Looking Queer

Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities

Dawn Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136380198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Looking Queer: Body Image in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities contains research, firsthand accounts, poetry, theory, and journalistic essays that address and outline the special needs of sexual minorities when dealing with eating disorders and appearance obsession. Looking Queer will give members of these communities hope, insight, and information into body image issues, helping you to accept and to love your body. In addition, scholars, health care professionals, and body image activists will not only learn about queer experiences and identity and how they affect individuals, but will also understand how some of the issues involved affect society as a whole. Dismantling the myth that body image issues affect only heterosexual women, Looking Queer explores body issues based on gender, race, class, age, and disability. Furthermore, this groundbreaking book attests to the struggles, pain, and triumph of queer people in an open and comprehensive manner. More than 60 contributors provide their knowledge and personal experiences in dealing with body image issues exclusive to the gay and transgender communities, including:

• exploring and breaking down the categories of gender and sexuality that are found in many body image issues
• finding ways to heal yourself and your community
• discovering what it means to "look like a dyke" or to "look gay"
• fearing fat as a sign of femininity
• determining what race has to do with the gay ideal
• discussing the stereotyped "double negative"--being a fat lesbian
• learning strategies of resistance to societal ideals
• critiquing "the culture of desire" within gay men's communities that emphasizes looks above everything elseRevealing new and complex dimensions to body image issues, Looking Queer not only discusses the struggles and hardships of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, but looks at the processes that can lead to acceptance of oneself. Written by both men and women, the topics and research in Looking Queer offer insight into the lives of people you can relate to, enabling you to learn from their experiences so you, too, can find joy and happiness in accepting your body.Visit Dawn Atkin's website at: http://home.earthlink.net/~dawn_atkins/

SECTION A: WOMEN, WIMMIN, WOMYN

PART 1: CONSTRUCTING OURSELVES

Beauty Is a Beast

Amy Edgington

We are told it lies

no deeper than a woman's skin.

We are told it lives

in someone else's eye.

We starve ourselves and pad our breasts,

bleach or burn our skins,

curl or straighten our hair,

because beauty must be domesticated—

wolves don't worry about their appearance;

there is no Miss Bear contest.

But underneath the clothes

and the attitudes that cage us,

something paces, wanting out.

A wild woman longs to strut,

baring every scar and crease and bulge:

she knows her pack would not judge

but read what life has written on her.

They would delight to see how the spirit

spills through her frayed skin,

shining, like electric fur.

Living into My Body

Nancy Barron

After nearly a lifetime of silence, I am eager to write about lesbian bodies. As I weaken the stranglehold that sexism and homophobia have had on my ability to experience and communicate my lesbian body meanings, perhaps I also will find readers hungry for such reflections. Together, we may be able to experience the joyful, sometimes tearful, relief of seeing experienced realities named at last. We may feel the surge of vitality of simply being ourselves. Our expanded consciousness may also expand our power, giving us an opportunity to reduce oppression of lesbians. This is a personal essay with an unabashedly political aim.

In my earliest years, I challenged the heterosexist, patriarchal privileges within my family, yet I didn't hear the word “lesbian” until I was in my thirties (although I had once read it in my abnormal psychology course). It was not a word I said out loud until my forties. Now, in my fifties, I experience a vital integrity because lesbian is at the core of my identity.

I have studied body image for fifteen years (Barron, Eakins, and Wollert, 1984). Nonetheless, only in the last few years have I ventured professionally to speak of lesbian body image, for instance, in my university class on self-image and body size. In speaking of lesbian bodies, we are breaking a taboo, the taboo of silenced homosexuals, and no doubt every word we say will be fraught with our conditioned response to duck the anticipated societal blows. From this silence, my language suffers from a lack of names for experience and concepts that have relevance particular to my lesbian experience. Still, I am eager to speak and eager to listen.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and M. Lock (1987) offer a definition of body image and three ways of viewing the body, which I find useful in my thinking about lesbian bodies as well:

Body image refers to the collective and idiosyncratic representations an individual entertains about the body in its relationship to the environment, including internal and external perceptions, memories, affects, cognitions, and actions. (p. 16)

I paraphrase this as “Our body image is what we believe our body experiences, form, and actions mean in our life.” Scheper-Hughes and Locke propose:

... three perspectives from which the body may be viewed: (1) as a phenomenally experienced individual body-self; (2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society, and culture; and (3) as a body politic, an artifact of social and political control. (p. 6)

Arthur Frank (1991) offers a typology of body use. The disciplined body becomes predictable through regimentation. It is perhaps among others, but not with them, dissociated even from itself. It is insufficient, and discipline sustains it. The mirroring body predictably reflects that which is around it. It reflects itself. It, too, is dissociated, assimilating only the objects made available for it to consume. The dominating body is a male body characterized by a sense of lack in the form of anxiety and fear, living through conquest. All is contingent on the insecure ability to dominate. The communicative body is a body in the process of creating itself. Relatedness is dyadic, and this body's desire is for reciprocal expression and the recognition of others rather than consumption, domination, or mirroring.

“Body image,” as we use it here, implies a particular cultural/historical context. The eating disorder epidemic; the fitness craze; the preoccupation with personal, social, professional, and business image; the inescapable barrage of electronic images; a consumer economy of abundance faltering in the face of massive maldistribution creating richer and poorer; the need to save and preserve our global environment; and the second wave of feminism followed by backlash and possibly a third wave—these are among the powerful influences in which this writer-reader conversation takes place.

While certainly not only a body issue, being a lesbian certainly is a body issue. Intimate, sensual/sexual sharing with another of the same gender is a different experience from which to build body image than a heterosexual would have. The physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual differences that are coupled with loving women give alternative meanings to living in one's body. And, living identified as a lesbian in the social world offers others the opportunity to make judgments about lesbian bodies. The response of society—parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, employers—to our lesbian identity lets us know that the lesbian is very important and controversial, if not sinful, in their eyes. For them, the social body of the lesbian is fraught with danger. Lesbian reality becomes a political issue of control.

The reality of lesbian experience is hard to conceptualize, for the general culture has few words for our experience and relegates those words about our bodies to profanity and perversion or punishes us for speaking them. Our most tender exchanges are used as targets for disgust, fear, and derision.

Homophobia is an undeniable part of our experience. Here, in Oregon, the lesbian body politic recently narrowly escaped severe castigation through the defeated Measure Nine, which would have defined homosexuality as “wrong, unnatural, and perverse,” forced teachers to teach that attitude in schools, and prohibited equal rights for homosexuals. Many lesbians and gay men became more visible and more vulnerable, and many people are now more aware of homosexuality through that political struggle.

As a culture, we have a great deal of body shame. As women, we bear a disproportionate share of that shame about bodily functions. As lesbians in a society racked by such quakes as the Oregon measure, informal social disapproval threatens to be bolstered by constitutional condemnation—and we would have the opportunity to carry a triple burden of body shame.

Yet many lesbians are happy and proud about their bodies. This may come through the crucible of differentiating how I feel about myself (the body image as experienced) from how others feel about me (the social body image). And the surge of gay pride/gay activism speaks of lesbian commitment to bringing choice and self-control to lesbian bodies (the body politic).

Several points of contrast promise to help clarify the dynamics of lesbian body issues. I will use myself as my best-known example to contrast the body image experience of living as a heterosexual woman and living as a lesbian, including information from others as possible. While my heterosexual and homosexual experiences are from different ages and eras, my basic personality and my cohort remain constant.

I will reflect on differences in body image and fatness for lesbians and heterosexual women. My experience in founding and leading the size acceptance organization, Ample Opportunity, has put me in contact with thousands of women interested in grappling with the societal meanings of fatness and the control of women through fat phobia. Some of these women are lesbian. Have the fat lesbians and the heterosexual women dealt with the same issues? Are there struggles particular to fat lesbian women? What are the dynamics when fat lesbian and heterosexual women attempt to work together on body image?

I will briefly describe the issues and resolutions from a lesbian body image support group.

MY BODY AS EXPERIENCED GAY AND STRAIGHT

I have a different relationship with my body living as a lesbian than I had before I came out. “My lesbian body” reflects a different experience within me and says more and different things about me than “my woman's body” or, simply, “my body.” Homophobia has fostered a silence, a taboo, on issues of lesbian body image, which has made it very difficult to express these differences.

(My coming-out story in a nutshell: I have known sexism was not right and that I preferred women since I was three, had crushes on my sixth-grade teacher and girl friends since junior high, dated boys in college, married for twenty years after a Fulbright and a year and a half of graduate school, divorced and came out when my children were ten and thirteen, fifteen years ago.)

As a lesbian, I seldom feel “too.” In contrast, during adolescence and while living as a straight woman, I felt “too” big, “too” tall, “too” intelligent, “too” capable, “too” independent, “too” masculine, and certainly, “too” fat. The anxiety and shame about my body has diminished markedly. The size and shape of my body has not.

Fatness is the characteristic I believe others accept least. Even so, I feel better about my fatness as a lesbian. Freedom, joy, fear, and at-homeness characterize my lesbian body experience. I moved from a heterosexual relationship in which my husband loved my body in spite of its fatness, to a lesbian relationship in which my partner loved my body irrespective of its fatness, to a partner who considers my ample proportions part of what drew her to me. I feel at home in this body, without shame or anxiety no matter where she touches me. My belly or the scallops of flesh on my sides are no longer flinch zones. I live in, make love with, and am loved in my body as an organic whole. My skin is an intimate communicator.

I feel less owned as a lesbian. My body belongs more to me. Although I'm excruciatingly aware of the political control over my body as a deviant from the heterosexual “right” way, being illegal in some states and countries, I still feel more in control of who touches me and how. I may consult others in decisions I make about my body, but I feel less pressure in how I make them.

I feel more at home in this body. I have been socialized into some of the gestures and postures of the heterosexual woman. I find some of them fitting to my basic self. However, many of the movements I am expected to make as a woman do not fit: keeping my knees together, holding my shoulders still as I walk, keeping my elbows in by my side, tilting my head to look up. Neither do I find a swagger comfortable. In fact, when I stride out, because of the structure of my body, I have quite a sway in my hips. I am content to move as best suits my body structure, without resentment of having to try to appear “feminine” when it doesn't fit and without fear of appearing “masculine”.

Yet, assuming a lesbian lifestyle is not about becoming masculine, I was amazed that I felt so much more womanly after beginning to make love with women. For me, assuming a lesbian lifestyle was not about butch-femme, although I do feel these concepts carry significant experiences and feelings (which have little to do with masculine-feminine). Rather, as I have become lesbian, I have become more comfortable with moving, behaving, and dressing as I feel I am at any point in time, instead of how others think I should be.

Becoming lesbian is partly about reclaiming the neutral from being defined as masculine. For instance, hairy armpits are not masculine; they are human and as sensual as a woman's bush. Shoes that allow one to walk naturally are not masculine; they are human. Of course, one need not be lesbian, or even feminist, to reclaim the gender-neutral aspects of bodies. It may be easier if lesbian because of caring less about male approval or disapproval of one's body. Those intimately drawing pleasure from my body are not male.

Not only intimate relations shape and control my body image. Worrying about what people on the street think can be equally controlling. Clothing is far from trivial. It can still ruin my day to have “nothing to wear,” and not just from personal insecurity. It is a constant battle to find clothes large enough. That battle is even more grueling when I want to exclude clothing that is extremely feminine or masculine because I often must shop at men's big and tall stores in order to find clothes that fit. Dyke finery also is often not available in my size. Both social acceptability and personal expressiveness are hampered by my size.

Socially and politically, being fat is still difficult. “Fat dyke” is the ultimate flinch word to keep women in line. That epithet condenses the union of two characteristics so negatively valued that people cringe.

Fat lesbians face double jeopardy in terms of dual discrimination for their threatening characteristics. Naomi Wolf, in Beauty Myth (1991), wrote incisively of young and thin as the mandates of patriarchal control—she neglected to add heterosexual. Examine the inverse of these, and you get “an old, fat dyke.” Sound ferocious? Daring to exist differently from the patriarchal norm, such a woman threatens the cultural control. Such a woman risks social punishment for her being different, not only for being old, or fat, or lesbian, but also for being all three. I am a fifty-seven-year-old, fat dyke, and I am very fond of who I am, despite how those words ring in common parlance. Many of my friends also come in this category, and I delight in their women's beauty. However, they and I are at a social and occupational disadvantage within the mainstream.

Despite the double risk of “fat dyke,” it was only after coming out that I felt secure enough to launch Ample Opportunity. AO is a size acceptance organization focusing on the health and happiness of fat women through joyful physical, social, and educational activities (Barron and Lear, 1989). Within a short time, I realized that, although mine was a body type many people didn't prefer, I probably experienced more feelings, and more positive feelings, in my body than nine out of ten people, including th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Looking Queer
• Section A: Women, Wimmin, Womyn
• Section B: One, Both, Neither
• Section C: Beyond the Pale
• Section D: Men, Boys, and Trolls
• Index