[Feature Image: A young child is smiling while being held up by the arm by mother and father on each side. Flickr.com/Jin.Dongjun ]
The Maine of my childhood was a very homogenous state in terms of race and really of class, at least in my small town. For the most part, everyone I knew looked like me. Their families looked like mine. We usually practiced the same religion and even when we didn’t, we knew the language. Even so, I was different. I was the weird kid, quirky, and the other kids bullied me for it. Later as I branched out into the world outside of Maine, I met others like me. And it was a life-confirming experience. Finding a community shifted how I saw myself in the world and gave me the courage to keep on being, even when I moved back to Maine and felt that same sense of isolation. Just the knowing that somewhere out there beyond the borders of my state existed others like me helped me in the process of learning to accept myself.
But I learned something just as valuable when I got out of Maine. There were others who experienced the world in vastly different ways than not just me, but those I knew in Maine. Their struggles sometimes intersected with my struggles adding another dimension to their journey. I wasn’t alone in feeling isolated and I knew that it was not something I wanted to perpetuate so I worked towards making sure that my isms included inclusion.
When I first began to study feminism formally the sense of not seeing myself marred my initial excitement. Where were the poor and working class women I grew up with in the pages of The Feminine Mystique? My experience didn’t lend itself to the velvet prison described by Friedan. The women I knew didn’t stay at home cooking dinner for their husbands or raising their children. They worked. And often did those things after work. They were not suffering from boredom, but exhaustion. While I understood that the stories in the book were valid, I looked for other kinds of women. Women I’d met in the kink scene. Women who were transgender. Women of color. They weren’t there in those early pages I read. I remember the relief I found when my excellent poet professor introduced to us Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Marilyn Fry, Gloria Anzaldua. I devoured the writings of Susie Bright and Nancy Friday. These women sometimes reflected back my own experience as a woman, but they also challenged me to get out of my skin.
Intersectional feminism absolutely helped me to find my own voice but it also taught me to listen. It taught me that my sisters were not just the ones who experienced my world. My sisters were all women.
[Featured Image: Person sitting indoors against a wall, they are holding a red poster on a frowning face. Pexels.com]
Have you ever felt burnt out? Have you ever felt like you just couldn’t go on doing what you’re doing? Have you ever felt like you hit a wall in your work or education, and that there must be something wrong with you?
Welcome to burnout, the feeling we get when we’ve reached our physical, mental, and/or emotional limits in our occupational work or schoolwork. As you might have gathered from the name of this less-than-glamorous state of being, burnout refers to the flame of a candle or a match reaching its end, extinguishing due to the sheer fact there isn’t anything left to burn. Burnout is primarily caused by stress in the spaces where you carry the most responsibilities, where everything becomes too overbearing to handle the way you might have been able to when you first started your new job or started taking classes. If you start to detach from your work, or feel like you can just never do well enough
Psychology Today describes the main signs of burnout in three major areas. The first area is physical and emotional exhaustion, which has symptoms including chronic fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, anger, and other physical symptoms, such as headaches, dizziness, heart palpitations, and gastrointestinal pain. The second area is cynicism and detachment, with symptoms such as loss of enjoyment, pessimism, isolation, and detachment. The final area, ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment, with signifiers including feelings of apathy and hopelessness, increased irritability, lack of productivity, and poor performance.
If you’re experiencing burnout at work, that can look like showing up late more and more often, falling asleep at work, getting angrier with coworkers or clients/customers more frequently and more intensely, feeling anxious about upcoming deadlines when you don’t typically have anxiety, turning work in late, calling out sick more and more, struggling to complete tasks you’ve previously mastered, so on and so forth.
[Feature Image: Photo of four people sitting on a bench against a light-colored wall. The person to the left has short white hair and is wearing a black sweater, blue shirt, brown skirt and black stockings and shoes. The person next to them on their right, is wearing a hat, a brown jacket, a blue shirt and has a white bag in front of them. The person to their right has short brown hair and is wearing a dark jacket, a blue shirt, blue jeans and white shoes. The person to the far right has short dark hair and is wearing a dark jacket and blue jeans. Source: CGP Grey]
For most of my life, and especially since coming into a fat identity, I have usually been one of the fattest people if not the fattest person in any given room I enter.
When I came into fat activism, I did it operating under the (false) assumption that my experience of fatness was the same—or at least similar, or perhaps comparable—as other fat people’s. The more my community and conversations expanded, particularly around experiences related to fatness and its intersections with and complications by race, gender, ability and especially size and shape, the clearer this became.
It would lead to confusion when I would see others I was in community with, others who shared a fat identity having experiences that I felt were not available to me—everything from sex and dating to clothing to seating to the ways our bodies were capable of moving. It took me a long time to unpack how different the fat experience is from body to body.
A product of the fat acceptance movement is a bigger and more diverse group of people embracing their bodies and claiming fat identity. There are so many reasons to claim fatness and so many ways to be fat. It’s an embodiment that is contextual depending on other variations like race, gender and ability especially. I don’t think that the destigmatizing and expanding the boundaries of fatness is necessarily a bad thing, but it can become complicated for me when the vast majority of these people are on the smaller end of the spectrum of fatness.
What do I mean by smaller fat people? This is a somewhat ambiguous term and is completely relevant on who is answering. Part of the ambiguity and flexibility of fat identity is that it can be relevant to so many different experiences. There is no hard and fast rule for this standard, but you might be able to decipher your position on the fat spectrum based on which of these experiences you relate to.
Here is some of the harm caused when fat communities focus on smaller fats.
1. It reimagines ideas of body—but not enough
In some ways, this can reify fat stigma and antagonism against larger fat people. When a bigger range of people begin to identify with fatness, but they all remain in a specific and smaller range, it can work to reformulate ideas of a standard and acceptable body size rather than integrate fat liberationist ideas of bodies and body size.
[Featured Image: A photo of a person standing outside. They have short dark hair, large, black and yellow earrings. They are wearing a green dress. They are smiling and standing under a wooden roof. Source: cheriejoyful]
This two year old article, To the Guy Flying a Confederate Flag in New England, started making the rounds again on social media after the white terrorist attack in Charlottesville, VA on August 12, 2017. The article, written by a white woman, does not even come close to capturing the anger-fear-disgust cocktail I experience when I see a confederate flag flying in New England. I am a Black, visibly Muslim person who’s been living DEEP in white New England since 2010. When I say deep, I mean that I’m living in Maine. When I say DEEP, I mean that, every year, the state of Maine trades off with New Hampshire and Vermont as being the whitest state in the nation. It took me 3.5 years of living in New England to finally spend time in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. After spending time in all three states, I made myself a certificate for having experienced the Trifecta of Whiteness.
When I tell people who live among Black people about life in Maine, they always ask two things: 1) there are Black people there?! and 2) what it’s like to live in Maine?! Maine, like much of New England, is a beautiful place. The landscape is a combination of ocean, rocky and beachy coastlines, mountains, and dense forests. The seafood will walk right up to you and tell you about yourself – that’s how fresh it is. I’ve made the conscious decision to stay in Maine (for the time being) because of this beauty.
[Feature Image: A photo of a person with short dark wavy hair. They are wearing a pinstripe short sleeved shirt. Their face is in profile. Source: Marilyn Roxie]
Let’s be real — the vast majority of dating advice is aggressively cisheteronormative. From popular magazines and dating advice books to talk shows and Bachelor Nation, we have a veritable dearth of suggestions on how cishet white able-bodied upper middle class folks can date each other within cishet, patriarchal structures. Fighting over the bill only to “let” the man pay, dressing in certain levels of revealing or put-togetherness for a certain date, when to engage in sex, when to say I love you, how to play “games,” the godforsaken “negging” — the scripts go as far as to label performing oral sex on a person with a vagina as “weak” or “lame,” while oral sex on a person with a penis can be considered “expected.” All of that is prescriptive, toxic nonsense.
Our humanity cannot be boiled down to a binary. There is a spectrum of gender, as well as a spectrum of sexuality, and there is also a full spectrum of personhood, needs, wants, desires, and abilities! Intersecting patriarchal constructs of gender, sexuality, race, ability, and beyond dictate what we’re supposed to want, and when.
[Image: A black and white photo of an interior with a large banner that says, Black Lives Matter. There are pictures on the wall below the banner. A person is standing in the center of the room. Another person is sitting on a chair. Source: rah.photography]
As someone with chronic illnesses, marching in the streets is just not accessible for me. Just because you can’t make it to a protest or direct action doesn’t mean you can’t be involved in activism. It’s ableist, sexist and otherwise problematic that protests are seen as the best, or even only, way to participate in social movements. Just like institutionalized racism is constant and not episodic, our activism needs to be constant and on many different fronts. Here are just a few ways that I have found to support The Movement for Black Lives, most of them can be done from bed.
1. Financial Support
As a disabled person I don’t have a lot of cash lying around to be able to give away. I do give what I can, but it is not much. If you do have money, give it. Just because you don’t have money doesn’t mean you can’t help raise it, though. It can be as small as sharing a fundraiser, or as large as writing a grant or planning a fundraiser. If you have a skill or talent you may be able to leverage that to help with raising money, for example making jewelry to sell, or offering resume writing services that can be auctioned off.
I think that a lot of times we don’t like to talk about the money needed for activism because capitalism is the worst, but money is crucial to the work that needs to get done whether for bail funds or helping to pay organizers. Also remember that part of white supremacy is white folks having more access to resources so I encourage my fellow white friends to think about that when figuring out how much money we can give.
The Body Is Not an Apology’s goal is to share the myriad ways human bodies unshackle the box of “beauty” and fling it wide open for all of us to access. Our goal is to redefine the unapologetic, radically amazing magnificence of EVERY BODY on this planet. When we do, we change the world! Join the movement and become a subscriber today! bit.ly/NoBodiesInvisible.
[Image: A photo of a child with a white baseball cap and blue jeans. They are carrying a large, red sign that says in white lettering, “We’re Not Criminals.”]
When I was nineteen years old, I ran away from home. I didn’t have much, only a suitcase filled with clothes, and a bag filled with letters from friends and family. I didn’t have any food, or money, nor an ID, so staying at shelters was almost impossible. When I was finally able to stay at a women’s shelter in the town of Ogden, I was asked for a background check, and had to leave when I couldn’t fill one out. I had been bouncing from couch to floor to bench like this for almost two years, when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was announced. In that evening my world completely changed, I was now not just an undocumented immigrant, but also a person filled with possibilities.
Now, five years later, the very program that saved my life seems to be ending. I think about my life without DACA, and the many ways that this program made it so that i could be the person who I am today. I think about the community that made this program possible, the very same community that continues to fight today for bigger brighter dreams, and I am a little less afraid and a lot angrier. Though this program saved my life, it also left many behind, including some of the people that fought for it to become a reality. Though this program saved my life, it also took so much from it, it made me a taxpayer without access to healthcare, a worker without access to education, another silent voice in a world filled with success stories.
I think about the last five years of my life, and I feel guilty, should I have done more? Should I have applied for Advanced Parole (a program within DACA that allowed undocumented folks to travel), and tried to go visit my family in Peru? Should I have climbed the capitalistic ladder of success and tried harder, worked harder, dreamed harder, dreamed better, become the “dreamer” that the media wanted? Climbing out of homelessness meant learning how to have a home, learning how to do the things that an abusive household doesn’t teach you: How to love softly, how to make space for others, and how to survive after surviving. It doesn’t teach you however, how to undo trauma and unlearn the oppressive behaviors that being undocumented has instilled in you. Though I deeply wish I had been able to do more, I also wish I had been able to do things exactly as I did them; the third part of the saying “Undocumented and Unafraid” is “Unapologetic”. And though I find it hard to convince myself that crossing these borders in the first place was worth it, I also now am settled with the fact that I am here.
The Body Is Not an Apology’s goal is to share the myriad ways human bodies unshackle the box of “beauty” and fling it wide open for all of us to access. Our goal is to redefine the unapologetic, radically amazing magnificence of EVERY BODY on this planet. When we do, we change the world! Join the movement and become a subscriber today! bit.ly/NoBodiesInvisible.
[Image: A person with long brown hair and pink sunglasses is in a car looking out the window. Source: Keirsten Marie]
Dear White Friend,
Maybe you’re not sure how you feel about being called “white”, and you’re pretty sure you and I are not friends. But we could be friends, or friends of friends…I saw your social media comment about how white privilege isn’t a thing, how all lives matter, and what about black-on-black crime anyway?
I hear you. I get it.
The first time I heard about white privilege was during a training I attended as part of my work with domestic violence survivors. We did an exercise where we all stood on a line in the center of the yard and took steps forward for every level of education we had, another step or two forward or back for income, a step back for being queer, a few steps forward for being white, a few back for being a person of color. At the end of the exercise, I was shocked to find myself standing on the privileged side of the line. Every fiber of my being resisted the idea that my life had benefits other folks didn’t have. My mind started complaining: “What about my eating disorder? I was molested as a child, you know! And bullied. My parents worked hard for their money. We sometimes had cereal for dinner. My life hasn’t been a piece of cake. Plus I’m a woman! I know what oppression is like–I’ve been put down by men my whole life. I’ve struggled! Hell, I’m still struggling.”
I believed that anyone who saw the whole of my failures and rejections could never say I’m privileged.
[Image: A photo of a person with long blonde hair blowing in the wind. They are wearing a red short-sleeved shit and wire-framed glasses. Behind them is blue water and blue sky with clouds. Source: Nicholas Erwin]
CW: surgery
In January of this year, I had a laparotomy. This is the fancy medical term for ‘an operation where the stomach is cut open’. Basically what happened was that I had developed a humongous ovarian cyst on my right ovary. These cysts are quite common, and normally they are removed with keyhole surgery. Mine was a bit too big for keyhole, however, so they had to go by the more traditional open surgery method. I now have a large scar right down the centre of my stomach, and one fewer cysts. It was a trade that I was more than happy to make.
I mention my laparotomy for an important reason. A couple of weeks after the surgery, I was talking to some loved ones about my recovery, and I mentioned that I was thinking about incorporating some light exercise into my day to help with the healing process.
If I were a thin person, I imagine that my words would have been met with a couple of “yeah, that’s a good idea”s and “but remember not to push yourself because you’re still recovering”s, and maybe a polite nod or two. But, because I am a fat person and I had just said the word “exercise”, the conversation abruptly changed from being about my recovery to being about me losing weight. The only slight attempt at a smooth segue was when somebody mentioned that the surgery might have been easier if the surgeons hadn’t had to cut through so much belly fat. Admittedly, that was a fair point.
[Image: A black and white photo of a person’s face partially covered by a mask. Source: Sodanie Chea]
The article was originally published on EverydayFeminism.com and is republished with permission.
“I want to say: we come from difference, Jonas,
You have been taught to grow out, I
have been taught to grow in.” – Lily Myers, “Shrinking Women”
It’s an early spring evening in Montreal, and my boyfriend and I are arguing about feminism on the metro (hello, my life). Today’s politically charged topic that’s highly sensitive to me and mostly only intellectual for my boyfriend (hello, love) is emotional labor.
Like many men I know, my boyfriend claims not to believe in the concept of emotional labor: the feminist idea that women – and other people that society labels “feminine” – are socialized to provide a vast array of emotional services for other people (usually men), most often without acknowledgement or pay.
Common examples include the social practice of random men telling women to smile in public– Why? She isn’t happy to see you; she doesn’t even know you! – the expectation for waitresses and airline hostesses to flirt on the job, and the higher pressure on mothers than fathers to take on the brunt of child-raising duties.
Less commonly discussed, but just as important, examples include the expectation for gay men to play the “gay best friend” character and for trans people to describe the shape of their genitals (answering the “have you had the surgery” question) to anyone who asks.
