"I want to be visible, that the nadie le doubt that I walk down the street,
molesting the heteropatriarchal eye accustomed to submission and uniformization. We make visibles as a conscious exercise of disturbance
del ojo ajeno salir del espacio de la verguenza"
Constanzx Alvarez Castillo
For Foucault, corporalities are subject to controls that encourage their modification, subjection and improvement to meet certain standards, and he calls them "docile bodies". According to Mattos, "the body envied and admired by people is a "worked", "worked", "healed", "defined" body, a cultivated body, which under the morality of "good shape" appears as a mark indicative of a certain superior virtue of the one who possesses it". He still states "beauty, therefore, acquires a value, not only social, but also moral [...]". This implies that not having this corporal capital brings as a consequence a devaluation and, therefore, a regulation of dissident bodies.
We are aware of the different institutions that occupy this place of surveillance and control (family, church, school, university, health, etc.), but other, more effective mechanisms are needed for regulating the abject-bodies. In this way, society is captured by the discourses of these institutions, which establish provisions to govern conduct, and thus also begins to play its role as watchdog, controller and punisher.
This is how people appreciate us, observe us, how bodies in the becoming-public and observable affect and are affected within a society that holds the body as capital. Along with the biopolitical paradigm, fat bodies are epidemic and impure, they contaminate, even visually.
How do you look at a fat person on the street? Have you ever asked yourself that? Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and recognized your faces, the different possible movements of the so-called facial muscles? I don't know about you, but when we were kids they showed us faces to learn how to express an emotion. There are some facial expressions that we can control, but there are others that are even more spontaneous, that shine through our unconscious and why not, our desires and revulsions. To change a look, to change the expression that accompanies it, it is a work of de-re-constructing paradigms of desire, beauty and aesthetics. The gaze can also be violent.
“It's been a few years since I allowed myself to eat out of the house and in company, before for me this was very difficult and complex, because I kept looking to see how people looked at me when I ate, the disgust, the look of disapproval, of sadness, disgust.”
In his book “The trouble with normal”, Michel Warner describes the ethics of sexual shame and its politics, in this he talks about the construction of moral values within a hetero-cis-normativity and their effects on the way LGBTI people are views. This book made us reflect on the politics of shame as a control, in the case we are talking about here, of fat bodies within a body-normative, body-fit/adjusted paradigm. As we said in our previous text and reinforced in this text, fat bodies are morally frowned upon and this is carried out in the practice of looking. Only with – a glance – can we change a person's behavior, make them feel either belonging to a space or outside of it.
Thus, stereotypes and prejudices are situated in the field of ideas, but discrimination is the response that is manifested by actions that are hidden behind notions naturalized by a construction process that makes violent and rejecting fat people through fatphobia . Those looks then hurt, tear apart self-esteem, lock fat women in their homes, foment self-hatred, kill a little more every day.
The look of others wants to colonize fat bodies and as you well know, the colonization process is sinister, violent and erasing differences.
Finally, we invite you to think about how you look at others, to reflect on and consider that language is also corporal and can be as violent as verbal language.
Readings that helped in the discussion
* Constanzxalvarez castillo. La bristle punk. Essays from a fat, lesbiko, anti-capitalist & anti-speciesist feminism. Valparaiso: Editorial Trio. 2014.
* Flavia Costa. The fitness device in biological modernity. Aesthetic democracy, just-in-time, crimes of ugliness and contagion. Journeys of Body and Culture National University of La Plata. Argentina May 15 to 17, 2008.
* Michel Foucault. Vigilar y Punir: birth of prison. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2002.
* Rafael da Silva Mattos. I'm fat, I'm abnormal. Rio de Janeiro, vol. 3 n. 2, 2007.
* Warner, Michael The Trouble with normal: sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life. New York: Free Press. 1999.
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Ale Mujica Rodriguez. Graduated in Medicine. Sanitarian. (Trans)feminist, transimmigrant-sudaka, fight for the free womb and fatactivist.
Cynthia L Montalbetti (Chichi). Sociologist and political scientist, migrant, feminist and fat activist.
