Friday 18 March 2011

Fatshion

I have to say, I've little interest in clothes. This wasn't always so. Way back I was really big on self expression through clothes. Then as time continued, I found myself increasingly caught between my vision of a slim canvass that I could never make manifest and the reality of what was available to wannabe fat style icons.

The implosion came when I threw a strop and dropped out in a tizz, I just couldn't deal with this anymore.

I tell you this hardly interesting little tale is to explain how surprising it is that even though my style impulse continues to languish in oblivion (as far as gladrags goes) I still find the fatshion scene, specifically on tumblr to be a compelling and moving view.

It's not that I feel to go and check in with any regularity, as I do with the wordy fatsphere but when ever I do for some reason or other, its arresting.

It seems more accessible and more effortlessly diverse than the wordysphere although dealing with images will bring that out more clearly there does appear to be a greater representation of fatz of all varieties.

It sets up an alternative view, rather than reacting to a redundant one. It looks at the fat body and deals with stuff through that. It doesn't so much bypass the "oppression narrative", but by looking at it looks forward, rather than looking back at fat hate and trying to tunnel out with 'evidence' of what has no basis above the desire to hate, full stop.

It deals directly with peeling off the layers of fat phobia by coming to terms with the vision ahead.

The equivalent of what a lot of the wordysphere does imposed on to fatshion, would be to set it in a clothes store that only went up to a size 14 and then attempted to use its stock to explain why this is not good for sizes above.

It just creates for fatz using our experiences to write fat acceptance. In doing so it restores  more of the vibrancy and character we've lost to the annihilation and erasure of the crusade.

In a way its an embodyment of the normal eating/intuitive eating process where you bypass a mind overloaded with unbalancing negativity and go straight into setting up a positive realitionship with food by doing so establish a new positive loop.

Rather than battling old negative ones within the terms set by that negativity. Giving the chance for it to be at least be tamed by that abandonment and withdrawal of energy.

My combative side, which dislikes a situation where there is only one point of view pretending to be the only one possible when it is not. Even more when it splits itself in two and assigns a bit to those who oppose it because it beliefs that is its privilege.

Then claims this is a "debate" because it is rightly ashamed of its own hating view, like spraying perfume on a turd.

Engaging with it as if it is anything but what it is enobles it and allows it to continue to set our agenda, in its own absence, power indeed.

Power it does not deserve on any level.

The proof of that is fat people referencing themselves and the normalcy of that for all people, in doing so, they reclaim it for themselves as a matter of course.

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