the Fat Underground, members of the Fat Women's Problem-Solving Group, and some of our friends moved onto the stage. We carried candles and wore black arm bands, in a symbolic funeral procession. Lynn [Mabel-Lois] spoke. She began by describing the inspiration Cass Elliot had represented to us, as a fat woman who had refused to hide her beauty. She ended by accusing the medical establishment of murdering Cass, and (because they promote weight loss despite its known dangers) of committing genocide against fat women. For the next few weeks, we were local heroines. The Los Angeles feminist news paper Sister devoted a full page in its next issue to Fat Liberation, with a photo of our Women's Equality Day demonstration on the cover. Publicly, at least, local radical feminists began to acknowledge fat women's oppression as a problem they would have to take seriously. 143 142 Cooper, Fat and Proud 134-135 and Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground‖ 143 Fishman, ―Life in the Fat Underground‖ 76 This event marked a public coming together of hundreds of fat and thin feminist women who acknowledged the intersection between sexism and fatphobia that the members of the Fat Underground had been pointing out since before their inception as a solidified activist group. The Fat Underground further interacted with local feminist communities by instituting consciousness-raising groups at the Women‘s Liberation Center in Los Angeles, protesting against the television network NBC‘s local broadcast of a lengthy series that recommended dieting as a healthy alternative to fatness, and participating in a Los Angeles city-wide rally and march ―protesting crimes against women, linking starvation and surgical treatments imposed on fat women to world- wide patterns of violence based on sexism.‖ 144 The recognition of fat oppression and the need to considerate it amongst other intersectional identities was not consistent during the height of mainstream Second Wave Feminism in the 1970s, nor has it been in the past twenty or so years of what some have called Third Wave Feminism. This is not to say that issues of fat, appearance, health, and aesthetics pertaining to women have not been analyzed by broad-based feminist movements over the past forty years, but that it has not been done so in any dependable or coherent manner, unless by groups such as the Fat Underground and NOLOSE (a current fat and queer-positive national organization), who were/ are explicitly dedicated to them as their core issues. This too is the case with the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, although once again we can see several intersections between the fat politics proposed by the FU and lesbian feminist tactics and theories of representation. Vivian Meyer 144 Vivian F. Mayer, ―Foreword,‖ Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression. Eds., Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1983) xv 77 recounted the ambivalence exhibited in fat and lesbian feminist communities during the early 1970s: The companionship of other women offered fat women a social environment in which – often for the first time in their lives – they could be loved for their intelligence and personalities, and their ‗ugliness‘ according to conventional standards could be overlooked. Indeed, these conventional standards were attacked as oppressive to women. In theory, then, lesbian feminism offered a haven wherein a fat woman could affirm her beleaguered sense of womanhood and could almost forget that she was fat. The expectation was satisfied up to a point. That point came when fat women sought lovers among other women. Then the ‗support‘ of slim lesbian feminists often revealed itself to be liberalism that easily turned into rejection. […] The struggle itself helped to sort out issues of fat politics versus generalized sexism, and was enormously popular in developing fat women‘s consciousness. 145 Many of the members of the Fat Underground, including Mayer, identified as lesbian and feminist upon joining the group and continued to integrate their interests in lesbian subjects within their anti-sexist and fat-acceptance campaigns. One major endeavor was the book entitled Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, published in 1983, the year that marked what has become known as the official demise of the Fat Underground, but conceptualized and worked on for at least six years before that (Figure 1.14). 146 Shadow on a Tightrope featured six sections in which were included writings by women affected by fat oppression in various ways in their personal and professional lives: ―The Fat Illusion: Exposing the Myths,‖ ―Growing Up: Memories of Fat Women‘s Lives,‖ ―‗I Stilled the Dancer in Me‘: The Struggle of Fat Women to be Outside, to Exercise, to Participate in Sports,‖ ―Ordinary Hassles: Living with Harassment and Isolation,‖ ―They‘re Trying to Kill Us for Our Own Good: 145 Mayer, ―Foreword‖ xiv 146 Mayer, ―Foreword‖ xv 78 Medical Crimes and the Dieting War Against Women,‖ and ―A Spoiled Identity: Fat Women as Survivors.‖ 147 While a few of the essays published in Shadow on a Tightrope were written by the Fat Underground and some if its individual members, some were written by professional and self-identified fat dyke writers (i.e., Elena Dykewomon), and others were written by non-professionals based on their own personal stories. In an essay entitled ―coming out: notes on fat lesbian pride,‖ included in Shadow on a Tightrope, a self-identified fat lesbian author named thunder explicitly took to task feminist community members who sought to diminish the validity of fat women, lesbian or otherwise, by interrogating the values she had seen perpetuated in feminist communities about identity and body size. 148 Considering the ―lesbian feminist community in general,‖ thunder wrote, lesbian pride is taken for granted; indeed, pride is the sine qua non of feminism – pride in ourselves, individually and collectively, and the strength to act and resist which grows out of that pride. but in this same community, fat pride is virtually nonexistent. i see radical feminists who believe in themselves and their strength as women trying to reduce their size – which is to me the ultimate contradiction. 149 At the same time that feminist communities had struggled to critique patriarchal notions of representation, and to restructure patriarchal social conventions, including those based on physical appearance, the dislike or even hatred of fat and fatness as a state of 147 Lisa Shoenfielder and Barb Wieser, ―Table of Contents,‖ Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression. Eds., Lisa Shoenfielder and Barb Wieser. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1983) vii- viii 148 thunder‘s name is self-consciously spelled with all lower-case letters, as is the title of her essay. 149 thunder, ―coming out: notes on fat lesbian pride,‖ Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression. Eds., Lisa Shoenfielder and Barb Wieser. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1983) 214 79 being in women remained a core belief for many feminists. In addition, because taking up physical space in the world had been seen as directly related to holding power, fatness in women became vilified, sometimes even by activists who vigorously sought to challenge male-dominated ideals such as the idea that women should be small and powerless. thunder‘s essay spoke to the deep cultural embeddedness of such notions about bodies and their representations, and the power such ideas have in infiltrating conceptions of self in both conscious and unconscious ways. That lesbian feminist communities perpetuated such patriarchal values pointed to the need for continued work such as Shadow on a Tightrope and the Fat Underground. Shadow on a Tightrope remains the only collection of its kind – a non-academic anthology of essays by women (or anyone) committed to detailing the many facets of living as a fat individual – to this day. It has marked several contemporary lesbian, feminist, and/or fat-empowerment activists‘, artists‘, and writers‘ formative experience of the championing of fat women‘s rights in contemporary U.S. and European culture. Contemporary novelist, poet, and activist Susan Stinson reviewed Shadow on a Tightrope in Gay Community News in 1984, just after it was published and wrote: Shadow was not an easy book for me. I was conscious of my body as I read it [….] I was aware of myself as a fat woman listening to other fat women, always with one eye on how we look to thin people, the only people who have ever counted. I‘ve spent a lifetime feeling repulsive, so I‘m not about to wake up to the fact that I‘m a full human being (and I mean full) without hesitations and suspicions. But the honesty in these articles, interviews, and poems reached me, and I forgot, for a while, anyway, those other eyes and the compulsion to laugh. […] I ache for a fat lesbian erotica, for fat dyke massage classes and writers‘ groups and civil disobedience affinity groups and swim teams and car pools, for lesbians of all sizes who don‘t shy away from the sight and the touch of a fat woman, and who won‘t tell me I‘m sick, lazy or lying when I say I‘m oppressed. Shadow on a Tightrope leaves me with a lot of anger and some unmet needs, but 80 it also leaves me with the voices of fat women as sensitive, articulate, creative beings. That‘s a rare sound in literature. I‘m starving for more. 150 Stinson poetically conveyed what it was like as a fat lesbian feminist to read this book for the first time right after was published. The simultaneous feeling of celebration of self and community and witness to suffering attended much of the anti-oppression work that the Fat Underground produced during its time as an activist collective. And while Stinson was correct in pointing out the lack of visual images included in the publication of Shadow on a Tightrope (―Shadow suffers for its lack of graphics, for if anyone needs visual images that celebrate us, fat women do.‖ 151 ), the texts remain a significant legacy of the Fat Underground‘s efforts at intersectional liberation. As thunder writes at the conclusion of her own essay in Shadow on a Tightrope, the radical notions advocated by the FU were in many ways the first of their kind to be publicly heralded by a collective of fat women: ―that some women may not want to diet, or may not want to be thin, or may actually like themselves as fat is never seriously considered, by either mainstream or feminist theories.‖ 152 ―We must,‖ thunder continued, ―reclaim, redefine, and, most of all, E-X-P-A-N-D.‖ 153 150 Susan Stinson, ―Articulate Voices of Fat Women,‖ Review of Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, originally published in Gay Community News (December 1984) 5; shared with author in email July 17, 2009. 151 Stinson 5 152 thunder 215; emphasis original. 153 thunder 215 81 Tee Corinne: The Cunt Coloring Book and Solarized Photography Tee Corinne became an artist before she came out as a lesbian, but her most well- known and widely-circulated images are those that she made after the 1973 break-up of her heterosexual marriage. Corinne was living in San Francisco in 1973 and soon became involved sexually and politically with women over the next several years. 154 Corinne became closely engaged with sex education programs in the Bay Area and met with feminist authors, artists, and activists who were creating presentations and slideshows that illustrated the female sexual response system, including Betty Dodson, who was then establishing her career as a sex educator known for her attention paid to the issue of female masturbation. In recounting this moment in her life, Corinne wrote, In May of 1973 I went to a ―Women‘s Sexuality Evening‖ because movies showing women masturbating to orgasm were advertised. Part of the program was Betty Dodson‘s invigorating talk, ―Liberating Masturbation.‖ In 1974, the second time I heard her speak, she showed slides of women‘s genitals: large, vividly colored slides. Later that evening I told her I wanted to do drawings of labia. She said, ―Aw, do it, honey.‖ I did. 155 Corinne began to draw and photograph individual women‘s genitalia in order to visualize and name those parts of the body that were supposed to remain private and secret. ―I knew that the things we don‘t have names for, or images of, are the ones we label crazy and bad,‖ Corinne wrote, ―I believed that reclaiming labial imagery was a route to 154 Tee Corinne, ―Crafting Erotic Imagery,‖ Unpublished manuscript of essay courtesy of Tee A. Corinne Papers, 1966-2003, University of Oregon Special Collections, n.p. This essay was eventually completed and published in Corinne‘s book of photography Intimacies (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2002). 155 Tee Corinne, ―Censorship‖ (1992) Unpublished manuscript, Courtesy of Tee A. Corinne Papers, 1966- 2003, University of Oregon Special Collections 1 82 claiming personal power for women.‖ 156 Corinne‘s interest in visualizing female sexual imagery stemmed from her interest in empowerment and reclamation, themes that were absolutely crucial to Second Wave Feminism of the 1970s as well as to lesbian feminist and gay and lesbian rights movements of the 1970s through today. The issue of visibility in terms of lesbian life was at the core of Corinne‘s work from 1973 until her 2006 death. In a 1986 paper entitled ―Lesbian Photography: A Personal and Public Exploration,‖ republished in her 1997 anthology Wild Lesbian Roses, Corinne traced three major foci that she felt were at stake in creating a woman-centered lesbian art over the course of her lifetime: 1. Affirmation I want to create images that lesbian women will see as positive and life affirming. 2. Confronting of Stereotypes I want to avoid the pop culture images of lesbians as predatory vampires or adolescents. 3. Questioning of Assumptions About Beauty Do I succeed in making beautiful images of skinny women, fat women, women with scars, with glasses, older women, disabled women? 157 These three concerns are exhibited in each of the kinds of art that Corinne produced during the more than thirty years in which she was an active part of an American lesbian art scene. I will be discussing Corinne‘s work in each of the chapters of this dissertation and begin here with her early work. Describing her work as imbued with a sense of ―romanticism‖ and ―glamour,‖ Corinne and her imagery have alternately been called shocking and comfortable, 156 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 1-2 157 Tee Corinne, ―Lesbian Photography: A Personal and Public Exploration,‖ Wild Lesbian Roses: Essays on Art, Rural Living, and Creativity, 1986-1995. (Wolf Creek, OR: Pearlchild, 1997/ 2003) 5; Bold emphasis original. 83 depending on the moment in which it was made and viewed. 158 Her aggressive stance on the creation and display of sexually explicit visual representations of individual women lesbian couples and trios, of imagery of women who do not fit within traditional standards of beauty, of series of self-portraits that record the bodily and emotion changes that come upon a woman as she ages, and of portraits that appeal to ―garden variety lesbians‖ mark Corinne not simply as a long-lasting artist of the late twentieth-century, but as an entrepreneur and pioneer in the establishment of diverse lesbian visual representations that can be traced back to a moment in which such imagery was generally unheard of, let alone unseen, especially within the realm of the fine arts. 159 After discussing the idea of drawing female genitalia with Betty Dodson in 1974, Tee Corinne launched herself into the project with enthusiasm. Almost every woman Corinne met in work, volunteering, and social situations was asked whether or not she would be willing to pose for the artist while she drew their labia. 160 Many of them accepted, and Corinne would draw them in soft graphite, after which she would use tracing paper to re-create them in ink, so that they would be easier to reproduce. 161 Corinne wrote, ―I made copies on cardstock and sold them through local women‘s bookstores. I learned that there was a market for these images. Women really liked them, 158 Tee Corinne, ―Crafting Erotic Imagery‖ n.p. 159 In several of her essays recounting her own life as a lesbian artist, Corinne wrote that Barbara Grier, former editor of The Ladder and co-founder of Naiad Press described many of Corinne‘s subjects as those with whom ―garden variety lesbians‖ would likely identify and ―feel proud of.‖ Here I am specifically referring to the passage discussing this in Corinne, ―Crafting Erotic Imagery‖ n.p. As Corinne described in her essay ―Censorship,‖ amongst other pieces of writing, some of her earliest sexual imagery of female genitalia was used by teachers and educational textbooks because such graphic, truthful imagery had not been previously available for publication. 160 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 1 161 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 2 84 liked to hang them on their walls and give them as gifts.‖ 162 Such imagery fit well into the trend of the early 1970s that saw an increasing number of visual representations of female genitalia, whether realistically or symbolically, as part of a program of reclamation of the female body from the male gaze. 163 Through much of the recorded history of Western art, male artists had controlled the presentation and circulation of images of the female body, both clothed and nude. As argued by feminist art historian Linda Nochlin in her pioneering 1971 essay, ―Why Have There Been No Great women Artists?‖ due to social conventions that restricted women‘s access to art education, relatively few female artists were able to become well-known and/ or successful artists during the past several centuries. 164 Indeed, even when women were allowed access to art training programs, they were rarely provided the foundation of working from a nude model, male or female, upon which male artists had based their figural work for hundreds 162 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 2 163 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, ―The male gaze is a position of privilege in social relations which entitles men to look at women and positions women as objects of that look. As John Berger succinctly puts it: ‗men act, women appear‘ (1972, 47). In other words, the male gaze is men doing something to women. This ocular gesture of dominance acts out the gendered asymmetries of patriarchy as it proliferates in institutionalized cultural forms such as films, beauty contests, advertising, striptease routines, and fashion shows. Laden with sexual desire, predation, voyeurism, intimidation, and entitlement, the male gaze often achieves the prolonged intensity of staring. […]Regardless of which sex the partners in the exchange identify with, looking masculinizes, then, and being looked at feminizes.‖ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 41. For further analysis on the ―male gaze,‖ see Linda Nochlin, ―Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art‖ (1972), Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988); Laura Mulvey, ―Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‖ (1975), Visual and Other Pleasures. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); E. Ann Kaplan, ―Is the gaze male?‖ Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen, 1983); and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ―Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a Project of Historical Salvage,‖ Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 164 Linda Nochlin, ―Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‖ ARTnews 69 (January 1971). Republished in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988) 50 85 of years. 165 Now, in the late 1960s and 1970s, not only were female bodies being reclaimed and reconstructed by female artists through such artworks as Corinne‘s labia, Judy Chicago‘s Red Flag (1971) (Figure 1.15), and Carolee Schneeman‘s Interior Scroll (1975) (Figure 1.16) within a specifically feminist setting, but art critics and art historians took off from Nochlin‘s work and began to theorize what feminist art-making practices might mean after centuries of masculinist bias in reporting the history and theory of art production. Out of her collection of close-up images of labia, Corinne created the now-famous Cunt Coloring Book in 1975 (Figure 1.17). The coloring book consisted of more than thirty pages of black ink on white paper drawings of the various labia Corinne had sketched, suitable to be colored in as the name of the collection described. On the choice of the name for the book, Corinne described her simultaneous discomfort with and appreciation of the use of the word ―cunt,‖ a term for female genitalia only just being reclaimed by some feminist artists in the United States during the early 1970s: ―No other name seemed really to fit, although the word ‗cunt‘ was not one with which I was particularly comfortable. The alliteration, though, was nice. I also liked the idea of combining a street term for genitalia with a coloring book, since both are ways that, as children, we get to know the world.‖ 166 Corinne evoked the processes of learning as a child in her foreword of the 1988 edition of the coloring book as well: 165 Nochlin, ―Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‖ 50. Telling in its blunt embrace of hegemonic culture as the primary force in the historical oppression of women in the arts, Nochlin wrote in the essay, ―The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education-education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals.‖ 166 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 2 86 I organized the drawings into a coloring book because a major way we learn to understand the world, as children, is by coloring. As adults many of us still need to learn about our external sexual anatomy. Coloring is a way for the child in each of us to revision and reclaim this portion of our bodies from which we have been estranged. 167 The allusion to childhood might seem unexpected in a book with very detailed, intimate portraits of women‘s genitalia, but here Corinne invoked the ways in which coloring and naming as a child helped individuals to explore unfamiliar terrain, and to use multiple senses to take in and own the world around oneself. The same sentiment underlied Corinne‘s reasons for producing the coloring book in the first place, as a way in which women (and potentially men) could begin to become familiar with female bodies and their representations that would be ―lovely and informative, to give pleasure and affirmation.‖ 168 In editions of the book produced since 1988, which has now gone through ten printings with its current publisher Last Gasp Press, Corinne included a brief foreword in which she described the history of the creation of the images as well as the printing and naming processes of the text. 169 In this text as well as several of Corinne‘s manuscripts and unpublished essays, the artist recounted the initial problems she had had with producing the book. The first printing of the book was created by a small, local women‘s printing shop in the Bay Area in 1975. At 2000 copies, Corinne intentionally produced a small run because she was unsure of the response to an entire book of hand-drawn genitals. She needn‘t have worried at that stage, however, and the 2000 copies, advertised 167 Corinne, ―Foreword,‖ Cunt Coloring Book (San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1988/ 2006) n.p. 168 Corinne, ―Foreword‖ n.p. 169 Tee Corinne, ―Foreword‖ n.p. 87 in women‘s bookstores, sold out in one year. 170 When she approached the same printers to create a second, and larger, printing run, however, she was refused. Corinne wrote, ―I went back to have more printed. One of the women blanched, said she never thought they would sell, that she had hated printing them, thought the book objectified women‘s bodies, separated a part from the whole.‖ 171 The printers‘ disapproval hurt Corinne, but she soon rallied and found a different women‘s print shop, where all of the members of the collective approved of the book‘s content, to publish its second edition of 4000 copies. 172 Once these were sold out in 1981, Naiad Press, a lesbian feminist publishing house based in Florida, suggested that the book would sell even better were its name changed to Labiaflowers (Figure 1.18). Corinne agreed, but the name-change hurt sales rather than boosting them. ―It bombed,‖ Corinne wrote, ―It took the whole of the 1980s to sell 2000 copies.‖ 173 As Corinne commented in the book‘s 1988 foreword, ―So much for euphemisms.‖ 174 Since 1988, the ―original‖ Cunt Coloring Book, along with Corinne‘s foreword translated into French, Spanish, and German, and eight additional drawings, has been printed ten times by Last Gasp, and continues to be a popular selection in feminist and LGBT bookstores, and feminist, LGBT, and sex education classes around the world. 175 170 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 2 171 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 2 172 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 2 173 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 3 174 Corinne, ―Foreword‖ n.p. 175 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 3 88 The book began with a basic drawing that scientifically labels each part of the female genitalia, not to teach the reader the ―correct‖ names for each of the parts, but so as to display the commonalities inherent in most women‘s cunts (Figure 1.19). None of the individual drawings included in the book incorporate any labeling or explanatory text; the drawings speak on their own about the variety and diversity of female sex organs (see Figures 1.20-1.24). The quality of the ink on paper technique Corinne used to create the images of female genitalia that constituted the Cunt Coloring Book formed a set of rather tactile drawings that played on the representation of three-dimensional body parts on a two-dimensional paper plane. Corinne adapted her line to fit each individual body, and browsing through the images in the book shows Corinne‘s adept use of thick and thin lines, cross-hatched shading, and stippling techniques to create images that show the particularities and differences between the labia and overall genital area for each of her models. The images seem simultaneously simple and complex. The free-hand drawings have a sense of spontaneity, a freshness that comes from direct, quick observation and a joy of movement with the pen swiftly covering space as it moves across the page. At the same time, the drawings seem studied, detailed, and utterly specific, suggesting a deliberation and concentration of each stroke of the pen. This is especially apparent in comparing the forms of lines in each individual drawing and across the various images of the book. While pen and ink on paper is a fairly simple medium of recording, the changes in line thickness and technique within the drawings imbued a greater complexity to the images. Thick lines and solid shading mingled with the thinnest of lines vanishing as they move from one area to another; a solidly-drawn set of labia is surrounded by a complex set of stippled lines that describe the fluffy fullness of pubic hair surrounding the vagina 89 (Figure 1.20). In one image the hair is wild and shaggy, and we are only able to see the interior organs with the help of the model‘s hands, which Corinne drew in next to the mons veneris and clitoris (Figure 1.21). In another image, no hair was drawn at all, and the succinct lines and shading made the subject of the work almost impossible to understand save the two fingers on either side of the vaginal opening and the drawing‘s placement within the coloring book (Figure 1.22). With no explanatory texts, the viewer needed to decipher the sets of lines that make up each cunt so as to understand the formation of each image and each set of genitals. Each of the sets of genitalia that Corinne drew was almost entirely decontextualized from the rest of the subject‘s body. This was the primary reason that some women objected to Corinne‘s work in the Cunt Coloring Book, as the images seemed to them to boil down an individual woman into her genitalia, a potentially essentialist point of view that reified a male-centered approach to the female body as an object to be looked at and desired for her sexual characteristics and nothing more. Corinne‘s goal, however, and likely the primary reason behind the strong selling history of the book over the past twenty-eight years, was to empower women on the topic of their sexuality, and to unashamedly display the unique qualities of women‘s genitalia, showing that differences in size, shape, and amount of hair of the labia, clitoris, vagina, and mons veneris was normal and healthy. The textures of skin and hair that Corinne captured through her drawing method emphasized this point. Corinne didn‘t shy away from the anatomical intricacies, or intimacy for that matter, of looking closely at female sex organs and translating what she saw to paper. 90 In addition to her drawing series that culminated in the Cunt Coloring Book, Corinne worked on producing photographs of female genitalia and lesbians engaged in erotic activities from the start of her career as a lesbian feminist artist. Corinne became known for the solarization techniques that she employed widely in presenting lesbian couples in various sexual acts. One of Corinne‘s most well-known photographs of lesbian lovemaking, one that has become an icon of lesbian feminism of the 1970s, and of lesbianism across time more generally, appeared on the front cover of the third issue of the lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom in 1977 (Figures 1.25 and 1.26). In this photograph, two women are pictured having sex before a plain background. One woman sits up with her legs crossed, while her lover lies in front of her supported by her left arm, her right hand hidden by her lover‘s groin and thigh. The woman in the foreground seems tense with sexual pleasure as her lover‘s face is buried in her neck. Not only was this image featured on the cover of Sinister Wisdom, but for many years after it was offered by the journal and in feminist bookstores as a full-size poster (approximately 18 by 24 inches) with a mid-grey background color. Indeed, Fran Day, the editor of the thirtieth- year anniversary issue of Sinister Wisdom reprised Corinne‘s iconic image for the front cover of the commemorative edition of the journal in 2006, such did its power as a lesbian representation endure. 176 Not only was this image of lesbian lovemaking a pioneer in terms of visualizing an explicit lesbian sexuality, as it has been circulated nationally and internationally over the last thirty-three years, but it introduced thousands of viewers to Corinne‘s solarized photographic work. The solarization process is one in which the photographic negative or 176 Sinister Wisdom #70, Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration (2006). Retrieved 1 September 2009, <http://www.sinisterwisdom.org/journal.html> 91 paper is exposed to light during the process of developing or printing in the darkroom such that when the resultant image develops, a reverse effect of high contrast black and white tones is revealed. In other words, the areas that would have been black in the original print are now white, while the areas that would have been white, or in light shades of grey, are now black. The high-contrast and linear quality of photography is especially emphasized by using this technique as the various sections of the solarized photograph seem to be outlined by either black or white. While multiple shades of grey remain in the image, very strong blacks and whites dominate the composition of an image that has been solarized. Corinne originally began using the solarization process for two specific reasons; one was ―the privacy it gave to the subjects‖ of the photographs. 177 Because solarization emphasizes the contrast between black and white tones, and deemphasizes the grey areas in between, details within faces and bodies tend to become obscured. Solarized photographs do not create a one-to-one replica of any given scene; instead they highlight overall form and contrast. Thus, individual identities often cannot be deciphered within a solarized image. The second reason behind Corinne‘s extensive use of solarization is also related to the formal qualities underscored in such imagery. By emphasizing contrast and line in the images, shape and movement become the focus of solarized photographs. When used for imaging lesbians in sexual acts, self-portraits, and images of women who were not conventionally beautiful, Corinne‘s solarized photographs created a sensuality and texture based on shape and line that felt, like her Cunt Coloring Book images, rather tactile, or even musical in terms of movement, dimensionality, and composition. This 177 Corinne, ―Censorship‖ 3 92 produced a feeling of intimacy in the images, and called the viewer to move close to the image, whether in a book or on a wall, in order to decipher the shapes and lines as human bodies. That solarization in Corinne‘s hand could make photographic identities feel distant and intimate is an achievement of both form and content in her images. We see these formal and symbol themes as developed in Corinne‘s solarized photographs crop up in her artworks dating from the 190s through 2000s later in this dissertation. Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics The radical feminist journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics began production in early 1977 and lasted through 1992. Heresies was thematically planned by a changing collective of women, so that each edition contained a multiplicity of visual and textual representations related to that issue‘s theme produced by a specific collective for each topic. The topics explored in the journal ranged from labor (Heresies #7: Working Together), race, ethnicity, geography, and economics (Heresies #8: Third World Women in the U.S.; Heresies #15: Racism is the Issue), women in the arts (Heresies #4: Women’s Traditional Arts/ The Politics of Aesthetics; Heresies #10: Women and Music; Heresies #11: Making Room: Women and Architecture; Heresies #16: Film/ Video/ Media), and sexuality (Heresies # 3: Lesbian Art and Artists; Heresies #12: The Sex Issue). As its full name and mission statement, published in each issue, attest, art and politics were the central cores around which each journal issues‘ themes were planned. The Heresies mission read, Heresies is an idea-oriented journal devoted to the examination of art and politics from a feminist perspective. We believe that what is commonly called art can have a political impact, and that in the making of art and of all cultural artifacts our identities as women play a distinct 93 role. We hope that Heresies will stimulate dialogue around radical political and aesthetic theory, encourage the writing of the history of femina sapiens and generate new creative energies among women. 178 Each issue integrated the politics important to that issue‘s collective into visual and textual representations including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, photography, collage, and drawings. Over the course of its life it was printed in a variety of paper formats, finally ending with being printed on glossy paper, with a multicolor front and back cover, and black and white interior pages at a 9‖ x 12‖ size. On Heresies‘ collection of works in each issue art historian Francis Frascina wrote, The diversity of texts included in the first issue of Heresies is evidence of the publication‘s educational and creative agenda. The emphasis on ‗herstory,‘ historical and contemporary, cultural and political, and on the importance of the visual in art and everyday experience roots the magazine in the legacies of underground or alternative press publications of the 1960s and early 1970s. […] Heresies and other journals […] cut across the grain of established cultural values in the USA and contributed to their radical revision. 179 The first issue, of Heresies, from January of 1977, featured no less than six articles on art historical topics by feminist critics and historians Lucy Lippard, Carol Duncan, Martha Rosler, and Harmony Hammond, among others, as well as a bibliography of sources related to its theme of ―feminism, art, and politics.‖ 180 Taking a much different focus than The Ladder, Heresies provided an example of an arts-centered feminist journal with radical feminist roots. As such, Heresies traced key concerns taken up by visual representation and its analyses by a collective committed to Second Wave and eventually 178 Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Eds., Heresies Collective (New York: Heresies Publishing, 1977-1992) Page numbers vary per issue. 179 Francis Frascina, ―New Modes of Dissent in Art of the 1960s and 1970s: Visual Culture and Strategies of Resistance: from Semina to Heresies,‖ American Visual Cultures. Eds., David Holloway and John Beck. (London and New York: Continuum, 2005) 197 180 Heresies Collective, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #1 (Jan. 1977), downloaded from Heresies Film Project < http://www.heresiesfilmproject.org/> (Accessed March 15, 2007) 94 ―Third Wave‖ feminist values that embraced multiple viewpoints and interrogated its own assumptions. The Lesbian Art and Artists issue of Heresies was only the third in its publication history, created during the first year the journal began to be published (Figure 1.27). The collective responsible for creating this issue of Heresies began the edition with a note that describes the place from which the group conceptualized the Lesbian Art and Artists issue: This issue of Heresies arises out of our need to challenge the heritage of secrecy, silence, and isolation which has been a necessity for lesbians who make art. Because we have no recognizable community with a sense of history, we seek to begin one by affirming and making visible the excellence of our efforts. 181 The collective presented their efforts through both textual and visual expressions of lesbian lives and lesbian sexualities within this issue of the journal. They recognized that such an act – to create an entire issue of Heresies devoted to lesbian art – might have seemed tokenizing, but they contended that feminist work was in large part based on the work of lesbians, and the decision to focus on lesbians in this issue did not preclude the inclusion of lesbian art and artists in future issues of the magazine: ―the decision [to have a Lesbian Art and Artists issue] reflects our belief that feminist aesthetics and politics would not exist and will not continue to develop without the vision and energy of women whose sole commitment is to women.‖ 182 This integration of lesbianism within feminist theory and practice paralleled Adrienne Rich‘s notion of the lesbian continuum, described 181 Heresies Lesbian Art and Artists Collective, ―Lesbian Art and Artists Issue Statement,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists (Fall 1977) n.p. 182 Heresies: Lesbian Art and Artists Collective, n.p. 95 in her essay ―Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence‖ written three years after the publication of the Lesbian-focused Heresies in 1980. The first work published in Heresies #3 was the essay by writer Bertha Harris, entitled ―What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature.‖ As described in the introduction, in this essay Harris argued that lesbians were at their most artistically and politically effective when they were ―monstrous.‖ 183 According to Harris, the lesbian was the epitome of the ―non-normative‖ other. The theme of taking on danger or ―otherness‖ was found throughout this issue of Heresies in both print and visual representations. In a two-page photo spread by Los Angeles-based artist E.K. Waller, a visual and metaphorical shift between lesbians in ―Reality Portraits‖ and ―Fantasy Portraits‖ that spoke to the notion of transformation as a productive method for lesbian expression. 184 On the first page, Waller presented ―Reality Portraits‖ of four women, Bia Lowe, Lily Tomlin, Earlene Mills, and Terry Platt, situated in front of urban Los Angeles building walls, sitting, standing, or crouching (Figures 1.28-1.31). Each woman looked directly at the camera and viewer, with a relatively neutral facial expression and bodily pose that resonated a no-nonsense attitude and sense of seriousness or perhaps even impatience along with a feeling of self-confidence and contentment in her body. On the second page of the layout, Waller displays three ―Fantasy Portraits‖ of three different women: in one, Diane Devine was dressed in a large white circle skirt with a crinoline underneath, typical of the 1950s sartorial aesthetic, but she has lifted up the 183 Bertha Harris, ―What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3 (Fall 1977) 6 184 E. K. Waller, Reality/ Fantasy – Portrayals, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists (Fall 1977) 92-93 96 skirt entirely to cover her torso with her white-gloved hands and expose the lower half of her body (Figure 1.32). Her face is twisted in a wide, false smile and she appears to be dramatizing a sense of conventional youthful femininity from an earlier era. Next to her we find Kathleen Burg outfitted as a seventeenth or eighteenth century Western European male musician, in close-cut pants and tall dark boots with an elaborately decorated jacket and a hat to top off the androgynous look (Figure 1.33). In one hand she held what looks like a mandolin, although the majority of the instrument is obscured by her body. She stood in front of a door and window of a stucco house, typical of Los Angeles, and while the glass in the door and window is not historically accurate for the seventeenth/ eighteenth century, the entire scene emits a sense of age and old-worldness, primarily due to her costume and strong stance, which looks somewhat candid yet simultaneously posed for greatest effect. The last fantasy portrait was photographed in front of a sign for a grocery or convenience store, displaying advertisements for Pepsi and beer and wine (Figure 1.34). In front of this wall stands Diane Salah, who was almost entirely covered in an American Flag, with only her hands and feet showing. In each of her hands she held a small American flag on a stick. In this ―fantasy‖ transformation it seems as if Salah‘s entire person had been taken over by the material and symbolism of the flag; it obscured almost any sense of the body the viewer might have as she becomes embedded within the stars and stripes of the fabric. Whether this is a positive or negative fantasy is difficult to ascertain here, whereas in the other two fantasy images, while perhaps neither positive or negative per se, each exhibit a kind of whimsicality that comes from temporarily masquerading as something one is not. Being situated behind an American flag suggests engulfment that is not voluntary, however, but rather potentially suffocating. 97 Perhaps this reading comes primarily from the fact that we cannot see Salah‘s head or face in this image to read any kind of expression and to get an idea of what Salah or Waller might have been trying to capture with such an image. In regard to its connection with Harris‘ article, this photographic series explored visually what it was like to take up a new identity, to magically transform oneself and embody anew an ―other.‖ At the same time, we might ask if the ―Reality Portraits‖ rather than the ―Fantasy Portraits‖ better realized the idea of a monstrous, powerful lesbian in the sheer frankness of each subject‘s imposing stare, unwilling to submit to the patriarchal gaze of dominant culture. In the photograph accompanying Elsa Gidlow‘s essay in the same issue of Heresies we find another version of the transformed lesbian (Figure 1.35). The black and white photograph, simply entitled Women, was taken in 1915 and was attributed only to the New York State Historical Society, with mention of authorship. In it we see a group of seven women sitting on the floor of what looks like a furnished house or apartment, grouped in a semi-circle. Each of the women was wearing a hat and skirt suit, complete with button-up shirt and tie. Many were holding drinking glasses and a few hold smoking pipes as well. While no other title other than Women has been lent to the image, we might see Gidlow‘s article title ―Lesbianism as a Liberating Force‖ acting as a descriptive title for the image, even though there is no direct mention of the image in Gidlow‘s essay. Because the women in the photograph were enrobed in masculinely-styled garments, we have a sense of transformation here, a feeling of empowerment through sartorial appropriation. We can interpret the choice of this kind of dress as a liberating force, at least in part, from the traditionally feminine frills of the late Victorian period, perhaps 98 without the corsets that slowly went out of style during the Edwardian period, although it is difficult to say as the women in this photograph were well-covered from neck to foot. Masculine clothing could be seen as a way out of the conventions of femininity, as was the likely sentiment in the image‘s use in Heresies, as the pairing of the photograph and essay suggest. 185 Thus a visual assumption of power occurs in combining this essay and image, wherein lesbian women become the ―other‖ that Bertha Harris so champions earlier in this edition of Heresies. Fat Chance and Fat Lip Readers Theater In 1979 a new women‘s dance group was formed in Santa Rosa, California, just north of the San Francisco Bay Area. Calling themselves Fat Chance, the dance group was made up of five fat women who explored physical movement and visual representation of fat women in a form of art traditionally unavailable to them. Western dance, as fat activist Sharon Bas Hannah described in 1980, ―has long been a major aspect of thin people‘s privilege over fat people.‖ 186 If still visual representations of fat people has been considered difficult to look at, obscene, or monstrous, fat performance exacerbates the ―problem‖ to an even greater degree, as the audience is ―subjected‖ to watching the movement of fat as it bounces, jiggles, and rolls on the dancers‘ and 185 At the same time, however, the taking on of masculine attire can be seen as reifying conventional notions of masculinity in terms of power (i.e., the women in the image have been positively transformed because they are more masculine than feminine). In other words, because men are culturally endowed with greater power than women, such a change of clothing marks the upward mobility of these women. Thus by taking on such a sentiment, the women in this image potentially reinstall that which is masculine as superior to that which is feminine. Thus we have another tense situation of ambivalence in terms of visualizing and conceptualizing the lesbian (and by extension fat) subjects that are the topic of this dissertation. 186 Sharon Bas Hannah, ―Fat Women As Dancers,‖ Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression. Eds. Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1983) 102 99 performers‘ bodies. Yet feminist performance, especially performance that was entrenched in a reclamation of the female and feminist body, was of deep historical significance in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, whether live or captured on moving or still film, as we can see in the works of such artists as Faith Wilding (Waiting, 1972), Hannah Wilke (S.O.S./ Starification Object Series, 1974), and Carolee Schneeman (Interior Scroll, 1975). Because Fat Chance was created by and for a small group of fat women, there were no undue physical pressures on them, nor were they expected to perform as an act of humiliation or ridicule. Rather, Fat Chance allowed for a non-professional exploration of movement conventionally denied to fat women as participants and audience members. One of the primary members of Fat Chance was Judy Freespirit, a fat lesbian who was a founding member of the Fat Underground during the 1970s as well. In a letter to fellow Fat Underground member Aldebaran dating from 1979, Freespirit described the dance group for the first time: We call ourselves ―Fat Chance‖ and we have performed 5 times for approximately 400 women all tolled. Two of our performances were in Berkeley and three were in Santa Rosa where we are based. One of the Berkeley performances was the filming by Iris Films of what will hopefully be a 30 minute documentary when it is finished. […] I think the impact of the film will be incredible. Not only are we moving and dancing as if we had the right to do so, but we‘re on film, bigger than life. […] it will be a consciousness-raising film and may be an opportunity to get fat politics consciousness out to a lot of people who would not otherwise be reached. 187 It appears that the film was never completed and the dance group disbanded fairly soon after Freespirit had written this letter to Aldebaran. Indeed, Freespirit even hinted about this possibility in the same latter, as she described the difficulty of working together with 187 Judy Freespirit, Letter to Aldebaran, dated December 31, 1979. Courtesy of the Vivian Mayer Collection of Fat Liberation, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut, Storrs. 100 four other women who had full-time jobs as well as ―some political and personal differences.‖ 188 They did not break up, however, before lesbian photographer Cathy Cade photographed at least one session of their performance rehearsal in preparation for a section about Judy Freespirit in her book, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists, eventually published in 1987. 189 Cade‘s book explored the lives of seven lesbians, primarily through vintage photographs, images by Cade, and in their own words. Each woman was represented by several different kinds of images, those from their past (as young children, young adults, and/or of their parents and grandparents), and those from their present in several settings. Freespirit‘s biography was visualized by her work with Fat Chance, the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theater, at her job, socializing with friends, and relaxing at home. There were two photographs of Freespirit engaged in movement as a part of Fat Chance published in A Lesbian Photo Album (Figures 1.36 and 1.37). In one she is alone, holding onto a double- tiered trapeze bar, stretching her body upward (Figure 1.36). She is in casual ―work out‖ clothing and is barefoot on a wooden gymnasium floor. Freespirit is looking up toward her right hand, and the image seems intimate because it appears that Cade has caught her alone and unawares while Freespirit is thoroughly absorbed in her activity with the trapeze. Cade‘s choice of cropping the image, whether made with the camera at the time of the photo shoot or in the darkroom during printing, created a focus on Freespirit that isolated her from anyone else that might be in the gymnasium with her. This careful attention to the detail of Freespirit‘s mental and physical state while engaged with the 188 Freespirit, Letter to Aldebaran, dated December 31, 1979 189 Cathy Cade, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists. With a Historical Introduction by Lois Rita Helmbold. (Oakland, CA: Waterwomen Books, 1987) 101 trapeze bar adds to the contemplative nature of the image. At the same time, it helps to produce a feeling of suspense or expectation, as the viewer wonders what Freespirit‘s next actions were, and perhaps wishes they too were documented in the book. The documentary nature of each of the images in Cade‘s book heightened this sense of intimacy with all of the lesbians included in the book because Cade followed and photographed them doing the various, often mundane, activities of their everyday lives. Indeed, much of the meaning of this book lies in just such a ―slice of life‖ format and guiding principle. As Lois Rita Helmbold wrote in her introduction to the book, ―As lesbians we have a passion to learn about ourselves, and, as women seemingly without a past, we hunger for our histories.‖ 190 The reference to a historical absence of artistic lesbian representation is a recurring theme in much of the lesbian feminist visual and textual artwork created between the late 1960s and today, and we will see it in particular in regard to lesbian feminist journals published during the 1980s and 1990s in the next two chapters of this dissertation. The desire to seek out gaps in the historical record and to correct them by introducing imagery that documented the common lives of lesbians is readily aligned with the reclamation of the invisible or unseen body in feminist art of the 1960s through 80s. Indeed, it was a central mode of reference for fat-acceptance movements as well, especially those in which Freespirit was involved, such as the Fat Underground. This focus on making the socially unintelligible lesbian and fat woman visible seemed particularly concentrated in projects similar to Cade‘s lesbian photo album, wherein individuals were portrayed as working members of communities; as such, 190 Lois Rita Helmbold, ―A Historical Introduction,‖ A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists. With a Historical Introduction by Lois Rita Helmbold. (Oakland, CA: Waterwomen Books, 1987) 13 102 definitions of the self were intimately intertwined with definitions of community, even when multiple communities were represented and intersected one another based on an individual‘s multi-dimensional subject position. It is the ordinariness of the images created by Cade and others that needs to be stressed here. As is becoming obvious in many of the reclamatory artworks and performances discussed here, it is precisely the quotidian lives of lesbians, fat or not, that were at the crux of the 1970s motto, ―The Personal is Political.‖ Indeed, the move toward self-definition, reclamation, and empowerment can be seen embodied throughout the forty year period that this dissertation covers, as various groups work to make themselves recognizable in a society that had long denied them a visible place. Whether the push toward visibility was a productive or profitable movement depended on the moment in time, the individuals involved, and the level of risk the women involved were willing to take. Visibility in and of itself was a step toward social intelligibility in which several lesbian, feminist, and fat socio-political groups wanted to be involved. The implications of this desire to become visible would come to be seen and examined later by some, and disregarded by others. The intimacy of seemingly casual or documentary images that captured a community of subjects at work was heightened in a photograph Cade made that showed all five of the Fat Chance dancers skipping around in a circle together, holding hands (Figure 1.37). Cade captures the inherent movement of a dance troupe in this photograph in a way that was missing in the solo image of Freespirit at the trapeze bar. While the first image was contemplative, the second is less so; instead it captured a moment in time and champions the act of moving as part of a group. Even though we implicitly know that 103 Cade must have taken several photographs during this circle dance, and that she likely chose to feature the one in which the viewer can see Freespirit‘s face and smile, by encapsulating the movement of the circle of dancers in a single shot Cade enforced a sense of spontaneity, compounded with joy, that really was unusual to see in a group of moving fat women during the 1970s and 80s. Reminiscent of Henri Matisse‘s 1909 canvas, The Dance, Cade‘s black and white photograph retooled the iconic art historical image of women dancing in a circle to fit a 1970s fat-positive lesbian feminist vantage point. Cade‘s group of images of Freespirit also included two photographs of Freespirit‘s participation in the theater group Fat Lip Readers Theatre, formed in 1981 (Figures 1.38 and 1.39). Like Fat Chance, which lasted for a limited time, Fat Lip Readers Theater was created as a creative performance group with political motives. Unlike the dance group, it had a much longer lifespan, lasting past its tenth anniversary in 1991, which it celebrated with a performance night called ―Still Fat After All These Years.‖ 191 Based in the San Francisco Bay area, the Fat Lip Readers Theatre consisted of between five and fifteen members over the course of its lifetime. Freespirit described some of the performance work the group had planned in a letter to Aldebaran in September of 1982: The Fat Lip group has been in great demand and we‘re doing a lot of performing, for different groups and under different conditions which necessitates revising and restructuring the script each time, so it‘s been exhausting to say the least. We‘re 191 Fat Lip Readers Theatre, ―Still Fat After All These Years,‖ Performance Program, May 18, 1991. Courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY. 104 performing at the West Coast Women‘s Music Festival on the 26 th of this month and at the Women‘s building in October and in Santa Rosa in November. 192 The two photographs of Fat Lip Readers Theatre members that Cade featured in A Lesbian Photo Album focus on the group process that Freespirit referred to in the first part of her description of the Fat Lip Readers Theatre. These images, like the photographs of Fat Chance, were casual and appear spontaneous. They showed two sides of the emotions of five members of the group as they interacted and discussed their plans for their performances. 193 In one photograph, each of the five individuals pictured are laughing and/or smiling. They sit in what looks like someone‘s living room, on a couch and folding chairs. Freespirit‘s head is thrown back and her mouth is wide as she laughs out loud. One woman is in the middle of talking, her mouth slightly open and her arm raised in a gesture to explain her thought. The other three women each look at the speaking member, smiling at what she has shared with them. In the photograph adjacent to this one, the group has took on a serious tone. Individual members appear tired, frustrated, and confused. Once again, one of the women appears to be mid-sentence and mid-gesture. Freespirit looks dispirited and uncertain. The captions of each of these photographs, written by Freespirit, read respectively, ―A Planning meeting for Fat Lip Readers Theater. We‘re using the same skills I learned in our radical therapy collective in Los Angeles in the early 1970s: power sharing, consensus decision-making, criticism/ self-criticism‖; and ―I want a willingness to struggle through problems, to be truthful and 192 Judy Freespirit, Letter to Aldebaran, dated September 8, 1982. Courtesy of the Vivian Mayer Collection of Fat Liberation, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut, Storrs. 193 While only five group members are pictured in these photographs, there are at least two more in the same room, sitting across and to the side of those women shown, as can be seen from the edges of their legs and feet. 105 get off the superficial. Otherwise, what‘s the point?‖ 194 The triumphs and pitfalls of the search for genuine communication between the group members were made visible and recognizable in Cade‘s photographs. The Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre presented original theatre skits, songs, and poetry during their performances that dealt with living life as a fat woman. Some of the material was humorous, some poignant, and some scathing critiques of the diet industry, the medicalization of fatness, and societal prejudice. Some of the material also dealt with issues specific to being a fat lesbian. The group began in 1981 after several of its members saw a feminist theatre group that engaged the audience with similar tactics to present an alternative sense of self and community than that forwarded by a sexist, homophobic, and fatphobic U.S. culture. 195 In recollecting their origins, the group wrote that at the start, we were ten fat women committed to the concept of political theatre, feminist analysis, collective structure and decision making by consensus. We were women in our 20s, 30s, and 40s. We identified ourselves as Jews, lesbians, heterosexuals, pagans, feminists, disabled, working class and middle class. We were women with no theatrical experience and women with substantial theatrical training. We were experienced writers and those who had never written. We were diverse, excited, and scared! 196 The passion and energy for creating new cultural representations becomes obvious in looking closely at the variety of performances the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre produced during the ten years of its existence. 194 Judy Freespirit, ―Judy,‖ A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists. With a Historical Introduction by Lois Rita Helmbold. (Oakland, CA: Waterwomen Books, 1987) 92-93 195 Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre quoted in Don Carter, ―Discriminate Against Heavies and Get a Fat Lip,‖ Seattle Post Intelligencer (March 5, 1983) D1 196 Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre, ―Our Beginnings,‖ Performance Program for ―Still Fat After All These Years: Tenth Anniversary Celebration,‖ May 18, 1991 n.p. Courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. 106 The format for each of the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre shows included a discussion session at the end of each performance so that the audience and the actors could talk about the issues brought up by the songs and sketches in relation to the emotional and psychological responses of the audience 197 These performances were meant to simultaneously entertain and educate a wide variety of audiences, both those who were familiar with fat-positive and anti-diet rhetoric and those for whom the performance might be their first opportunity to explore these topics. Troupe member Louise Wolfe commented that in the group‘s performances she had noticed that ―fat people laugh more,‖ while ―from the thin women, you get a lot of gasps.‖ 198 The material written and performed by the members of the theatre group came primarily from incidences and feelings from the members‘ lives. 199 For example, one sketch recounted the travail of purchasing a plus-size bathing suit in a department store in Hawaii; the suit was difficult to find, and looked nothing like any of the other bathing suits available for smaller women to purchase. It was neither stylish nor comfortable. The troupe described it as ―cotton, with a big skirt … egg yolk yellow with big, royal blue pineapples … Did the size 10 suits come in this delightful fabric? Noooo. Did anything in the store – awnings, lawn chairs? Nooooo!‖ 200 This sketch highlighted not only the 197 Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre member Karen Bourque from Carter D1 198 Louise Wolfe quoted in Carter D1 199 Carter D1 200 Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre sketch quoted in Joan Price, ―A Theater Group Gives Discrimination a Fat Lip,‖ Radiance (Spring 1989) 49; Finding clothing that fits, especially items that are designed to show off certain body parts, such as swimsuits, has long been a problem for fat people, especially women. Plus-size clothing still tends to be made in less flattering designs and of fewer natural fabrics than ―straight‖ clothing sizes. It is as if the shame circulated about being fat in U.S. culture were extended to clothing items like the yellow pineapple bathing suit so it might make a fat woman‘s rolls and bulges stand out more ostentatiously on a beach or at a poolside. At the same time, however, some fat activists might have 107 difficulty of shopping, but of finding clothing that was desirable by the fat consumer. As Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre illustrated, obnoxiously-colored and oddly patterned clothing items were the norm for fat women. In this same vein, a song called ―Polyester (AKA Oh The Clothes),‖ created by Nancy Thomas of the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre took to task the artificial fabric with which so many fat women were familiar: Polyester also means mismatched patterns and torn seams Fabric prone to runs and snags fashioned into shapeless bags. Why can‘t women who are fat demand the same quality that allows our sister‘s clothes to last and remain more than just colorfast. […] Oh Poly …Oh Ester … Your name has become a metaphor for the oppression fat women can stand no more. 201 That clothing figured so prominently in the performances of the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre was no accident. The garment industry and its products were one aspect of social conditioning that enforced the idea that fat women had little right to legitimacy in contemporary culture. By offering a limited amount of clothing options in a limited variety of styles and fabrics, the fashion industry reinforced the notion that fat women embraced such a ―kitschy‖ look and wear such a swimsuit proudly, as an offering of one‘s own self- confidence and fat-positive attitude. The renegotiation of the meaning that clothing that has historically been considered ―low class,‖ and/or ―fatphobic,‖ such as the swimsuit described here, as well as muumuus or caftans, oversized sweaters, and the like seems to be at its height at the present moment, with several vintage-focused plus-size clothing stores opening up across the United States to great acclaim. For example, see Re/Dress, owned and operated by Deb Malkin in Brooklyn, New York (<http://www.redressnyc.com/>) and Fat Fancy, owned and operated by Annie and Carlee in Portland, OR (<http://www.fatfancyfashions.com/index.html>). While members of the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre might not have anticipated such a form of activism and self-esteem, the work that this group circulated undoubtedly influenced the activists of the past two decades that have embraced ugliness and non- normativity as desirable qualities for individuals and clothing options. 201 Nancy Thomas, song lyrics included in Price 51 108 were monstrous, unattractive, and undignified; why provide such subjects with beautifully designed and constructed garments? Conventional wisdom suggested that such problematic bodies should not be allowed to pervert the work done in creating fine tailoring and good quality fabric of any such clothing item. By pointing out such quotidian inequities, Fat Lip Readers Theatre honed in on the personally oppressive moments in subjects‘ lives that were also institutional and political. The two finale numbers in the group‘s ten year anniversary performance in 1991 showed that the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre was not only concerned with pointing out the problems inherent in a fatphobic culture. They also remade cultural performances in their own image, as a way in which to insert fat bodies into cultural production in ways that were pleasurable and provocative for other fat individuals. Both of the final songs were reconstructed versions of popular music; Nancy Thomas rewrote the homage to mothers, ―M is For …,‖ into ―F is For …‖ in honor of the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre and Marilyn J. Stiller created new lyrics for ―There‘s No Business Like Show Business,‖ so that it became ―There‘s No Body Like My Body.‖ 202 Highlighting the community formation that came with producing theatrical work as a group, by and for fat women, Nancy Thomas‘s song read, F is for the fine, fat friends it gave me A is for the audience applause T is for the theaters we‘ve played in L is loving women, which we are I is for the images we‘re changing P is for the politics we hold. 203 202 Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre, Performance Program for ―Still Fat After All These Years: Tenth Anniversary Celebration‖ n.p. 203 Nancy Thomas, ―F is for …,‖ Performance Program for ―Still Fat After All These Years: Tenth Anniversary Celebration‖ n.p. 109 These lyrics succinctly encompass the work that the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre was able to do in terms of creating performative and visual culture that embraced and accelerated a fat-positive approach to women‘s bodies at a point during the late 1970s and 1980s wherein certain bodies were considered more acceptable than others in feminist and lesbian and gay communities alike. Marilyn Stiller‘s celebration of the fat body reinforced this message: There‘s no body like my body It‘s like no body I know Everything about it is appealing It‘s so soft and sensuous and round Everyday I get that happy feeling When I am stroking my precious pounds There‘s no women like fat women We‘re gorgeous – that we know When folks tell us we‘re too chubby, we don‘t care Because we love ourselves clothed or bare From our earlobes right down to our derrieres Our bodies we won‘t hide We‘re bursting with Fat Pride We‘re bursting with fat pride. 204 Cary, an audience member from North Carolina who visited San Francisco and saw the fifth anniversary performance of the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre in 1986, wrote into Lesbian Connection to testify to the important work that the theatre troupe did in their performances. She wrote, Fat Lip performs sketches which relate to the writers‘ and performers‘ experiences of the day-to-day abuse, misuse and forced invisibility of fat women by family, doctors, employers, the media, clothing stores and the lesbian community among others. The stories are painful and sometimes funny. One sketch dealing with the fear which non-fat women feel in the presence of a fat 204 Marilyn J. Stiller, ―There‘s No Body Like My Body,‖ Performance Program for ―Still Fat After All These Years: Tenth Anniversary Celebration‖ n.p. 110 woman rang particularly true for me. I am the personification of her fear, and therefore a prime target for her hate. Her fear is killing me. It is time for her to own it, for I am weary of making her hatred my own. 205 This performance review brings us back to the dominating theme of this dissertation: the reclamation and renegotiation of the feared, excessive fat female body. The skit that Cary pointed out brought to light the issue of competition between women in terms of body size. Relative fear and/or happiness with one‘s body size in comparison with other women was typical, though not often discussed even within fat-positive communities. Cultural beliefs about the value and validity of certain subjects over others conditioned all individuals in U.S. society to become competitive about bodily appearance and ability. That thin women would be fearful of fat women stemmed from the issue of personal culpability in becoming fat. Because our culture blames fatness on individual food choices, ―willpower,‖ and activity level of individuals, women were taught that they could become fat at any time if they make the ―wrong‖ choices and ―let themselves go.‖ The presence of fat women in society can seem to confirm just such a fear. It can also have devastatingly negative effects on fat and thin women both, as the evidence of billions of dollars of diet industry profit shows. Yet, as Cary wrote, by pointing out such underlying tensions among women, this Fat Lip Reader‘s sketch emphasized the potential for changed attitudes, especially by fat women in regard to a positive outlook about their body size. Fat women could work to remove themselves from such competitive notions of correct or faulty body size and distance themselves from any woman‘s fear of fat by establishing their own self of self-confidence and love, and body positivity in becoming an active agent in their own subjectivity. Visual representations of feminists, lesbians, 205 Cary, ―Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre Review,‖ Lesbian Connection (1986) 6 111 and fat women during the 1970s helped to establish a cultural system that oppressed women could take up in their work for structural reform. Fat Is a Feminist Issue In 1978 British psychoanalyst Susie Orbach published Fat is a Feminist Issue: A Self-Help Guide for Compulsive Eaters (FIFI), an anti-diet book aimed at women. 206 In this text Orbach attempted to speak both to fat-acceptance rhetoric and mainstream beliefs about fat. Fat is a Feminist Issue‘s message primarily coincided with dominant culture‘s own ambivalent viewpoint on fatness and fat people in terms of blaming individuals for their ―neuroses‖ that lead them to becoming fat, and assuming that fatness was a pathological condition that all individuals would gladly exorcise themselves of should the immediate possibility arise. At the same time, it tried to alleviate the immediate blame for fatness on individual women by contextualizing fat as a social problem, stemming from patriarchal notions of femininity that repressed and oppressed women. In Fat is a Feminist Issue Orbach wrote, Fat is a social disease, and fat is a feminist issue, Fat is not about lack of self- control or lack of will power. Fat is about protection, sex, nurturance, strength, boundaries, mothering, substance, assertion and rage. It is a response to the inequality of the sexes. Fat expresses experiences of women today in ways that are seldom examined and even more seldom treated. While becoming fat does not alter the roots of sexual oppression, an examination of the underlying causes or unconscious motivation that lead women to compulsive eating suggests new treatment possibilities. Unlike most weight-reducing schemes, our new therapeutic approach does not reinforce the oppressive social roles that lead women into compulsive eating in the first place. What is it about the social position of women that leads them to respond to it by getting fat? 207 206 Susie Orbach. Fat is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-Diet Guide for Women. (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1978); see also Orbach‘s follow-up Fat is a Feminist Issue II: A Program to Conquer Compulsive Eating (New York: Berkley Books, 1982). 207 Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue 6-7; emphasis original 112 According to Orbach‘s psychoanalytic point of view, fat was not an individual, but rather a social problem. But it is also one in which women ostensibly take part of their own (unconscious) volition. As such, fat was made pathological, as it indicated a negative personal response to dominant culture‘s treatment of women, but this pathology was deemed a sickness of society rather than each fat person who was assumed to be unable to exercise control over her own habits. In the remainder of Fat is a Feminist Issue Orbach went on to advise women on how best to combat fatness as a symptom of social inequities through psychological regulation rather than via inadvisable and unhealthy dieting. Orbach‘s argument about why people become fat focused almost entirely on heterosexually-identified women. Orbach described women in patriarchal culture as necessarily learning how to appeal to men in order to be sexually valued and validated. 208 Practically speaking, Orbach‘s theory did not account for anyone other than women being fat. If we follow the theory to its potential conclusion, no (heterosexual) men would ever be fat because they were part of the patriarchal matrix of power from which women are seeking protection via their ―fat layer.‖ Non-heterosexual women, and men, inculcated with patriarchal notions of appearance, beauty, size ideals, and bodily representation in general, to be sure, but Orbach never hinted at the possibility that women, whether heterosexual or not, might challenge such cultural norms via any strategies other than compulsive eating leading to fatness. Orbach wrote, The media present women either in a sexual context or within the family, reflecting a woman‘s two prescribed roles, first as a sex object, and then as a mother. […] Since women are taught to see themselves from the outside as 208 Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue 7-8 113 candidates for men, they become prey to the huge fashion and diet industries that first set up the ideal images and then exhort women to meet them. […] But these models of femininity are experienced by women as unreal, frightening and unattainable. 209 Orbach contended that the only potentially, and very much temporary and fleeting, positive experience of fatness comes from its use as a rebellion against stereotypical looksism. 210 Thus, Orbach proposed, Becoming fat is […] a woman‘s response to the first step in the process of fulfilling a prescribed social role which requires her to shape herself to an externally imposed image in order to catch a man. […] just as many women first become fat in an attempt to avoid being made into sexual objects at the beginning of their adult lives, so many women remain fat as a way of neutralizing their sexual identity in the eyes of others who are important to them as their life progresses. 211 Describing getting fat as a challenge used by heterosexual women to avoid conventional objectification begged several questions: where did fat women who are not heterosexual stand in this series of relationships? What did these allegations mean for people who do not view fat as pathological, as a result of compulsive eating, and/or even as a positive experience? Were there ways to see to see non-normative bodily forms as neutral or productive in and of themselves rather than as a negative result of a social and/ or psychological problem? Delving into Orbach‘s theories of fatness is a helpful way in which to see how at least one feminist viewpoint of the 1970s and 1980s constructed, and indeed reiterated, the perception of fatness and bodily appearance along conventional sexual, gendered, and fatphobic lines. 209 Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue 8-9 210 Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue 9; Looksism is a term describing the collective expression of oppression based on appearance, and can include a thin body ideal, ablism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism, amongst other conventions of ―typical‖ beauty. 211 Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue 9 and 13 114 Soon after the book was published it came under scrutiny by feminist and fat activists, including Judy Freespirit, whom I have discussed previously in relation to her roles in Fat Chance, the Fat Lip Reader‘s Theatre, and the Fat Underground. In a personal letter to Aldebaran, also of the Fat Underground, in 1979, Freespirit wrote, I was hoping you had read it and would be willing to send me a copy of anything you have written. I am so livid about the whole thing that every time I sit down to write about it I get so angry I totally become inarticulate. Not only is the book doing serious damage but there are ‗feminist therapists‘ all over this area (and I assume all over the country) who are using it as a model to do groups. 212 Freespirit‘s rage over the publication of a book that she believed purported to help women with ―feminist‖ psychological techniques while advocating thinness as the ideal for healthy psychological and physical embodiment was obvious in her words to Aldebaran. Freespirit‘s reaction was and remains typical of fat, and often queer, women who considered themselves part of a community of fat activists working on creating a culture of self-love rather than seeking a ―cure‖ to their psychological disabilities. Writing two decades later, Charlotte Cooper reiterated the notions of Orbach‘s treatise that Freespirit saw as problematic, despite Orbach‘s contention that fat was a ―social disease.‖ What made such an argument intolerable to many fat-acceptance advocates was the search for a treatment to the ―disease‖ through the individual psychological restructuring of fat women, rather than a wholesale cultural reformulation of the values attached to particular body sizes and shapes. Cooper contextualized Fat is a Feminist Issue within its time period in terms of fat and feminist activism and scholarship: FIFI and other books like it were 212 Judy Freespirit, Letter to Aldebaran dated December 31, 1979. Courtesy of the Vivian A. Mayer Collection of Fat Liberation, Archives and Special Collections at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. 115 part of the attempt to reclaim traditional patriarchal psychotherapy and psychoanalytic symbolism on women‘s terms, and they owe a great deal to contemporary women‘s issues in Britain and America during the late 1970s, including the notion of the personal being political. […] These books appealed to a very specific audience which happened to consist of predominantly middle-class and white women who had access to therapy and self-help groups in the 1970s. 213 Fat is a Feminist Issue has had an enormous influence since its publication for both the audience described by Cooper and others, including those who have never actually read the book. Indeed, the phrase itself, ―fat is a feminist issue,‖ has come to signify beyond the actual boundaries of the texts written by Orbach. It has come to have a life of its own in many ways, and has been imbued with a similar sentiment to ―the personal is political.‖ As Cara Hood writes, Like many other women, when I have said, ‗fat is a feminist issue,‘ I knew that I was citing the title of a book; however, not having read the book, I didn‘t know the author‘s name, I didn‘t know of Fat is a Feminist Issue II, and I didn‘t know the subtitles to either of Orbach‘s books. As a result, I have used ―fat is a feminist issue‖ to mean something quite different from what Orbach intends. 214 Hood goes on to write that for her the phrase meant a kind of bodily acceptance that did not dictate that a thinner body was healthier and more attractive than a larger one, although admittedly this belief only worked to an extent. 215 The rhetoric that fat is a feminist issue can thus be seen to have several different forms of meanings and intentions attached to it, from Orbach‘s original messages of psychoanalytical anti-diet reform for women, to the critical response from fat activists such as Freespirit and Cooper, to a 213 Charlotte Cooper, Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size (London: The Women‘s Press, 1998) 87 214 Carra Hood, ―The Body is the Message,‖ Feminist Media Studies 5:1 (2005) 238 215 Hood 239; Hood‘s focus is primarily on the mediation of the message of a thin body ideal for adolescents and young women. While she implicitly critiques Orbach‘s promises of health through the promotion of weight loss, she does not actually dispute the efficacy of media messages that are fatphobic, nor does she promote self-acceptance no matter one‘s body size and/or weight. 116 phrase imbued with a general sense of feminism as a philosophy that strives for freedom, equality, and self-representation. Thus ―fat is a feminist issue‖ has become, like ―feminist‖ or ―feminism‖ after the 1968 Miss America protest, a generalized phrase with little historical or cultural specificity attached to it. As such it has become overdetermined and ambiguous, which can be potentially dangerous for members of U.S. culture that identify as and/or are deemed fat. Taking these meanings into consideration then, we can see that fat certainly was a feminist issue during the 1970s and remained so over the next several decades. How feminism, or that ―issue‖ was defined, however, depended primarily on the immediate and cultural contexts of the person or group making use of it. 117 Chapter 1 Images Figure 1.1. Welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction, originally published in The Liberated Woman's Appointment Calendar and Survival Handbook, 1971, Eds. Jurate Kazickas and Lynn Sherr (New York: Universe Books, 1970). Republished with Judith Duffett, ―Atlantic City is a Town With Class – They Raise Your Morals While They Judge Your Ass,‖ Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement (October 1968), online in the Veteran Feminists of America web-zine. Retrieved 4 January 2010, <http://www.vfa.us/MissAmerica1968JUNE122008.htm> 118 Figure 1.2. The Winner, A Rival in Black and Some Ribroast Ribbing, originally published in Life Magazine (September 20, 1968). Republished in Veteran Feminists of America web-zine. Retrieved 4 January 2010, <http://www.vfa.us/MISS%20AMERICA%20PROTESTER.jpg> 119 Figure 1.3. Miss America 1968 Protesters, Atlantic City, NJ Boardwalk. Published by Sally Swift, ―Go Ahead, Laugh at my Perfect Miss America Record,‖ Open.Salon.com. Retrieved 4 January 2010. <http://open.salon.com/blog/sally_swift/2009/01/25/go_ahead_laugh_at_my_unbeaten_ miss_america_record> Figure 1.4. Real Women Chained to Amerika-Dolly In Guerilla Theatre Skit in Atlantic City, published in ―WLM vs. Miss America,‖ Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, October 1968. Archived at Chicago Women‘s Liberation Union Herstory Project, CWLUHerstory.org. Retrieved 4 January 2010. <http://www.cwluherstory.org/CWLUArchive/voices/voices4-1.html> 120 Figure 1.5. Giant Miss America Puppet with Leah Fritz, Florika, and Flo Kennedy, published with ―The Miss America Protest: 1968,‖ Redstockings.org. Photograph source attributed to Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, Liberation News Service Collection. Retrieved 4 January 2010. <http://www.redstockings.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59&Ite mid=103> 121 Figure 1.6. Charlotte Curtis, ―Miss America Pageant is Picketed by 100 Women,‖ and ―Illinois Girl Named Miss America,‖ The New York Times, September 8, 1968: 81. 122 Figure 1.7. Cover Drawing, The Ladder, October 1957. Image re-published in Katherine Franke, ―Public Shaming as the New Revolt of the Homosexual,‖ November 1, 2009, Columbia Law School, Gender and Sexuality Law Blog. Retrieved 15 January 2010. <http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/genderandsexualitylawblog/2009/11/01/public-shaming- as-the-new-revolt-of-the-homosexual/> Figure 1.8. Cover Image, The Ladder, September 1957. Courtesy of ONE Lesbian and Gay Archives, Los Angeles, California. 123 Figure 1.9. Cover Image, The Ladder, February 1962. Image re-published in Paula Martinac, ―In a Plain, Sealed Envelope,‖ The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites, May 21, 2009. Retrieved 15 January 2010. <http://queerestplaces.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/in-a-plain-sealed-envelope/> Figure 1.10. Cover Image, The Ladder, February 1964. 124 Figure 1.11. Cover Images, The Ladder, November 1964 and April 1965. Images re- published in ―Coming Out in America: An Historical Perspective,‖ September 2007. Retrieved 15 January 2010. <http://cowboyfrank.net/archive/ComingOut/02.htm> Figure 1.12. Cover Image, The Ladder, May 1966. Image re-published in Katherine Franke, ―Public Shaming as the New Revolt of the Homosexual,‖ November 1, 2009, Columbia Law School, Gender and Sexuality Law Blog. Retrieved 15 January 2010. <http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/genderandsexualitylawblog/2009/11/01/public-shaming- as-the-new-revolt-of-the-homosexual/> 125 Figure 1.13. Cover Image, The Ladder, October/ November 1969. Image re-published in ―Old Dykes Getting Married,‖ Meta Watershed, June 17, 2008. Retrieved 15 January 2010. <http://maggiesmetawatershed.blogspot.com/2008/06/old-dykes-getting- married.html> Figure 1.14. Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression. Eds., Lisa Schoenfelder and Barb Weiser. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1983. 126 Figure 1.15. Judy Chicago, Red Flag, 1971, Photolithograph. Figure 1.16. Carolee Schneeman, Interior Scroll, 1975, Performance. 127 Figure 1.17. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1975/ 1988. Figure 1.18. Tee Corinne, Labiaflowers: A Coloring Book. Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1982. 128 Figure 1.19. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1975/ 1988. Figure 1.20. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, Pen and Ink Drawing. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1975/ 1988. 129 Figure 1.21. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, Pen and Ink Drawing. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1975/ 1988. Figure 1.22. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, Pen and Ink Drawing. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1975/ 1988. 130 Figure 1.23. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, Pen and Ink Drawing. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1975/ 1988. Figure 1.24. Tee Corinne, The Cunt Coloring Book, Pen and Ink Drawing. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press, 1975/ 1988. 131 Figure 1.25. Tee Corinne, Solarized Photograph, Sinister Wisdom 70: 30 th Anniversary Celebration, 1996. Figure 1.26. Tee Corinne, Solarized Photograph originally appearing on Front Cover of Sinister Wisdom 3, 1977. 132 Figure 1.27. Cover, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. Figure 1.28. E.K. Waller, Bia Lowe Reality Portrait, Photograph, 1997. Image from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. 133 Figure 1.29. E.K. Waller, Lily Tomlin Reality Portrait, Photograph, 1977. Image from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. Figure 1.30. E.K. Waller, Earlene Mills Reality Portrait, Photograph, 1977. Image from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. Figure 1.31. E.K. Waller, Terry Platt Reality Portrait, Photograph, 1977. Image from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. 134 Figure 1.32. E.K. Waller, Diane Devine Fantasy Portrait, Photograph, 1977. Image from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. Figure 1.33. E.K. Waller, Kathleen Burg Fantasy Portrait, Photograph, 1977. Image from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. 135 Figure 1.34. E.K. Waller, Diane Salah Fantasy Portrait, Photograph, 1977. Image from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. Figure 1.35. Women, Photograph, 1915, State Historical Society, New York Public Library Picture Collection. Image from Elsa Gidlow, ―Lesbianism as a Liberating Force,‖ Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #3: Lesbian Art and Artists, 1977. 136 Figure 1.36. Cathy Cade, Judy Freespirit in Fat Chance Rehearsal, Photograph, n.d. From Cathy Cade, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists. With an Historical Introduction by Lois Rita Helmbold. Oakland, CA: Waterwomen Books, 1987. Figure 1.37. Cathy Cade, Fat Chance Rehearsal, Photograph, n.d. From Cathy Cade, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists. With an Historical Introduction by Lois Rita Helmbold. Oakland, CA: Waterwomen Books, 1987. 137 Figure 1.38. Cathy Cade, Fat Lip Readers Theatre, Photograph, n.d. From Cathy Cade, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists. With an Historical Introduction by Lois Rita Helmbold. Oakland, CA: Waterwomen Books, 1987. Figure 1.39. Cathy Cade, Fat Lip Readers Theatre, Photograph, n.d. From Cathy Cade, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists. With an Historical Introduction by Lois Rita Helmbold. Oakland, CA: Waterwomen Books, 1987. 138 Chapter Two Embracing the Self and Embodying the Other: Intersections of Sexual and Political Identities in Subcultural Representations, 1982-1992 This chapter of the dissertation focuses on several photographic and performance- based series of visual representations of lesbian and fat subjects by artists who are both fairly unknown and those who have made a name for themselves in lesbian communities over the past twenty to thirty years. The images and performances explored here focus on the material embodiment and conditions of life in which lesbians of the 1970s through 1990s lived; thus representations of sexuality, community, history, and self-perception come together within heightened rubrics of visibility and invisibility during a decade in which queer bodies were framed as distasteful, diseased, and threatening – both to other LGBT individuals and to mainstream communities. The Lesbian Avengers, founded in 1992 as a specially lesbian-focused response to the AIDS crisis and the role of lesbians in gay and dominant communities, were perhaps the subjects who most overtly dealt with such issues during this time period. Tee Corinne, Laura Aguilar, and the collaborative editors, contributors, and readers of the journal Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives, however, cannot be overlooked in their contributions toward the re-conceptualizations and definitions of community identity, sexual empowerment, and establishment of a visual historical presence by fat and lesbian subjects during the 1980s and early 1990s. Each of their photographic projects, especially Corinne‘s Yantras of Womanlove book and the issues of Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives, were made to circulate amongst the communities and individuals that they represented. These interactive and intimate aspects of such visual imagery was particularly useful during a historical moment in which dominant 139 culture fairly carried out a psychological and emotional, if not physical, war on women and queers. Fat is a Feminist Issue II In 1982 Susie Orbach published a sequel to her influential late 1970s Fat is a Feminist Issue book, called, Fat is a Feminist Issue II: A Program to Conquer Compulsive Eating (FIFI II). Marketed as a supplementary book to the original, FIFI II explored the theoretical dimensions behind fatness less than the original text, and instead focused on giving readers a system through which to control their food issues and practice self-care by leading themselves through a program that would ―release‖ them from the compulsion to eat. Less well-known that the first book, though no less fatphobic in its characterization of fat women, FIFI II intersperses psychoanalytic advise on compulsive eating with methods for organizing a support group and dealing with one‘s sense of self in terms of bodily comportment. While Orbach‘s characterizations of the relationships between fatness, femininity, and legitimate subjecthood might have been one of the first to thoroughly contemplate how fat women figure into the structure of a sexist society, as we saw in the critical reviews of Fat is a Feminist Issue in the last chapter, Orbach fundamentally blamed women for their fatness by advocating that women become fat as a way to distance themselves, and thus protect themselves, from cultural edicts about sexual availability and attractiveness. In FIFI II, in a section on ―The Roots of the Problem,‖ Orbach wrote about how women were alienated from their bodies because they learn through cultural signs that their bodies are instruments that are ―powerful in a negative sense, they can 140 destabilize men and get us into trouble. […] we become frightened of our bodies and see them not as where we live but as a part of us that we must control, watch and direct.‖ 216 These points are cogent in their designation of the female (and feminine) body as dangerous and excessive, to women and others. At the same time that Orbach critiqued the limited vision of bodily standards in this misogynistic attitude, the only solution she proposes to this social problem is entwined with the very problem itself: recommending that women do indeed ―conform to today‘s slim body image‖ by eating less and losing weight. 217 Thus Orbach‘s project to expose and reconstruct the social disease of fatness fails as a feminist undertaking. Even though Orbach located the cause of fatness in a destructive social order, her method for remedying the situation was not to remake that social order, but to remake the women who responded to it ―negatively‖ by becoming fat through the control over their assumed overeating. Other feminist theorists have since commented on the place of fat women in Western culture in terms of sexuality, space, and embodiment, giving a more complete and nuanced picture of the reasons as to why fatness might be considered a social disease. Naomi Wolf has pointed to anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and other forms of disordered eating organized around the search for a thin body ideal as corporeal social diseases. 218 Wolf explicitly critiques Orbach‘s methodology as being about individual women‘s choices, rather than cultural imperatives: 216 Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue II: A Program to Conquer compulsive Eating (New York: Berkley Books, 1982) 24 217 Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue II 24 218 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York and London: Anchor Doubleday Books, 1991) 179-186 141 The many theories about women‘s food crises have stressed private psychology to the neglect of public policy, looking at women‘s shapes to see how they express a conflict about their society rather than looking at how their society makes use of a manufactured conflict with women‘s shapes. 219 Wolf goes further, arguing in striking opposition to Orbach‘s proposal that fat hides women‘s sexuality, ―Fat is sexual in women. […] To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.‖ 220 This is the case on both aesthetic and biological levels. Women who strive to control their bodies so much that they become unnaturally thin are more likely to have problems with fertility including a lack of menstrual periods. Because fat cells store estrogen in women, hormone imbalance can occur when women lose a lot of weigh. 221 At the same time, researchers have found that fatter women have a greater desire for sex than thinner women, by a factor of two. Dieting also has a negative impact on sexual desire, as food intake of less than 1700 calories a day has been shown to impact women through significant decreases in sexual fantasies and masturbation. 222 Negative psychological changes also occur in dieters, including obsession with food and eating ritual, depression, increased anger, disorganization, apathy, reduced alertness, and social isolation. 223 Wolf asserts that each of these negative changes in women‘s sexual health, reproductive health, and psychological health signal a political investment in keeping 219 Wolf 189 220 Wolf 192-193 221 Wolf 192 222 Wolf 193 223 Wolf 194 142 women powerless by a patriarchal culture intent on devaluing the physical and cultural space that women occupy: The ideology of semistarvation undoes feminism; what happens to women‘s bodies happens to our minds. If women‘s bodies are and have always been wrong whereas men‘s are right, women are wrong and men are right. Where feminism taught women to put a higher value on ourselves, hunger teaches is how to erode our self-esteem. If women can be made to say, ‗I hate my fat thighs,‘ it is a way she has been made to hate femaleness. The more financially independent, in control of events, educated and sexually autonomous women become in the world, the more impoverished, out of control, foolish, and sexually insecure we are asked to feel in our bodies. 224 Similar arguments have been made about the parallel between the containment of women‘s bodies and the repression of their sexuality and power in the world by other feminists over the last several decades, including Susan Bordo‘s suggestion that the domesticization of women‘s bodies, and in particular the maternalization of female bodies, is one patriarchal method of exerting control. Pregnancy is just about the only bodily state in which fatness in women is deemed acceptable, and even seen as sensual and sexualizable in hegemonic culture. 225 In critiquing the thin body ideal that can have seriously negative effects on reproductive and sexual health, Bordo does recognize one underlying, potentially feminist reason for working to abandon the ability to reproduce in favor of thinness: ―For many women,‖ she writes, ―disidentification with the maternal body, far from symbolizing reduced power, may symbolize (as it did in the 1890s and 1920s) freedom from a reproductive destiny and a construction of femininity seen as 224 Wolf 196-197 225 For example, see the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair magazine, on which actress Demi Moore appears nude and pregnant. Moore‘s appearance on and in the magazine caused a stir and set forth a trend for female celebrities to pose nude or nearly-nude in mass media outlets while pregnant. This topic will not be further discussed here, but will become part of a future project on fatness, pregnancy, and contemporary media representations of the female body. 143 constraining and suffocating.‖ 226 This insight can certainly be true for some lesbian women who found benefits in same-sex desire and sexual interactions that moved beyond personal attraction and into the realm of the non-reproductive. This too might correspond to those historical cases wherein women chose to be a part of lesbian communities primarily for political purposes, rather than sexual ones. Tee Corinne: Yantras of Womanlove In 1978 and 1979 Tee Corinne began to experiment with creating kaleidoscopic solarized images from photographic prints; these images would come to be collected in the 1982 book Yantras of Womanlove that included an accompanying erotic poem by Jacqueline Lapidus (Figure 2.1). 227 In creating the kaleidoscopic solarized images that fill Yantras of Womanlove, Corinne was interested in juxtaposing repeated photographs within a singular image in order to invoke a sense of rhythmic movement: ―I was looking for an intellectual as well as a visual form which could convey the specifics of sexual 226 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993/ 2003) 209-211; Correspondingly, some women have asserted that becoming or maintaining a dominant ideal of thinness has helped them feel in control of themselves in contrast to the beliefs that fat people are excessive, out of control, and extend beyond the conventional boundaries of the body. This mode of thinking, however, could potentially be a sign of false consciousness for women who believe this in the sense that such individuals have acculturated themselves to the patriarchal belief system embedded in the cultural politics of the body. 227 A yantra is an object of meditation used in tantric practices as a visual focal point. Derived from Sanskrit, the term yantra has several complementary meanings, including ―an instrument or machine,‖ ―an instrument for holding or fastening,‖ and ―a mystical or astronomical diagram.‖ In yogic practices, the yantra has been associated with the physical body while the mantra (meditative speech or thoughts) is compared with the mind. Madhu Khanna, Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity. (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions, 2003). Corinne‘s use of the word as a descriptor for this collection of images has both visual and spiritual meaning. The photographs that Corinne designated as yantras visually resemble traditional forms of yantras, which are often formed around a central core and move outward, like the a mandala or the kaleidoscopic images described here. 144 activity and also the repetition of movement which sexual satisfaction requires.‖ 228 In the foreword to the Yantras of Womanlove book Corinne describes the relationships she felt the images had with a sense of spirituality and fullness based on the repetition and movement created in the visual field: Yantras is about the spirituality of sexuality, the transcendence that can take place when making love to ourselves and others, the repetition of action through which pleasure is sustained and release is possible. The patterns that grew like snowflakes, like the sound of rain, still surprise me. The organizing principle within the book is Baroque like the South I grew up in: full of details, running on and on, overflowing. 229 The majority of Corinne‘s Yantras of Womanlove are based on an individual image of female genitalia and/or two lesbians kissing or engaged in a sexual act (see Figures 2.2-2.4). A few focus on flowers, or include floral images within larger multi- photographic composite pictures. The most common method Corinne used to create the kaleidoscopic images was to quadruple the original black and white solarized image across both vertical and horizontal axes. Rather than simply repeating the same image four times (or more, as is the case in some of the larger compositions), Corinne rotated the negative of the image from a central point before printing. By flipping the negative backwards and upside down (as in mirror images) in three of the four photographs, Corinne created a visual puzzle for each print composition in which the image appears to be radiating outward from a shared focal point. This method of image construction creates the fractured shapes and black and white tones familiar to us from viewing the scenarios created by a mirror and set of beads in a toy kaleidoscope. Instead of being 228 Corinne, ―Crafting Erotic Imagery‖ n.p. 229 Tee Corinne, ―Foreword,‖ Yantras of Womanlove (Tallahassee: The Naiad Press, 1982) 8; Not all of the Yantras were comprised of solarized black and white photographs, but a large majority of them were. 145 completely abstract, however, Corinne‘s Yantras images are both abstract and representational because they were initially based on female figures having sex. The Yantras are formally playful as viewers ponder the construction of the image, perhaps searching for the boundaries of the original image in order to figure out what the initial photograph represented. They are also visually poetic in their concern with repetition, as shape, line, and color direct the viewers‘ eyes around the images, whether or not the initial subject matter is obvious to the viewers. While each image that is composed of four photographs has a very obvious center point, these centers are generally read as abstract, with the greater contrast and details of the image found on the areas exterior to the center. This compositional technique challenges the viewer to read the image from a variety of vantage points, rather than settling on a singular point of interest in the image. Moreover, by creating such kaleidoscopic prints from solarized negatives, Corinne played conceptually and physically with the psychology and visuality of distance and intimacy created through the formal elements and the subject matter of the images she used. As with Corinne‘s first solarized photographs of lesbian sex scenes, the Yantras tend to obscure the specific identities of the women pictured in the photographs. Indeed, Corinne pushes this farther in the Yantras of Womanlove images than in her individual photographic prints because the kaleidoscopic technique creates an image that is even less-immediately readable than the single solarized prints. Describing her desire to image explicit lesbian sexuality with such visual complexity, Corinne emphasizes the advantages of visualizing sexualized subjects in this way: In Yantras I wove much of my thinking about sexual images: safety issues, inclusiveness, grace. It contains images of older women, oral sex, women of 146 color, disabled women, young women, fat women, skinny women and genitalia. I wanted to create images complex enough that people would want to stay with them for a long time, puzzle them out, understand them as multilayered and evocative rather than simple and descriptive of individual sexual acts. 230 Corinne‘s desire to visually represent the lesbian body as a complex subject unable to fit within a limited (and limiting) set of stereotypical parameters is notable not simply for the intention to portray individuals or a community of subjects more realistically than they had conventionally been imaged. Corinne goes further in producing images that speak to multi-dimensional subjects heartily based in specific bodies with specific bodily desires. As Margrit Shildrick asserts in her book Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism, and (Bio)Ethics, postmodern feminism must take into consideration both the sexed/ gendered corporeal structure of the body and the cultural inscriptions borne on that body by virtue of its existence in any given time and place (here, Western Euro-American culture): ―postmodern feminist theory, in its project to integrate the excluded without losing touch with specificity, places new emphasis on reclaiming the body in both its corporeality and its desires, as the site of multiple subject positions.‖ 231 Corinne‘s Yantras images portray lesbian bodies in ways that confound traditional ways of visualizing and viewing the female body. By creating a visual puzzle composed of solarized and kaleidoscopic photographs of lesbian bodies, Corinne challenges viewers to look deeply into her images in order to decipher non-normative bodies that have historically been considered problematic and unrepresentable. 230 Corinne, ―Lesbian Photography‖ 6 231 Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism, and (Bio)Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) 172 147 Corinne set up a visual conundrum that functioned in two ways with regard to the problem of visual surveillance and the policing of lesbian and other non-normative bodies. One is relatively straightforward, as Corinne wrote in her quote above, that the complexity of these images requires an interested viewer to pause and contemplate the photograph in order to see all of its parts, to see inside of it and beyond the abstractions created by the techniques of solarization and kaleidoscopic multiplication. In presenting explicit scenes of lesbian sex in this way, Corinne largely guaranteed the subjects‘ security from a hostile public culture that might otherwise wish to co-opt or misuse the images to their own end. The second way in which these images function is the aesthetic one that Corinne mentioned at the end of the above quote on the Yantras of Womanlove images, that she wished them to be ―multilayered and evocative rather than simple and descriptive of individual sexual acts.‖ As she wrote in the foreword to the Yantras of Womanlove book, Corinne wished to create a kind of Baroque art that was intricately detailed, full of movement, rhythm, and grace, and that could be gazed at indefinitely as an object of aesthetic and spiritual, in addition to sexual, gratification. Thus, in this particular form of lesbian art, Corinne‘s work seems able to resist the overall cultural intelligibility of the lesbian body, while making it available to a smaller subculture who might better appreciate it and see themselves expressed in it. 232 Corinne‘s alternative 232 This mode of confrontation can be found, however briefly, in Foucault‘s descriptions of the ways in which power works its insidiousness in the social world as well. At the very moment that his vision of power dynamics seems nihilistic and impossibly livable for subjects living outside the conventions of culture, Foucault recognizes the possibility of resistance built into the hegemonic power structure. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes, ―Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. […] These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. [….] [O]ften one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about […].‖ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Trans., Robert Hurley. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978/ 1990) 95-96; Though hegemonic power seems complete and unending, using the subject herself to 148 system of imaging lesbian sex and sexuality challenged the potential reification of a patriarchal ownership of the female, and lesbian, body as sexual object (as prey). Corinne‘s later imagery – her self-portraits, her portraits of disabled and multi-sized women, and her portraits of well-known lesbian literary figures – continued this work as she moved from explicitly sexual representations to focus on the faces and bodies of maturing and aging lesbians. In such images, Corinne tackled subject matter that had been ignored or discarded by mainstream masculine culture because aging women have historically been seen as less worthy and less commodifiable subjects. Women past their mid-twenties to thirties had been classified as ―damaged goods‖ in a culture that fetishizes youth and conventional ―beauty.‖ Corinne‘s Three Graces photograph exemplifies her vision in creating photographic work that matter-of-factly, yet poetically, captures bodies considered out of bounds in conventional art and visual culture (Figure 2.5). The image features three mature fat women in the typical Three Graces pose, with one woman centered and turned toward the viewer and two women on either side of her turned away from the viewer (see Figures 2.6 and 2.7 for examples of a Renaissance and a Baroque painting of The Three Graces). The story of the Three Graces found their origins in Greek Mythology; they were three sisters representing beauty, charm, and joy, who were part nymph and part enact and enforce its dominance, there are locations spread across the power grid that can challenge this force. While these sites are fractured and never permanent, they do provide moments of opposition that can disarticulate visualization as a mode of policing bodies, opening visibility up to subculturally-productive expressions of identity. Rather than thinking of the visibility of bodies as always and only a trap, we can see it as useful for self- and group- pronouncements of identities. Corinne‘s solarized photographs, as examples of visual expressions of non-normative bodily identities can work as sites through which the engagement of visibility and invisibility are played out, reworked, and made to appear and disappear, providing examples of the dialectical relationship of power and resistance that Foucault explains. From a feminist perspective, I take this to mean ―the archaeological project of discovering alternative systems of thought profoundly disturbs and deflates the putative inevitability of patriarchal domination.‖ Shildrick 48 149 goddess. The three sisters regularly watched over festivals, parties, and other enjoyable social events of both mortals and gods and goddesses to ensure a pleasurable event. They have been conventionally portrayed by young maidens, with two of the sisters facing in one direction and the third in the opposite direction in order to give the figures a sense of movement, as if engaged in a circular dance. Corinne‘s version of the sisters varied widely from the traditional maiden figures, and challenges contemporary cultural assumptions about the gracefulness (or lack thereof) of older, larger female bodies. While the three women in Corinne‘s solarized photograph do drape their arms on each others‘ bodies, as is typical, they are definitively standing still, and are not in the process of dancing. Each woman has her feet planted firmly on the ground, and the poses of their arms reiterate their solid poses; they are not so much holding each other as they perform a dance as they drape their arms along each others‘ bodies in a no-nonsense stance. The woman in the center stands tall and looks directly at the viewer. Each of the other women has their heads turned in a partial profile, looking at the woman in the center. Each of the figures‘ bodies is solid, with full hips, back, and breasts. Each figure has a slightly different body shape and height, which lends the photograph an intriguing visual patterning; this is especially true because of the way in which the colors of the photograph have been changed through its solarization. The figure on the far left is composed of a nearly-solid mid-toned silvery grey color, outlined with a darker charcoal on her right side. The figure in the center has a much darker upper body than lower body; her shoulders, upper chest, and breasts are primarily dark in tone, whereas her belly, pubis, and legs are primarily bright grey and white. This figure‘s waist is highlighted with a swathe of shining white that is a result of the solarized light on the right figure‘s arm as 150 it wraps around the centered woman‘s waist. The woman on the far right has been transformed into a rippling multi-colored grey tone rainbow because of the way the light has shadowed and highlighted the fat rolls on her back, her buttocks, and the backs of her legs. The mottled coloring on this subject‘s body makes her flesh appear shimmery and visually inviting. Much of the visual and political poetry in this photograph comes from the juxtaposition between the figures‘ matter-of-fact poses, their muscular, blocky bodies and the ways in which the light grazing off of their bodies has been captured in the solarization process. As such this photograph becomes an excellent example of the ways in which Corinne has used solarization in both visually compelling and culturally challenging ways. The image confounds a simplistic reading in terms of form and content because it is more visually complex than some of the conventional versions of The Three Graces that have been rendered over the course of time. As a solarized print, this photograph holds the viewer at bay for longer, and requires a greater concentration to see its details. In doing so on a formal level, this image forces the viewer to contemplate women who they might otherwise have glossed over in a mass media image or in everyday life. It also forces the viewer to ask why the image is so compelling, steering us into a greater mode of contemplation of the artwork. It is here that Corinne‘s hope for a spiritually meaningful practice in visual representation can be seen; intense consideration of the formal and contextual cues of the photograph can induce a state of wonder, awe, and appreciation for that which had not been seen before. 151 Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives, published between 1981 and 1996 in Iowa City, was originally an offshoot from Sinister Wisdom, a self-identified lesbian-feminist periodical that started in 1976 and continues to be published today. Two of Sinister Wisdom‘s former editors felt the need to expand the world of lesbian publishing in order to provide more venues for lesbian-centered expression. 233 According to the first issue‘s explanation of the inception of Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives, ―The magazine is a forum for developing and clarifying our women-defined social and political relationships.‖ 234 In a way similar to Adrienne Rich‘s ―lesbian continuum,‖ though not nearly so generalized, we can take this description of Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives as a definition of what ―lesbian‖ means as an identity here. 235 The title of the journal was chosen to reflect both the inherently political nature of a woman-defined space and the communal creation of its content by editors and contributors alike who identified as ―ordinary lesbians, women who have always struggled to survive and create a culture for ourselves‖; the mission statement published in each issue of Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives reiterated this desire: Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives is committed to reflecting the diversity among us by actively soliciting and printing in each issue the work and ideas of lesbians of color, fat lesbians, lesbians over fifty and under twenty years old, physically challenged lesbians, poor and working class lesbians, and lesbians of varying cultural backgrounds. CL/LL feels a strong responsibility to insure access to women whose lives have traditionally been denied visibility and to encourage lesbians who have never thought before of publishing to do so. 236 233 Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives Editorial Collective, ―Notes to Our Readers…,‖Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives #1 (Fall 1981) 3-4 234 Ibid. 235 Adrienne Rich, ―Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,‖ Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986) 236 Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives Editorial Collective 1981, 3-4 152 Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives contained fictional short stories, non-fiction, and poems about the intersection of fat and lesbian identities in at least half of the more than fifty-five issues published over fifteen years. Typical of the kinds of non-fiction essays that dealt with the intersection of fat and lesbian identities, ―They Are Trying to Kill Us (but it‘s for our own good),‖ was a manifesto written by Kelly, a self-defined feminist fat activist and lesbian, in issue #1, from Fall 1981. The essay addressed the multiple ways in which fat women are oppressed on a daily basis. Kelly wrote, ―Oppression has many ways of showing up in everyday life. When a woman is subject to daily doses of oppression, her health suffers. […] Her self-image suffers to the point that she learns to accept the abuse, as background noise in her life. […] I decided to steal back a small portion of our oppression, and then list the ways that we are not loved.‖ The essay enumerated more than nine ways in which fat oppression infiltrated the everyday life of women in the United States, including lies about the efficacy of dieting; exploitation of the emotional and psychological pain of fatphobia in order to increase the multi-billion dollar diet industry; the social normality of publicly suggesting diets, exercise, starvation, and therapy to anyone deemed fat; limited access to health care, events with uncomfortable or impossible seating arrangements, participation in sports, and clothing choices, which can often in turn produce fat women as isolated, alienated and silenced with the dominant culture even as she physically represents more than half of all women living in the United States. At the close of the essay, Kelly introduced the fat liberation movement as a location of political activism to counter the depressing statistics cited within. She suggested that the feminist practices of consciousness-raising, public 153 protesting, and creative self-consciousness and self-expression be pushed further and used in retaliation against a ―war that has a thousand fronts,‖ a war against women‘s selfhood that demands impossible bodies for every single woman within this society. 237 Kelly ended, ―Enough is enough, it‘s time for self-love, it‘s time to demand equal treatment in all areas of our lives.‖ 238 In contrast to the large number of essays, poems, and fiction published about fat identities in the journal, Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives included photographs or drawings of fat lesbians in fewer than ten issues (each issue generally contained between eight and twenty visual representations, including the cover art, in addition to the texts). While there are probably several reasons behind this limited number of visual representations, we might ask why it‘s so difficult to visually portray fat lesbians, even in a venue that overtly welcomes such imagery. Were visual representations submitted of fat lesbians that were not included because they were not of a certain quality desired by the editors? Were lesbian artists, fat or not, who had made such imagery, unaware of the journal? Was there a lack of imagery of fat lesbians made or circulated by lesbian artists at the time? If this was the case, why was it ―easier‖ to portray fat lesbians textually in relation to visual portrayals? As becomes quickly obvious, there are no concrete answers to these questions. The speculation, however, is a useful way to think through the particularities and peculiarities of visual representations of fat lesbians in feminist publications in the United States. 237 Kelly, ―They Are Trying to Kill Us (but it‘s for our own good),‖ Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives #1(1981) 238 Kelly, ―They Are Trying to Kill Us (but it‘s for our own good‖ 154 The texts and images we do see about fat lesbians in Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives are usually celebratory of fat women‘s bodies and lives while confronting fatphobic attitudes and actions on the part of friends, the public, and the media. Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives number twelve from 1984 featured a Lesbian Photo Album that included work with the themes of visibility and inclusion (Figure 2.8). Leslie Baker, one of the eighteen contributors to the photo album, produced the only images in this issue that called attention to the political act of imaging fat bodies in her photographs of fat lesbian lovers (Figures 2.9 and 2.10). In describing her project, Baker writes about her desire to circulate such imagery: ―it is especially important to present our fat positive, beautiful selves to the lesbian community. These photos are shared in hopes of a growing appreciation and understanding of fat and fat liberation among all dykes.‖ 239 Baker‘s images are from her Fat Frolics series of photographs. Two of the photographs show lovers Meridith and Judith lying nude in a rumpled bed, perhaps post-coitally or upon waking. The light is bright and clear, highlighting their comfort with each other and with the quotidian nature of lying naked in each other‘s arms. Baker presents her subjects‘ body sizes and shapes informally; the hills, valleys, folds, and peaks of their flesh are not displayed for the titillation of the viewer, but as the factual circumstances of their embodiment. In one of the photographs the two women lay directly next to each other, heads propped up on pillows and hands. They tilt their heads and look at each other, sharing a personal moment at the same time that Baker captured them for her larger audience. We view the women from the foot of their bed so that their heads are farthest away from us, and their bodies stretch out before us to behold without coyness, humility, 239 Leslie Baker, ―Artist‘s Statement,‖ Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives, #12 (Summer 1984) 27 155 or overt eroticization. Indeed, the sexualized intimacy of their relationship comes from not their nude bodies, but the surrounding disheveled bedclothes and the glance exchanged between them. The second photograph is a closer shot of the nude lovers on their bed from the far right side of the previous image. Meridith drapes her arm over Judith‘s breasts, her head resting on Judith‘s right shoulder, while Judith‘s arm wraps around Meridith‘s head and shoulders. The women have pulled each other closer as we as audience members have become closer to them. The lovers look out toward the camera with smiles on their faces, inviting the photographer and the viewer to share their time together. While not documentary in style per se, these images appear casual in pose and framing. Baker‘s description of her project and her photographic subjects and compositions underscore the journal‘s focus on the commemoration of individual lesbian lives that otherwise might go unseen and undocumented. That these are two of very few images of fat lesbians featured in the fifteen year run of Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives is accentuated by the editorial collective‘s statement for the Lesbian Photo Album issue: ―As you enjoy the Album we ask that you also keep in mind all the lesbians who are not pictured here – all the photographs that for varied reasons were never taken or were later hidden or destroyed.‖ 240 The other photographs in the album tend to portray other underrepresented groups of lesbians: lesbians of color, lesbians with disabilities, and older lesbians among them. Within this context, we might see the paucity of fat lesbian imagery in Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives not so much as a blatant affront to fat lesbians, but as part of the negotiation of multiple lesbian identities 240 Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives Editorial Collective, ―Notes to Our Readers…,‖ Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives, #12 (Summer 1984) 4 156 within a single, and communal, location. Here visual representation is used to counteract an extensive history of silence and absence on the subject of lesbianism in American culture. To represent lesbians, specifically fat dykes here, gives voice to a subcultural group, legitimating their history, oppression, and present impact on society. We can‘t dismiss the history of absence or invisibility of positively-represented fat women in published media, but we can see how this history is one facet of a larger story about the visual under- and misrepresentation of many lesbian identities. In order to contextualize the journal, and see it as a productive step in representational politics, we can look at Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives as a foundational lesbian journal that sets the stage for future, potentially more radical, integrations of fat, lesbian, and visual cultures. The use of visibility to bring recognition and legitimation to disenfranchised and overlooked subcultures has been criticized, in particular as a method of empowerment limited to an identity politics perspective, seen as too narrow and monolithic in its approach to affirming individual and group identities. While always and only using singular identities as a tool of self-determination is problematic, such tactics should not be abolished altogether. Indeed, it is in such journals as Common Lives/ Lesbians Lives that such approaches can be seen as a useful means through which to produce political and social acknowledgment and coalition. Here the identity of ―lesbian‖ acts as an umbrella position through which to bring together multiple perspectives, interests, and subcultures, including those by and about fat women. 157 Laura Aguilar: Latina Lesbians and Clothed/ Unclothed Laura Aguilar has focused on bringing attention to conventionally ignored subjects in the visual arts. Aguilar‘s focus has typically been in portraiture, both of other subjects and herself. While Aguilar‘s photographs are briefly mentioned in several survey articles and books on the nude in contemporary art, lesbian photography, and Chicana/ Latina contemporary artists, as well as contemporary exhibition reviews, there has been little written on the material constructions of Aguilar‘s photographs as aesthetic portrayals by and of a fat, disabled, Chicana lesbian artist. 241 Aguilar‘s work has been generally categorized in two ways: her multiple portrait series has been lauded for its representation of disenfranchised groups of people of color and LGBT individuals; her early, individual self-portraits have been described in similar ways, with particular attention paid to the political intelligibility of Aguilar as a subject in her own right, especially in the context of her Chicana, working-class roots. Aguilar‘s work can be understood as figural images that, like Corinne‘s work on lesbian erotica and visibility, visualize the subjects at the intersection of multiple, and complex, identities that are made simultaneously visible and invisible in the picture planes of her black and white photographs. Laura Aguilar is a primarily self-taught photographer working since the mid- 1980s on photographic series centering on subject she had been familiar with from her everyday life, including lesbians and gay men, people of color, and working-class people. 241 For examples of brief treatments of Aguilar‘s photographs, see Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, ―Laying it Bare: The Queer/ Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar,‖ Living Chicana Theory. Carla Trujillo, ed. (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1997); Amelia Jones, ―Bodies and Subjects in the Technologized Self- Portrait: The Work of Laura Aguilar,‖ Aztlán. 23:2 (Fall 1998), 203-219; Harmony Hammond, ―Laura Aguilar,‖ Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (New York: Rizzoli, 2000) 84-85; Bill Smith, ―The Natural: Laura Aguilar, in the flesh,‖ LA Weekly (January 10-16, 2003). 158 Aguilar spent some time pursuing photography studies in a community college environment, but did not earn a formal degree. She had been photographing since she was a young teenager and was comfortable behind a camera for some time before she began making portraits of her neighbors, friends, and people she met at local events and bars; Aguilar‘s self-portraits come even later, as she started to explore what it was like for her to live in an ―imperfect‖ body. 242 Aguilar‘s education prompted her to explore issues of identity, as several of her teachers encouraged her to come out as a lesbian and to think about the ways this identity, as well as her Chicana identity, influenced the ways in which she saw the world around her. 243 Aguilar initially felt alienated from these cultures because she didn‘t readily identify with the portrayals of lesbians and Latino/as that she had experienced growing up in Los Angeles. 244 In a brief article that reviews her beginnings as an artist, Luis Alfaro quotes Aguilar: ―I was having trouble identifying as a Latina because in some ways I was ashamed by the color of my skin. I grew up in a predominantly Anglo/ Asian community. All of my friends referred to themselves as American or Japanese-American.‖ 245 A class in Chicano studies gave Aguilar a sense of history and context in which to see her own work; the professional and friendly connections she made in this class lead to others, which propelled her to a sense of self- pride that eventually helped to launched her career as a fine art photographer specializing 242 Laura Aguilar in interview with author, July 14, 2008 243 Luis Alfaro, ―Queer Culture,‖ Vanguard (August 7, 1992) 17 244 Alfaro, ―Queer Culture‖ 17 245 Aguilar quoted in Alfaro, ―Queer Culture‖ 17 159 in portraiture. 246 Aguilar states, ―I photograph the people around me – women, people of color, gays and lesbians. I wouldn‘t know what to do with the perfect body. Can we get comfortable with the imperfections?‖ 247 Based in the Los Angeles area, where she has spent most of her career and where she has had gallery representation in the past, Aguilar‘s work has been shown internationally in a wide variety of solo and group exhibitions dealing with bodily, queer, and ethnic subjectivities. While Aguilar‘s images can easily be classified as ―fine art,‖ as they are primarily circulated in gallery and museum spaces and are available for purchase within these spaces, she has had a persistent interest in imaging individuals who do not necessarily have immediate access to such art world institutions. In 1993, Luis Alfaro described the artist‘s work presented in that year‘s Venice Biennale as ―reveal[ing] beauty in those who make the mainstream, straight white culture uncomfortable.‖ 248 Indeed, Alfaro goes on to quote Margaret Lazzari, who writes, Aguilar‘s subjects, often persons of color and/or members of the lesbian/ gay community, seem comfortable with their sexuality, race, or size in stark contrast to their stereotypes. Her subjects don‘t fit the ‗isms‘ and labels others give them. By avoiding the unreality of stereotypes, she photographs real people who exist credibly between the poles of ‗undesirable‘ and ‗perfect.‘ 249 Amongst the work that most explicitly represents such interpretations is Aguilar‘s early series called Latina Lesbians, begun in 1986, and which was conceived of as a continually growing set of photographs of Latina lesbians accompanied by the subjects‘ 246 Alfaro, ―Queer Culture‖ 17 247 Aguilar quoted in Alfaro, ―Queer Culture‖ 17 248 Luis Alfaro, ―Laura Aguilar,‖ Flash Art International Venice Biennale XLV (1993) 226 249 Quoted by Alfaro in ―Laura Aguilar,‖ Flash Art International Venice Biennale XLV (1993) 226; originally published in Margaret Lazzari, ―Curriculum Viva: An Art of Persona by Latinos of Los Angeles,‖ Visions (Spring 1992) 18 160 own writings on the printed photograph (for example, Figures 2.11 and 2.12). This series, like many of her early works, engaged with communities that Aguilar herself is a part of, and/or with which she, as a Latina lesbian woman empathizes. Aguilar has written that the Latina Lesbians series aimed to show images which allow us the opportunity to share ourselves openly, and to provide role models that break negative stereotypes and help develop a better bridge of understanding. I also hope that the pieces provide the opportunity to explore ourselves and others, and to express our own beauty, strength and dignity. […] Within the Lesbian and Gay community of Los Angeles, people of color are yet another hidden subculture; we are present, but remain unseen. 250 The Latina Lesbians series, which is technically ongoing, although Aguilar has not added to it in approximately two decades, 251 was created by photographing women in settings of their choice. Aguilar then printed the images to take up only part of the photographic paper‘s 11‖ x 14‖ space 252 , so that the subjects could add their own commentary to the image. This collaborative process was essential to Aguilar, even though it made accessibility to the final product more difficult for her, due to her dyslexia: I decided to add language; that was the only way I could see myself saying anything about being Latina or Lesbian, and it's working out. However, adding language makes the process harder for me. I have dyslexia, so reading, writing, and understanding is very frustrating. Most of the women used handwriting which is even more difficult to figure out. It has been and continues to be quite a challenge, but when I see the series work, I get a great deal of satisfaction. 253 250 Laura Aguilar, ―Artist Statement,‖ Women Artists of the American West: Lesbian Photography on the U.S. West Coast, 1972-1997. Originally printed in Nueva Luz, Vol. 4, #2, 1993 and Gallerie: Women's Art, Vol. 1, #1, 1988. Retrieved September 10, 2009, <http://www.sla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Corinne/Aguilar.htm>. 251 Laura Aguilar in interview with author, July 14, 2008 252 Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, ―Laying it Bare: The Queer/ Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar,‖ Living Chicana Theory. Ed. Carla Trujillo. (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1997) 295 253 Aguilar, ―Artist Statement,‖ Women Artists of the American West: Lesbian Photography on the U.S. West Coast, 1972-1997. 161 Figure 2.11 shows one image from the Latina Lesbians series. It features a woman named Carla Baibza, 254 dressed casually in pants and a tee-shirt as well as a dark and shining leather motorcycle jacket. She is intensely focused, looking directly at the camera, and thus the viewer, her forehead slightly wrinkled in her concentration. Her hands rest on her lower hips, toward her back, in a gesture that seems neither planned nor quite casual or comfortable. This slight awkwardness might come from her lack of experience in front of a camera; or she might have been in the middle of a larger movement with her arms when Aguilar shot the photograph. She stands in front of a plain wall painted a light color at its top and a darker color on the bottom; the colors form a line just behind the subject‘s shoulders, emphasizing what the dark jacket and the angle of her body already highlight: strongly set shoulders that are tense, and relatively wide. She wears her straight dark hair in a short cut, parted on her right side, and pushed up and forward onto the left side of her forehead. Her hair is in a modified (1980s version) of a pompadour, wherein thickness and height is emphasized. This hairstyle meshes with her casual clothes and motorcycle jacket to give her a somewhat tough and butch look, stressing the angularity of her body in the angles of the jacket‘s lapels and front zipper against the light-colored tee-shirt. At the same time, the curves of her oval face and her smooth hair contrast with the sharper lines of her body and clothing. As Yvonne Yarbro- Bejarano writes about Aguilar‘s early works, ―much of the [a]esthetic pleasure of the spectator derives from Aguilar‘s treatment of the bodies as sculptural forms unanchored 254 The subject‘s last name is hard to distinguish with full certainty; Baibza is my best guess at its spelling. 162 in any particular environment [….]‖ 255 This woman is no-nonsense, but approachable; serious, with an element of vulnerability. Under her photograph, Carla Baibza has written, ―My mother encouraged me to be a court reporter … I became a lawyer.‖ Concise, biting, and humorous, Baibza chose this statement to summarize herself in words as an accompaniment with Aguilar‘s image of her. Whether the subject chose to write this upon seeing this specific image or had planned it ahead of time, we‘ll never know, but the fact that she chose this as her epitaph of sorts tells us at least in part about her relationship with her family. Perhaps her mother encouraged her to become a court reporter so that she would have realistic, yet still professional, dreams for a career. Or perhaps she imposed a limit on her daughter based on cultural assumptions, rather than personal ambitions. That Baibza became a lawyer rather than a court reporter potentially signals an upward move in social and economic status as well. The inclusion of the remark about her chosen profession with a photograph that seems relatively casual marks an interesting intersection between the text and the image. Were the photograph exhibited without the added text, one might never guess that Baibza was a lawyer. That she chose her profession as her defining feature in contrast to what she chose to wear at the photo shoot for the image gives us an extended sense of the subject as a multi-dimensional individual; in addition to being a Latina Lesbian, she is a lawyer, sure of herself, intense and thoughtful, and a bit vulnerable in her bodily awkwardness. The collaboration between Aguilar and her subject was successful in its 255 Yarbro-Bejarano 297 163 presentation of an individual that breaks from the dominant norms about Latinas and lesbians. Aguilar‘s Clothed/ Unclothed (1990-1994) photographs similarly renegotiate the visual representation of subjects whose identities are either largely forgotten or actively made invisible within mainstream United States culture. In Clothed/ Unclothed, Aguilar photographed individuals and groups in diptych format, one image depicting the subjects wearing their regular clothing, the other with the subjects nude (e.g., Figure 2.13). The first photograph is Untitled, as are all of the photographs in this series. This diptych showcases a young heterosexual African-American couple, who, based on both of their poses in this double image, seem very much in love with one another. The Clothed image shows the two hugging one another, the front of their bodies pressing closely together, with their heads turned to the camera. Both of the subjects are fat, and both wear casual clothing; the man is wearing dark jeans and a plaid short-sleeved short and the woman is wearing a sleeveless dress and one or two bracelets on her bare arm. The man is several inches taller than the woman, and in their position together the woman leans her head into the top of his chest, as he leans his cheek on the top of her head. Together they form a strong triangular, or more precisely, pyramidal shape, again recalling the reference to Aguilar‘s photographic work as sculptural in form. They look directly, if a bit shyly at the camera in this Clothed image; their facial expressions seem skeptical, hesitant, or perhaps not quite trusting in this photograph. In the Unclothed photograph, the couple seems both more playful and more confident. The subjects now face forward, and continue to look directly at the viewer. Each of the subjects is nude, and the woman stands in front of the taller man, covering 164 most of his body with hers. He has draped himself over her back and right side, however, and his massive right arm moves diagonally across her body and covers part of her right breast and the center of her belly. His left arm meets his right as it moves around her waist and sits on her belly. The woman‘s hands are clasped together on her stomach, just above her pubic area, and her partner‘s hand rests on top of them. The woman is now smiling slightly at the camera and her eyes are more open and bright than in the Clothed photograph. Behind her, her partner still seems shy and questioning, which connects with his stance behind her, as if he is hiding, or, in contrast, protecting her as he leans over her from behind. The contrast in their skin tones are highlighted in this nude photograph and their intertwined pose brings more visual interest to this photograph than in the Clothed image. In the Clothed photograph the subjects seem to meld together more easily; they appear to be one unit, with little distance (physical or metaphorical) between them. The Unclothed image, in comparison, continues to propagate the intimacy shared between the two figures, but it does so in a way that is more visually poetic in terms of line, color, contrast, and three-dimensionality. The figures in the Unclothed image are not joined as one so much as they are layered, which produces a very different visual effect. This visual effect is heightened when we look closely at the light that moves over the two figures‘ fat bodies, creating a modeled appearance similar to the chiaroscuro practiced in two-dimensional Renaissance artworks. In this diptych and other images from Clothed/ Unclothed, Aguilar questions the methods through which identities are formulated by individual subjects and by the world that engages with such subjects. She interrogates whether stereotypes can be altered or reified when we see individual subjects embodying a wide range of sized, gendered, 165 sexualized, racialized, and classed identities. At the same time, Aguilar cultivates ―an [a]esthetic of the ordinary that quotes the casual informality of the family snapshot‖ in these photographic diptychs. 256 Most of the subjects in the Clothed/ Unclothed series are shown in everyday garments, in poses that are casual and generally not very self- conscious. The informality of the figures remains in the nude images that accompany the clothed photographs, and the added registration of nudity gives the dual images a frisson of shock or energy, not because the nudity is shocking in and of itself, but because as viewers, we rarely see regular people standing open, nude, and potentially vulnerable before us. Aguilar has said, I use people in my photographs to reflect the parts of me that I am. The lesbian series, the Clothed/ Unclothed series all came out of issues that I have been dealing with in my life. I‘m trying to allow the softness of myself to be out and be represented in these photographs. I believe that the viewer is as vulnerable as the nude person in the clothed/ unclothed series because they are hopefully seeing images of themselves. 257 Indeed, that the individuals Aguilar includes in this series represent anything but perfectly-thin and white dominant beauty ideals is what makes the images both delightfully surprising and relatable. Even more to the point, Aguilar does not strive to beautify or perfect her subjects in these images, whether in the clothed or unclothed photographs; instead, she pictures them ―as-is,‖ exposing their humanity and imperfections as important factors in understanding the intersectional subject. Both Aguilar and Yarbro-Bejarano speak to this subject. According to Yarbro-Bejarano, Aguilar‘s [a]esthetic goes beyond merely presenting an alternative vision of what is good, true, and beautiful to interrogating the very binary divisions on which the 256 Yarbro-Bejarano 297 257 Aguilar quoted in Alfaro, ―Queer Culture‖ 17 166 philosophy of [a]esthetics has traditionally been based. For example, her images are not asexual or non-erotic, but the sexual/ erotic energy in Aguilar‘s portraiture is unconventionally routed and more dispersed. 258 The idea that Aguilar is not reframing beauty here, but rather fostering visual interest in actual corporeal subjects that are conventionally invisible, unreadable, and overlooked in mainstream culture is important. Too often an unreflective rhetoric of changing standards of beauty is used when describing art work that portrays subjects not traditionally represented in Westernized fine art; this can be problematic primarily because the change is rarely actually sustained within dominant and/or mainstream culture in the United States. They are instead usually reincorporated into dominant cultural constructions of beauty based on body size, extent of femininity (or masculinity), and appearance trends, and used as a talking point for a dominant culture that wishes to misdirect a public audience in terms of the actual work it is doing in fostering ―diversity.‖ Heresies: Food is a Feminist Issue Issue number twenty-one of Heresies from 1987 took the name of Food is a Feminist Issue. This installment of the journal included a much broader range of topics under their food and feminism rubric than did Orbach‘s Fat is a Feminist Issue book, including imagery, fiction, and non-fiction about being fat, the exploitation of female labor in agricultural societies, and pesticides and preservatives in American food. 259 The theme as articulated in their table of contents reads, ―A woman‘s relationship to her body 258 Yarbro-Bejarano 296 259 Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, #21: Food is a Feminist Issue. Eds., Heresies Collective. (New York: Heresies Publishing, 1987) 167 and food is a paradigm for the use and control of food in the world. Since a woman‘s individual power to control her own conditions of life has been taken from her, issues of feeding and nurturing have moved out of the personal, and into the political realm.‖ 260 As a feminist publication, Heresies continued to take up and work with the theme of personalizing politics through the late 1980s. In explicitly making food and it intersection with the body a political issue, Heresies both commented upon previous cultural work that took the body as its subject and created a space for new work to build upon and/or contest the feminist interpretations of corporeal politics formulated during the decade of the 1980s. One of the series of visual work in Heresies: Food is a Feminist Issue is called Personal Growth by Kay Kenny (Figures 2.14-2.21); Kenny had had photographs included in issues of Heresies before, as we saw in the Sex issue in 1981, though this is the first time that she explicitly referred to fatness in her figural imagery. The eight images in the Personal Growth series combine photographs with drawings, other two- dimensional collage elements, and captions that comment on both the artist‘s and others‘ reactions to her body, which she identifies as fat. Each of the eight images features a photograph of a section of Kenny‘s body, only one of which includes part of her head or face. In contrast to ―headless fatty‖ images circulated in mainstream media sources, however, this series of artworks does not replicate conventional attitudes about fat bodies. Two factors mitigate this kind of reading: one is that Kenny uses her own body in her work to comment on how she and potentially other fat women feel about their bodies; and two is that the captions tell us how Kenny is thinking about the place of her body 260 Heresies #21, Table of Contents, back cover 168 within her own life, within the lives of friends and acquaintances, and within visual imagery depicting female bodies. As such, Kenny‘s captions, both thought-provoking and humorous, act as a voice even when there is no head/ face in the images to visually indicate her own subjectivity. At the same time, the images could stand on their own, without the text as a commentary on how the personal and the political intermix, in particular within the context of how fat female bodies are often perceived as public property within dominant culture. 261 The first image in Kenny‘s series features a photograph of the artist sitting nude on the ground with her legs spread out before her (Figures 2.14 and 1.15). The image is taken from above and to the left side of Kenny, so that we can see her chest from just above her breasts down, her protruding belly, and her legs to her knee and ankle. Her hands are spread out just under her breasts, as if holding them up and presenting them to the viewer. Above this photograph are three drawings of a similarly posed Kenny, although more closely cropped than the photographic image. Each of these drawings focuses on the intersection of Kenny‘s belly and thighs as they meet at her groin. The resultant triangle shapes become the predominant theme of these drawings. It is not until the viewer looks very closely at the drawings that one realizes that these images are based 261 Feminist scholar Carla Rice argues that much of the negativity circulated about women‘s bodies in Western culture happens because of the ―collective displacement of much of what is wrong with this culture onto the terrain of women‘s bodies and that such feelings have their roots in an age old attempt to control and colonize women.‖ She continues, ―I believe our collective feelings of loathing, shame, and alienation are the fall-out of a war – a conflict waged on the landscape of our bodies. This conflict, played out on the terrain of that which defines us as female, is fought through the regulation, control, suppression, and occupation of virtually every aspect of our physical being – sexuality, dress, appearance, deportment, strength, health, reproduction, shape, size, space, expression, and movement. The effects of such struggle on our bodies, minds, and spirit are similar to the effects of violence on the landscape of any other war – suffering, chaos, starvation, mutilation, devastation, and even death.‖ Carla Rice, ―Out from Under Occupation: Transforming Our Relationships with Our Bodies,‖ Canadian Woman Studies/ Les Cahiers de la Femme (Summer 1994) 44 169 on the photograph next to them; the image becomes more abstract than figural in the drawings because of the cropping and the attention paid to the line rather than to the modeling, as is more apparent in the larger photograph. Above the image a title of sorts reads, ―She demanded more space in the world.‖ 262 The caption for this conglomerate image reads: ―Her body expanded, making lavish personal statements that intruded upon the intimate thoughts of others.‖ 263 The combination of the image and caption points to the ways in which meanings applied to fat bodies and their representations are negotiated between the subjects who create and are featured in them and the subjects who view them. Kenny makes no apologies about her body, but rather presents it as the bearer of meanings given to it by the social world, which includes her own feelings about it, a larger public‘s responses to it, as well as the potential readers of a journal such as Heresies. We can say that Kenny ―capitalizes‖ on the allure of the fat body that Charlotte Cooper recommends in her description of the ways in which ―headless fatties‖ have been produced in mass media outlets in the United States and Western Europe in recent decades. Cooper calls for an articulation of the self by fat individuals in order to counter the silencing images of fat people that have been circulated, primarily as illustrative of the ―fattening up‖ of Americas during the ―obesity epidemic.‖ Headless fatty images are used to give voice to dominant culture‘s assumptions about what fatness means and what it is like to be a fat person in American culture. Kenny‘s work speaks back, and is provocative because it tests the boundaries between self and other in terms of meaning- 262 Kay Kenny, Personal Growth, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21 (1987) 30; I wrote ―title of sorts here‖ because the table of contents of this issue of Heresies lists the name of the 8 image series as Personal Growth, but this line of text is featured above the first image printed in the series. No other image in the layout has a heading, and it is written in a larger font than the captions of each image are. 263 Kenny, Personal Growth 30 170 making about bodily representations. Kenny‘s image walks the line of the alluring fat female body because it is visually compelling, in large part due to its deviance from the thin-body ideal and norm that is circulated in visual culture and fine art featuring nude women. This deviance does not need to be pathologized, however, which is what we are taught to do to any body that does not fit the socially regulated form of thin, white, able- bodied, heterosexual, and male. Kenny‘s images directly engage with the process of bodily judgment that usually happens so quickly and unconsciously as two or more subjects look at each other that we take it for granted. This visual policing of one another has likely been part of our, and every, culture for hundreds, if not thousands of years, as a survival mechanism to evaluate the kind of interaction we are likely to have with the people around us. But such surveillance has morphed into a process of pathologization of ―the other‖ that constantly and usually negatively affects the quotidian lives of ordinary people. Kenny‘s Personal Growth images visualize this process in a way that does not simplify fatness into a negative state of being, nor does it favor a cultural norm over a personal belief system. They contest bodily and psychological pathologization while confirming the ambiguity that is necessarily part of cultural contestations of self and other, good and bad, visible and invisible. The fourth image in Kenny‘s Personal Growth series emphasizes the idea of demanding and taking up more space in the world, even when it seems difficult (Figures 2.19 and 2.20). The photograph featured in this image shows Kenny in a frontal pose from her chin to just below her knees, almost entirely nude. She is holding a too-small bath towel around her waist; the corners of the towel just come together in her hands at the smallest part her waist, under her breasts, but the rest of the towel hangs open, 171 exposing her belly, pubis, and thighs. Kenny‘s silhouetted reflection in the glass door or mirror directly behind her body stands out from the lighter areas around it. This solid black bodily shape, whose details we can best see in the head and leg area, underscore the three-dimensionality of Kenny‘s fat female body. The flatness of the solid shape contrasts with the three-dimensionality of Kenny‘s body mass in much the same way that the darkness of the shape contrasts with Kenny‘s much lighter skin tone. Even though these elements have different visual properties, they support one another in creating a weighty figure in the photograph. This photograph is centrally located within the larger image, which is primarily made up of abstract dark and light sections that mimic the textures and colors of the photographic print, but are not representational. For example, the towel that Kenny holds around her is striped, and there is a hand-painted striped section of paper that has been collaged into the larger image on the bottom right side. There is also a section of white curved brushstrokes just to the bottom left of the photograph that is reminiscent of the terry-cloth texture of a bath towel. The caption that accompanies his image reads, ―Do whales raise the level of the sea? she chuckled, slipping into her overflowing bath.‖ 264 The comparison between fat human beings and large animals, be they whales, elephants, hippos, etc., is not new; neither are self-deprecating jokes made by fat people so as to better conform to the fat hatred rampant in contemporary U.S. culture. Kenny does not quite replicate either of these modes of humor directed at fat individuals, however. Instead, Kenny visually and textually exposes the conditions within which fat people, including herself, live as ordinary citizens, too-small towels and bathtubs among them. 264 Kenny, Personal Growth 31 172 That the caption is paired with this particular image also points to Kenny‘s tone of challenge in this series; demanding more space in the world requires testing the boundaries, physical and cultural, of the ways in which one‘s fatness is used against them. Rosemarie Garland Thomson‘s theorization of bodies with physical disabilities can be usefully extended to include fat and lesbian bodies, other bodily forms which are marginalized and considered non-normative. Garland Thomson has written, Constructed as the embodiment of corporeal insufficiency and deviance, the physically disabled body becomes a repository for social anxieties about such troubling concerns as vulnerability, control, and identity. […] Disability, then, is the attribution of corporeal deviance – not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do. […] Representation thus simultaneously buttresses an embodied version of normative identity and shapes a narrative of corporeal difference that excludes those whose bodies or behaviors do not conform. […] the disabled figure operates as the vividly embodied, stigmatized other whose social role is to symbolically free the privileged, idealized figure of the American self from the vagaries and vulnerabilities of embodiment. 265 Kenny‘s fat body in her Personal Growth series of images fulfills the promises about the disabled body that Garland Thomson outlines here. Indeed, Garland Thomson‘s assertions about the way in which the physically disabled body is constructed emphasizes the argument I am making about the allure of fat bodies: that the allure of non-normative bodies and their representations buttress ―an embodied version of normative identity and shape a narrative of corporeal difference‖ that plays upon the competing yet simultaneous forces of desire and repulsion. Kenny‘s series of eight images is set into the text of a fictional story by Susan Thomas called ―Formerly Fat.‖ This story describes the lives of fat twin sisters Barbara 265 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 6-7 173 and Michelle La Grande who are dancers/ performers that go on a medical diet in order to lose most of their weight. For the first time in the twins‘ lives, they begin to move apart from one another as they have different feelings about the diet and what it is doing to their bodies. Initially, this seems an incongruous choice of a text with which to juxtapose Kenny‘s visual work, since it is ostensibly anti-fat. The story is more complicated, however, and like Kenny‘s visual work, it captures the fluctuations felt by women in their own bodies, whether fat or thin, or somewhere in between. The semi-disjunctured integration of visual representations and text that is found throughout this issue of Heresies can be seen as one of the issue‘s strengths, as it presents multiple viewpoints and multiple storylines about bodies of all kinds and their visual and textual representations. This edition of Heresies highlights one of the most compelling aspects of such lesbian and feminist periodicals: the creation and support of otherwise marginalized subjects through the interaction between visual and textual strategies of representation. We will see this theme reemerge in different configurations in the continued examination of alternative lesbian and fat publications. The Lesbian Avengers The Lesbian Avengers are a now-widely defunct political direct action group that was formed in early 1992 by six New York-based lesbians, Ana Maria Simo, Anne- Christine D‘Adesky, Maxine Wolfe, Marie Honan, Ann MaGuire, and Sarah Schulman. 266 The women, who had been longtime friends and fellow activists in a variety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer action groups, sought to create a new 266 Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/ Bush Years (Routledge: New York, 1994) 279 174 group with a specific lesbian focus that ―would quickly respond when lesbians were mistreated.‖ 267 Over the course of the group‘s history, which included multiple outposts around the United States and internationally, the focus of the Lesbian Avengers opened up to include the proactive fostering of lesbian culture and visibility, as well as responsiveness to everyday and systemic injustices. 268 Groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation had been formed in New York in 1987 and 1990, respectively, in response to the AIDS epidemic and governmental neglect of people with HIV and AIDS and the wider LGBT community. 269 Schulman wrote, ―This was a big step for the lesbian movement [….] It focused our work directly on the right wing, and established a new tone for lesbian politics – a post ACT UP lesbian movement.‖ 270 ACT UP, and its visual arts faction Gran Fury, were created in response to government inaction during the first few years of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s in the United States. As art historian Richard Meyer documents in Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, the visual representations produced by and circulated of political action groups such as ACT UP, Gran Fury, and the Lesbian Avengers, can often put into circulation a counter discourse that challenges or manipulates traditional media representations of ―dangerous‖ 267 Lisa Springer, ―Lighten Up: The Lesbian Avengers Are Here,‖ Sappho’s Isle 6:1 (January 1993) 6 268 ―About the Lesbian Avengers,‖ LesbianAvengers.com, retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about.shtml> 269 ACT-UP New York, ―NYC Information,‖ ActUpNY.org. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.actupny.org/indexfolder/NYC.html>; Susan Stryker, ―Queer Nation,‖ glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture (2004). Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/queer_nation.html> 270 Schulman 282 175 communities. 271 As one if its members, Jennifer Monson, noted a few months after the group had been established and had performed a number of actions, ―Most of our actions are attempts to find alternatives. They come from a lesbian point of view and are subversive by definition.‖ 272 The Lesbian Avengers produced at least two sets of images of themselves, much like the 1968 Miss America protesters: they created visual imagery in the form of placards, posters, sculptures, flyers, and handbooks that they distributed in order to publicize the group and increase the production of lesbian cultural artifacts; and at the same time countless images were circulated of them through LGBT, Queer, and mass media avenues in newspapers, magazines, television coverage, films, and eventually the internet. That both of these kinds of visual representations came to represent the political force and power of lesbian communities around the U.S., creating a new kind of ―dangerous‖ lesbian image, is in large part what made the Avengers so successful in their endeavors, even if they did not have the longevity that ACT UP has had. ACT UP, or AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, performed political actions, or direct interventions, that expressed members‘ outrage over the ways in which the people of the United States had been forgotten by big business pharmaceutical companies and local and federal government in regard to HIV and AIDS (Figure 2.22). It focused on creating actions that would disrupt the everyday business and lives of those ignoring the AIDS crisis, using basic civil disobedience practices, such as marches, large crowds, calling the mass media, and creating images and placards that expressed their anger. 271 Richard Meyer, ―Vanishing Points: Art, AIDS, and the Problem of Visibility,‖ Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 225-275 272 Jennifer Monson quoted in Springer 6 176 Perhaps the most well-known image still associated with ACT UP is the stark black poster featuring a pink triangle in its center and the now-iconic words SILENCE = DEATH on the bottom (Figure 2.23). Queer Nation was less organized than ACT UP and the Lesbian Avengers would be, and they were only active for two years, likely as a result of the anarchical style of the group. 273 They had an incredibly strong impact on contemporary LGBT/ Queer life and politics, however, starting with the greater circulation and purposeful use of the designation ―queer‖ as a descriptor of not simply sexual orientation or identity, but an added layer of political commitment that was not inherently embedded in the terms lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. ACT-UP was known for its ―die-ins‖ during which members would lie, sometimes with grave markers, on the ground to demonstrate the numbers of people who died due to governmental and healthcare negligence. The ―kiss-in‖ was invented by Queer Nation as an alternative method of protest that asserted LGBTQ persons‘ right to be sexual and loving with same- gender individuals; as a protest tool kiss-ins were provocative and pleasurable, asserting one‘s civil rights while mocking the heteronormative restrictions of dominant culture. Queer Nation was formed at much the same time that queer theory began to be described and practiced in academia; the amorphousness, instability, and socio-political mission underlined by queer theoretical approaches to sexual identity in national and international contexts can in large part be attributed to the actions performed by members of Queer Nation, who reclaimed a previously negative epithet for their (our) own renegotiation of cultural power. 273 Stryker 177 The Lesbian Avengers sought to creatively re-invent direct action protests for and with members interested in issues specific to the lesbian community in New York City. Once the Avengers‘ actions were publicized across the country, new outposts of the group sprang up in a variety of locations, including Massachusetts, Idaho, Florida, and California. The Lesbian Avengers‘ iconic visual symbol quickly became a bomb with a sparking fuse (see Figure 2.24). It represented the potential havoc the Avengers could provoke in their work to defend lesbian communities and infiltrate the heteronormative and homophobic public sphere with lesbian performance, literary, and visual culture. At the same time that the Lesbian Avengers was originally formed, its core members decided that the first political action it would create would be in response to a New York City public school district‘s refusal to accept a new curriculum model that encouraged educators to discuss lesbian and gay families within a wider context of family and cultural diversity. The ―Children of the Rainbow‖ curriculum was formulated primarily to bring a multicultural lens to teaching ―racial harmony‖ to young public school students in New York City. 274 As one New York Times journalist asserted, out of the 443 pages that detailed this curriculum program, three pages were devoted to exploring some of the ways teachers might include discussion of gender and sexual diversity in family composition. 275 One Queens, NY school district refused to implement the curriculum based on the grounds that it fostered ―dangerously misleading 274 Steven Lee Meyers, ―How a ‗Rainbow Curriculum‘ Turned into Fighting Words,‖ The New York Times, December 13, 1992. Retrieved 19 February 2010,<http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/13/weekinreview/ideas-trends-how-a-rainbow-curriculum-turned- into-fighting-words.html>. The attention paid to creating an interracial ―multicultural‖ classroom seems rather old-fashioned today and is not without its problems; these issues, however, are beyond the scope of this dissertation. 275 Meyers, ―How a ‗Rainbow Curriculum‘ Turned into Fighting Words‖ 178 lesbian/homosexual propaganda‖ because it recognized same-sex partnerships as legitimate family circumstances, as was portrayed in such young reader books as Heather Has Two Mommies, Daddy’s Roommate, and Gloria Goes to Gay Pride. 276 Much anger was wielded on both sides of the issue and the fight against the curriculum lasted several months and become the focus of the issue, rather than the educational program itself. In response to the battle waged in the public school system, the Lesbian Avengers chose to stage a protest that would introduce students, parents, and educators to actual lesbians who wanted to respond both personally and politically to the negative impact of their refusal to recognize LGBT lives. The Avengers began their preparations for the event early, so as to attract greater membership and media attention. During the late-June Gay Pride events in New York that year the Avengers handed out bright green club cards (small flyers) that read, WE WANT REVENGE AND WE WANT IT NOW! LESBIAN! DYKES! GAY WOMEN! […] Let‘s Face It: Government, Media, Entertainment, the Money System, School, Religion, Politeness … are irrelevant to our lives as dykes. We‘re wasting our lives being careful. Imagine what your life could be. Aren‘t you ready to make it happen? WE ARE. If you don‘t want to take it anymore and are ready to strike, call us now […] WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE? 277 The card included a telephone number, which, when called, gave interested parties information about the first planning meeting for the action to take place that summer. 278 The Lesbian Avengers spent the next two months planning for the action and creating the 276 New York City public school District 24 Board President Mary A. Cummins quoted in Meyers, ―How a ‗Rainbow Curriculum‘ Turned into Fighting Words‖ 277 Schulman 279 278 Schulman 280 179 format through which their subsequent actions would be planned and accounted for in an Organizing Handbook (see Figure 2.25 for the Lesbian Avengers action checklist). At the action, which took place on the first day of school for the Fall 1992 term at one of the district‘s elementary schools in Queens, the Avengers put together a marching band, handed out lavender balloons that read, ―Ask About Lesbian Lives‖ and wore t- shirts printed with the slogan ―I was a Lesbian Child‖ to protest the anti-LGBT curriculum addendum (Figure 2.26). 279 The Avengers had hired a marching band to play ―We Are Family,‖ a gay and heterosexual disco favorite alike, as the protesters marched to the school. 280 As journalist Lisa Springer wrote in early 1993 about this protest, the crowds gathered under hundreds of hovering balloons listening to the music gave the event a ―festive‖ feel; ―the idea was for it to be a happy message.‖ 281 This was not the interpretation of it by police, many parents, and school administrators however, even if the Avengers had captured the children‘s imaginations with their cheerful display (Springer writes, ―The children wanted to perceive it differently. ‗Why can‘t I keep the balloon,‘ one boy asked.‖ 282 ) In recounting the scene, Schulman recalled that while the small town ―had never had a lesbian parade before,‖ there was ―very little hostility and no violence.‖ She continued, I think people were so flabbergasted to see live lesbians there was no room for any other response. […] We were willing to confront the greatest taboo in the culture – homosexuals in the school yard. And we did it in a creative, imaginative, and constructive way. It was a strong, radical, confrontational action. But it was 279 Schulman 279-282 280 Schulman 281 281 Springer 6 282 Springer 6 180 friendly. It also set a pattern for our future of going directly to the sources that are attacking us and confronting them on their territory. 283 This methodology would prove fruitful across a wide range of direct action projects and locations. During the next three years, the Lesbian Avengers worked on combating anti- LGBT legislation in Oregon (Proposition 9, 1992) and Colorado (Amendment 2, 1995- 1996); they organized a march on Washington D.C. with no legal permits that included at least 40,000 attendees; and they created several art projects that recognized and added to the lesbian community in New York City and abroad. 284 During that same time, at least thirty-five chapters of the Lesbian Avengers were formed across the U.S. (see Figure 2.27). 285 The Lesbian Avengers‘ publicity flyers and posters memorably exemplified the spirit of the subversive (ephemeral) visual culture that they circulated during the early 1990s. Early in the group‘s history Carrie Moyer designed much of the Lesbian Avenger‘s flyers and posters including two that feature the slogan, The Lesbian Avengers: We Recruit (Figures 2.24 and 2.28). The notion that the Lesbian Avengers ―recruit‖ was a pointed play on the fears of dominant U.S. culture that there was a ―homosexual agenda‖ wherein sexual ―deviants‖ could influence the children of heterosexual parents to become lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender simply by teaching them about LGBT relationships and culture. The Lesbian Avengers took up this 283 Schulman 281-282 284 Benjamin Shepard Interviews Sarah Schulman, ―The Reproductive Rights Movement, ACT UP, and the Lesbian Avengers,‖ From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization. Eds., Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk. (London and New York: Verso, 2002) 138- 140 285 ―Herstory: The Lesbian Avengers – Time to Seize the Power and Be the Bomb You Throw!‖ Autostraddle, July 24, 2009. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.autostraddle.com/herstory-the- lesbian-avengers-time-to-seize-the-power-be-the-bomb-you-throw/> 181 slogan both to highlight its ridiculousness and to turn the tools of the heteronormative culture around to become a weapon in the fight for civil rights and social justice. Both of the images here by Moyer renegotiate visual representations for the service of the Avengers as well. In Figure 2.24 we see the image of a stereotypical feminine woman in a 1950s gingham dress serving the viewer the Lesbian Avenger‘s bomb on a platter. Instantly recognizable as a symbol of heterosexual, sexist, middle-class white American values of the mid-twentieth century, the woman pictured here has eschewed her ―duty‖ as a housewife and mother and become part of the Lesbian Avengers‘ arsenal of visual imagery; she no longer represents the dominant cultural values of domesticity and womanhood, but has been ―recruited‖ for service by lesbians out to seek justice for the oppression they have undergone for years. The female figure in Figure 2.28 has a similar commitment to the struggle for lesbian freedom from tyranny, though a different past. This figure is based on an image of actor Pam Grier, best known in the 1970s for her role in such blaxploitation films as Foxy Brown (1974) (Figure 2.29), in which she played an African-American female superhero of sorts who took no attitude from men or whites and who used her skills in the arts of seduction and full-body combat to save herself and other exploited individuals. 286 In the flyer, the figure wears pants laced up on the side and a bikini top, holds a large gun, and looks defiantly into the viewer‘s eyes. She projects an air of tension such that the viewer needs to remain cautious and not be tempted to step on her toes for fear of what she will do. Like the flyer of the 1950s woman, this 286 A blaxploitation film was one in which African-American characters are portrayed in rather stereotypical ways (as urban pimps, drug dealers, criminals, or Southern slaves), but that is targeted toward a modern African-American audience. The themes of each film varied, and before 1974‘s Foxy Brown, women were usually portrayed as second-class citizens in misogynistic ways. After Pam Grier starred in Foxy Brown she became one of the most wanted and widely-known sting female characters in film, blaxploitation or not, and was featured in several more similar films in the 1970s. 182 representation of the spirit of the Lesbian Avengers takes up an image associated with popular culture and renegotiates the context so as to reimagine it as a publicity tool for the Avengers. Whether lesbians wanted to remake the image of femininity or take the world by storm, the Lesbian Avengers were the cause to join. During their first year of work, the Lesbian Avengers were also filmed by lesbian filmmaker Su Friedrich for a project that would become an hour-long documentary called The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too. 287 One section of this documentary shows part of the Lesbian Avengers‘ Valentine‘s Day action in 1993, during which they installed a newly-created papier maché sculpture of Alice B. Toklas next to the bronze Gertrude Stein statue found in New York‘s Bryant Park, near the central branch of the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan (Figure 2.30). Originally created in 1926 from a clay model (see Figure 2.31), the bronze Stein in Bryant Park was a 1991 copy and recent installment in the New York park. 288 The Avengers sent out invitations to the event to its members; the invites included a remade version of the Lesbian Avengers‘ lit bomb in dark pink, surrounded by the text ―a Rose is a Bomb is a Rose is a Bomb,‖ designed by Carrie Moyer, as a tribute to Stein‘s famous ―A Rose is a Rose‖ poem (Figure 2.32). 289 The event exhibited another side of the Lesbian Avengers‘ interest in promoting lesbian culture and community through a celebration of lesbian love, showing that not all 287 This film is included in The Films of Su Friedrich Volume 1, from 1993, along with another short documentary called The Ties That Bind, about the relationship between the filmmaker and her mother, who grew up in Nazi Germany. Su Friedrich, The Films of Su Friedrich Volume 1 (New York: Outcast Films, 1993) 288 Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and Jo Davidson with Portrait Sculpture, Getty Museum Photography Collection. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=53277> 289 Lesbian Avengers, ―New York City Actions Timeline: Alice B. Toklas Action,‖ LesbianAvengers.com. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about/action_timeline.shtml> 183 of the Avengers‘ actions were formulated out of anger or irritation with a particular set of actions or events. The event commenced with the wheeling into the park of the new Toklas sculpture, covered in a pink swathe of fabric so as to create a proper sense of an unveiling when the time came. With snow covering the ground in some areas and attendees dressed in hats, scarves, and coats to ward off the cold New York City temperatures, several women rolled the statue next to Stein‘s, and Maxine Wolfe read a prepared declaration of the celebration of lesbian love, in all forms and varieties, in order to set the stage for the unveiling of the sculpture. Part of the Lesbian Avengers‘ goal was to ―make visible the love we have for ourselves and each other when we organize and take direct action together on our own behalf.‖ 290 When revealed, we see that the Toklas statue is painted in bright gold, and shows her nude, and standing, with a rather jaunty fedora or bowler hat on her head (Figure 2.33). The Avengers who helped to create the actual piece nicely matched Toklas‘ pose with that of Stein‘s: Toklas stands in profile next to the crouching Stein, reaching out her hands and arms to grasp Stein‘s face, with open palms offering her affection to her lover (Figure 2.34). With the newly-installed sculpture as their immediate backdrop, several of the Avengers chose to read poetry and prose to mark the event. Eileen Myles and Melanie Hope read their original poems, ―I Always Put My Pussy‖ and ―Lesbian Bed Day,‖ while the Thespian Avengers read Stein‘s ―Lifting Belly‖ poem, about having sex with her lover, as a group performance. Finally, Yvonne Rainer read a section of Toklas‘s memoir What is Remembered about the days leading up to and including Stein‘s death in Paris in 1946. The afternoon finished up 290 Maxine Wolfe in Su Friedrich, The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too 184 with a contingent of attendees waltzing around the park and the statues despite the snow and the cold. The attendance for the Valentine‘s Day action was rather impressive; Friedrich‘s film captures at least 30-40 women standing and watching the program of events as they unfolded. Indeed, Friedrich‘s recording appears to be the only publicly-available visual representation of the entire Lesbian Avengers performance and provides us with a rather useful document through which to study it. This particular action stands out because of its institution of a simultaneous and multi-layered combination of community activity, group performance, and visual art display. It strongly fulfills the Lesbian Avenger mission as a ―direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility.‖ 291 The action made lesbian relationships a priority; not only romantic relationships, which are the focus of Valentine‘s day and a heteronormative culture that values monogamous coupling as the height of ―proper‖ romantic relationships, but community relationships between lesbians and dykes who had known each other previous to this action as well as those who had never met before. In her introductory speech, Maxine Wolfe specified that part of the celebration of the day was the recognition of lesbian love in all its forms and expressions, including romantic love, cruising, one-night stands, singles, couples, threesomes, butches, femmes, and those of us whom no one has bothered to categorize, the writers, the teachers, the secretaries, the housekeepers, the nurses, and the truck drivers [….] 292 The focus on community love and recognition was a refreshing change from the years of toil and anger brought about by the neglect and outright hatefulness of the LGBT and Queer community of New York, and elsewhere in the U.S., by heteronormative culture 291 ―About the Lesbian Avengers‖ 292 Wolfe in Friedrich The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too 185 on national and local levels, in everyday occurrences and major governmental actions. This is not to say that this Valentine‘s Day action was better than other Lesbian Avengers, ACT UP, Queer Nation, etc. campaigns to stop the violence and hate directed at LGBTQ individuals and groups, but only that it was a different mode of operating that allowed for community and cultural production out of love rather than resentment and hate. 186 Chapter Two Images Figure 2.1. Tee Corinne, Yantras of Womanlove: Diagrams of Energy. Tallahassee: The Naiad Press, 1982. Figure 2.2. Tee Corinne, Yantra #30, Solarized Photograph, Yantras of Womanlove, 1982. 187 Figure 2.3. Tee Corinne, Yantra #41, Solarized Photograph, Yantras of Womanlove, 1982. Figure 2.4. Tee Corinne, Yantra #42, Solarized Photograph, Yantras of Womanlove, 1982. 188 Figure 2.5. Tee Corinne, The Three Graces, Solarized Photograph, 1980. Figure 2.6. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Three Graces, Oil on Wood, 1535. 189 Figure 2.7. Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces, Oil on Wood, 1636-1638. Figure 2.8. Cover, Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives #12, 1984. 190 Figure 2.9. Leslie Baker, Judith and Meridith, Fat Frolics Series, Photograph, Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives #12, 1984. Figure 2.10. Leslie Baker, Judith and Meridith, Fat Frolics Series, Photograph, Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives #12, 1984. 191 Figure 2.11. Laura Aguilar, Latina Lesbian Series, Photograph, 1986. Figure 2.12. Laura Aguilar, Latina Lesbian Series, Photograph, 1986. 192 Figure 2.13. Laura Aguilar, Untitled, Clothed/ Unclothed Series, Diptych Photograph, 1990-1994 Figure 2.14. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. 193 Figure 2.15. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. Figure 2.16. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. 194 Figure 2.17. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. Figure 2.18. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. 195 Figure 2.19. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. Figure 2.20. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. 196 Figure 2.21. Kay Kenny, Personal Growth Series, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics #21: Food is a Feminist Issue, 1987. Figure 2.22. ACT-UP, ―Homosexuals Arrested at AIDS Drug Protest,‖ The New York Times, March 25, 1987. Image used to illustrate ACT-UP protest history at ActUpNY.org. Retrieved 19 February, 2010, <http://www.actupny.org/documents/capsule-home.html 197 Figure 2.23. ACT-UP, SILENCE = DEATH, Poster, 1987. Figure 2.24. Carrie Moyer, The Lesbian Avengers: We Recruit, Poster/ Flyer, 1992. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about.shtml> 198 Figure 2.25. Lesbian Avengers, Final Action Checklist from the Lesbian Avengers Organizing Handbook. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/resources.shtml> Figure 2.26. Carrie Moyer, I Was a Lesbian Child, Poster, 1992. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about/actions.shtml> 199 Figure 2.27. Carrie Moyer, Thirty-Five Chapters and Counting: Highlights from Two Years of Troublemaking, Poster, 1994. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about/chapters.shtml> Figure 2.28. Carrie Moyer, The Lesbian Avengers: We Recruit, Poster/ Flyer, 1992. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/direct_action.shtml> 200 Figure 2.29. Foxy Brown, Movie Poster, 1974. Figure 2.30. Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein, Bronze Sculpture, 1926/ 1991. Image from New York City Department of Parks and Recreation Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/hs_historical_sign.php?id= 1232> 201 Figure 2.31. Man Ray, Jo Davidson and Gertrude Stein with Portrait Sculpture, Photograph, 1926. Image from The Getty Center Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=53277> Figure 2.32. Carrie Moyer, A Rose is a Bomb is a Rose, Invitation to Valentine‘s Day Alice B. Toklas Sculpture Installation in Bryant Park, New York City, 1993. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about/action_timeline.shtml> 202 Figure 2.33. Carolina Kroon, Sarah Schulman Speaking at Alice B. Toklas Action, Photograph, 1993. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/images/photos1.shtml> Figure 2.34. Carolina Kroon, Thespian Avengers Reading Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly” at Alice B. Toklas Action, Photograph, 1993. Image from The Lesbian Avengers Website. Retrieved 19 February 2010. <http://www.lesbianavengers.com/images/photos1.shtml> 203 Chapter Three From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary: Grassroots and Self-Taught Artists and Activists Creating Fat Visual Culture, 1994-2004 The visual representations examined in this chapter explore and bridge the gap between what we generally consider to be ―ordinary‖ and ―extraordinary,‖ whether in terms of embodiment, community, artistic experience, and/ or material production. While the very creation of artistic representations of fat and lesbian subjects can be extraordinary in terms of self-representational techniques that value such subjects on their own terms and in unconventional ways, much of what we have seen and continue to see in terms of visual representations by these subjects features ordinary moments and depictions of ―regular‖ people. What might be considered ordinary and mundane is likely so readily embraced by lesbian and fat subjects during the 1990s and 2000s because of their relatively absence in mainstream, dominant culture as anything but warning signs against the alleged problematic of an imagined ―obesity epidemic.‖ During the last twenty years, imagery of fat individuals has exponentially increased in the United States, but not for the good; such hypervisibility tends to turn on the rhetorics of medicalization, disability, and inhumanity, ideas that, not coincidentally, have been widely applied to LGBT individuals and groups as well over the past several decades. The visual imagery produced by the photographers, writers, performers, and activists discussed in this chapter rework the notion of visibility to their own ends, to tell their own stories and fight for their own interests in the face of increasingly oppressive techniques of visualization and surveillance formulated by a U.S. culture obsessed with bodily normativity in so many forms. 204 Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes In 1994 the photographer Laurie Toby Edison and the writer Debbie Notkin published their collaborative book project, Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes (Figure 3.1). The book was the result of a nearly decade-long process that started with a fatphobic remark made in 1984 by a fat man that denigrated the appearance of nude fat women. 293 After having read the comment, published in a community magazine, a woman who had been fat all her life and who had experienced similar forms of fatphobia on a daily basis reacted negatively to it, while Edison, a woman who had never been fat, became completely enraged. These responses became the basis for political activist work the two women began in their shared community of science fiction fandom, a community that involved magazines/ journals (including the one in which the original comment was published), conferences, and fictional and non-fictional writings about a wide variety of topics related to science fiction books, movies, and television. Notkin and Edison began to organize panels discussing ―Fat, Feminism, and Fandom,‖ at the science fiction conferences and conventions they attended, which gave them a speaking platform for their own experiences with fat oppression and fat liberation, as well as opening up the topic to other women who took part in these community events. 294 These panels proved enormously popular. As Notkin recounted, People filled the rooms and they stayed and talked and listened. Panels scheduled for an hour ran overtime and had to be moved into hallways and vacant rooms. Writers talked about how they wrote about fat characters; readers talked about 293 Debbie Notkin, ―Enlarging: The Personal Story,‖ Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes (San Francisco: Books in Focus, 1994) 108 294 Notkin, ―Enlarging: The Personal Story‖ 108-109 205 how they responded. Everyone talked about their personal experiences – lots of fat women came and talked, along with a surprising number of thin women and men of various sizes. 295 The success of these first group discussions about the role that fatness and fat individuals played in the fandom community, in particular in terms of feminism as theory and practice in science fiction, verified to Edison and Notkin the usefulness of exploring the ways in which fatness was considered in creative communities. It also prompted both of the women to explore the ways in which fat had previously been discussed and visualized more generally in U.S. culture; in their research they discovered Shadow on a Tightrope and The Fat Lip Readers Theatre, amongst other literary, performance, and visual work that analyzed fat within feminist and dominant culture viewpoints. The project of photographing fat models that would become Women En Large was also a creative response to the history of Western art‘s aestheticization of the nude female body and art history‘s investment in a thin-body ideal for its female subjects. While Western art does not entirely ignore fat women, 296 much of the history of the female nude is intimately involved in supporting the conventional beauty standards of its day. In doing so, large groups of individuals, who had been made socially unintelligible due to gender, race/ ethnicity, class, ability status, and sexuality, had been made artistically invisible by being left out as subjects of visual culture and fine art. Even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, historical moments in which the very basis of what constitutes art in terms of form, function, and subject matter have been questioned time 295 Notkin, ―Enlarging: The Personal Story‖ 108 296 The cultivation of a thin-body ideal is an historically and culturally specific phenomenon that has been part of a cycle with a focus on larger bodies through the past several centuries of art making in Europe, and to some extent in the United States. 206 and again, certain subjects remain more difficult than others to visualize. And when fat and/or disabled and/or non-white bodies are pictured in fine art and visual culture, their presence is rarely accepted as a ―natural‖ choice in subject matter; rather, the decision is usually scrutinized by the mass media, art press, and art historians asking whether or not such subjects are worthy of becoming visualized and displayed in our culture. 297 Edison, a photographer and metal smith, sought in Women En Large to contest the ways in which fat women had been given an outsider status, and were made to become invisible in contemporary art practices. Notkin charges the practice of photography in particular with being complicit in making certain subjects worthy of visibility and fostering the invisibility of others. At the same time, Notkin proposed that photography had the capacity to change this status quo because of its intimate relationship with the ―real.‖ She wrote, Photography is about seeing and being seen. In the contemporary age, we take the pictures we see at least as seriously as we take the living evidence of our own eyes; therefore, which pictures get shown, and where, has an enormous effect on how we see the world. Who is seen and who is invisible? Who has the right to see, and who has the right to be seen? […] 297 For example, see just a few of the many reactions to the installation of Marc Quinn‘s Alison Lapper Pregnant sculpture in Trafalgar Square, London, UK in 2005. Alison Lapper is a woman with phocomelia; she has no arms and shortened legs. Friend and fellow contemporary artist Marc Quinn created the larger than life sculpture of Lapper a part of a an art project called ―The Fourth Plinth,‖ sponsored by several arts foundations in London, that brought contemporary artworks to one of the more conventional public spaces of London. Caroline Lewis, ―Alison Lapper Pregnant Takes Plinth Position in Trafalgar Square,‖ Culture 24 (September 15, 2005), retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/sculpture+%2526+installation/art30597>; Adrian Searle, ―Arresting, Strange, and Beautiful,‖ The Guardian (September 16, 2005), retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/sep/16/art>; BBC News, ―Square‘s Naked Sculpture Revealed: A Statue of a Naked, Pregnant Woman with No Arms has been unveiled on Trafalgar‘s Fourth Plinth,‖ NewsBBC.co.uk (September 19, 2005), retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4247000.stm>. On his own sculpture, Quinn remarks that it is ―vexingly visible‖ within a culture that tends to overlook most public sculpture. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson write, ―Quinn says that his statue makes people ‗see things that are there.‘ In other words, it invites them to stare because it is something novel they do not expect to see. ‗That‘s why people are outraged by it,‘ Quinn concludes.‖ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 157 207 A photographer has the opportunity to make the invisible visible, to reveal things […] which the culture denies people the option to see. […] we believe that what you are forced to see every day constrains how you look at the rest of what you see, should you even be fortunate enough to get the opportunity to examine generally undistributed images. Photography is an especially powerful tool for social change because it carries with it a profound sense of reality. […] Thus, effectively used, the perceived reality of photography has a disturbingly powerful effect on how people see, even something as basic as how we see ourselves. 298 Edison‘s arguments about the relationship between photography and reality come in part from her own experience making metalwork sculptures and jewelry of fat subjects. While gratifying personally, the works were heavy and expensive, and thus much more difficult than two-dimensional artwork to distribute widely. 299 Thus photography became more politically expedient than metalwork in at least two ways: it‘s easy and relatively cheap reproducibility and its relationship to the real as an index and/or substitute for the real in two-dimensional form. The idea for creating the photography project in book form took shape in 1989, and over the course of the next five years Edison and Notkin worked on the texts and the images that were eventually included in Women En Large. During the process they created slideshows and newsletters about the project in order to raise funds for its completion; as such, the work became a collaborative project not only with the women who sat for the photographs, but with them and others who contributed to the texts included in the book, that help to situate how many of them feel about living in a fat, and sometimes disabled, body. 300 Edison and Notkin had a difficult time getting the project published initially, as most mainstream publishers, and even several ―alternative‖ 298 Laurie Toby Edison, ―Body Image From Within,‖ LaurieTobyEdison.com (2002), retrieved 18 February 2010, <http://www.laurietobyedison.com/library/bodyimage.html> 299 Notkin, ―Enlarging: The Personal Story‖ 110 300 Notkin, ―Enlarging: The Personal Story‖ 111; Debbie Notkin, ―Enlarging: Politics and Society,‖ Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes (San Francisco: Books in Focus, 1994) 91-107 208 presses were hesitant to take on the social and political ramifications of a book filled with large pictures of fat nude women. 301 The publication of the project as a book, however, allowed for a much greater circulation distance of the images than a single gallery show would have. The book format made fat-acceptance and bodily empowerment, along with the trials and tribulations of being a fat woman in contemporary U.S. culture, accessible to a wide, international audience. 302 It also provided a space in which the women who took part in the image-making were able to communicate intimately with the viewer through their own words, which are included in one of Notkin‘s essays in the book, as well as next to some of the photographs in the book. All told, Women En Large included forty-one black and white images of fat women; most of these were individual portraits that were taken in the subjects‘ homes, but several were multi-figural compositions at personal homes, gymnasium showers, or outside in the Northern California landscape. A large majority of the photographs were posed, though casually, and a few seemed more likely to have been candid shots. What was striking about the group of photographs in the book, and what was likely an important part of the plan for this project by Edison and Notkin, was the ordinariness of the women and their images. All of the photographs were straightforward; they look unmanipulated in any major ways. Even the photographs taken out of doors were unremarkable in their choice of landscape setting and lighting. As Tee Corinne wrote in a review of the book, 301 Tee Corinne, ―A Weight Lifted,‖ Afterimage (December 1994) 10 302 In addition, several photographs from Women En Large and multiple essays about the book project are included on Laurie Toby Edison‘s blog, LaurieTobyEdison.com. 209 Women En Large is clearly situated within a feminist practice of empowerment through the honest examination of individual women‘s lives. In Women En Large the visual stance and narrative of self revelation are used to confront attitudes and institutions. […] The photographs in Women En Large fill a void and redefine the parameters of culturally admissible imagery. 303 The most extraordinary element of these most ordinary photographs was precisely that they are all of fat women, of various sizes, shapes, ethnicities, gender presentations, and living circumstances. One of Edison‘s portraits of April Miller in Women En Large exemplified this idea of the ordinary turned extraordinary (Figure 3.2). The photograph shows Miller lying on the floor of what looks like a bedroom of her house. Posed in a traditional odalisque style, Miller is reclining on her left side and holding herself up with her left elbow. Her right arm is draped casually over her right side, ending just below her knee. In front of her is the edge of a bed and behind her is a dresser with a few decorations on it. We see Miller from the front, but because her pose shows her half sitting up and half lying down, her body is slightly twisted. In addition, the bottom edge of her body, where it meets the floor on which she sits, is obscured by the shadow from the bed. It appears that Edison must have been sitting or standing on the bed or just next to it on the viewer‘s side in order to capture Miller at this particular angle. On her left and just behind Miller is a large drawing of a nude fat woman from the upper chest to the calves. This image might be a portrait of Miller, made by her or someone else, or it might be an image of someone else. In either case, it provides an interesting sense of visual repetition when compared with Miller‘s own body lying next to it. The drawing of the body is completely frontal, but is placed against the wall on the 303 Corinne, ―A Weight Lifted‖ 10 210 right side of the image; because of this, it appears to recede toward the back corner of the bedroom. Its simultaneous frontality and recession into space creates a kind of visual puzzle that is repeated in the movement of the viewer‘s eye from Miller‘s actual body to the body pictured in the drawing next to her. The primary different between the depiction of Miller here and the drawing next to her is that we see Miller‘s entire body, including her head, in this photograph. Miller is looking directly at the camera with a slight, subtle smile on her lips. Pairing Miller in a full-body portrait with this drawing seems to provide the drawing with an opportunity to become a subject in itself, since it has no head of its own. 304 While the figure in the drawing can be readily objectified, Miller‘s direct gaze poses a challenge to the viewer in figuring her as only an object to be looked at. This seems particularly relevant if we read Miller‘s contribution to Notkin‘s essay, ―Enlarging: Politics and Society,‖ alongside this photograph. She writes, I‘ve been fat all my life and I‘ve always received a lot of sexual attention related to my size. […] I was raised to hate my body. My size made me visible, vulnerable. It made people behave in ways that left me frightened, angry, and ashamed. […] I have developed a personal style which is sexually aware and challenging. Once I realized that part of accepting myself was claiming and enjoying my sexuality, I decided to be the sexiest fat girl I was capable of being. 305 Miller‘s statement about reclaiming and owning her body and sexuality bring up an important point here: that while many fat individuals are made invisible and unintelligible as full subjects in U.S. culture, many are simultaneously made hypervisible, often in terms of sexuality and gender expression. Fat bodies are sometimes considered ―public‖ 304 This is not to say that all visual representations of bodies without heads is necessarily problematic and constitutes the sitter as an object instead of a subject; nor is it to say that this particular drawing does this in a violent or anti-feminist way. In this specific case, the juxtaposition of Miller‘s full body, head to feet, with this headless drawing calls particular attention to its lack of a head, both formally and metaphorically. 305 April Miller in Notkin, ―Enlarging: Politics and Society‖ 103 211 bodies in that fat people receive a lot of commentary about the (un)acceptability of their body in the public sphere, in terms of physically or symbolically taking up space, or public bodily control in terms of clothing choices, eating, and architectural space. 306 The sexual attention that Miller received while growing up as a fat girl, adolescent, and woman is one example of this kind of phenomenon. Miller‘s choice to pose nude in this and other photographs in Women En Large is one way in which she is able to speak to and for her own sense of self and sexuality rather than be only at the mercy of an objectifying gaze. Miller‘s direct focus on the camera and viewer in this photograph underlines the feeling of ownership of her body and sexuality that Miller speaks to in the text. While in Miller‘s photograph we see a rather private view of an otherwise public subject, in the image of Debbie Notkin that graces the cover of the Women En Large, we a private subject gone public (Figure 3.3). This photograph of Notkin is rather quiet and self-reflective, yet it functions as the visual representation and cue of the book project as a whole because of its placement on its cover. Informally called Debbie with Stripes by Edison and Notkin alike, this photograph features Notkin lying on her side on a geometrically-patterned couch in front of several windows with Venetian blinds. The light coming through the blinds from the window just out of the frame has created a pattern of dark and light stripes on her otherwise unadorned body. The photograph was taken from just above Notkin‘s feet, and in the frame of the image we see Notkin from 306 On the impulse to intervene in a non-normative subject‘s personal space based on appearance disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, ―Extraordinary bodies demand attention. The sight of an unexpected body – that is to say, a body that does not conform to our expectations for an ordinary body – is compelling because it disorders expectations. Such disorder is at once novel and disturbing. This interruption of expectations, of the visual status quo, attracts interest bit can also lead to disgust.‖ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 37 212 her bent knee upward; in part because of the perspective of the image, and in part because of Notkin‘s shape, her lower body appears much larger than her upper body and head. Her light-colored skin tone makes the shadowy stripes on her body from the window‘s light more pronounced. Juxtaposed with the strongly-patterned couch on which she lays, Notkin‘s body helps make the photograph a study in pattern, texture, and color. The prominent curves of her body, especially her hips, her upper arm, and her breast, have distorted the lines of the shadows of the blinds so that the patterns created on it look like the contoured lines of a topographical map of her fat body. Except for the window behind Notkin‘s head, and the rectangular frame of the photograph itself, everything in the photograph is plush and curvy: the decorative pillow, the couch, and Notkin‘s body. The similarity in shapes between the major elements of the image helps to foster the textural differences of these same elements. Thus the photograph becomes rather tactile as the viewer imagines the smoothness of Notkin‘s skin against the rougher, fibrous texture of the couch and the raised bumpy texture of the decorative pillow behind Notkin‘s back. We never forget that the subject of the image is a human being here, and that the image itself is very much representational in nature, but at the same time a sense of abstraction is accentuated through the harmony of textures, colors, shapes, and patterns that dominates the image. As Edison stresses, the primary ―thing‖ in this and every other image in the book being photographed is the light available in the scene, ―the play of light and darkness, reflections across the human figure, light's entrance into the frame, the way light reflects, illuminates, or disguises articles in the background, the way light shapes the face.‖ 307 This portrait of Notkin relies in large part on the light apparent in the 307 Edison, ―Body Image From Within‖ 213 image to shape our comprehension of her as a fat woman. Her body‘s shape, its lushness and tactility, have become the main focus of the photograph. These perceptions translate to our understanding of Notkin as a subject in her own right: intense, contemplative, and solitary. Lesbian Connection Lesbian Connection, published since 1974 in Lansing, Michigan, is a newsletter- slash-journal that retains much of the same format today as its original; it features brief news articles of note to lesbian communities, lists of events, contacts across the U.S., and letters and responses about a wide variety of topics from its readers. These letters and responses form the core of the journal in terms of both form and function. Published six times a year with a black and white paper interior and currently a multi-colored glossy cover, each issue is relatively thin and portable. 308 In its early years Lesbian Connection was produced in a text-only format, but since the early 1990s it has featured an image on each of its covers. In the nearly twenty years since this addition of visual content, Lesbian Connection has only twice depicted fat women on its cover and in both cases the decision to do so resulted in a massive response from the journal‘s readers. Lesbian Connection volume twenty, issue number one was published in mid-1997 and included a photograph of a reader, Harvest Brown, on its cover (Figures 3.4 and 3.5). 308 Lesbian Connection is circulated in two ways, one via subscription and one via feminist, lesbian, and other ―alternative‖ bookstores. When in subscription form, the magazine continues to be sent in a plain envelope with the return address marked as ―Elsie‖ (e.g. LC) which became Lesbian Connection‘s alter- identity early in its life, so as not to call attention to the lesbian content inside the envelope. Both subscriptions and individual journals picked up at bookstores are ―free to lesbians everywhere,‖ with a suggested donation, now up to $7 per issue. As such, both subscribers and bookstore-goers can have access to Lesbian Connection for free, through donations are solicited both on the cover and within the magazine in order to continue its publication. 214 Brown submitted the photo with a letter to the journal, describing the context in which it was made and her reasoning behind its submission: Here is a black and white photo for your consideration. I had the photo taken as an anniversary present for my lover, and it was a very empowering experience. For years I hated my body and believed the people who made fun of my size. Then I met my sweetie. She fell in love with me and adores my body size and shape. And when I saw this photo of my full nude breasts and hips and thighs, for the first time in my life I saw myself as beautiful. I encourage all wimmin to treat themselves to a photoshoot. 309 The photograph, credited to artist Phoenix Featherwomon, 310 shows Brown nude from behind, standing outdoors in front of what looks like a painted shed and garden area, likely in Brown‘s own backyard. Her arms are symmetrically raised and one foot is in front of the other. The light color of Brown‘s skin stands out against the darker vegetation and her long dark hair trails down the center of her back, emphasizing the rolls of flesh on either side of her torso. The chosen pose and setting of the photograph suggest a relationship between the subject and nature reminiscent of imagery seen in feminist art practices since at least the early 1970s; there is nothing inherently innovative in the iconography itself. Feminist artists such as Tee Corinne, Ana Mendieta, and Mary Beth Edelson, amongst others, produced similar nature- and goddess-inspired imagery in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in multiple media. However, we can see how contemporary cultural interpretation and context strongly influence this photograph‘s meanings in the feedback to the photograph published in subsequent Lesbian Connections. 309 Harvest Brown, ―Letter to Lesbian Connection,‖ Lesbian Connection, 20:1 (July/ August 1997) 5-6 310 Harvest Brown provided no other information about the photographer of this image, and she is not mentioned otherwise in Lesbian Connection in any subsequent issues. 215 The more than twenty-five responses to this cover in the three following issues of the journal suggested an audience violently split in its judgment of the image. Readers from all parts of the United States enthusiastically supported the photograph, touting Brown‘s bravery and self-confidence, as well as the aesthetic beauty of the image, as inspirational. A reader from upstate New York wrote, ―I really really loved the July/ August cover! Wow! That‘s the kind of photo I‘d like to have hanging on my wall, and the kind of cover I would like to see a while lot more of.‖ 311 Other readers expressed distaste and indignation at the photograph, citing no specific reason, but objecting vehemently against its publication; from Texas: ―I‘m writing to strongly protest against the cover of the July/ August issue. I find it so offensive that unless I see an apology in your magazine I shall discontinue my subscription and stop supporting you.‖ 312 Others lodged complaints against the ostensible ―anti-health‖ message of the photograph: When I looked at the July/ August cover photo and read the accompanying letter, I didn‘t just see someone who is happy with her body because she had found someone to accept her. Instead I saw a woman who is what we in the medical profession refer to as morbidly obese. […] I know it is very P.I. [politically incorrect] to criticize heavy women, but this is a health issue. I advise Harvest to see a therapist, not to learn self-acceptance, but to get at the root causes of your overeating. 313 And still others supported the radical political and visual politics of the image: I was delighted by your July/ August cover photo: a strong statement of tribute to the beauty of large-sized women. I am a lesbian of ‗average‘ size/ weight who has had several big lovers, and I‘m always willing to speak out against the fat-phobic remarks regrettably heard in our lesbian community. […] I encourage more 311 Mardee Edelstein, ―Responses,‖ Lesbian Connection 20:2 (Sept./Oct. 1997) 32 312 Elizabeth E. Day, ―Responses,‖ Lesbian Connection 20:2 (Sept./Oct. 1997) 32 313 Dorothy, ―Responses,‖ Lesbian Connection 20:2 (Sept./Oct. 1997) 32 216 images that reflect the real women among us, and applaud LC for its genuine commitment to diversity. 314 The letters Lesbian Connection printed in response to Brown‘s photograph exhibited a passion not usually seen in reactions to other concerns published by the journal. That a fat lesbian‘s nude portrait could provoke such intensity of feeling speaks in part to what Charlotte Cooper described by the use of the term ―allure‖ in detailing the potential political efficacy of visualizing and giving voice to fat subjects in today‘s Western culture in this dissertation‘s introduction. This allure is not simply based on a singular feeling of desire or repulsion, but rather seems to be situated on the tense divide between these two reactions toward fat bodies, akin to the draw of the ―freak show‖ at a circus. Like disability, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson has recognized, fatness can be ―a shocking spectacle to the normate eye.‖ 315 Similarly, according to dominant ideology today, fatness is a state of being that ought to be forbidden; we can see this plainly in the headless fatty phenomenon. At the same time, fatness has historically been seen in Western culture as a sign of health, wealth, and enjoyment of life. It was only in the two decades leading up to the twentieth century that changes in economics, religious devotion, and food production conjoined to change the ideal body shape from fat to thin. 316 Indeed, over the course of the twentieth century ideal standards of body size and shape for both men and women have shifted continuously over time; 1920s, 1950s, and 314 Bonnie J. Morris, ―Responses,‖ Lesbian Connection 20:2 (Sept./Oct. 1997) 32-33 315 Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, 26. ―Normate‖ is Garland Thomson‘s own term used to describe subjects with bodies interpreted to be normative according to conventional social standards. 316 Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat. (New York: Anchor Books, 1986) 75-111 and Peter N. Stearns, History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997/ 2002) 3-24 217 1980s body size and shape ideals are quite different from one another, in part as a response to various forms of dieting promoted over the course of the century, although all focus on the relatively thin body. 317 That fat and thin are fluid signifiers contingent upon historical moment, geographical location, and cultural definition causes the allure of the fat body to rest unsteadily in our personal and social consciousness. A controversy similar to that surrounding the publication of Brown‘s nude portrait occurred a few years later for Lesbian Connection, in early 2004, when it chose for its volume twenty-six, issue four cover Diana Lee‘s polychrome painting Solstice III, which portrays a circle of nude women waist deep in a body of water at night (Figures 3.6 and 3.7). In the background are the white silhouettes of trees against a dark sky and a large full moon. In the foreground ten women of varying sizes, shapes, and ethnicities stand in a circle holding hands with their arms upraised. The buttocks, hips, and legs of the figures closest to the viewer can be seen from behind under the rippled water. Many of the women painted here have broad shoulders, backs, and relatively large breasts; their waist- to-hip proportion is high as well, signaling wide hips and/or buttocks in an ―hourglass‖ body shape. Based on the title of the painting, we can deduce that the women are taking part in a solstice ritual of some kind, the exact nature of which is indeterminate. That the event is taking place in the dark under a full moon gives the painting a sense of stillness and solitude. It seems unlikely that there are viewers of the event outside of the circle of women. As in Brown‘s photographic portrait, the iconography of this image was in no way new or overly complex. The history of nude women represented in a natural setting has 317 Schwartz 1-19 218 been extensively analyzed in the field of art history in both canonical and feminist art practices. Neither is the painting is any more sexually graphic than thousands of contemporary advertisements for any number of consumer goods in the media today. The inclusion of pagan ritual within such an image is nothing new either, as hundreds of years of paintings of Venus and her cohorts, on their own or interacting with humans, can show us. But once more, as with Brown‘s photograph, there were numerous vehement responses to this Lesbian Connection cover painting. Both negative and positive responses to the image were printed in the journal, although this time the letters overwhelmingly focused on how fatness and ―health‖ have been bandied about as an issue for fat women in lesbian community discourse. Assumptions that fat and health are inherently oppositional, as well as the counterargument to this stance, were major themes in these responses. A reader from Ohio compared the risk of cancer with the risk of disease based on fatness and had this to say on the portrayal of fat lesbians in the journal: While the loyal LC reader is reminded at least a few times a year to check her breasts for lumps, the sage advice ends there. Readers should also be reminded to get their blood pressure checked, get their cholesterol checked, and yes, weigh themselves once in a while. […] I do not dislike fat people nor feel offended by them. But I do feel that obesity should be treated more intelligently in your pages. Being fat is a serious health issue. […] I‘m sure somebody will write in saying she loved the fat women and you will feel validated in your decision to run that painting on the cover. Fat women will say they are tired of being ignored by magazines and television. It‘s sad that they are treated shabbily, it‘s true. But please, let‘s have some sensible dialogue in your pages. Being fat like the women on the cover is a heck of a lot more risky that failing to squeeze your mammaries every month. 318 While we see a similar viewpoint evidenced in one of the letters from the 1997 cover photograph of Brown, it was much more pervasive in the 2004 responses to Lee‘s painting, suggesting that the stakes had been raised for being fat (and female) in 318 M.K., ―Responses,‖ Lesbian Connection 26:5 (March/ April 2004) 16; emphasis original 219 dominant and lesbian cultures. The focus on health as the central issue illustrated a shift in thinking about fatness as a sign of physical and emotional disease/ disability. M.K.‘s apprehension of Lesbian Connection‘s seemingly fat-positive stance was unlikely based in actual concern for each and every individual fat lesbian‘s health. More probable was that it was based on an anxiety about the fat body itself: the fat body that can be aesthetically alluring but discursively deadly. According to disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and William Ian Miller, Unusual Bodies are ‗unsettling because they are disordering; they undo the complacency that comes with disattendability; they force us to look and notice, or to suffer self-consciousness about looking or not looking. They introduce alarm and anxiety by virtue of their power to horrify and disgust.‘ Such bodies fascinate; they demand that we ‗sneak a second look.‘ 319 In what way does an image of a group of fat women engaged in a solstice rite advocate anything other than freedom of religion and freedom from body fascism? The specter of health, one of the few topics fatphobic individuals and organizations believe they can latch onto when arguing against civil rights for fat people, is brought into the picture by M.K.‘s own concern with the issue, not the artist‘s nor the two-dimensional women depicted in the painting. 320 The notion of health here was used as a way in which the painting could be critiqued in a seemingly productive way. Offended by the image as a 319 William Ian Miller in/ and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look 37 320 Many scholars and activists agree that the connection between fat and disease is an extremely tenuous one that has not been proven by unbiased scientific research. Instead, it has been studied in experiments promoted by weight-loss companies, hyped by the media to undue heights, and made into the dreaded and loathsome monster that is called the ―obesity epidemic.‖ For excellent research on this topic, see Paul Campos, The Diet Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health. (New York: Gotham Press, 2005) (also published as The Obesity Myth); Glenn Gasser, Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health. (Carlsbad, CA: Gurze Books, 2002); and Abigail C. Saguey and Rene Almeling, ―Fat in the Fire? Science, the News Media, and the ‗Obesity Epidemic,‖ Sociological Forum. 23:1 (March 2008). 220 representation of an ―extraordinary‖ body, 321 and its sanction by Lesbian Connection, the reader uncritically accepted the dominant rhetoric circulated about fatness and fat people without question. She wrote, ―Fat Women will say they are tired of being ignored by magazines and television. It‘s sad that they are treated shabbily, it‘s true,‖ but she is unconcerned with social justice, with opening up a space for size-acceptance, self-esteem, or any other mentally healthy work for fat women. 322 Feminist scholar Carla Rice argues, Hatred of fat is justified by health reasons. Fat is despised because it is seen to be under an individual‘s voluntary control. Yet, fatness is not a disease or a symptom of weakness or moral decay. It is a genetically inherited trait, much like height. Fat women may be as healthy as those who are thin and the health risks of fat are not only grossly over-exaggerated, but they may even be caused by dieting. 323 As both Garland-Thomson and Rice contend in their descriptions of the ways in which fat and other non-normative bodies are perceived, M.K.‘s ―concern‖ about the fat women in Lee‘s painting belied her fear and contempt for the body and subject of ―the other.‖ Like much of the media that described the 1968 Miss America protest as a fight between ―feminists‖ and ―contestants,‖ this response letter is concerned with individual ―choices‖ rather than structural oppression, even in the health care system. 324 321 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 322 Even if there were a correlation between higher weight and increased chance of illness, one‘s health status should not impress upon one‘s status as part of an oppressed group. 323 Carla Rice, ―Out From Under Occupation: Transforming Our Relationships with Our Bodies,‖ Canadian Woman Studies/ Les Cahiers de la Femme 14:3 (Summer 1994) 46 324 One reason I make such a big point of this difference is to point out the internalized sexism and fatphobia by some who identify with an amorphous lesbian ―community,‖ to break down the assumption of a monolithic notion of this community, and to point out the pervasiveness of fear and contempt for fat people more generally. 221 Fat Girl: A Zine For Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them debuted in 1994, a decade after the Lesbian Photo Album of Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives was published (Figure 3.8). It was produced by a collective of self-proclaimed fat dykes through 1997 in the San Francisco Bay Area. In those three years they made seven issues of Fat Girl. The zine contained drawings, photographs, cartoons, poetry, and both fiction and non-fiction prose. Fat Girl was printed in black and white on 9‖x12‖ newsprint paper and circulated through the U.S. and abroad, primarily via word of mouth. 325 Because the zine contained nudity and explicit sexual imagery, those zines that were shipped were sent in sealed envelopes that protected the content of the zines from being shared with non- subscribers. 326 The cost was $5 for each sixty to seventy page edition, printed at two thousand copies per issue. Fat Girl‘s identity was centralized around the fat dyke; it was explicitly political, raucous, and edgy. The title alone embodied the tone of righteous indignation and confrontation that Fat Girl‘s imagery supported for two major reasons; for one, the reference to fat dykes, rather than lesbians, which signaled an aggressive envisioning of the political impact of queer female identity. As a term of personal identification, dyke has no medicalized or scientific history; when used by queer women it is entirely the reclamation of a once-derogatory slur by those it had previously been used against. As such, dyke has a force of power quite different from more widely-acceptable terms such 325 Only the covers of each issue of Fat Girl included any color, and in each case, it was just one color per issue in addition to the black lettering. Each issue featured a different cover color. 326 Email exchange between Max Airborne and author, November 30, 2004. 222 as lesbian or gay woman. Additionally, the title tells us that the publication was about, by, and for, fat dykes and those that were willing to embrace them as such. This zine had a mission to visualize and give voice to a specific, though diverse, subculture that had been severely underrepresented in American visual culture for its own sake and desire. No specific attempt was made by Fat Girl to reach out to a more general lesbian, feminist, and/or mainstream audience, though it certainly was conceptualized using several feminist tenets and it might have been read by people who didn‘t identify as a fat dyke. Each of Fat Girl’s seven issues contained a variety of texts and images that contemplated and celebrated issues of being fat and queer, as well as related matters, such as the roles of race, class, and gender expression in fat dyke communities; masturbation and individual and group S/M activities; the place of food and feeding in the erotic sphere of fat dykes; and advice about sex, dating, and sex toys. Personal ads, and notices for fat- and queer-positive stores and organizations were also featured in its pages. In the inaugural issue of Fat Girl, from the summer of 1994, the frontispiece exclaimed that Fat Girl was (among other things) ―aggressive,‖ ―hungry,‖ ―in your face,‖ ―joyous,‖ ―kinky,‖ ―making room,‖ ―open minded,‖ ―smart,‖ ―unapologetic,‖ ―visual,‖ and ―XXXXXXXXXL.‖ 327 The words were represented in a variety of fonts, shapes, and sizes, much like the women visualized through the poetry, prose, drawings, and photographs within the zine. Multiple identities were proclaimed together, and while some might have seemed to be in contradiction with one another (such as butch and femme, charming and smutty, in your face and reflective), they were combined to 327 Fat Girl #1, frontispiece 223 enlighten the reader as to the panoply of available identities within and on top of the already proclaimed one of ―fat dyke.‖ This description of Fat Girl elaborated on their mission statement: ―Fat Girl seeks to create a broad-based dialogue which both challenges and informs our notions of Fat-Dyke identity.‖ 328 Dealing with both queer and fat communities, dyke and fat pride, Fat Girl was a complex object of visual culture that combines images and text to reformulate and define the multiplicities of fat dyke subcultures and its creative productions at a moment in history highlighted by greater visibility of queer communities, size-acceptance, and fat pride activist movements. It exemplified both a homemade and journalistic materiality. Fat Girl was a unique artifact among the communities of fat-empowerment in the 1990s in terms of its use of explicit sexual imagery to define a politics of the erotic with and for fat lesbians. The Fat Girl Collective‘s use of sexually explicit photography in the zine gave voice to sexual desire and desirability for fat dykes by using visual cues from traditional and feminist pornographic imagery. The dykes pictured within the zine were shown in various settings and states of dress, sometimes with several lovers, performing a multitude of sex acts. This set the zine apart from much of the other visual representations looked at here, including other publications such as Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives and Lesbian Connection. One two-page spread in the first issue of Fat Girl depicts two fat women having sex across five photographs (Figures 3.9 and 3.10). They are nude from the waist up, and are wearing only underwear, garters and stockings otherwise. Both women wear leather bracelets with grommets and metal decorations and necklaces; one has a leather collar and the other a set of black chains that wrap around 328 Fat Girl #1, ―Mission Statement‖ 1 224 her neck, under her breasts, and around her waist. The photographs were taken outside, in the grassy landscape next to a house. Each of the photographs focuses closely on the couple, who are physically and psychologically concentrated on one another; there is little background visible in each. Each of the images shows both figures‘ bodies almost entirely. The photographs are candid and each of them show the two women looking directly at one another, except for one that shows the woman with lighter hair kneeling down, her face in the crotch of the woman with dark hair, who is standing. Visually, the flesh of each of the white fat dykes stands out against the dark clothing and body adornments, as well as the darker background spaces behind the couple in each photograph. This makes their extreme body curves stand out in the photographs, as the light caresses each breast and fleshy bulge. This makes the photographs rather sensual and not just about having sex as an activity to an end, but about the pleasures of the fat dyke body as a whole. Another set of photographs from the fourth issue of Fat Girl records the sexual interplay between two butch dykes (Figures 3.11 and 3.12). Unlike the previous set of photographs, where the subjects were nearly nude, each of these images teases the viewer by showing the subjects almost completely clothed, with only their dildos, and in one photograph an ass, on display. What starts out in the first photograph as what seems to be a comparison between the two figures‘ cocks turns into a sexual servicing of the figure in the dark t-shirt by the butch in the light colored t-short. Subsequent photographs show the dark-shirted butch receiving a hand job and then a blow job by the other subject, and the concluding photograph shows just the center of each of their torsos as the figure in the white short bends over, presenting her ass to the figure in the dark shirt, who is teasing 225 the ass with her cock, potentially getting her ready for penetrative sex. This photo series is unusual not simply because it shows two fat dykes having sex, but because it is explicit about the fact that the two figures both identify as butchly masculine, through clothing, and hairstyle, as well as the fact that they both wear dildos. 329 Conventional heterosexual and queer pornography rarely shows two masculinely-identified women together; the fact that Fat Girl was created by a collective that included subjects of multiple gender expressions and with diverse sexual interests is likely the basis for its wide variety of visual representations such as these photographs. Indeed, the success of the collective can perhaps be measured by the large number of different kinds of fat dyke bodies pictured in the zine, along with the kinds of sexual interactions, the forms of visual representations, and the subjects tackled in the zine. Many of the images in Fat Girl could have been seen as ―inappropriate,‖ and in fact, depending on the viewer, perhaps ―antifeminist.‖ In this way, Fat Girl flirted with impropriety in terms of mainstream social expectations of fat women and some feminist subcultures. The sexually explicit, kinky photographs could be seen as bad and dangerous, in more than one way: dangerous to the people imaged and/or dangerous to society in general. But they were also emphatically active, presenting consenting sex acts between fat dyke subjects who had never before been visualized in this way for a specifically queer audience. They visualized fat and queer female subjects who had all too frequently been seen as passive, desexualized, and unworthy of sexual fantasizing by dominant cultural sexual ideals (and by some feminist and lesbian communities as well). 329 Although this last attribute is certainly not only common for masculinely-identified dykes and lesbians; many femme-identified, androgynous, genderqueer, and non-gender-identified queer women also wear and engage in dildo/ cock play and penetrative sex. 226 They did so in order to simultaneously bring themselves pleasure, bring the zine‘s readers pleasure, and stretch the boundaries of normative ideals of how fat women should behave sexually and politically. As described by several of the collective members, as well as in letters to the editorial collective in later issues, these kinds of explicit sex scenes featuring variously-abled and sized queer women were previously almost unheard of. To have had them collected in a portable, private collection along with sex-positive and fat-positive articles opened up a space of inclusion that was both personal and community-oriented. The format of a collective-created zine was ideal for this kind of opportunity. In addition to the sexually explicit imagery, Fat Girl published several sets of images that illustrated political events, pride rallies, and community parties that challenged conventional notions about how fat women should act in public. For example, In Fat Girl #6, one of the members of the Fat Girl Collective, Bertha ―the Kitchen Slut,‖ hosted a picnic that evolved into a food fight. The resultant images in the six page spread (complete with captions and recipes) showed numerous fat dykes playing with food in erotic and joyful ways (Figures 3.13-3.15). Chocolate syrup and whipped cream were sprayed and dripped all over the bodies of the picnic participants with concentrated pleasure. Strawberries were dipped in fondue and fed to one another. Popcorn, bananas, and cake were eaten and used as bodily decoration. Most of the participants were semi- nude and/or clad in lingerie and were shown having an energetic time ―fighting‖ with one another. All of the photographs included in this set were candid images. As a result, these images documented an articulation of community, sexuality, and sensuality rather than representing a particular photographic vision by the photographer, credited as Laura Johnston. In an interview about the process of conceiving of and making Fat Girl, Bertha 227 ―the Kitchen Slut‖ remarked, ―I wanted it [her recurring column] to be fun, silly, sexy, and about food! To be political and funny! I did it humorously and tongue-in-cheek about sexy, good, fattening foods! No guilt allowed in my column!‖ 330 These images reimagined relationships between food, fat, and sexuality, troubled topics in contemporary American culture, and themes that come up frequently in several of the issues of Fat Girl. Another photographic series from the first issue of Fat Girl had similar aspirations. This photo layout accompanied the ―Fat Girl Roundtable,‖ a transcribed discussion between several of the Fat Girl collective women. Seventeen images were integrated with the text; in the images food and bodies were offered by and to fat dykes for pleasurable and highly eroticized consumption (Figures 3.16-3.18). Whipped cream was licked from bellies, boots, and breasts; grapes were dangled above mouths; frozen popsicles were teasingly fellated. On the first page of this article and photo spread, collective member Barbara McDonald stated, Even within the dyke community, dykes see ‗fat‘ first before they see ‗dyke.‘ That‘s just one (of the many) reasons why we want to do Fat Girl. And I wanted a feast of images, there just are not enough images of fat dykes. The ones out there are few and far between [….] 331 This article playfully provides McDonald with her feast of images of precisely that: fat dykes feasting on food and each other. Fat Girl delivered on McDonald‘s desire throughout its run, picturing fully nude as well as variously dressed/ accessorized fat dykes in auto-erotic, group, and coupled sex 330 Bertha quoted in V. Vale, ―Fat Girl,‖ Zines. (San Francisco: V/Search, 1996) 135; emphasis original 331 Barbarism/ Barbara McDonald, ―Fat Girl Round Table,‖ Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, #1. (San Francisco: Fat Girl Publishing, 1994) 33 228 scenes amongst their other photographs, drawings, and texts. The collective placed into visual representation images of actual fat queer female subjects engaged in erotic activities; they were shown enjoying themselves and other fat lesbian bodies in ways that defied stereotypes if only due to the sheer number and variety of scenes and women depicted. The images captured a community politically and personally invested in making fat, sexuality, bodies, desire, and food about personal freedom, community relationships, civil rights, and joyful expression. Such imagery made Fat Girl a space in which self- definition was of central import and mainstream models of acceptable behavior, by women, fat people, and/or queers was eschewed. The photographs published in Fat Girl renegotiated social attitudes about fat women by exploring female on female sexual and gustatory pleasure; they claimed fat women‘s bodies as vibrantly alive, sexual, and self- possessed. Fat Girl emphasized the conjunction between material and discursive productions of the body and social identities. By recognizing that discourse of and on the body, especially the multiply ―deviant‖ body, was never natural or inherent, the collective members of Fat Girl opened up a space of representation in which they actively worked to assert different modes of discourse about and around the fat dyke body. At the same time, they textually and visually imaged fat queer bodies as corporeal sites through which eroticism, pride, and self-possession became embodied practices. The zine did not merely envision an alternative to the ways in which fat dykes are theorized and discussed, but imaged alternatives to how they performed and created physical pleasure with and within their bodies as well. 229 Fat Girl might be critiqued for its reliance on identitarian tactics to formulate its resistances to hegemonic bodily and sexual ideals. Such strategies are not necessarily always problematic, however; rather, it seems indicative of the slippery slope of identity politics so often looked to in the late 1980s and 1990s. While now widely disparaged, some of these tactics produced useful methods for inserting non-normative communities into, and re-forming, the public sphere. The very reliance on shaping communities based on similar identifications can be understood as both problematic and hopeful. While aligning oneself only along certain identity markers might in fact reinscribe exclusions subcultural communities seek to transgress, forming multivalent communities, that include fat and queer categories in addition to other (e.g. classed, racialized, and gendered) identities, can locate individuals within more complex systems of culture and provide the beginnings of coalitional social structures. Fat Girl used identitarian strategies as a fruitful starting point for more complex fat and queer activism. As the Fat Girl masthead proclaimed, ―Fat Girl is a Political Act‖ one that raised the stakes of living in fat and queer bodies within a culture that tended not to recognize either, and in fact actively made them socially unintelligible, within most media representation and publications. Laura Aguilar: Self-Portraits As was discussed in chapter two, Laura Aguilar has been concerned with visual representation of underrepresented people since the start of her career. Here I will focus on Laura Aguilar‘s self-portraits, beginning with two singular images and proceeding to two of her photographic self-portrait series that were created during the 1990s: Nature 230 Self-Portrait (1996) and Motion (1999). Each of these series envisioned Aguilar alone, or with other women, in natural landscapes within the United States. The juxtaposition between flesh and land exposed some of the ways in which the fat, lesbian, disabled body has been conceived of in contemporary culture as both the height of visibility and the height of invisibility, all at once. These photographic series were about nothing if not the materiality of Aguilar‘s body. At the same time, many of these photographs deny the viewer the gaze, or even the frontal definition, of the artist‘s body. This denial of the seeming epitome of individual selfhood, the face, can be read in multiple ways. One might be a sign of capitulation on the part of the artist as she acknowledges her insecurity about her body and/or status as a fat, disabled, Chicana lesbian in a society that tends to deny each of those identities within normative representation and discourse. Another reading might privilege the artist‘s agency in asserting her own self-defined self-portrait, as one that is intimate, yet distanced from the viewer. Access to Aguilar‘s nude fat body was given to the viewer, but not full and complete access, prohibiting the viewer to completely disavow and/or empathize with the body on display. The Motion series imaged Aguilar with other women of various body sizes and ethnicities within a wooded landscape. The relationships between their bodies were foregrounded in these photographs in terms of intimacy and disparity. In this section I will focus on Aguilar‘s engagement with both the surrounding environment and the camera in each of the images, or more precisely, her refusal to engage the camera/ viewer. What was at stake in the self-representations in which Aguilar denies the viewer‘s gaze? Why did Aguilar picture herself in this way, in this harsh landscape, nude, available to be seen, yet disengaged from the viewer? How did the play of gazes complicate the ways in which we 231 are trained to see the female body, and not see the fat female body? How was size and scale figured in these images – of Aguilar‘s own body, as well as in relation to the landscape and in relation to the other female figures? I start by looking at some of Aguilar‘s earlier work that acts as a transition between the politically and socially exuberant themes of her earlier photographs to the quieter, more contemplative, though no less socially-significant mode of visualization of Nature Self-Portrait and Motion. Starting in the late 1980s and early1990s Laura Aguilar turned her camera from subjects around the Los Angeles area onto herself and began to produce a number of photographic self-portraits. The two self-portraits for which she is still most well-known are Three Eagles Flying (1990) and In Sandy’s Room (1989/ 1993) (Figures 3.19 and 3.20). Three Eagles Flying is a triptych; an American flag is on the left, a Mexican flag is on the right, and Aguilar is in the center with a second American flag wrapped around her hips, stomach, and thighs and another Mexican flag wrapped around her head. Aguilar‘s breasts and arms are bare. A thick rope is twisted around her neck, her waist, and her thighs, and is tied around her hands in the center of her body. The name given to this image is a play on words as well as national and personal identity. The eagle is the United State‘s national bird, symbolizing freedom and thoughtful democracy; the Mexican flag exhibits an eagle in its center, the animal featured in an Aztec origin story as locating the land on which Mexico originated; and Aguilar‘s last name is a version of the Spanish word for eagle, ―el águila.‖ Karen Mary Davalos, Chicano/a Studies scholar has argued that Aguilar‘s Three Eagles Flying ―is a visual gesture that confronts Chicano and 232 American nationalism, Western imperialism, patriarchy, and homophobia.‖ 332 Aguilar positions herself at the center of just such a confrontation, as she visually embodies contestations of power on both the macro- and micro-social level. Aguilar‘s nudity and bindings highlight the problem of gender and sexuality codes in both American and Mexican culture, especially those that singularly sanction heterosexuality as a viable sexual identity. She is bound and silenced by the national ideologies of the United States and Mexico, and were she to move in any direction she would only subject herself to further torture under their presence: ―She is immobilized between two nations or cultures.‖ 333 Three Eagles Flying positions Aguilar at the intersection of her multiple identities as a photographer, U.S. citizen, and self-identified Chicana, fat, lesbian, and female subject. The difficulty of negotiating this nexus of identities on individual, communal, and national levels is represented through the rope bindings and the silencing of Aguilar‘s mind and body by the national flags. In Sandy’s Room is a distinctly different kind of image from Three Eagles Flying, though no less critical of conventional notions of social intelligibility. Lying back on a chair beneath a fully opened window, Aguilar depicts herself in profile with an icy drink in one hand, legs propped on an ottoman, table fan on and pointed directly at her face and upper torso. Aguilar is nude, and as the thin arm of the chair does little to obscure her body, we can see it in its full fat corporeality; large arms, belly, breasts and thighs. Aguilar looks relaxed, as if she is comfortable in her skin, and only in her skin, and is willing to take up the space she needs and desires to cool herself down on a hot Southern 332 Karen Mary Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001) 57 333 Davalos 57 233 California day. Art historian Diana Hulick wrote of Aguilar in In Sandy’s Room, ―She is large, lesbian and Chicana, acutely aware of her separateness, yet comfortable enough with herself to present us with a personal vision that is both intimate and authoritative.‖ 334 Chicano/a Studies scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano has presented a slightly different, more ambiguous view of this image: ―Played against the relaxed airiness of the print‘s ambiance the subject‘s expression is emotionally ambivalent. Is she depressed? Is she just hot?‖ 335 In a third opinion, the mood of the photograph becomes completely pessimistic. Feminist art historian Laura Cottingham has narrated the photograph as ―an image of diminished expectations.‖ 336 Cottingham continued, ―my experience of lesbian existence doesn‘t allow me to accept [a positive] interpretation.‖ 337 With these three differing views for the same Aguilar image, we can see that the contestation of fat Latina lesbian subjectivity becomes manifest not only within the images Aguilar created, but within the readings of these critics. If we follow the logic of Cottingham‘s cryptic remark, no visual imagery of fat lesbians could be seen in a positive and/or productive way. Perhaps the potential depression that Yarbro-Bejarano saw in this photograph came from Aguilar‘s bodily position; while it seems relaxed to me, Yarbro- Bejarano might have read it as a slumped pose of emotional deflation. Hulick‘s interpretation that Aguilar‘s self-portrait as simultaneously ―intimate and authoritative‖ is 334 Diana Emery Hulick quoted in Harmony Hammond, ―Laura Aguilar,‖ Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History. (New York: Rizzoli, 2000) 85 335 Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, ―Laying it Bare: The Queer/ Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar,‖ Living Chicana Theory. Ed. Carla Trujillo. (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1997) 288 336 Laura Cottingham, ―Eating from the Dinner Party Plates and Other Myths, Metaphors, and Moments of Lesbian Enunciation in Feminism and Its Art Movement,‖ Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History. Amelia Jones, ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996) 225 337 Cottingham 225 234 most in line with my own view of this photograph. In Sandy’s Room shows Aguilar as an anonymous, and specific, individual with few ties to the outside world, especially in comparison with her heavily symbolic Three Eagles Flying. In the latter image Aguilar has been contextualized within and interpolated by multiple systems of identity that gain powered through her oppression; in the former image, Aguilar has claimed her nude body as the singular, though no less symbolically fraught, marker of her identity. As a fat, disabled, lesbian Latina, Aguilar could never escape the interpretations her body is given by the dominant culture of the United States. 338 In Sandy’s Room does not have to be a scene in which Aguilar has accepted such readings of her body, however. Instead, it can be a photograph that exposes the center (of dominant discourse) by renegotiating the margins. Beyond the superficial mention of Aguilar‘s ―size‖ in the small library of literature on her photography, most writers have had little to say about Aguilar‘s fatness and how it inflects her identity. There are two brief, but important, exceptions. In both, Aguilar‘s ―fleshiness‖ and ―monumentality‖ are mentioned as signals of possible erotic and political investments within the image (by both the viewer and Aguilar). 339 It is here that the two dates attributed to the image‘s creation, 1989 and 1993, seem to be important. The first time the photograph was printed in 1989, Aguilar printed it at 16 x 20 inches, a fairly standard photographic print for gallery hanging. 340 In 1993, however, Aguilar enlarged the image further by printing it at what Yarbro-Bejarano, perhaps 338 Or, for that matter, based on Cottingham‘s pessimistic remark, those readings consistent with U.S. subcultures either. 339 See Yarbro-Bejarano‘s and Harmony Hammond‘s essays, pages 298 and 85 respectively, cited above. 340 This is equivalent to a small-to-medium poster size on someone‘s apartment wall. 235 excessively, called ―mural proportions,‖ three by five feet. 341 This format is much larger than standard photographic prints, and when displayed would allow for a much more public exposure of Aguilar‘s nude body. The large size of the print in combination with the large size of Aguilar‘s body could both repel and excite viewers in its fleshy, perhaps erotic, perhaps political, but definitely material ―excess.‖ A small print of the same subject might have coerced the viewer to move close to the photograph to examine its details and textures in spite, or because of, its subject matter. A larger photograph, however, especially one that is as large as three by five feet in dimensions, allowed Aguilar‘s persona in the image to literally and metaphorically take up space in the room. In a large print, Aguilar asserts her subjectivity within the image‘s space as well as the exhibition space; she is unmistakable and unapologetically fat as well as photographically large. The format could force the viewer to visualize the marked yet usually invisible identities of the fat Chicana lesbian body of the artist. The size of the print unequivocally produces Aguilar‘s body specifically to be looked at. The lingering gaze of the viewer has the potential to sexualize the fat female body as well as empathize with its subject position. We might see Aguilar‘s body not just as an assertion of her own subjectivities as a queer and fat Chicana woman, but as an object to be offered to and consumed by the viewer. This mode of objectification can reroute traditional feminist critiques of the commodification of the female body as exchange object of the heterosexual male gaze. Aguilar‘s photograph redeploys the power from that male subject position to her own as a fat lesbian imaged in large scale on a gallery wall. We can see Aguilar‘s self-portrait as a manifestation of the desire to be objectified through the gaze 341 Yarbro-Bejarano 288 236 of the fat lesbian subject, to be consumed by a subject that replaces and renegotiates the male gaze. Aguilar‘s later self-portrait series also reformulate the ways in which fat, lesbian, Latina bodies have been marked by hegemonic U.S. culture, opening up visual spaces of same-sex desire and lesbian expression. In 1996 Aguilar produced a series of fourteen self-portraits entitled Nature Self- Portrait set in the desert landscape of the American Southwest (for examples see Figures 3.21-3.27). Most of these photographs depict Aguilar from behind, showing her tucked into herself, lying on her side, or strewn over a rock, perhaps mimicking the boulders around her. Several show Aguilar‘s body frontally, but again she refuses the viewer‘s gaze by either closing her eyes, covering her face with her hair, or tucking her head into her neck and chest. There are essentially five variations of images among the fourteen photographs in the series, including one image of Aguilar with her back toward the viewer standing on a large dead tree trunk that has many branches protruding into the sky in much the same way as Aguilar‘s arms are in a salutary and perhaps celebratory pose (Figure 3.23). The other poses occur more often in the images: Aguilar looking away from the camera, back to the viewer, seated or lying on the flat desert landscape; Aguilar reflected in a small body of water (puddle size) next to which she lies; and Aguilar lying on large rock formations surrounding a pond (Figures 3.21-3.22, 3.24-3.26). In each of these images, Aguilar covers her face, closes her eyes, and/or looks away from the camera. 342 Three related series, Stillness (1999), Motion (1999), and Center (2001) also 342 Because Aguilar is both the photographer of these images, and the initial viewing subject, there is an interesting connection implicit between what I am calling the ―camera‖ here and the ―viewer.‖ I tend to use the terms interchangeably here, though I do believe there are important differences between them. For the purposes of the current investigation, I take the camera to be the fixed entity before which Aguilar and her others models posed when the photograph was taken. When I speak of the viewer, I tend to posit her or him 237 contain nude self-portraits set in desert or forest landscape, and feature Aguilar as its central figure, even if she is with others in the image. 343 One thing all of these images have in common is the refusal by Aguilar to represent her face in her self-portraits on a regular basis. Stillness #15 and #18 show Aguilar from the front or side, but with her head down, tucked into her chest, and/or her long hair draped over her head to further hide her facial details (Figures 3.28 and 3.29). In these photographs Aguilar documented her body interacting with the landscape, and seems quite aware of and interested in recording it in formally intriguing ways, but chose to disengage from the viewer. There is a striking difference between those images in which Aguilar portrays her body as facing away from the viewer and those in which she exposes the front of her body to the sun and the viewer. In the former group of photographs, Aguilar appears physically introverted; her body tucks into itself and/ or wraps around itself, and she appears to mimic the boulders around her. The grounds on which she lies are obviously dry and dusty, rocky and hard. In several of the Nature Self-Portrait images there is little sign of life other than Aguilar‘s body. In fact, in the photograph labeled #13 her body has disappeared completely and we are left solely with the rocky terrain. Set amongst the boulders on the dry landscape, Aguilar‘s body becomes another irregular rocky formation, both blending into her surroundings, and in her liveness and softness of flesh, standing out, making the viewer aware of the different textures of the as an unfixed entity with changing characteristics, though admittedly tending to have a queer perspective. This is obviously based on the fact that I am the viewing subject here. 343 All of these images were originally printed in a smaller or standard size format, between 9 x 12 and 16 x 20 inches. 238 body, the rocks, and desert floor as well as the feel of that harsh landscape on the nude flesh that becomes part of it. Perhaps the landscape represents the culture of the United States, ruthless and unyielding to the fat lesbian subject, all the while providing a location into which she can become invisible, unnoticeable amongst the more idealized and normative identity and bodily formations it values. Aguilar‘s physical presence within the landscape highlights the materiality of the human body and positions the substance of the body as another object amongst others in the desert. The concept of invisibility is key here. This set of photographs within the Nature Self-Portrait series seems to visualize the fine line between blatant presence and absence of the fat lesbian in contemporary U.S. (and Western) culture. The fat female subject, here doubly marginalized as a lesbian, and triply marginalized as a person of color, becomes unseen because she is socially conceived of as unsightly within visual representation. Aguilar convincingly articulates this in the self-portraits that show her in the desert landscape, but not of it. Her fleshiness becomes hypervisible even as she distances herself from the viewer, physically and emotionally. In Nature Self-Portrait #13 Aguilar seems to answer an implicit call to erase herself completely from this earth (Figure 3.27). She images that erasure as a self- portrait, emphasizing the contradictory, but nonetheless crucial materiality of the fat Chicana lesbian female body. The other photographs of the Nature Self-Portrait series, in which Aguilar exposes the front and sides of her body, seem to have a different relationship with the camera and viewer. These images, exemplified by Nature Self-Portrait #4 and #9 (Figures 3.22 and 3.25), depict Aguilar next to a pool of water that varies in its dimensions. In #4 the water looks like a puddle that has formed in an approximately five 239 by four foot crevice in the desert floor. In #9 Aguilar lies on large rocky formations next to what looks to be a much larger body of water, perhaps a pond; here Aguilar lies on the rocks that ring the farthest edge of the water, while some reedy grasses frame the pond in the foreground. This is the first vegetation we see in this self-portrait series. In three of the four of these water images, reflections of Aguilar‘s body figure prominently. In the only one that doesn‘t record a reflection of Aguilar in the water‘s surface, Nature Self- Portrait #6 (Figure 3.24), we see Aguilar on her back, draped in the curved interstice of the far rock formation. Her right hand trails over the rock ledge to dangle above the water. Her left leg is bent upward at the knee. The flesh of Aguilar‘s breasts, stomach and thighs drape toward the water. The effect of gravity on Aguilar‘s fat has been captured as she manages to rest seemingly comfortably in what must be a precarious position, due to the curvature of the rock beneath her body. The smoothness of Aguilar‘s skin and its movement in the direction of the water emphasize the physical presence of Aguilar‘s body as a living body in the harsh landscape. Her thick flesh both balances and yields its materiality at the edge of the water. Curator Margarita Aizpuru has described Aguilar‘s body and body of work, referring specifically to the Nature Self-Portrait images on the pond, in a way that likens Aguilar to the stone around her: Her figure seems all of a piece with the slabs of the landscape, as though it were one more component of its construction; moreover she displays it with the greatest naturality, utterly comfortable inside her fat, eschewing any kind of scenography or technological aids that might alter or slant the facts. The austerity and simplicity of the portraits and their surroundings transmit a rare sensation of balance, serenity and beauty, with courage and a calm self-assertion. 344 344 Margarita Aizpuru, ―The Fair Gender,‖ El Bello Génaro. (Madrid, Spain: Consejería de las Artes/ Comunidad de Madrid, 2002) 126 240 This passage underscored the links made between Aguilar‘s fat body, the landscape in which it is placed, and the image itself. Aguilar‘s body was praised for its ―naturality‖ both for itself as a non-normative body willfully exposed sans ―technological aids‖ and for this seemingly ―instinctual‖ relationship with the natural landscape. 345 Here we can see a connection made between the materiality of Aguilar‘s body and the social constructions of the female form, especially the fat female form, as at once abstract, non- eroticized, ―a slab‖ within the landscape, and transcendent of the very corporeality that makes her ―utterly comfortable inside her fat.‖ When the fat female body is seen, and thus socialized and politically constructed in western culture, the body often becomes non-human and non-erotic, and/or signifies beyond its flesh, into the ―spiritual‖ world of the goddess, or the asexual mother. In this process, the political authority of the body in the images becomes erased, either disappearing completely, or becoming tokenized as the ―positive‖ exemplar of the non-normative body (fat, female, disabled, Chicana, lesbian). A different way of looking at the images on which Aizpuru commented might be to liken the landscape to Aguilar‘s body, rather than the other way around, which tends to dehumanize Aguilar‘s body and unquestionably integrate it into an idealized wilderness. Alternatively, if we look at these photographs and think about how the texture of the rocks on which Aguilar lies reiterates the texture of her skin over the fat of her body, the materiality of Aguilar‘s body is accentuated allowing for a more implicitly political reading. In these photographs Aguilar has remade the landscape in her image; in conjunction with the knowledge that the photograph is always ideologically constructed, we can see these representations as challenging the abstraction of the body into an object 345 I do not know what kind of ―scenography‖ or ―technological aids‖ Aizpuru is thinking of here. 241 of the landscape. Instead, Aguilar‘s body and body of work manipulates the way in which the body and landscape are naturalized, positing a different way of looking at both the fat female body and the landscape in which it is placed. To further this point, in the three Nature Self-Portrait images that feature Aguilar‘s body reflected in the water next to which she lies, we once again see the mounds of her flesh fold over her body frame, but not uncomfortably. In #9, Aguilar is at the same pond as in #6, this time on a wedge of rock that is closer to the camera. She is lying on her belly and breasts and her hair is draped over her head, falling into the water; it is through this tenuous connection that her physical body is tied to her immaterial reflection. Her face is cradled on her forearms, and it seems that she is gazing at her reflection in the water. The pose is contemplative and serene, though we cannot see details of Aguilar‘s facial expression in the shadows on her face. Aguilar‘s reflection in this and the other two images double the presence of her body. But rather than make an assumption that Aguilar stares longingly at her reflection wishing it would change into a more conventionally attractive one, Aguilar‘s interaction with her reflection can be seen as an acknowledgement of the corporeal existence of her fat body, one which assertively doubles her presence, rather than erasing it. This kind of representation is especially evident in Nature Self-Portrait #4 (Figure 3.15). In this photograph, Aguilar lies on her right side, body facing the camera. Her face is fully visible, and her hair is pushed behind her right arm, but her eyes are closed, thus perpetuating a denial of her gaze. Aguilar‘s left arm rests on her body and hip, the flesh of which slides toward the ground, as does her large breasts, stomach, and thighs. She looks restful, but not to the point of sleep, despite her closed eyes. The posture of her 242 body is both relaxed and slightly rigid. Almost all of Aguilar‘s body is reflected in the pool of water behind which she lies. The reflection is rippled, adding another layer of texture to Aguilar‘s skin already rippled with fat. This image seems particularly erotic and sensual. The interaction of Aguilar‘s fat, smooth flesh with the dryness of the land, the implied coolness of the water, and her rippled reflection create a series of textures that insist on the viewer‘s imagined interaction with Aguilar in her surrounding environment. The way in which the photograph is cropped, and the fact that Aguilar‘s body appears larger and closer to the viewer in this image as compared with almost all of the other images in this series, heightens the desire to touch Aguilar‘s body and become part of the scene with her; we are made to believe we are in reach of her body. Aguilar‘s dark nipples and areolas stand out against her creamy skin, and the shadows created on her body further define her breasts and belly. But at the same time, Aguilar keeps her eyes closed, divorcing her presence from that of the viewer‘s. By doing so, she forces the viewer to reckon with the body before them without an acknowledged complicity of its subject. On this photograph, feminist art historian Linda Nochlin has written the following: Aguilar's Self Portrait is elegantly deployed in formal terms, playing the rotundity of the outstretched body against the irregular roundness of the reflecting pond beneath it. One doesn't even have to work out the connection between the conformation of body and that of the earth she lies on; it is made by the visual data of the image itself. The arm stretches out like a rock-stratum, the belly sags downward like a fleshy waterfall, the legs are like angular hills. The boundaries between conventional notions of beauty and ugliness are always stretched if not outright contravened by such images in which bodies we would find unpleasant in real life are transmuted into something else by the eye of the artist -- we see the body differently because of her. And it's her body, to add to the paradoxical nature of the image. 346 346 Linda Nochlin, ―Offbeat and Naked,‖ Artnet.com (November 1999). Retrieved 14 September 2009, <http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/FEATURES/nochlin/nochlin11-5-99.asp> 243 In Staring: How We Look, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson asserts that beauty is not a static concept, but a process that is constantly changing, depending on the situation: ―Beauty is a perceptual process and a transitive action: it catches interest, prompts judgment, encourages scrutiny, creates knowledge. […] beauty is novelty at work.‖ 347 This idea of beauty is so useful here because it takes us out of the closed circuit of heterosexual gazes or exchanges in which conventional feminine beauty has been created and framed and makes ―beauty‖ a much more amorphous or ambiguous concept as opposed to a concrete set of formal elements. With eyes closed, or head turned away or covered by hair as in the other photographs, Aguilar rejects the normative gaze. She refuses to participate in an exchange of gazes that perpetuates a heterosexualized methodology of looking at the female nude seen throughout much of the history of art. Simultaneously, by revealing her ―deviant‖ body on her own terms, she opens up the possibility of her objectification by and/ or through a queer gaze that can eroticize the conventionally non-idealized body. Both of these tactics can be seen as articulating a politics of the eroticization and objectification that moves beyond the boundaries reified by heteronormative and thin- body ideals. Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s theory of phenomenology is useful here to connect the body of the subject and its perception, of the self and by others. Merleau-Ponty took a bodily-centered approach to perception and identity formation that is helpful for visual representation. At the core of Merleau-Ponty‘s understanding of phenomenology is the 347 Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look 187 244 location of perception within the material body. In this theory there is no dual Cartesian subject, one who has both mind and body, the latter only necessary to serve the former. Rather, the body is always already the object or place through which we perceive, and thus think and act. The ―self‖ and the ―body‖ are one and the same. 348 Merleau-Ponty emphasized that the body ―keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive;‖ it is in this theory of visuality that we can see a fusing together of both sight and the body. 349 The gaze is never separated from the corporeal structure from which it originates, and as such, must always be considered as part of the constitutive force of identity. Within this method, there is no assumption of objective thinking, because all is perceived through the culturally-, historically- and physically-specific entity of the body. While visible and invisible identities are never stable, they are still governed by the limits of social codes and constructs that, with individual perceptions and expressions, constitute the knowability of the body. A viewer‘s own empathetic relationship to a represented body reveals the degrees to which certain bodies can become intelligible, or conceptually visible, in contemporary Western culture. Art historian Amelia Jones has situated Merleau-Ponty‘s theory of the visible within the specific realm of the photograph: We understand our relationship to the photograph of another subject's body […] through what Merleau-Ponty calls inter-corporeity: the ‗coiling over of the visible upon the visible‘ that animates other bodies besides our own [….] It is our being looked at by the photograph-as-flesh that makes us fully corporeal subjects in 348 Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. (Montreal, Kingston, and Ithaca: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 2002) 69 349 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 1962/ 2002) 235 245 vision; this being looked at also substantiates the subjectivity of the person in the picture, but always already in relation to us, those it ‗views.‘ 350 In Aguilar‘s Nature Self-Portrait #12, the viewer faces the back of a nude body lying in a rocky desert landscape. Due to the angle of the sun, the body is both highlighted and hidden in shadow. In this way the body replicates the few boulders in the foreground, and in doing so, both stands out from and blends into the landscape. We can perceive this figure simultaneously as a human body and not as a human body. In physical and social terms, this body is only moderately visible. As an embodied subject, the viewer in perceiving this image can empathize with the feeling of exposed skin on dry, pebbly ground; the heat of the sun; and the coolness of shadow. The corporeal object is perceived as an unusual addition to the landscape even as it mimics the environment‘s forms so well. At the same time, this body as a subject is difficult to fully read, and so, to fully see. We can only gaze upon the broad expanse of the subject‘s back and lower legs tucked into themselves. The head is mostly camouflaged in darkness, and other than the physical perception of skin in its differentiated texture from the ground, the viewer cannot fully gender, racialize, or even fully humanize this body. In conjunction with a lack of easily readable signs of identity as marked on and through the body here, there is one sign that makes this body both hyper- and in-visible: its corporeal ―excess,‖ or fatness. In terms of material presence and visualizability, fat bodies become noticeably marked as deviant against the socially normative construction of the thin and ―contained‖ body. Because they literally take up more space than their thin counterparts, fat bodies 350 Amelia Jones, ―The ‗Eternal Return‘: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment,‖ Signs 27:4 (Summer 2002) 970; Emphasis original 246 are made into sites of physical surplus and thus moral overindulgence. At the same time, because fat bodies do not conform to thin body ideals, they become illegible as subjects within Western culture. As grounded in Merleau-Ponty‘s phenomenology, we can see the dialectical relationship between the social and corporeal body in the way that ―fat‖ is and is not recognized as a legitimate subject identity. In Aguilar‘s Nature Self-Portrait #13, the physical effects of this discourse about the body are seen. While labeled as a self- portrait, this photograph depicts only the desert landscape in which we had previously seen Aguilar‘s body. The body is no longer able to be viewed; Aguilar has removed her body as subject of the image, reproducing in material form the social conditions of the unrecognizable, and thus invisible, non-normative body. Sociologist Kevin Paterson, in rethinking phenomenology for use in the field of disability studies, has written ―[T]he disablist and disabling sociospatial environment produces a vivid but unwanted consciousness of one‘s impaired body. Here, the body undergoes a mode of ‗dys- appearance‘ which is not biological but social.‖ 351 In other words, the deviant body is overlooked in its inability (or unwillingness) to conform to social standings of subjectivity, and also made to become ―unceasingly present in experience.‖ 352 Aguilar‘s photographs manifest the profound effects of situating the subjectivity of the body on the fine line that delineates material, social, and political visibility and invisibility. Paterson‘s remodeling of phenomenology to describe the social and physical conditions on and through which the so-called disabled body is constructed provides an 351 Kevin Paterson, ―Disability Studies and Phenomenology: Finding a Space for both the Carnal and the Political,‖ Exploring the Body. Eds., Sarah Cunningham-Burley and Kathryn Backett-Milburn. (London and New York: Palgrave, 2001) 89 352 Paterson 89 247 effective methodology for further linking the flesh, the gaze, and their cultural discourses. Paterson‘s goal is to demonstrate the political possibilities embedded in the phenomenological subject. He writes, ―Phenomenology provides the conceptual tools to trace the ways in which oppression and discrimination become embodied and ‗lived‘ through everyday reality.‖ 353 Through an analysis of the sociology of pain, Paterson draws together a theory of ―dys-appearance‖ of the non-normative body. In the context of pain, disease, or other bodily formations and experiences that do not fit within the terms of the ―healthy‖ body, ―the body becomes ever-present in experience, albeit in a dysfunctional manner. In other words, in contrast to the disappearances that characterize ordinary functioning, the body, in the context of pain, dys-appears.‖ 354 Paterson describes the presupposition that the ―able‖ body can easily function within the everyday world, and thus can momentarily be ―forgotten,‖ contrasting it with a ―disabled‖ body‘s ―dys- appearance.‖ The theoretical construction of ―dys-appearance‖ prioritizes the ―dysfunctional‖ materiality of the body in order to expose that the corporeal ―information that is imprinted onto the world is dominated by non-disabled bodies, by a specific form of carnality which excludes as it constructs.‖ 355 Aguilar‘s Motion series explores the mutually-constituting categories of identity within the context of multiple figure self- portraits. Unlike the Nature Self-Portrait photographs, Motion as a series is set within a landscape defined primarily through large trees with ropes of vines hanging down and 353 Paterson 82 354 Paterson 88 355 Paterson 90 248 spread on the ground. There are sections of the ground that are rather rocky and similar in general to the floor of the desert in the Nature Self-Portrait series, but the texture of the trees, vines, and leaves, as well as the shadows created by them are what dominates the backgrounds of the Motion series. Motion #55 and #56 are multiple figure images that play on the themes of identity and difference (Figures 3.30 and 3.31). In Motion #55, two fat female figures 356 lie on their left sides, facing the camera, curled in fetal positions. Both have their hair draped off of their face, but their eyes are closed. The figure farther from the camera is almost completely bathed in shadow, and we can see the figure closer to the camera in much greater detail. The figures are centered vertically in the photograph and lie on a very rugged and rocky stretch of land. Motion #56 is very similar, except that Aguilar is now featured as the figure closest to the camera, and the bodies are no longer centered in the composition. Instead they are lined up in what appears to be size order, 357 reaching from the top right of the photograph to the bottom center. The other major difference is that now each female figure has her hair draped in front of her face, completely covering her eyes. The figures in the image mimic the terrain in which they placed and as well as accentuate the physical differences between the colors and textures of the fat female bodies and the rocks and trees surrounding them. This intensifies the specific presence and materiality of the fat female form as separate from the natural environment, rather than seamlessly incorporating the figures into their setting. It is here that Judith Butler‘s notion of the body as politically constituted through social interaction is useful. While Butler‘s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and 356 Neither are Aguilar; this is the only image within the series that does not picture the artist. 357 Though due to the foreshortening of the image, this is uncertain. 249 Violence has a different set of interests than her earlier work on the body and subject construction, her articulation therein of the humanity of the physical presence of the body posits that the bodies of minoritarian subjects that do not necessarily fit within conventional notions of citizenship becomes politically viable through ―social vulnerability.‖ She has written, [E]ach of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies – as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. 358 This description seems especially apropos for Aguilar‘s photographs and the subjects therein. In their display, both are exposed to and constituted by social understandings of the fat female body, the natural landscape, queer and heteronormative gazes, and histories of art. As Butler writes, connection and vulnerability go hand in hand, causing the imaging of the politics of the fat Chicana lesbian female body to rest on the tension between the two. This is part of what makes Aguilar‘s images so compelling. To conclude this section, I want to take one last look at the Motion series. Motion #58 is a reorganized version of Motion #53 (Figures 3.32 and 3.33). The same four women are present within the same setting. Here, however, the physical interactions between the figures are emphasized. The four figures occupy the center of the frame and are grouped in two pairs. On the viewer‘s left rests Aguilar and the African-American woman in nearly identical poses, their bodies overlapping. We see Aguilar‘s head and torso as she leans back and to her right. Her head is turned away from the camera and it 358 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (New York and London: Verso, 2004) 20 250 seems that she is looking up and/ or to her left. The African-American woman lies in the same pose over Aguilar‘s legs. Her head too is tilted up and back, exposing the rest of her body, but not her face to the camera. To these figures‘ left, the two remaining women sit with their knees bent and folded. The light-haired woman is farther back; her hair covers her whole head, and her body from the knees to shoulders is shown in three-quarters profile. The woman with long dark hair twists her torso so that we just see a partial profile of her legs, torso, and arm. Her head is entirely turned away from the viewer. These figures‘ postures mimic each other, as do Aguilar‘s and the African-American woman‘s. This image, more than any of the others examined up to this point, provides a representation of same-sex community. Due to the ways in which the figures‘ postures replicate one another, as well as their close proximity, we have a sense of interaction between the bodies that simultaneously focuses on their physical presence and their gazes‘ absence. Each in turn denies the viewer her gaze, and in doing so inscribes a relationship between each other that can be seen to be reiterated between the photograph as a whole object and the viewer. There is an erotic charge in both, playing on the pleasures of the fat female bodies through visual and affective texture. Within the photograph, the women are barely touching, if at all, yet they visually overlap and signify a shared space. They do not explicitly invite the viewer into the scene, instead positing an exchange of desire between them. The connection between the viewer and the image works on a circuit of gazes and bodies. The viewing eye moves continuously across the smooth flesh of the bodies, across the cracked rocks, and the scratchy branches of the trees. This constant comparison between body and landscape 251 heightens the sensuality of the image, as in Nature Self-Portrait #4. We once again long to touch the bodies to participate in their materiality. As Butler writes, The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariable public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. 359 The bodies of the subjects in Aguilar‘s images are constructed through their sensuality and subjectivity from both sides of the camera. Aguilar seems to be shining a light into the inquisitive eyes of her audience, forcing them to confront normative notions of the female nude while positing new political formations of the fat female body that simultaneously appreciates and objectifies them, that insists on their erotic potential and material presence as political goals in themselves. This interaction between corporeal object and political agent is precisely what makes the visualization of Aguilar‘s images and subjects instances of contemporary cultural specificity. The subjects and viewer can thus come together to queerly construct erotic and political representations of fat female bodies in these photographs. Big Burlesque: The Original Fat Bottom Revue Big Burlesque, or the Fat-Bottom Revue, as the group was also called, was begun in 1999 with an explicitly political intention to reclaim female sexuality and embodiment 359 Butler, Precarious Life 26 252 specifically for fat women (Figures 3.34 and 3.35). 360 Founded by Heather McAllister, also known by her stage name Reva Lucian (Figures 3.36 and 3.37), the dance troupe was conceived of as a way in which to introduce fat women to the world as attractive, sexual, and powerful in a way that challenged traditional notions of what fat people are seen to be: lazy, stupid, undesirable, and weak. Big Burlesque was a grassroots burlesque troupe; the women who performed in it were not trained in performance or dance, though many of them participated in a variety of arts-related activism before joining Big Burlesque and/or in conjunction with their time in the group, including participation in the Fat Girl collective and the Lesbian Avengers. 361 Many of the members of Big Burlesque self- identified as lesbian and/or queer, and the audiences of Big Burlesque have often been composed of fat and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities. Although not all of the dancers in Big Burlesque identified as lesbian and/or queer in terms of their sexuality, the group‘s performance work sat squarely within the field of queer culture in terms of its revolutionary intention and various embodiments of drag, camp, and same-sex desire on the stage. 362 As has been recently documented by several performance and art historians, as well as performers and pop culture enthusiasts, burlesque as an art form has had a long 360 Heather McAllister, ―Embodying Fat Liberation,‖ The Fat Studies Reader. Eds., Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. (New York: New York University Press, 2009) 305 361 After the group had initially been created, McAllister did insist that all of its members take a formal dance class of some sort in order to improve their skills. As she writes, ―I really wanted to bring dance to the burlesque stage. It was not about simply getting dolled up and taking it off; I was intent on giving our audience a quality show. As a member of several marginalized communities, I was unhappy with seeing below-par performance hailed as ‗great‘ simply because we are so desperate to see ourselves represented on stage that we accept anything.‖ McAllister 306 362 McAllister 305; While not all of the members self-identified as lesbian and/or queer, all members did identify as fat. 253 history in the United States and abroad. 363 The tradition of burlesque performance originally dates back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, as an extension of more traditional theater performances. 364 Theater performance was one of the few arenas in life that allowed women to ―act out‖ in a way that did not conform to conventional gender roles. As art historian Maria Elena Buszek argues, ―in the theater the presentation of the multiplicitous, shifting, even unstable womanhood of the actress was not only an acceptable but a celebrated identity for women.‖ 365 Burlesque came into its own as a specific form of performance during the middle to late nineteenth century as a combination of dance, comedy, music, and the display of semi-nude women attracted many male consumers at the height of the Victorian age, infamous for its reproach of public displays of sexuality and its desire for modesty in all social relations, especially for women, in both the United States and Europe. Burlesque performance initially included theatrical routines combining body movement, comedy, and music that satirized the tastes of the upper classes ―to challenge the established way of looking at things.‖ 366 Such acts almost always featured women scantily dressed and flirting with the audiences of primarily middle- and working-class men during the mid- to late-nineteenth century; little outright nudity was allowed in these 363 See, amongst many others, Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) ; Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind (Denver: Speck Press, 2004); Jane Briggeman, Burlesque: A Living History (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2009); Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006); and Jackie Wilson, The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008). 364 Buszek 28-29 365 Buszek 28 366 John Kenrick, ―Burlesque,‖ A History of the Musical, retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.musicals101.com/burlesque.htm> 254 first performances, but the hint or suggestion of naughtiness and female flesh is what had audiences coming back for more: burlesque relied on the display of shapely, underdressed women to keep audiences interested. In the Victorian age, when proper women went to great lengths to hide their physical form beneath bustles, hoops and frills, the idea of young ladies appearing onstage in tights was a powerful challenge. 367 The performance of sex appeal and potentially pornographic situations is likely what made burlesque so popular at the time and cinched it as what would become an American theatrical legacy for more than a century to come. Burlesque reached its height during the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States, as individuals became wealthier and had more money to spend on performances, as photography and film came to be a part of everyday phenomena, and as the country‘ political and social climate shifted through prohibition, the Depression, and World War II. Each of these factors contributed to the wider circulation of burlesque as a performance form as well as the sexually-teasing drawings and photographs used to advertise the women who performed in such shows. From its beginning, burlesque was risqué in terms of the most basic social norms as well as more deeply-seated Western cultural beliefs about the place of women and female bodies in the family and society. ―The art of the tease,‖ as burlesque has often been called, shows us that where there are social conventions for women, there are those ready and willing to challenge them on multiple fronts. 368 According to Robert Allen, ―The very sight of a female body not covered by the accepted costume of bourgeois respectability forcefully, if playfully, called attention to the entire question of the ‗place‘ 367 Kenrick 368 Baldwin 1 255 of woman in American society.‖ 369 The connection between the ways in which female performers created a sexually-alluring, performative ―femininity‖ in traditional theater and burlesque that defied social norms and the rather strict cultural mores is important here. Even though many women and men also worked on expanding women‘s roles in terms of suffrage and a more general cultural life in the United States (and abroad) during the Victorian moment, the repression of sexuality during this time likely had much to do with the unfolding of illicit methods of sexual expression such as burlesque and vice versa. We can see a similar connection between the backlash against Second Wave Feminism of the 1980s and a reinvestment in ―neo-burlesque‖ performance culture that began to develop during this moment. Emerging out of this tension, burlesque performance has more recently been reformulated by feminists, lesbians, drag performers, musicians, fat women and other non-conventional groups. 370 Perhaps because of this complicated context, since it has reemerged during the 1980s and 90s, burlesque seems not to take itself as seriously as it had in decades past, and many performers have embraced the ironic tone of postmodernism in their performances. There has been a plethora of grassroots and feminist burlesque troupes formed all over the United States, many of which have been composed of non-traditional burlesque performers: ordinary women, genderqueers, self-identified lesbians and dykes, and fat women, many of whom have had complicated and/or tenuous relationships with Second Wave Feminism due to its history of racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Newer burlesque performers and troupes have tended to embrace a queer perspective of 369 Allen 258-259 370 These identities/ groups are not necessarily mutually-exclusive. 256 sexuality, gender, and performance, with a focus on the idea of fractured and intersectional identities and desires played out on the stage. As one manifestation of neo-burlesque performance, 371 Big Burlesque played with shifting notions of performance, femininity, queerness, and fatness in their dances. Big Burlesque was open to dancers of multiple gender expressions, though most of the participants have identified themselves as queerly femme. As such, the performance of gender that Big Burlesque often created was based on hyper-femininity or feminine drag. This was both a personal and a political choice on the part of the dancers in the troupe. The premise of a queer fat femme burlesque group in and of itself had political markings; femme identity in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities has often been made invisible because both mainstream and society assumed that femme lesbians are replicating traditional heterosexual feminine stereotypes rather than asserting their own sense of self and personal identity as related to queer community. In contrast to this assumption, queer femme identity has been theorized as a political persona because it challenges the fact that conventional femininity must be heterosexual and that the trappings of such femininity can be a form of performance in and of itself. Michelle Baldwin argues that much of neo-burlesque can be considered as ―female-female impersonation.‖ 372 Baldwin continues, Burlesque performers, like drag queens, are more woman than the average woman. Both wrap themselves in corsets and stockings, jewels and fabrics, wigs or coiffed hair, and stage makeup – the trappings of stereotypical femininity. […] 371 Several individual performers and burlesque troupes with fat and/or queer performers and sensibilities have become part of the neo-burlesque performance scene in addition to Big Burlesque over the last decade, including Stilettos and Strap-ons, The Chainsaw Chubettes, the Corpulent Cuties, Bodacious Burlesque, Alotta Bouté, and Tonsa Tush. I‘ve chosen to focus on Big Burlesque because it is one of the first and most influential fat burlesque troupes. 372 Baldwin 99 257 [Burlesque performers, like drag performers] are sometimes parodies of women, but more often they are superwomen. 373 The notion of a ―superwoman‖ seems particularly relevant for a burlesque troupe of fat women. Big Burlesque‘s fat performers have had a tendency to parody the rhetoric around the ―obesity epidemic‖ and fatphobia rather than fat bodies themselves. They have also been known to take up the image of the excessive and dangerous fat woman in order to deconstruct it through performance, dance, music, and costume. 374 In addition to queering gender identity, expression, and sexuality, Big Burlesque queered the model of asexuality in fat women. If we remember back to Susie Orbach‘s claims about fat women hiding their sexuality behind their layers of fat, we can see that the members of Big Burlesque did nothing of the sort. Rather, they insisted on the ownership of their sexual attraction and desires as fully-realized subjects who had been pathologized, demoralized, and overlooked in the past by dominant culture. A recent ethnography of fat burlesque performers substantiates this claim; D. Lacy Asbill writes, ―In a culture that rarely associates fat bodies with sexuality, publicly claiming sexual agency, desire, and desirability allows fat women to take pleasure in their bodies.‖ 375 In response to feminist women who have taken issue with the focus on sexuality as a method for deploying subjectivity to fat women, McAllister has noted that ―there is a big 373 Baldwin 99 374 Big Moves, another San Francisco Bay Area-based fat dance company with several outposts around the U.S. and Canada, has also created parodic performances that make fun of the stereotypes associated with fat women. For example, their 2006 East Coast Tour was entitled ―Gargantua: Fear of a Fat Planet.‖ The promotional poster for it sported a huge (tall and fat) female figure dressed along the lines of a Greek Goddess walking an ―alien‖ planet‘s landscape. See Big Moves: Because Every Body Can Dance, at <http://www.bigmoves.org/merch.html> (retrieved 19 February 2010). 375 D. Lacy Asbill, ―‗I‘m Allowed to be a Sexual Being‘: The Distinctive Social Conditions of the Fat Burlesque Stage,‖ The Fat Studies Reader. Eds., Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. (New York: New York University Press, 2009) 300 258 difference between debasing oneself because of real or perceived lack of sexual opportunities, and empowering oneself and others to give fat people, particularly fat women, sexual currency.‖ 376 McAllister demonstrated the production of pleasure and desirability in a performance at Viva Variety in 2003. Still in the early days of Big Burlesque, McAllister was then known as Ms. Demeanor, and performed here alone on the stage in front of a mixed (in terms of gender and sexuality) audience. McAllister danced to fat bisexual singer Candye Kane‘s song, ―200 Pounds of Fun," from her 1998 album Swango. 377 As Candye Kane croons her jazzy pop song about the joy of fat bodies (―It takes a lotta woman/ to keep you satisfied/ and I got me a saddle/ it comes in double wide‖), McAllister dances across the stage wearing a short cobalt blue fringed dress, a blue feather boa, and matching blue arm bands, circa 1920s flapper-style. She also wears a blunt-cut bobbed wig, and the ensemble, with the hair piece and saxophone-driven jazz music evokes an earlier time in U.S. history. McAllister teases the audience for several minutes before she begins to remove her clothing, starting with her boa and moving on to her dress. As she dances around the stage, McAllister makes the most of the fringed dress, so full of movement from its hundreds of strips of fabric hanging down. As she shakes her body, the whole dress moves, emphasizing her body size and her shape. This continues as she begins to take the dress off; her hips were wider than her upper body, and she moves the dress off her body much more slowly from her hips down, lingering so that she can shake her hips and, as she turns around, her ass at the audience. As she 376 McAllister 311 377 Big Burlesque spent time touring with Candye Kane in 2003. 259 removes the dress, the audience sends up a loud cheer, and we are left watching McAllister in her black under things, also lined with fringe (and the bra with gold spangles) to maximize the visual impact of her fat dancing and shaking body. Between taking off her dress and taking off her fringed briefs and bra, McAllister parades around the stage, dancing and gesturing to the audience to invite them to become part of the act through whistling, sheering, and clapping as she moves around. She plays to the audience‘s positive reactions to her slow striptease and vigorous movement, but she is quite obviously in control of the entire act. McAllister gives them only what she wants to give them, whether this is an extra flash of skin or particular body movements that make her fat thigh, hips, and belly jiggle. When they respond enthusiastically to her, she grants them a little more movement in the form of a shimmy or a shake, or a bit more skin as she rolls down her briefs to show off her thong underwear and nearly sheer gold- spangled hip wrap that leaves little to the imagination, but tantalizes the audience by enhancing her wide hips and ass. Similarly, just as McAllister takes off her black bra in the final scene of the dance, she covers her breasts with the fan she had been holding earlier and walks off the stage, flaunting her shimmering ass all the way. McAllister provides the audience with a taste of her luscious, fat, sexual body, but not with it all, leaving room for future fantasies and a desire to see more – of her body and of future performances. The quote McAllister is probably most well-known for, by fat activists, audience members, and fellow burlesque dancers alike, is ―Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it's political. Add physical movement, then dance, 260 then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.‖ 378 If we look to McAllister‘s performance as a framework for reading the revolutionary, we can see that the guiding principle of it is control. McAllister, as the subject of her performance here, is in control not simply of the way that she looks, the way she struts around the stage, and the ways in which she offers herself to the audience. She is also in control of her sexuality, her creativity, and of the reactions of the audience itself in seeing a fat woman dance her ass off for her own and their pleasure. The tease of burlesque and its semi-nudity is in brandishing this control and offering it to the audience as both a gift and a spectacle of the fleshy, active, corporeal body. McAllister, and Big Burlesque, had the power in that relationship, and they flaunt it. The Padded Lilies The Padded Lilies are a group of fat female synchronized swimmers. Based out of the Oakland/ San Francisco Bay Area, the Padded Lilies have been practicing and performing together since at least 2000 (Figure 3.38). The group is composed of four to ten women, all of whom consider themselves to be out and proud fat activists; their swimming routines are political performances in which fatness as an identity is made lighthearted and pleasurable, confounding conventional notions of the excessive body as ugly and difficult to move and look at. Shirley Sheffield and Timnah Steinman began the group after having attended the ―Making Waves‖ weekly swim at an Oakland pool for approximately three to four years. ―Making Waves‖ is a weekly pool event in which fat 378 This quote is featured on the main page of the Big Burlesque website and has been circulated widely in the literature about McAllister, the fat activism and fat-empowerment movements, and Big Burlesque. See <http://www.bigburlesque.com/>. 261 women rent out a public pool for two hours each Sunday morning to work out, swim, play, and socialize with other fat women in a safe and comfortable environment. 379 As Sheffield and Steinman were swimming laps, they were watching a small group of women exercise by doing water aerobics, and the synchronized movement of the group gave Sheffield the idea for a fat synchronized swimming group. 380 In recounting the moment of revelation that lead to the creation of the Padded Lilies, Sheffield says, It was kind of cool to watch fat bodies moving together. […] We started talking about synchronized swimming and how funny that was and how funny and fun fat bodies could be doing it, and Timnah said she had some experience with it and might be able to choreograph something [….] It turned out that there was an actual coach at the pool that we didn‘t even know about who not only competes herself, in synchronized swimming and aquatic arts, but also coaches. So, she agreed to be our coach and we just started from there. 381 The group began to form as additional women found out about the prospect of a fat synchronized swim group and Diane, their new coach, taught them a routine based on the Broadway musical A Chorus Line, complete with glittering gold vests, bowties, and plastic top hats. 382 The women in the group learned some of the specialized moves that impress an audience, including producing a star out of their bodies, with their feet together in the center of a circle, and their bodies stretched out and floating on the surface of the water (Figure 3.39). 383 These spectacular kinds of movements, performed in 379 Allen Steadham, ―Q & A With The Padded Lilies,‖ Without Measure, the International Size Acceptance Association Newsletter (April 2001). Retrieved 11 February 2010, < http://www.size- acceptance.org/without_measure/wom_archive/wom_04_2001/wom0401_page3.html>; the Sunday swim for fat women continues through today at a different, but nearby pool in Albany, California. 380 Steadham; Shirley Sheffield in Karole Langlois, Fat Chicks: The Padded Lilies, n.d. Retrieved 11 February 2010, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq5E0PJ4QcE> 381 Sheffield in Langlois 382 Sheffield in Steadham 383 Sheffield in Steadham 262 combination with colorful and theatrical outfits have become a signature of the Padded Lilies. It has what brought them national media attention; they have been featured on Entertainment Tonight and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, as well in at least two short documentaries made by Masters students in visual arts and film, Buoyant (2004) by Julie Wyman and Fat Chicks: The Padded Lilies (n.d.) by Karole Langlois. 384 The Padded Lilies capture an essence of enjoyment that can be just as effective as anger as a motivating factor in the desire for social and political change. The members of the group explicitly see their participation in it as a political act; Sheffield remarks, ―just about any time an oppressed group breaks the mold and refuses to be held back by stereotypes and bias, they become activists and spokespersons for their group.‖ 385 When asked about how members of the group keep up a positive attitude toward fatness and fat activism in a fatphobic culture, Sheffield and Trish Bailey, another Padded Lily, point to the pleasure of their participation in the swim group, as well as their audiences‘ delight in their performances as ways in which they maintain their enthusiasm. 386 The Padded Lilies‘ chosen method of political performance, and the accoutrements that come with synchronized swimming, including costumes and music, is inherently compelling. Water, in the form of a pool or an ocean, is a meaningful part of United States culture‘s conception of leisure, vacation, and amusement. Swimming and playing in water is something that for most people, starting in childhood, becomes a fantasy associated with 384 These films are especially useful to this dissertation, as they provide the most thorough documentation of the rehearsals and performances by the Padded Lilies, even when they are contextualized within a creative filmic piece, as with Wyman‘s Buoyant, which was submitted as her MFA final project at University of California, San Diego. 385 Sheffield in Steadham 386 Sheffield and Trish Bailey in Steadham 263 getting away from the difficulties of everyday life, with relaxation, and with warm weather. Admittedly, the ability to engage in such leisure activities on a regular basis presupposes a certain class level and social status in the U.S., but the fantasy is still a solid part of U.S. cultural identity. Synchronized swimming, only an Olympic sport since 1984, 387 has historically been seen more as a form of entertainment than an athletic activity like traditional swimming, likely in large part due to its connection to the drama and music of theatrical performance. Indeed, while tracing its roots back to at least the first decade of the twentieth century, U.S. synchronized swimming in the contemporary era owes much to entertainment spectacles such as the ―Modern Mermaids‖ that performed at the 1934 World‘s Fair in Chicago, and Esther Williams/ Busby Berkley water musical films, including Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and Easy to Love (1953) (Figures 3.40 and 3.41). 388 Indeed, in a recent rendition of the Padded Lilies by graphic artist Les Toil, four of the current members of the group are depicted in matching red swimsuits at the edge of the seashore on the Brooklyn coast, with a Coney Island amusement park landscape behind them (Figure 42). This image links the contemporary politics of the Padded Lilies‘ stance on fat-empowerment with a nostalgic viewpoint of the famous New York beach as home to vacationers and locals immersed in mermaid fantasies while walking the carnivalesque boardwalk, riding the roller coaster, and eating 387 United States Synchronized Swimming, ―History of Synchronized Swimming in the U.S.‖ Retrieved 13 February 2010,< http://www.usasynchro.org/About_Synchro/history.htm> 388 United States Synchronized Swimming, ―History of Synchronized Swimming in the U.S.‖ Before she became a mid-twentieth century film star in such films, Williams was a U.S. national freestyle swimming champion and performed at the 1940 San Francisco World‘s Fair ―Aquacade.‖ 264 hot dogs and cotton candy. 389 This kind of ―old-fashioned‖ charm of synchronized swimming or water dancing is in large part what makes the Padded Lilies so compelling to a wide variety of audiences. The Padded Lilies‘ choice of costume reflects these earlier days of synchronized swimming and ―water ballet.‖ In rehearsals the Lilies may wear whatever swimsuits they feel like, but in their performances in front of an audience and/or camera, the Lilies often wear color-coordinated or color-contrasted bathing suits, such as all red or blue (see Figure 3.43) or a different solid color for each swimmer (Figure 3.44). Their trademark accessory is a multi-colored floral bathing cap, reminiscent of the popular bathing cap styles of the 1940s and 1950s that have become part of a kitsch sentiment over the past few years (see Figure 3.44). As described above, the Padded Lilies feature humorous and campy entertainment in their routines, setting one water dance to music from A Chorus Line, and another to music from the musical Gypsy. 390 The Lilies also swim to more traditional classical ballet music; the performances that are choreographed to such music highlights both the gracefulness of water dance and the rebellious humor of a group of fat women chest-deep in a pool, swimming in synchronized form. The Padded Lilies have been featured in two short films, one a nine-minute documentary produced by Karole Langlois in the early 2000s called Fat Chicks: The Padded Lilies, and a twenty-eight minute art film/ documentary by Julie Wyman in 2004, called Buoyant. Both films were created as part of graduate school projects during the 389 On the web page that features this custom image of the Padded Lilies, artist Les Toil remarks that the women of the Lilies resemble the early twentieth century ―bathing beauties‖ of World Fairs and ―aquacades‖ in terms of body size and shape more closely than thinner women do today. Because the thin- ideal for the feminine body did not become completely widespread until the decades just after the turn of the twentieth century, this observation is historically accurate. 390 Sheffield in Steadham 265 filmmakers‘ time in a Master of Arts film program and a MFA visual arts program, respectively. Langlois‘ film focuses entirely on the Padded Lilies as they explain their origins, motivations, and goals for the swim group. The members are interviewed as a group, and the footage moves back and forth between the group, fully clothed, sitting together during their interview and the group performing in a large outdoor pool, seemingly without any audience other than Langlois herself. Some of the spoken interview segments are imposed over the swim routine, while at other moments in the film instrumental music by Strauss and Offenbach provides the backdrop for the water dancing. 391 Langlois‘ film provides insights both into the fat activist perspective of the Padded Lilies and their style of water movement. The interview is rather casual, and while Langlois must have asked the women several specific questions, these have been edited out and the entire film is narrated by the Lilies alone. The results are more of a group discussion than a formal interview, and individual voices occasionally come to the fore to tell a specific story or explain a particular attitude held by one or more of the film‘s subjects. The women laugh with each other, chatting about their particular experiences in terms of coming into fat consciousness and becoming part of a fat- acceptance community of women through the ―Making Waves‖ swim group. They also talk about why they take part in the Padded Lilies. For example, near the end of the film, Shirley Sheffield comments on how fat individuals can perpetuate their own oppression when they internalize the fatphobia that surrounds them. The swim group works to provide an antidote to this kind of self-hatred. Sheffield says, 391 Langlois 266 I‘ve always felt like fat people participate in their own victimization to a certain extent. It‘s like, sure, yeah, we‘ve all been oppressed to some extent and people make comments about us and we‘ve been hurt in our lives. But if you go through life seeing yourself as damaged goods, and carrying yourself that way, and being afraid to do things and try things because you‘re fat, then you‘re a participant. […] And when we go out there and do what we do, people see us as proud, strong women, having fun and doing stuff, and they don‘t think so much about, oh, they‘re fat women in bathing suits doing goofy stuff in their bodies. 392 While Sheffield makes an important point about the ways in which oppressed individuals often play out the cultural norms they have learned throughout their lives on their own minds and bodies, I don‘t think it is as easy as she says to make an audience, or even a single viewer, ―forget‖ about a subject‘s bodily presentation as she assumes in her last statement. Individual and group identity is so fundamentally tied into phenotypical and/or corporeal appearance in our culture that ―forgetting‖ or overlooking that one is fat, or disabled or a person of color, or any other non-normative body-based identity is nigh impossible. It is also a questionable goal in that actual social change will likely only happen through the restructuring of a cultural system in a way that accommodates and values a wide variety of bodily forms, rather than a single dominant form, as is the case in U.S. (and Western) culture today. Another Padded Lily, Marilyn Wann, pushes this point further when she stresses the challenge that the group represents to stereotypes about fatness and fat individuals. Wann argues that the Padded Lilies have created a space of safety and pleasure that fosters activism on private and cultural levels: I think in our culture, the way fat people are represented is as targets. We are targets for stupid jokes, we are targets of stereotypes, we must be eating all the time, we must be really lazy, we‘re all couch potatoes. We have all of these negative attributes that get stuck on us, and they‘re not true, and I think it‘s really great for fat people to bust those stereotypes by doing their own very visible, very fun, public thing, whatever it is. It doesn‘t have to be synchronized swimming, 392 Sheffield in Langlois 267 although I do believe synchronized swimming, you know, is the key to world peace. 393 Wann‘s words hit on at least one of the key points about the size-acceptance and fat- empowerment movements that have coalesced in the last two decade in the United States: that in a culture geared toward making fat individuals feel terrible about themselves, and which tries to force them to change via dieting, extreme exercise, medication, and weight loss surgery, one of the most effective methods of resistance is to be public about one‘s acceptance of one‘s own identity as fat, and to find a creative way (or ways) through which to counteract such persistent negative social messages. 394 The fat acceptance communities of the United States have long been immersed not simply in contesting the stereotypes about fat that are circulated on a daily basis in the U.S. in the fields of mass media and medicine, but in creating counter- or sub-cultures in which individuals can find communities that speak to their interests and cultural production can be fostered so as to create alternative visual, audio, and literary culture and models for leading one‘s life as free from disparagement as possible. Julie Wyman‘s film, Buoyant, uses the artistic political work that the Padded Lilies perform in their swim routines as the basis through which to explore the ways in which science and the arts can come together to describe the nature of fat. 395 A much longer film that Langlois‘ Fat Chicks: The Padded Lilies, Wyman‘s film is part documentary and part art film featuring footage of the Lilies as they rehearse, prepare, 393 Marilyn Wann in Langlois 394 Carla Rice comments, ―For many women, the body is a mirror of the self. It is also an object that women become profoundly alienated from. This paradox leads many of us to experience our bodies as a primary site of conflict and distress.‖ Rice 48 395 Julie Wyman, Buoyant (New York: Women Make Movies, 2004) 268 and perform on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in conjunction with footage of Wyman familiarizing herself with a ―dry stroke‖ machine, which simulates the body‘s movements while swimming through ropes and pulleys. There are also portions of the film that involve animated drawings, created by Wyman, of mathematical curves, calculations of the volume of a curved object, and two-dimensional human figures (The Padded Lilies and Wyman). Many of these sections of the film were given a voice-over of a British woman narrating sections of Archimedes‘ mathematical formulations about volume and buoyancy of objects and bodies in water. Archimedes‘ work on buoyancy and volume structure the visual imagery in Buoyant by creating a conceptual framework through which to view fat bodies in a neutral way. Buoyant opens with a scene in which we see black and white footage of Wyman dressed in a long swim suit (shoulders to mid-thighs), bathing cap, and goggles, trying to balance herself in the multiple ropes of a ―dry stroke swimulator‖; over the course of the rest of the film, there are several more scenes of Wyman engaged with this contraption that looks old-fashioned to suit her choice of attire. In each of the following scenes, Wyman is better able to fit into and onto the ropes, with help from anonymous figures in the background. Near the end of the film we finally see Wyman using the swimulator for its apparently intended purpose of mimicking the feeling of being lifted by a body of water while practicing one‘s freestyle swim strokes. These scenes end up being the most awkward, or awkwardly self-conscious of the film, in contrast with the footage of the Padded Lilies and the animated drawings of mathematical calculations, bubbles, and fat human figures, all of which feel less staged and melodramatic than the swimulator scenes. 269 As a link between the first scene of Wyman interacting with the swimulator and the earliest scene of the Padded Lilies rehearsing in a hotel pool in Los Angeles prior to their debut on The Tonight Show, the narrator‘s voice speaks of Archimedes‘ discovery that greater buoyancy comes from greater surface area. Because buoyancy is theorized via the notion in physics that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, Archimedes found that the smaller a body or object in a body of water, the less the amount of water that will push back up at the body or object, working to make it float. Thus, larger bodies cause larger areas of water to push it up, making fatter bodies able to float more easily than thinner ones. During this voice-over, we see the members of the Padded Lilies rehearsing in a pool, and then walking out of it to go to the adjacent hot tub. As the women move from water to dry land, two-dimensional drawings appear on the screen, over their bodies, tracing their large mounds of flesh in circular shapes. As the scene progresses, the film footage fades out and the figural shapes turn into bubbles, floating upward as if in water. The scene then changes to a close-up image of bubbling water, and as the animation fades up and out of the image, it is replaced by drops of oil moving from the bottom of the screen to the top, demonstrating that oil – a type of fat – is lighter in density that water. This visual passage is accompanied by Archimedes‘ description of the specific density of fat, and the observation that he was able to come up with his theories about the physics of volume, density, and buoyancy while taking frequent baths. Thus the water/ bathing link is completed by Wyman in terms of visual culture, science and mathematics, and political activism; this link is exploited multiple times during the film, as different aspects of the Padded Lilies‘ lives as swimming fat 270 activists are juxtaposed with images of Wyman struggling to swim on dry land and the words of the ancient Greek physicist. As should now be clear, there are several layers of visual and textual work happening in Wyman‘s Buoyant. Not simply a documentary of the Padded Lilies in the style of Langlois‘ film, Buoyant is an artistic exploration in its own right of the ways in which fat, water, and bodies interact in aesthetic and scientific cultural spaces, historically and in contemporary society. Even though there is much to attend to in Wyman‘s film in terms of visual and audio work, the central theme of the dignity of fat bodies and physical movement brings the seemingly disparate elements together. Wyman described her motivation behind making the film as ―the exuberant possibility of a fat body that literally and culturally rises, like cream, to the top.‖ 396 Wyman‘s enthusiasm in exploring this notion of fat bodies is particularly apparent in a scene in Buoyant in which several members of the Padded Lilies are shown in a white room, draped in white cloths and robes, putting on makeup and discussing their relationships to their fat bodies. The overall scene was clearly staged, as each woman wears a similar white garment/ cloth draped over their body and most of the women are filmed sitting around a small white- draped round table in the center of which stands several tall white calla lily flowers. This is the most explicit interview scene in the film, as the women around the table speak about the motivation for their participation in the water dancing group, and their life-long relationships with their bodies and with their identities as fat women. The opening shot of this scene is of a fat body, specifically the fat stomach and hips of one of the Padded 396 Julie Wyman quoted in Trish Charles, ―Exploding Myths: Hartford Filmmaker Has a Different Point of View,‖ The Observer: The Magazine of the University of Hartford (Winter 2005). Retrieved 11 February 2010, <http://www.hartford.edu/NewsEvents/ObserverPast/ObserverSpring05/feature/sffeature1.html> 271 Lilies, being massaged by another fat woman. Several times during the course of the discussion, while the other members of the group talk around the table in the background, the camera pans in and closely focuses on the body of the woman being massaged. Feminine hands are seen moving smoothly over stretch-marked skin, around and around, over the wide surface area of the subject‘s stomach and hips. The images are remarkably intimate not simply because they are close-up to naked skin that we don‘t usually see, except perhaps in swimming pools and on beaches, but because of the close interpersonal contact between the masseuse and the woman receiving the massage. The stroking hands are strong and tender, aggressive but not violent; they move unhesitatingly across the surface of a body most Americans wouldn‘t want to look at, let alone touch, and the intimacy is further heightened as we watch the hands pour more oil over the subject‘s skin and continue to rub it into her body. As we watch this woman‘s fat body being massaged, Sheffield, sitting at the round table, calls water the ―antidote to gravity.‖ 397 She goes on to describe water as the only medium through which humans can gain a sense of suspension and flight their own, and as such is a reprieve from the physical and metaphorical weight of one‘s body in the world. The juxtaposition of these words about the magical buoyancy of water with the images of a set of hands deeply massaging a fat, fleshy body bring home Wyman‘s notion of fat as a substance and identity that ―rises to the top,‖ as a productive and positive attribute rather than a negative one. Wyman has noted that her interest in creating films centers upon exploring those subjects that do not fit into traditional classifications of legitimate subjecthood in 397 Sheffield in Wyman, Buoyant 272 contemporary culture, whether fat women such as the Padded Lilies, or the weight lifter Cheryl Haworth, the subject of Wyman‘s next film project. 398 She comments, I'm always interested in people who fall between the categories, who force us to rethink those categories. I notice people who don't meet our expectations of what is beautiful or what is appropriate. I keep notes on the ones I think have some potential to break through the stereotypes. 399 The question of what is appropriate in shifting circumstances is in large part what Buoyant investigates. Wyman contrasts the ways in which fat bodies have been conventionally conceived by presenting them as the focus of and inspiration for scientific and artistic cultural innovations; by linking ancient Greek physicist Archimedes‘ tenets about buoyancy with contemporary synchronized swimming and fat activism, Wyman forces her audience to rethink the ways in which they see fat bodies as corporeal subjects that take up ―too much‖ space. In Buoyant, fat bodies become potentially heroic because they best demonstrate the scientific advances made by Archimedes while renegotiating the boundaries of subjectivity in contemporary culture. 398 Wyman quoted in Susanne Rockwell, ―Weightlifter Documentary Questions Fit vs. Fat Theory,‖ Spotlight: A Lens into Multimedia (University of California, Davis, 2008). Retrieved 11 February 2010, <http://www.ucdavis.edu/spotlight/0308/documentary.html> 399 Wyman quoted in Charles 273 Chapter Three Images Figure 3.1. Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin, Women En Large, 1994. Figure 3.2. Laurie Toby Edison, April Miller, Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes. San Francisco: Books in Focus, 1994. 274 Figure 3.3. Laurie Toby Edison, Debbie Notkin, Large Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes. San Francisco: Books in Focus, 1994. Figure 3.4. Phoenix Featherwomon, Portrait of Harvest Brown, Cover of Lesbian Connection 20:1, July/ August 1997. Courtesy of the Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University. 275 Figure 3.5. Phoenix Featherwomon, Portrait of Harvest Brown, Cover of Lesbian Connection 20:1, July/ August 1997. Courtesy of the Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University. Figure 3.6. Diana Lee, Solstice III, Cover of Lesbian Connection 26:4, January/ February 2004. Courtesy of the Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University. 276 Figure 3.7. Diana Lee, Solstice III, Cover of Lesbian Connection 26:4, January/ February 2004. Courtesy of the Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University. Figure 3.8. Cover Image, Fat Girl: A Zine For Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, Issue #1, 1994. 277 Figure 3.9. Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #7, 1997. Figure 3.10. Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #7, 1997. 278 Figure 3.11. Laura Johnston, Potty Training, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #4, 1995. Figure 3.12. Laura Johnston, Potty Training, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #4, 1995. 279 Figure 3.13. Kitchen Slut Picnic, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #6, 1996. Figure 3.14. Kitchen Slut Picnic, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #6, 1996. 280 Figure 3.15. Kitchen Slut Picnic, Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #6, 1996. Figures 3.16 and 3.17. ―Fat Girl Roundtable,‖ Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #1, 1994. 281 Figure 3.18. ―Fat Girl Roundtable,‖ Fat Girl: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them #1, 1994. 282 Figure 3.19. Laura Aguilar, In Sandy’s Room, Photograph, 1989/ 1993. Figure 3.20. Laura Aguilar, Three Eagles Flying, Photograph, 1990. 283 Figure 3.21. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #1, 1996. Courtesy of the Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Figure 3.22. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #4, 1996. Courtesy of the Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. 284 Figure 3.23. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #5, 1996. Courtesy of the Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Figure 3.24. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #6, 1996. Courtesy of the Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. 285 Figure 3.25. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #9, 1996. Courtesy of the Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Figure 3.26. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #12, 1996. Courtesy of the Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. 286 Figure 3.27. Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #13, 1996. Courtesy of the Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Figure 3.28. Laura Aguilar, Stillness #15, 1999. Image from Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2008. 287 Figure 3.29. Laura Aguilar, Stillness #18, 1999. Image from Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2008. Figure 3.30. Laura Aguilar, Motion #55, 1999. Image from Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2008. 288 Figure 3.31. Laura Aguilar, Motion #56, 1999. Image from Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2008. Figure 3.32. Laura Aguilar, Motion #53, 1999. Image from Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2008. 289 Figure 3.33. Laura Aguilar, Motion #58, 1999. Image from Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2008. Figure 3.34. Kina Williams, Big Burlesque Dancers, n.d. Image from ―Big Burlesque Dancers Personal Portfolios,‖ BigBurlesque.com. Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.bigburlesque.com/> 290 Figure 3.35. Kina Williams, Big Burlesque, n.d. Image reproduced in Heather McAllister, ―Embodying Fat Liberation,‖ The Fat Studies Reader. Eds., Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Figure 3.36. Kina Williams, Heather McAllister as Reva Lucian of Big Burlesque, Photograph, c.2005-2007. Image from BigBurlesque.com, Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.bigburlesque.com/> 291 Figure 3.37. Kina Williams, Heather McAllister as Reva Lucian of Big Burlesque, Photograph, c.2005-2007. Image from BigBurlesque.com, Retrieved 19 February 2010, <http://www.bigburlesque.com/> Figure 3.38. Peter Stern, The Padded Lilies, 2001. Image from William J. Fabrey, ―Big News,‖ Radiance: The Magazine for Large Women (Winter 2001). Retrieved 11 February 2010, <http://www.radiancemagazine.com/issues/2001/winter_01/big_news.htm> 292 Figure 3.39. Peter Stern, The Padded Lilies, 2001. Image from Allen Steadham, ―Q & A With The Padded Lilies,‖ Without Measure, the International Size Acceptance Association Newsletter (April 2001). Retrieved 11 February 2010, < http://www.size- acceptance.org/without_measure/wom_archive/wom_04_2001/wom0401_page3.html> Figures 3.40 and 3.41. Posters from Esther Williams Films, Easy to Love (1953) and Million Dollar Mermaid (1952). Images reproduced in ―Esther Williams Magazine, Videotape, and Sheet music Covers,‖ Esther-Williams.com. Retrieved 13 February 2010, <http://www.esther-williams.com/magazine_covers.htm> 293 Figure 3.42. Les Toil, The Padded Lilies, 2003. Image from ―The Padded Lilies,‖ ToilGirls.com. Retrieved 11 February 2010. <http://www.toilgirls.com/pinups/lilies.html> Figure 3.43. The Padded Lilies, n.d. Image from Padded Lilies: Synchronized Swimming, Body-Acceptance, Fat-Empowerment, and Fitness at any Size. Retrieved 10 February 2010, <http://paddedlilies.com/> 294 Figure 3.44. Peter Stern, The Padded Lilies, 2001. Image from Allen Steadham, ―Q & A With The Padded Lilies,‖ Without Measure, the International Size Acceptance Association Newsletter (April 2001). Retrieved 11 February 2010, <http://www.size- acceptance.org/without_measure/wom_archive/wom_04_2001/wom0401_page3.html> 295 Conclusion Revisiting/ Revisioning Excessive Bodies, 2003-2007 Tee Corinne: Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives In the spring of 2006, lesbian photographer Tee Corinne sent a compact disc with more than a hundred digital color photographs to her friends and artist and art historian colleagues with an accompanying essay than explained her final project. Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives (2003-2005) was an artistic undertaking incredibly similar to and yet unlike any Corinne had created before; as with much of Corinne‘s career, the photographic series depicted lesbians, Corinne herself and her former lover Beverly Brown, in intimate connections with one another and their bodies that didn‘t necessarily conform to conventional notions of beauty. As with so much of her other work over the past thirty-plus years, Corinne wrote in detail about the processes she used during the project‘s creation (photographic and personal) and her intentions in making this new work in the accompanying essay. Unlike her previous work, however, this series was entirely digital, entirely color, and was highly manipulated using computer software to create the look Corinne sought to achieve. Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives was poignant, like much of Corinne‘s work in lesbian communities over the years, in large part because she was so close to the primary figure depicted in it, her former lover Beverly Brown. At the same time, however, this project had a depth of irony and intensity unlike her other work because just after Brown died and Corinne was finishing this series, Corinne herself was diagnosed with cancer and would die a few months after distributing her disc of images. Indeed, her diagnosis was what prompted her to finish the series when she did and to 296 distribute it in such an unusual way for the well-established, even legendary, lesbian artist. Thus Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives became Corinne‘s unintentionally last photographic series, one which informs and is influenced by many of Corinne‘s other photographs and picture-taking processes I have discussed earlier in this dissertation. Corinne‘s Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives is a rich series in terms of its innovative ways of envisioning the living and failing lesbian body, the body that reminds each of us of our own mortality, and that can be so difficult to approach and view in conventional conditions. Corinne‘s mode of visualization here, however, reforms the deteriorating body into a fascinating, lush, and productive subject that might reimagine the pain of the last months, weeks, and days of life. Corinne began the project of photographing Brown and herself some time after Brown was originally diagnosed with colon cancer in 2003. At the time, the two women had been lovers for more than fourteen years; Brown‘s prognosis was that she would live for another year and half at the most. 400 Corinne wanted to create a project that had a greater immediacy than black and white film photography did, in large part because of the limited time Brown and she would likely have left together. Thus after the initial diagnosis, Corinne began the process of learning to use a digital camera, manipulate digital images with Adobe Photoshop computer software, and to print the digital photographs to her liking. 401 She then began to take photographs of Brown alone, the two 400 Tee Corinne, ―Introduction: Colored Pictures, from the Series ‗Cancer in Our Lives,‘‖ Queer Cultural Center. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> 401 Corinne, ―Introduction: Colored Pictures, from the Series ‗Cancer in Our Lives‘‖ 297 of them together, and some of herself alone using the new techniques. Corinne called the resultant photographs ―collaborative‖; she wrote, It does not matter which of us is behind the camera or if we use a self-timer. They are shaped by who we are, how we are responding to these constantly changing realities, and who we have been individually and together over the past sixteen years. 402 This collaborative process of photographing was not new to Corinne‘s artistic vision, nor to her relationship with Brown. Over the decade and a half that they were together as lovers, they created a large body of portrait work and of their relationship as they changed over time. In Corinne‘s accompanying essay for Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, she recounted in both words and images the photographic relationship that she had had with Brown over the years within the larger context of her photographic career and her process of taking portraits and double self- portraits with her lovers since 1975. Particularly important to Corinne in such photographs was her desire to provide evidence in the images that the two subjects were lesbians in a relationship with one another. 403 In describing her and Brown‘s mode of operation in creating the earlier double self-portraits (Figures 4.1-4.4), Corinne wrote, Beverly loved appearing in double portraits with me and we often played in front of the camera. Frequently we used a mirror so that the picture would announce not only our lesbianism, but also that one of the subjects was the photographer. 404 402 Corinne, ―Introduction: Colored Pictures, from the Series ‗Cancer in Our Lives‘‖ 403 Tee Corinne, ―Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in Our Lives,‖ Essay distributed with photographic series of the same name via compact disc. Republished with sample images at Queer Cultural Center. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teeessay.html>. Corinne‘s essay included photographs and was composed of five sections, entitled ―Making Relationships Visible,‖ ―Crisis,‖ ―My Beautiful Friend,‖ ―Beverly‘s Leavetaking,‖ and ―Later.‖ 404 Corinne, ―Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in Our Lives‖ 298 We see these techniques taken up once again in the Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath series (see Figures 4.5-4.8). 405 Most of these images demonstrate an exploration of Brown‘s changing bodily form and emotional self, as well as the relationship between her and Corinne. Figure 4.7, however, is one of several individual self-portraits that Corinne took in this series of images. Corinne produced similar compositions of herself quite literally behind the camera over her career; in this one she photographed herself in a mirror in order to create a portrait that is about photography, about the process and the result at once. In this image we can just barely see her eyes over the upper edge of the digital camera. The camera‘s lens hasn‘t exactly become a metaphor for the photographer‘s eye, but it does multiply its capacity to see, so that Corinne now has an eye that can record and manipulate and display a scene to others as well. In framing her forearms, hands, and the portion of her face we can see in this image, all colored in deep purplish-oranges, with an outline of the bright turquoise blue used for the camera, Corinne made an image both representational and abstract, about the theory and practice of seeing as a profession. In several photographs, the two women are shown physically loving one another, kissing passionately in close-ups and three-quarter length poses (Figures 4.5-4.6). Figure 4.6 shows a ferocity in that passion, an intensity that perhaps comes from the limited time they expected to have together in the future. Corinne‘s choice of coloration in this photograph emphasizes the point of connection in the kiss, as the colors of the image 405 The images produced in Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives do not have descriptive titles, but are rather titled with a combination of letters and numbers, such as H4_0864e , likely representing the image number given to each photograph by the digital camera Corinne used. While arguable these titles are as subjective as any visual representation labeled Untitled or Portrait #1 by any other artist, these titles can read with some difficulty in a lengthy discussion. As such, I will primarily be using figure numbers and/or sequential titles (e.g., ―the first image discussed here‖) in my analysis here. 299 intensify around Corinne and Brown‘s heads, with hot pinks and bright glowing blues tracing their profiles and hair while their faces and hands remain relatively naturalistic in color. Indeed, this is one of the few images in the series that makes such wide use of naturalistic colors to depict the two women; it is also one of a few that is not very grainy in texture, which can obscure the details of the two figures. Instead, here Corinne created a grainier texture in the background, which causes the figures with their smooth skin and clothing to pop out at the viewer, as if the force of the two women coming together to share this kiss was simultaneously depicted in the color and texture of the image. By comparison, the kiss shown in Figure 4.5 is delicate and sensitive, a close-up image of a quiet, contemplative act. The overall blue color gives this image a sense of coolness rather than fiery passion, although the flares of orange color seem to refer to a greater passion below the surface. The similarity of the colors in the foreground and background force the viewer to spend more time looking closely at the image in order to understand what is being depicted than in Figure 4.6. This need for a greater attention to detail is reiterated in the close cropping of the photograph, in its focus on Corinne and Brown‘s faces. Brown‘s fingers, gently touching the side of Corinne‘s face heightens the sense of delicacy and intimacy of the image, and subtly points to the touching of their lips. While the images in this series are not hand-colored in the traditional sense of an artist adding color to an individual photograph or print on paper, they are hand-colored through computer software. Corinne‘s choice to manipulate the images through a software program mirrors her use of solarization in many of her earlier black and white film photographs. The effects of the coloration of the images in Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath very much resembles the formation of abstract shapes and color patches 300 in the process of solarization on paper photographic prints (see Figures 4.9-4.11). Several of the images in the series look ―inside-out‖ in terms of color, as if the naturalistic colors of the photographs had been swapped out for their reverse or complimentary colors. The grainy texture in many of the images also replicates the textures often seen in solarized prints. The combination of seemingly reverse coloration and the rough textures in Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath also act in much the same way that the solarization effects did in Corinne‘s earlier black and white prints. They distort the original image to the extent that the viewer needs to spend more time looking closely at the images in order to see what is being depicted in each. Thus they create a sense of both intimacy and privacy in the relationship between viewer and image, and for the subjects of the photographs. These images are eye-catching and visually compelling, but they are also complicated and intensely-filled with visual and emotional information. In comparison to the emotions depicted in the previous images, Figure 4.8 shows a much more dejected couple. Corinne has photographed her and Brown in a three- quarter length pose; though they are standing up, Brown in particular appears slumped, her shoulders sagging and her head twisted just to the left. They are both nude and Corinne stands behind Brown, lightly hugging her waist to provide physical and moral support. Her other hand grasps Brown‘s open palm raised from the elbow in solidarity and/ or as a sign of strength. The doubling of the two aging female bodies also provides the image with a visualizable element of support; they are of the same height and the same color range. Corinne‘s body melds into Brown‘s, especially in the hip and thigh area, and at the same time provides a barrier between Brown and the background, stopping the process of her fading away completely. It appears that Corinne is looking 301 directly at the camera while Brown stares out just to the side of it, looking off into space with a blank stare that embodies a deep loss of hope. Even though Corinne‘s face shows a similar set of emotions, her chin is slightly raised in a momentary look of defiance, as if to say, yes, we‘ve been beaten down by cancer, but no, it won‘t have us quite yet. Similarly, even though Brown‘s facial expression betrays her depressed state of mind, the warm, bright colors Corinne used as highlights on her foregrounded body speak to a hidden depth of fire and will that is only barely evident on the surface. The warmth and light provided by these contrasting colors belies Corinne‘s personal name for the image, The Saddest Picture I’ve Ever Made, although the sentiment of this descriptive title can easily be understood in this image. 406 This image is one of many that Corinne and Brown collaborated on that clearly shows Brown‘s ostomy bag attached to the stoma on the left side of her belly. The photograph in Figure 4.8, like the other images here, uses a different color to highlight the presence of the ostomy bag, although here the color difference is more subtle than in many other of the images (see Figures 4.12-4.16). Looking closely we can see that Brown‘s portacath appears as a small dash of dark blue within the otherwise magenta glow of her upper right chest, matching the color of the ostomy bag. While these additions to Brown‘s body are clear in Figure 4.8, if looked at quickly they might be read as one of several patches of color on the subjects‘ bodies. It is the relationship between Brown and Corinne that is the primary subject of this photograph, whereas the ostomy bag takes on a much more central visual focus in several of the other images in the series in a way that cannot be overlooked or ignored at all. In the images in Figures 4.12 406 Corinne, ―Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in Our Lives‖ 302 through 4.16, the ostomy bag becomes a focal point of the composition, achieved in part through specific choices in coloration and in part through composition. Figures 4.12, 4.13, and 4.15 make the ostomy bag the central compositional element as Brown‘s arms and upper body stretch, twist, and fold in on themselves. There is no shying away from the matter of fact-ness of its presence; indeed, in each of the images it is captivating in its shape and color. It becomes an entrance into the images for the viewer, as it was an entrance into Brown‘s body; it is only after taking in the ostomy bag that the eye begins to move around the photograph to see the configuration of Brown‘s body in its lyrical postures. In Figures 4.12 and 4.15 the bag is also a way into the color scheme of the photographs, while in Figures 4.13, 4.14, and 4.16 the bag becomes the contrasting element in terms of color, drawing greater attention to itself even when it is not front and center in the composition. The ostomy bag was required to collect Brown‘s waste after a surgical procedure that cut out part of her colon and rerouted the rest through the stoma, or opening, in her torso. The stoma and the bag, as well as the other resultant physical remnants of the surgery, came to be increasingly visually significant for Corinne and Brown. Soon after this surgery, Brown asked Corinne to photograph her, thus beginning the project that would become Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives. Corinne wrote, [S]he [Brown] stressed the importance of showing the scars, the stoma where her intestines now opened out of the left side of her abdomen, the ostomy bag which collected her body waste, and the portacath, above her right breast, which permitted easy access to her vascular system. She knew these images were important for other women to see. She wanted to show what happened to her body in order to demystify the results of having colon resection surgery, of using a body appliance like an ostomy bag, and of having a portacath inserted under one‘s skin. 303 Brown‘s impetus for making these images tells us about the typical ways in which most people react to seeing individuals who have bodily configurations different from their own, whether due to temporary or chronic illness and disability, different body size, shape, skin color, or the like. In her analysis of the physiological, psychological, and social aspects of staring, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson elucidates the ways in which close looking provides a space for the circulation of knowledge about both the ―starer‖ and the ―staree‖ and about the structure of ―the normal‖ within our culture. She writes, Stares are urgent efforts to make the unknown known, to render legible something that seems at first glance incomprehensible. In this way, staring becomes a starer‘s quest to know and a staree‘s opportunity to be known. Whatever or whomever embodies the unpredictable, strange, or disordered prompts stares and demands putting order to apparent disarray, taming the world with our eyes. Because we are all starers, knowledge gathering is the most productive aspect of staring in that it can offer an opportunity to recognize one another in new ways. 407 Asking Corinne to document her changed and changing body as a teaching tool, Brown understood the power of creating and collecting knowledge through the process of visualization. Garland-Thomson writes that people with disabilities or otherwise extraordinary bodies can provoke staring because their embodiment ―confirm[s] the intransigence of our own bodies.‖ 408 Brown offered herself up to be looked at specifically as a woman, as a lesbian, as someone living with the daily ordeals of cancer, and also as artist‘s model and muse to a specifically female audience (at least initially) that had conventionally been designated as the ―staree‖ rather than the ―starer.‖ Thus the 407 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 15 408 Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look 58 304 photography project came to have even greater layers of meaning in terms of bodily empowerment for the subjects on both sides of the camera lens; not quite a celebration, but nonetheless an aesthetically-charged series of images that was about corporeal living and corporeal failing or dying, about communicating personal intimacies, bodily knowledge, and social queerness in the largest sense of the word as that which is out of the ordinary. One of the last images in Corinne‘s Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives series shows Brown in profile from her knees up, leaning forward as if in mid-jump off of a diving board into a swimming pool (Figure 4.17). Her hair is streaming behind her, and her arms are clasped together in front of her chest, elbows out to either side of her body. The edges of her back, from thighs to arms to her entire head of wavy hair, is outlined in a bright chartreuse green while the rest of her body is a deep purple fading into a cobalt blue. We can just make out her ostomy bag in profile on her lower abdomen because it too is highlighted with green. The background of the image is a dark green merging into purple and is quiet grainy in texture compared with Brown‘s smooth body. This smoothness is exaggerated by the long line of her body leaning diagonally forward in the image. Brown looks like she is floating, about to open her arms and fly through the air. This is unlike any of the other images in the series; it is the only one in which Brown does not seem grounded, standing or sitting solidly in the frame of the photograph. Here we glimpse her in mid-movement, as if she will soon fly out of sight, beyond the frame of the photograph and into space. While Corinne did not indicate if this was intentional, the image seems to eerily mimic, in visual form, the experiences Corinne had just after Brown died in October 2005. In the hours after 305 Brown‘s death, Corinne, who no longer lived with Brown, felt her presence several times; this includes one moment in which Corinne reported feeling that Brown‘s spirit entered her body while she was driving the day after Brown died. 409 The sense of movement captured in Figure 4.17 seems potentially aligned with an incorporeal body, a spirit floating through the world on her way out of it. It seems quite possible that Corinne included this image as a culminating one in her series of photographs because it expressed to her a feeling of freedom of Brown‘s ―warm presence and jubilant‖ spirit. 410 Whether or not this is the case, the image does seem to allude to its subject embracing death, rather than fighting against it. As such, it parallel‘s Corinne‘s own goal of finishing the project of Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives and distributing it among her friends and colleagues before dying herself. Corinne‘s generosity of spirit in terms of representing individuals and a lesbian community she so thoroughly defined herself and her work through is readily apparent in her last photographs. Conclusion In 1994 Black feminist theorist Evelynn Hammonds conceptualized a ―politics of articulation‖ for the status of black women‘s sexuality in her essay, ―Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.‖ Hammonds wrote, The appeal to the visual and the visible is deployed as an answer to the legacy of silence and repression. […] An appeal to the visual is not uncomplicated or innocent. As theorists we have to ask how vision is structured, and, following 409 Corinne, ―Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in Our Lives‖ 410 Corinne, ―Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in Our Lives‖ 306 that, we have to explore how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and speak in the world. […] But in overturning the ‗politics of silence‘ the goal cannot be merely to be seen: visibility in and of itself does not erase a history of silence nor does it challenge the structure of power and domination, symbolic and material, that determines what can and cannot be seen. 411 It seems possible to extend this notion from Hammond‘s context as it is applied to women of color to other marginalized subjects, in particular those featured in this dissertation, fat and lesbian subjects. Hammonds insightfully notes the troubling line between visibility and invisibility in subcultural communities; a traditional aspect of fat, feminist, and lesbian identity politics, the fight for visibility does not always account for the potential threat of being watched or the need for a restructuring of systems of the gaze and surveillance. Thus visibility can be a dangerous concept toward which to strive and struggle, entangling the previously marginalized and invisible subjects within a world of acute observation and policing, rather than freedom and acceptance. At the same time however, the urge by marginalized subjects to become visible, to be visualizable in a literal way through represetations and as a metaphor for social recognition or intelligibility, is entirely understandable. When human beings are overlooked in Western, specifically United States, culture, they are often dehumanized, forgotten, and/ or exploited as an ―other‖ that legitimates the norm and the ideal in terms of visualizable bodies and social identities. ―Out of sight, out of mind‖ is a cliché for a reason. The subjects analyzed within this dissertation demonstrate the tensions inherent in this in/visibility debate, as well as a variety of approaches to creating spheres of visibility 411 Evelynn Hammonds, ―Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,‖ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. (Summer/ Fall 1994, 6: 2/3) 561 307 within and for fat and lesbian communities through individual and community-oriented visual representations of the self. The approaches to visual representation described in these pages tend to fall into two general categories: those that work to show the fundamental ordinariness of fat and lesbian subjects through imagery that depicts them in the midst of their regular routines as they go about their daily lives and those that tease out and exploit the notions of danger and monstrosity so freely applied to these subjects over the past many decades in the United States, in order to show their extraordinary bodies, relationships, and identities engaged in activities that might scandalize, frighten, and/or repulse some audiences. There is value in each of these methodologies at the same time that there is potential for greater policing and/or normalization for fat and lesbian subjects in these two styles of visualization. Rosemarie Garland Thomson characterizes these two approaches to visual representation as the rhetoric of the ―exotic‖ and the rhetoric of the ―realistic‖ when she describes the ways in which photographic images depicting people with disabilities have been formulated in United States history. 412 412 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ―Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,‖ The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Eds., Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001) 342-344. Garland Thomson writes, ―The category of disability exists as a way to exclude the kinds of bodily forms, functions, impairments, changes, or ambiguities that call into question our cultural fantasy of the body as a neutral, compliant, and predictable instrument of some transcendent will. Moreover, disability is a broad term within which cluster ideological categories as varied as sick, deformed, ugly, old, maimed, afflicted, abnormal, and debilitated – all of which disadvantage people by devaluing bodies that do not conform to cultural standards‖(348). I have made liberal use of Garland Thomson‘s writings on representations of and visual processes related to people with disabilities in this dissertation not because fatness and lesbianism are seen as necessarily disabling conditions, nor because there is an easy and complete one-to-one transfer of the material learned through/ about disability studies and culture onto fat and lesbian theories and culture, but because disability studies in general, and Garland Thomson in particular, articulates a mode of interpretation that focuses on connecting the material conditions of living in bodies with representational strategies taken by the mainstream and subcultures to depict people with ―non-normative‖ bodies via theories of vision, both physical and socio-cultural. This kind of analysis is an ideal method of approach to the current project, and Garland Thomson‘s writings on the construction of disability seem extendable in the creation of a 308 The strategic use of a rhetoric of realism ―avoids differentiation and arouses identification, positioning the viewer and viewed on the same spatial plane, often as equals.‖ 413 While seemingly assimilationist at first glance, Garland Thomson‘s evaluation of realism as a visual tactic actually targets it as a politically powerful method of visualization because it encourages ―practices of equality‖ for marginalized subjects. 414 The visual representations that I have looked at here that feature fat and lesbian subjects in ordinary situations were made primarily for a viewership composed of fat and lesbian individuals. Seeing one‘s body as ordinary and familiar, rather than as perpetually marked and mocked can be powerful for people whose identities cannot usually be taken for granted within the dominant culture. 415 People who are glared at, dismissed, and overlooked so much of the time, sometimes need a break and a place in which to view themselves as mundane citizens in a less oppressive world. Exotic imagery fosters the representation of the subject as ―large, strange, and unlike the [mainstream] viewer,‖ Garland Thomson argues; they insist ―on the empowerment of the transgressive, even at the expense of – or perhaps because of – distancing the spectator from the spectacle.‖ 416 As we have seen by looking at a wide- framework through which to understand other formulations of marginalized and under-/ mis-represented groups (with consideration given to historical-, cultural-, and identity-specificity). 413 Garland Thomson, ―Seeing the Disabled‖ 363 414 Garland Thomson, ―Seeing the Disabled‖ 372 415 Eli Clare, ―Gawking, Gaping, Staring: Living in Marked…Bodies,‖ lecture given at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon on April 22, 2010. 416 Garland Thomson, ―Seeing the Disabled‖ 360; Robert McRuer, another important contemporary Disability Studies theorist challenges Garland Thomson‘s assessment of ―realistic‖ imagery and instead deepens her exploration of the exotic or transgressive mode of visual representation in his chapter entitled, ―Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies,‖ 309 range of images, performances, and events in this dissertation, visual representations that evoke and reclaim the danger and excessive force of queerness and fatness can be productive by deconstructing the very notion of danger and monstrosity as seen by dominant culture and appropriate the concepts for use by fat and lesbian subcultures. Not only can this help create a sense of pride within marginalized identities, but it can manifest in powerfully aggressive and outspoken methods of confrontation for fat and lesbian individuals and communities. 417 The ―distancing of the spectator from the spectacle‖ is productive in itself, because it potentially reformulates the relationship between the viewer and the viewed from one of consumption and objectification to one of surprise and discomfort on the part of the viewer. Embracing danger and monstrosity is an empowerment strategy that can push the dominant culture off-kilter, and (at the very least temporarily) force it to reconsider its modes of oppression. As these strategies of visualization tell us, no one image or group of images ever tells a singular story about its subjects (those creating the images and those depicted in the images); cultural meanings and interpretations are much more complicated and ambiguous than an either/ or classification allows. This ambiguity is particularly alive and well in the cultural constructions of what it means to be fat and lesbian in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The history of visual representations I have in his book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006). 417 For example, the theme of the 2010 annual conference for NOLOSE, an organization which is composed of and aimed at fat and queer transgender and cis-gender women and their allies, is ―Fat Panic!‖ The scope of this theme is wide-ranging, and in asking for performances and workshops for the conference centered on the theme of Fat Panic! the organizers suggested submitting topics that both interrogate the use of the notion in dominant culture (i.e., the ―obesity epidemic‖) and those that foster its embodiment and use by radical fat-positive activists (i.e., a flash mob of fat women wearing only their bathing suits congregating in downtown San Francisco). NOLOSE, ―Call for Proposals,‖ Retrieved 26 April 2010, <http://nolose.org/10/call4proposals.php> 310 narrated here focuses on a varied group of subjects that have sought, above all, to take back the project of self-definition in the face of the underrepresentation, misrecognition, and erasure of their lives and identities within dominant culture. They have willfully taken up the challenge of in/visibility for fat and lesbian female bodies in productive ways to simultaneously challenge the hegemonic structures of silence and absence for those subjects who do not fit within normative body ideals and visually articulate the self- defined bodily subjectivities of fat and lesbian women. Over the course of the forty years studied in the pages of this dissertation, many different forms and theories of visualization have been embodied by several subjects all too often believed to be invisible and unrepresentable as valuable, self-confident, socially important, and materially significant. While celebration and visibility have been major goals for some of the ―deviant‖ subjects here, others used their marginal status in productive ways to reclaim and even exploit the power of the monstrous, the excessive, and the dangerous. Both of these tactics fight the rhetoric of in/visibility so readily held up by the prejudices and oppressive practices of a dominant culture obsessed with a singular way of appearing and being in the world. By imaging the self as an intersection of competing and complementary identities that threaten to overwhelm and overdetermine the body, the visual representations described in this dissertation point to the connections and boundaries between visible and invisible corporeal subjectivities. The art and visual culture analyzed here also highlight the vehemence and passion with which the producers and some viewers of these images engage with fat and lesbian visual culture. That this passion can be simultaneously negative and positive, intimately personal and blatantly political, demonstrates the tension inherent in visual representations of fat and lesbian 311 subjects. That these representations are fundamentally about how fat dykes make themselves matter, how they both materialize in visual representations and how they mean within the larger social world, highlights the stakes of making these images for fat and lesbian subjects in the United States over the past forty years. 312 Conclusion Images Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4. Tee Corinne and Beverly Brown, Collaborative Self- Portraits, Photographs, from Left to Right respectively: 1989, 1990, 2004, 2004. Images from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teeessay.html> 313 Figure 4.5. Tee Corinne, H4_0864e, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> Figure 4.6. Tee Corinne, H5_1419d, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> 314 Figure 4.7. Tee Corinne, J0_1461c, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> Figure 4.8. Tee Corinne, J12_1059c, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> 315 Figure 4.9. Tee Corinne, G2_1381d, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> Figure 4.10. Tee Corinne, G8_0531h, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> 316 Figure 4.11. Tee Corinne, J11_0008d, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> Figure 4.12. Tee Corinne, D1_0516n, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> 317 Figure 4.13. Tee Corinne, F2_0511dd, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> Figure 4.14. Tee Corinne, F3_0514e, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> 318 Figure 4.15. Tee Corinne, F6_0515a, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> Figure 4.16. Tee Corinne, G10_0527d, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html> 319 Figure 4.17. Tee Corinne, L4_1047f, from Scars, Stoma, Ostomy Bag, Portocath: Picturing Cancer in our Lives, Digital Image, 2003-2005. Image from Queer Cultural Center Online Exhibit. Retrieved 17 March 2010, <http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/TeeCorinnePgs/teethumb.html 320 Bibliogaphy ―About Us: History,‖ Affirmations: People Building Community. Retrieved 25 March 2010, <http://www.goaffirmations.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_affirmations> ACT-UP New York, ―NYC Information,‖ ActUpNY.org. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Snider, Stefanie (author)

Core Title Envisioning bodily difference: refiguring fat and lesbian subjects in contemporary art and visual culture, 1968-2009

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 08/02/2010

Defense Date 05/10/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,Art History,fat,gender,lesbian,OAI-PMH Harvest,sexuality,visual culture

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Meyer, Richard E. (committee chair), Halberstam, Judith (committee member), Howe, Eunice (committee member)

Creator Email ssnider@usc.edu,stef1213@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3245

Unique identifier UC1132132

Identifier etd-Snider-3775 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-362633 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3245 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Snider-3775.pdf

Dmrecord 362633

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Snider, Stefanie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu